The Last Camel Died at Noon - Elizabeth Peters [1]
CHAPTER 14: Into the Bowels of the Earth
CHAPTER 15: “The God Has Spoken”
CHAPTER 16: “Sleep, Servant of God”
For Ellen Nehr
With the compliments of the author
and Ahmet, the camel
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe the translation of Ramses’s Latin note to the kindness of Ms. Tootie Godlove-Ridenour; if there are errors, they are due to my careless transcribing or (more probably) to the haste of Ramses himself.
A tip of the chapeau as well to Charlotte MacLeod for coming up with a particularly loathsome method of rendering an enemy hors de combat, and a tip of the pith helmet to Dr. Lyn Green, who supplied me with copies of hard-to-find Egyptological research materials.
My greatest debt will of course be obvious to the intelligent Reader. Like Amelia (and, although he refuses to admit it, Emerson) I am an admirer of the romances of Sir Henry Rider Haggard. He was a master of a form of fiction that is, alas, seldom produced in these degenerate days; having run out of books to read, I decided to write one myself. It is meant as an affectionate, admiring, and nostalgic tribute.
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1
“I Told You This Was a Harebrained Scheme!”
HANDS on hips, brows lowering, Emerson stood gazing fixedly at the recumbent ruminant. A sympathetic friend (if camels have such, which is doubtful) might have taken comfort in the fact that scarcely a ripple of agitated sand surrounded the place of its demise. Like the others in the caravan, of which it was the last, it had simply stopped, sunk to its knees, and passed on, peacefully and quietly. (Conditions, I might add, that are uncharacteristic of camels alive or moribund.)
Those conditions are also uncharacteristic of Emerson. To the readers who have encountered my distinguished husband, in the flesh or in the pages of my earlier works, it will come as no surprise to learn that he reacted to the camel’s death as if the animal had committed suicide for the sole purpose of inconveniencing him. Eyes blazing like sapphires in his tanned and chiseled face, he plucked the hat from his head, flung it upon the sand, and kicked it a considerable distance before turning his furious glare toward me.
“Curse it, Amelia! I told you this was a harebrained scheme!”
“Yes, Emerson, you did,” I replied. “In those precise words, if I am not mistaken. If you will cast your mind back to our first discussion of this enterprise, you may remember that I was in full agreement with you.”
“Then what—” Emerson turned in a circle. Boundless and bare, as the poet puts it, the lone and level sands stretched far away. “Then what the devil are we doing here?” Emerson bellowed.
It was a reasonable question, and one that may also have occurred to the reader of this narrative. Professor Radcliffe Emerson, F.R.S., F.B.A., LL.D. (Edinburgh), D.C.L. (Oxford), Member of the American Philosophical Society, et cetera, preeminent Egyptologist of this or any other era, was frequently to be encountered in unusual, not to say peculiar, surroundings. Will I ever forget that magical moment when I entered a tomb in the desolate cliffs bordering the Nile and found him delirious with fever, in desperate need of attentions he was helpless to resist? The bond forged between us by my expert nursing was strengthened by the dangers we subsequently shared; and in due course, Reader, I married him. Since that momentous day we had excavated in every major site in Egypt and written extensively on our discoveries. Modesty prevents me from claiming too large a share of the scholarly reputation we had earned, but Emerson would have been the first to proclaim that we were a partnership, in archaeology as in marriage.
From the sandy wastes of the cemeteries of Memphis to the rocky cliffs of the Theban necropolis, we had wandered hand in hand (figuratively speaking), in terrain almost as inhospitable as the desert that presently surrounded us. Never before, however, had we been more than a few miles from the Nile and its life-giving water. It lay far behind us now, and there was not a