The Last Camel Died at Noon - Elizabeth Peters [57]
“Excuse me, Amelia,” said Emerson softly. His face was crimson and his voice shook with repressed emotion. “Did I hear you say something about going on at unnecessary length?”
“You are right to remind me, Emerson. I was about to commit the same error.” I brandished my teacup and raised my voice to a thrilling pitch. “Let us cut through the cobwebs of speculation with the sharp sword of common sense! The lost civilization Willoughby Forth set forth to find is a reality! He, and, let us hope, his wife, are prisoners of this mysterious people! One or more of them has pursued us, from the wilds of Kent to the barren deserts of Nubia! Their occult powers, unknown to modern science, have enslaved Ramses, and even now—”
But here my audience cut me short with a chorus of comment. Dominating the other voices was the deep, infectious laughter of my spouse. Not until his whoops of mirth had subsided could any other sound be heard, and that sound, as one might have expected, was the voice of Ramses.
“Mama, I beg your pardon, but I must take exception to the word ‘enslaved,’ which is not only exaggerated and unsubstantiated but derogatory, implying as it does—”
“Never mind, Ramses,” said Emerson, wiping the tears of amusement from his eyes with the back of his manly hand. (Emerson never has a clean handkerchief.) “Your mama did not mean, I am sure, to insult you. Her imagination—”
“I do not see that imagination enters into it,” I said loudly. “If either of you can come up with a better explanation for the strange events of the past—”
Ramses and Emerson spoke at once, then fell silent; and Reggie remarked, as if to himself, “Conversation with the Emerson family is stimulating, to say the least. May I say a word?” He went on without giving any of us an opportunity to reply. “I take it, Professor, that you disagree with Mrs. Emerson’s conclusions.”
“What?” Emerson stared at him in surprise. “No, not at all.”
“But, sir—”
“My amusement derived not from Mrs. Emerson’s deductions but from her manner of expressing them,” Emerson said. “I can think of other explanations, but hers is certainly the most probable.”
Reggie shook his head dazedly. “I don’t understand.”
“It is difficult for an ordinary intelligence to follow the quickness of Mrs. Emerson’s thought,” Emerson said kindly. “And she does—oh, yes, my dear, you do—she does exaggerate. There is no question of occult powers here; Ramses’s odd behavior is easily explained on the grounds of a posthypnotic suggestion, instilled by the conjurer whom we encountered in Haifa. If we assume, as we now have reason to do, that the message from Willoughby Forth was genuine, it must have been brought to England by a member of the group that holds him prisoner, for otherwise the messenger would have identified himself and explained how the paper came into his hands. That same mysterious messenger may have shed the blood we found at our gate—but if he was wounded, who shot him, and why? Can we conclude that there are two different groups of people involved, one hostile to the other? The conjurer in Haifa and the presence in camp last night of a man carrying an arrow of an antique and unknown pattern indicate that some member of one of the postulated groups has followed us from England for purposes—er—for purposes impossible to explain at this time.”
“Nonsense,” I exclaimed. “The purpose is obvious. It is to prevent us from setting out to rescue Willoughby Forth and his poor wife.”
“Curse it, Amelia, there you go again,” Emerson cried. “That purpose would have been more readily