The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog - Elizabeth Peters [5]
Emerson is a remarkable man, but he is a man. I need say no more, I believe. Having made his decision and persuaded me to accept it, he admitted to no forebodings. Emerson never admits to having forebodings, and he becomes incensed when I mention mine. In this case I had a good number of them.
One subject of considerable concern was how we were to explain where Nefret had been for the past thirteen years. At least it concerned me. Emerson tried to dismiss the subject as he does other difficulties. “Why should we explain anything? If anyone has the impertinence to ask, tell them to go to the devil.”
Fortunately Emerson is more sensible than he often sounds, and even before we left Egypt he was forced to admit that we had to concoct a story of some kind. Our reappearance out of the desert with a young girl of obviously English parentage would have attracted the curiosity of the dullest; her real identity had to be admitted if she was to claim her rightful position as heiress to her grandfather’s fortune. The story contained all the features journalists dote on—youthful beauty, mystery, aristocracy, and great amounts of money—and, as I pointed out to Emerson, our own activities had not infrequently attracted the attentions of the jackals of the press, as he was pleased to call them.
I prefer to tell the truth whenever possible. Not only is honesty enjoined upon us by the superior moral code of our society, but it is much easier to stick to the facts than remain consistent in falsehood. In this case the truth was not possible. Upon leaving the Lost Oasis (or the City of the Holy Mountain, as its citizens called it), we had sworn to keep not only its location but its very existence a secret. The people of that dying civilization were few in number and unacquainted with firearms; they would have been easy prey for adventurers and treasure hunters, not to mention unscrupulous archaeologists. There was also the less imperative but nonetheless important question of Nefret’s reputation to be considered. If it were known that she had been reared among so-called primitive peoples, where she had been the high priestess of a pagan goddess, the rude speculation and unseemly jests such ideas inspire in the ignorant would have made her life unbearable. No; the true facts could not be made public. It was necessary to invent a convincing lie, and when forced to depart from my usual standards of candor, I can invent as good a lie as anyone.
Luckily the historical events then ensuing provided us with a reasonable rationale. The Mahdist rebellion in the Sudan, which began in 1881 and had kept that unhappy country in a state of turmoil for over a decade, was ending. Egyptian troops (led, of course, by British officers) had reconquered most of the lost territory, and some persons who had been given up for lost had miraculously reappeared. The escape of Slatin Pasha, formerly Slatin Bey, was perhaps the most astonishing example of well-nigh miraculous survival, but there were others, including that of Father Ohrwalder and two of the nuns of his mission, who had endured seven years of slavery and torture before making good their escape.
It was this last case that gave me the idea of inventing a family of kindly missionaries as foster parents for Nefret, both of whose real parents (I explained) had perished of disease and hardship shortly after their arrival. Protected by their loyal converts, the kindly religious persons had escaped the ravages of the dervishes but had not dared leave the security of their remote and humble village while the country was so disturbed.
Emerson remarked that in his experience loyal converts were usually the first to pop their spiritual leaders into the cook pot, but I thought it a most convincing fabrication and so, to judge by the results, did the press. I had stuck to the truth whenever I could—a paramount rule