The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog - Elizabeth Peters [82]
“This is just the sort of inconsistency I object to,” he remarked to Cyrus. “If she dresses like a man and insists on doing a man’s work, why the devil should she expect me to jump to my feet when she enters a room? And,” he added, anticipating the reproof that was hovering on Cyrus’s lips, “why the devil can’t I speak as I would to another fellow?”
“You can say anything you like,” I replied, thanking Cyrus with a smile as he helped me into my chair. “And I will say what I like, so if my language offends you, you will have to put up with it. Times have changed, Professor Emerson.”
Emerson grinned. “Professor, eh? Never mind the academic titles, they aren’t worth—er—considering. Times certainly have changed, if, as Vandergelt here tells me, I have employed a female for the past several years. An artist, are you?”
Women had occasionally served in that capacity on archaeological digs; they were generally considered unfit for more intellectually taxing activities. I decided not to remind Emerson of the two ladies who had excavated the temple of Mut at Karnak a few years earlier, for even at the time he had been critical of their methods. But to do him and them justice, he was equally critical of the efforts of most male archaeologists.
Calmly I replied, “I am an excavator, like yourself. I am a fair draftsman, I am acquainted with the use of surveying instruments, and I can read the hieroglyphs. I speak Arabic. I am familiar with the principles of scientific excavation and I can tell a pre-dynastic pot from a piece of Meidum ware. In short, I can do anything you … or any other excavator… can do.”
Emerson’s eyes narrowed. “That,” he said, “remains to be seen.”
To my affectionate eyes he was still painfully thin, and his face had not regained its healthy tan. Not much of it was visible; he had irritably refused to trim his beard, and it had spread up his cheeks and formed a jetty bush around jaws and chin. It looked even worse than it had when I first met him. But his eyes had regained their old sapphirine fire; they shot a challenging look at me before he applied himself to his soup and relapsed into ominous silence.
No one broke it. Emerson might not be entirely himself again, but there was enough of him to dominate any group of which he made a part; and the two young men who were at the table with us shrank into near invisibility in his presence.
I beg leave to introduce to the Reader Mr. Charles H. Holly and M. René D’Arcy, two of Cyrus’s assistants. If I have not presented them before, it is because I had never met either of them; they were of the new generation of archaeologists, and this was Charlie’s first season in Egypt. A mining engineer by profession, he was a ruddy-cheeked cheerful young man with hair the color of Egyptian sand. At least he had been cheerful until Emerson got at him.
René, as pale and soulful-looking as a poet, was a graduate of the Sorbonne and a skilled draftsman. The ebon locks that fell gracefully over his brow matched the mustache that drooped with corresponding grace over his upper lip. He had a very pleasant smile. I had not seen the smile since Emerson got at him.
Emerson had quizzed them like students at a viva-voce examination, criticizing their translations of hieroglyphic texts, correcting their Arabic, and deriding their stumbling descriptions of excavation technique. One could hardly blame them for not coming off well under that blistering interrogation; I had heard distinguished scholars stutter like schoolboys when Emerson challenged their theories. The poor lads could not know that, and they took pains to avoid my husband thereafter. Neither of them knew the SECRET, as Ramses would have called it, but they were aware of the fact that the peril from which Emerson