The Spoils of Egypt

by Michael Pearce

  After a moment or two’s reflection, Miss Skinner was not quite sure how to take this and returned to her pages.

  Owen went in search of Mahmoud and found him talking to one of the workmen, the rebellious one from Tomas’s team. Owen would have gone away, not wishing to interrupt, but Mahmoud indicated with a welcoming jerk of his head that it was all right to join them.

  ‘Because this is the Mamur Zapt,’ he explained to the workmen.

  The workman was a country peasant, and unimpressed. The Mamur Zapt was a byword only in Cairo.

  ‘He’s only interested in the woman,’ he said. ‘And that’s only because she’s a Sitt and foreign.’

  ‘He’s interested in Abu and Rashid, too,’ said Mahmoud softly.

  ‘Is he? Well, it’s time someone was. Abu was from my village,’ he said to Owen. ‘He was my sister’s husband’s cousin. Part of the family. So when they came round asking for men, I said I would go. Someone had to find out what had happened to him! Really happened to him.’

  ‘What did you think had happened to him? Was it not an accident?’

  The man made a gesture with his hand and spat into the sand. ‘Accident!’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you this: there isn’t any such thing as an accident. There’s always a reason.’

  ‘And what do you think the reason was here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the man growled. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. But I’ll tell you this: I reckon he was on to something.’

  ‘On to something?’

  ‘Yes. Found out something he ought not to have found out. And so they killed him.’

  ‘Killed!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I thought you said it was an accident?’

  ‘That’s what they said. Accident!’ He spat again.

  ‘Which one was this?’ Owen asked Mahmoud.

  ‘The second one. He was found in a trench one morning with half a ton of earth on top of him.’

  ‘They said he’d been wandering about at night. Fallen in. Brought the walls down on top of him. His fault, they said. Didn’t look where he was going, and shouldn’t have been there anyway. Drunk, more likely than not. Drunk!’ said the man bitterly. ‘Abu! A decent, God-fearing Moslem. Never touched a drop. Well, not often. Not here, anyway. Where would he have got it from? Hadn’t been paid, had he? Nobody gets paid until the stuff is up at Heraq.’

  ‘Drunk! said Mahmoud, commiserating. ‘What a thing to say!’

  ‘And the man so new in his grave, the angels have not even had time to examine him!’

  ‘Outrageous!’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘A pack of lies, all of it!’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Mahmoud, ‘you’ve got to ask what he was doing there at that time of night.’

  ‘That’s it! It’s not as if there was a woman about.’

  ‘You’re sure there wasn’t a woman about?’

  ‘Over here? In the village, perhaps, not over here.’

  ‘I wondered if one had come over.’

  ‘Too far. In any case, those village women keep to themselves.’

  ‘You see, that would explain it. Some husband, perhaps—’

  ‘He’d have stuck a knife in him. Anyway, Abu wasn’t that sort. Well, not often. And he’d hardly been here long enough.’

  ‘True. That’s true. And anyway he fell into a trench.’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘What I ask,’ said the workman, ‘is what he was wandering about for?’

  ‘And what’s your answer?’

  ‘He was on to something. There was something going on and he wanted to find out what it was.’

  ‘So he went out to look?’

  ‘And found it. And they found him. And then—Bash!—that was it!’

  ‘Terrible!’ said Mahmoud, shaking his head commiseratingly.

  ‘What do you think he found?’ asked Owen.

  The man looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice.

  ‘Treasure,’ he breathed. ‘These Der el Bahari people know where it is, see? They’ve been robbing these tombs for centuries. They’ve got it all hidden away, somewhere. Let it out a bit at a time. Don’t spoil the market, see? Oh, they’re clever ones, everyone knows that. Well, it’s my belief that Abu got on to it somehow. Had an idea where they kept it. Went to have a look and they caught him. Well, that was it, wasn’t it? They had to finish him off. No choice, really. Didn’t want him telling anyone else. A quick tap and there you are.’

  ‘What about the trench?’

  ‘Stuffed him in it and knocked the walls down. Made it look like an accident.’

  There was a general shaking of head over man’s criminality and ingenuity and then a little silence.

  ‘And there it would have rested,’ said Owen, as if philosophizing, ‘if it hadn’t been for the other man. One accident, well, things like that happen, don’t they? But two! It makes you wonder.’

  ‘You don’t wonder very much,’ the man said bitterly, ‘if it’s a peasant that’s dead.’

  ‘It makes me wonder,’ said Mahmoud quietly.

  ‘Well, perhaps you’re different. Only it always seems to us that the city is a long way away and so is the Khedive, and no one cares very much about what happens up here and the Pasha’s whip is still long.’

  ‘Still?’

  That, at any rate, had been one of the British achievements: the curbash, whipping, had been abolished.

  ‘Still. As I said, the city’s a long way away.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Mahmoud. ‘I am here.’

  The man gave an acknowledging nod of the head.

  ‘You may be all right,’ he said, ‘and so may be your friend, for all I know, even though he’s a foreigner. But you won’t get anywhere. The Pasha’s too big for you. He’s too big for us. We’re just little flies on his big wheel and when the wheel goes round we’re the ones who get squashed.’

  ‘Little stones,’ said Mahmoud, ‘can make big wheels jump.’

  ‘Which are you,’ asked the man, ‘the stone or the wheel?’

  ‘I’m one of those who are trying to change the wheel.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘so you said. There are people, you said, in the city who are trying to change things. The Nationalists, was it? Well, there aren’t many Nationalists down here, I can tell you. And the city is still a long way away.’

  About a mile beyond the temple, where the great spur of rock which separated the plain from the Sahara curved sharply round, was the village. It merged so completely into the cliffs that, looking across in the daytime, Owen had hardly been aware it was there. At night, however, when the villagers were cooking the evening meal, the lower slopes were covered with the pinpricks of their fires.

  Approaching the village now, on mule-back, in the gathering dusk, Owen saw that the village was bigger than he had supposed. Children were playing among the boulders, women were busy in the courtyards at their buffalo-dung fires and men were sitting up on the roofs of their houses enjoying the evening breeze.

  The houses were not the usual ones of the river bank, tidy cubes of mud brick, with the roofs heaped high with onions and watermelons and firewood. These were built among the rocks and the walls were often piled stones. They ran back in deep trenches into the cliff face, so that they seemed half underground.

  There was no sociable communal square, no neat streets. The houses were scattered higgledy-piggledy over the slopes and the occupants sat on the roofs and shouted across to each other.

  There were indeed onions and watermelons and not infrequently tomato plants and beans straggling up the sides of houses, but compared with the abundance of the river this was subsistence only.

  Owen, used to the rich fields of the delta, was quite shocked. Yet in some curious wa
y it seemed familiar. And then, seeing high up above the village the shafts of abandoned excavations, he realized suddenly what it was. This was a mining village.

  ‘Grim!’ said Paul, giving a little shudder of distaste.

  ‘Hard!’ said Owen, and realized suddenly that he was using the expression of the miners in the village he had known as a child.

  The difference between the two expressions was the difference in perspective between the æsthete and the labourer. Owen had never been a labourer in that sense—his father had been an Anglican clergyman—but although on the periphery, he had known the shared life of a Welsh mining village. Now it came back to him unexpectedly. He felt suddenly that he knew the people here.

  He did; although not quite in the way that he supposed.

  As he slid off the back of his donkey, a surprised voice greeted him warmly.

  ‘Effendi!’ it said. ‘You are my father and mother!’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Owen, and then, seeing who had spoken, embraced the speaker warmly. ‘Sayid!’

  It was one of his favourite swindlers, last seen outside the Continental Hotel beguiling tourists with relics of dubious authenticity and patter of genuine imaginativeness. Astonished admiration of the patter had led Owen to pardon a few minor solecisms, thus laying the basis of a relationship which Sayid reasserted with eagerness every time he came to Cairo.

  ‘You have come to visit my home,’ said Sayid enthusiastically.

  ‘That is not the sole purpose of my visit,’ said Owen. ‘Nevertheless, I rejoice at the opportunity.’

  Sayid, chattering excitedly, led him up the cliff. As they gained in height, Owen, looking back, could see the roofs of the houses below him, the little walled courtyards, the winding, higgledy-piggledy paths which took the place of streets.

  There, at a corner where a barber had set out his chair and bowl and a small group had gathered expectant of miracles, sat Mahmoud, deep in conversation; and there, on the other side of the village, assisted unexpectedly by Tomas, was Miss Skinner, talking earnestly to another knot of villagers.

  ‘She gives baksheesh,’ said Sayid approvingly, ‘plenty baksheesh.’

  ‘You know her?’ said Owen, surprised.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And what does she give baksheesh for?’

  Sayid looked injured.

  ‘Not for, out of. Out of the liberality of her hand, out of the generosity of her heart, out of—’

  ‘I know the lady, too,’ Owen cut in. ‘What is she giving baksheesh for? Things that you have found? Or is it things that you know?’

  ‘I do not understand that latter point,’ said Sayid. ‘We have tried offering her things that we have found. Alas, she knows whether we have truly found them. She gives good prices for what is genuine. Unfortunately, we are running out of that sort of thing.’

  ‘Business is bad, is it?’

  ‘Terrible. It won’t pick up until it get cooler again and the tourists come back.’

  ‘Meanwhile, you’re getting a few things together. I expect?’

  ‘A few,’ said Sayid non-committally.

  Sayid’s house was at the top of the village, a gash in the rock covered over with slabs of limestone and sparsely furnished inside. Owen got the impression the inside wasn’t used very much. There was a bed-roll on the roof, which suggested that Sayid and his wife slept up there. Cooking was done on a brazier in the yard, and it was from there that Sayid’s wife shortly brought them cups of tea.

  She also brought two very small children. Owen complimented Sayid on a growing family. Sayid, however, seemed a little depressed.

  ‘Both girls,’ he said. ‘If she goes on like this, I don’t know what I shall do. Have to get another one, I suppose.’

  ‘Child?’

  ‘Wife.’

  Owen shook his head, commiserating.

  ‘The trouble is, it all costs money,’ said Sayid gloomily.

  They sat on the roof watching the dusk close down and the stars come out. The only lights in the village came from the braziers in the yards and the occasional tallow lamp where someone was still working. The smell of fried onions rose strongly through the evening air.

  ‘Ya Sayid!’

  It was somebody hailing from a neighbouring roof. Sayid rose to his feet.

  ‘They are finished. Come and see!’

  Sayid hesitated.

  ‘Do not let me stand in your way,’ said Owen politely. ‘I must go now anyway.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘I should go to see the woman. Perhaps she will offer me some baksheesh, too.’

  Sayid laughed and they descended from the roof. As they emerged on to what passed for the street, the neighbour came rushing over.

  ‘Perfect!’ he said. ‘Perfect, this time. Come and see!’

  He seized Sayid by the arm and then, encompassing Owen in his overspilling goodwill, caught him up too.

  ‘I—’ began Owen.

  But the man was already urging them through a low doorway and into his house. Down by the river, in the houses that Owen knew, the first room was often given over to the family buffalo. This one was not. It was a workshop.

  There were three windows, each giving light to a work-man’s bench strewn with scarabs, amulets and funerary statuettes in every stage of progress. Some were of wood, some limestone and some clay.

  What the neighbour had brought them in to show them, however, were some five ushapti images of glazed faïence, newly made.

  ‘Are they not good? My best work yet,’ said the neighbour, standing proudly beside them.

  Sayid looked uncomfortable.

  ‘They are indeed fine—’

  ‘Don’t you like them?’ cried the neighbour anxiously. ‘Look! The glaze. My best yet!’

  Sayid stole a glance at Owen.

  ‘They are remarkable,’ said Owen, picking up one of the figures. It was of a sower. The point of the images was that they were put in the tomb so that in the after-life they could work in the dead man’s fields. ‘As well made as any I have seen.’

  ‘There you are!’ said the neighbour, bursting with pride.

  ‘Yes, but—’ said Sayid unhappily.

  ‘Look! This one!’ said the neighbour, snatching up the figure of a ploughman bent to the plough. ‘Is it not fine? The hands, you see? I always find it difficult to do the hands.’

  ‘Exquisite.’ Owen picked up another one. ‘But what is this?’ he said, puzzled.

  The neighbour looked slightly abashed.

  ‘It is one of us,’ he said.

  ‘A digger? But—?’

  ‘He’s in a trench, you see, over at the temple. He’s bent, because he’s digging. He’s just going to shovel some out.’

  ‘I see that. But—that is today, isn’t it? And these others are of long ago.’

  ‘Well, it’s all work, isn’t it? And I thought it would be nice to have some of us. This, actually, is Abdul.’

  ‘Very nice. A nice idea. But—when it comes to selling it—?’

  ‘Oh, they won’t know. No, don’t worry about that. They won’t spot it. After all, one figure is very like another. Though I do think this one—’

  Owen looked around him. Some of the images were coloured. There beside them were the colours and brushes. To say nothing of files, gravers and little pointed tools like gimlets. A magnifying-glass of the kind used by engravers lay on one of the benches. Screwed to the bench was a small grindstone worked by a treadle. And there, in a corner, was a huge fragment of mummy-case, which showed where the old sycamore for the wooden figures came from.

  ‘You are well equipped,’ said Owen.

  ‘Have to be,’ said the neighbour seriously. ‘This is skilled work.’

  ‘Indeed it is. But—isn’t there good money to be had over at the temple?’


  ‘It comes and goes. I mean, they’re always digging somewhere but sometimes it’s a long way away and they don’t always need many men. No, this is much better. You have to work hard, mind, but the money comes in regularly.’

  ‘Even now?’

  ‘Well, not so much now, of course, but when the men go out in a month or two’s time they’ll need all the stock they can get. These will fetch very good prices, won’t they, Sayid?’ he said, stroking his figures fondly.

  ‘Er—yes,’ said Sayid.

  Owen sighed.

  ‘A man’s got to live,’ said Sayid defensively.

  ***

  ‘Ushapti images?’ said Miss Skinner. ‘No. I don’t think so. Charming, but I have plenty.’

  ‘Then what—?’

  Miss Skinner gave him a sidelong glance.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘these people have been plundering the tombs for centuries and in the process some fine things have come into their possession. It’s always worth offering them a special price. You’d be surprised at the things they produce.’

  ‘Not altogether,’ said Owen.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘If,’ said Miss Skinner venomously, ‘you could bear to deny me the pleasure of your company for even a few moments—’

  ‘I have no wish to force myself upon you, Miss Skinner,’ said Paul stiffly.

  ‘Then don’t,’ said Miss Skinner and walked off.

  A little later they saw her setting off across the desert in the direction of the village.

  ‘What do I do? Go after her?’ asked Paul.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ said Owen.

  Paul grimaced.

  ‘Sorry I brought you down,’ he said. ‘It all seems a bit of a waste of time.’

  ‘It was reasonable. She said she’d been attacked.’

  ‘And then she unsaid it. Afterwards. “Silly me.” Only I don’t think Miss Skinner is at all silly.’

  ‘Nor do I. So why did she unsay it?’

  ‘She obviously wanted to play it down.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Because she didn’t want too many questions being asked.’