Shadows on the Nile

by Kate Furnivall

  Jessie returned to her room just before dawn and tumbled into her own bed. She stretched her limbs, and smiled up at the ceiling where the mosquito net hung unseen on a metal hoop. For once she allowed her mind to drift, as effortlessly as one of the Nile’s feluccas, towards the possibilities that were opening up before her.

  She closed her eyes, her hands restless as birds on the sheet. The hugeness of love was something that she had struggled all her life to outrun, but not now. Not this time. She tried to understand what had happened, what was different, but couldn’t. Except that Monty made her want to stop running.

  What was it about Egypt? Why was it here that the dross and debris had suddenly been sifted from her mind, as though caught in one of Tim’s wire-mesh sieves? Did some force of the ancient gods still lie buried here? Or was it that the quality of time changed here? Somehow it took on a different dimension, lifting the veil between then and now, between the past and the present.

  With no warning at all, it had shifted the sand beneath Jessie’s feet.

  The Great Pyramid of Cheops rose up against the fiercely blue sky. Jessie stepped back from her window, stunned. The Great Pyramid, the oldest of the seven wonders of the world, seemed almost within touching distance of her balcony. It was immense. Disconcerting and incomprehensible. For thousands of years it was the tallest man-made object in the world, until the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889.

  It consisted of an almost solid mass of limestone that covered thirteen acres, and it loomed up on the Giza plateau, just a short walk away from the hotel up a ramp of scree. It was a vast bleached construction that defied belief and belittled all else. At this hour while the air was cool, human beings crawled over it like ants scaling Everest. Tiny insignificant creatures. Only the desert itself, with its endless wastes of sun-scorched sand and rock stretching to the horizon and beyond, could dwarf the great monolith.

  Yet it was the scent of the desert, rather than the sight of the pyramid, that captivated Jessie. It was a scent that would haunt her dreams and whisper ancient secrets close in her ear. The air on the plateau tasted clear and sparkling as it swept into her lungs and she paused to watch the fingers of the morning sun slap what looked like gold paint all down one side of the pyramid. On the opposite side a massive purple shadow lay hunched at the foot of the slope like a sleeping guard-dog. For a split second it made Jessie shiver.

  ‘Breakfast,’ she told herself.

  ‘Well, young madam, decided to come outside and sniff the roses at last, have you?’

  It was the London woman, the tall one from the train. The one staying at Shepheard’s. But here she was at Mena House breakfasting with Monty.

  ‘What a nice surprise, Mrs Randall.’

  ‘Call me Maisie, love. There’s no Mr Randall on the scene any more, God rest his dog-eared soul, but I ain’t letting that get in my way.’ She chuckled and sipped her coffee, little finger extended like a flagpole in true ladylike fashion. ‘Me and your Sir Montague here been chewing on what to see first. It’s like a bun-fight up there.’ She gestured towards the pyramids.

  But Jessie looked at Monty. His eyes didn’t move from hers.

  ‘Sleep well?’ she asked him quietly.

  ‘Very well. And you?’

  ‘A bit restless.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘For breakfast, I mean.’

  Colour raced to her cheeks. ‘Of course.’

  She ordered tea and watermelon with yogurt and honey. They were sitting on the hotel’s terrace which was already crowded with other guests. It was a popular watering hole among the thousands of tourists visiting the pyramids each season, ever since Howard Carter had triggered a world-wide passion for all things Egyptian and the Thomas Cook travel agency had commenced regular trips to the Middle East, turning Cairo into a fashionable winter resort.

  ‘Nice place you landed in,’ Maisie observed, eyeing the hotel’s luxurious gardens and incongruous golf course in the middle of the parched desert. Everywhere they looked, Egyptian men in turbans and striped robes were busy directing garden hoses at acacia bushes and at abundant riots of bougainvillea and mimosa. It was an island of greenery in a harsh sea of brown.

  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ Jessie agreed. She had to force herself not to stare at Monty as he calmly smoked a cigarette, his hair glinting coppery in the sunlight. She wanted to reach across and unhook his shirt buttons. ‘I believe this hotel started life as the Khedive Ismail Pasha’s hunting lodge in the nineteenth century and is named after King Menes of Memphis.’ The words filled up the crystal clear air that separated her from Monty. ‘He was the founding father of the first Egyptian dynasty.’ She gestured off to one side, past the towering eucalyptus trees. ‘Its swimming pool is the first and the largest ever built in Egypt.’

  She stopped, her cheeks warm.

  Maisie put down her cup. ‘Blow me, if you don’t know some weird stuff.’

  Jessie shrugged self-consciously. ‘My brother is an archaeologist. He tells me things. Some of them stick.’

  ‘He must be bleedin’ clever, then.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘That’s nice for you.’

  Jessie changed the subject. ‘Are you off to see the pyramid this morning?’

  ‘Good grief, I’ve done that already. An early bird, that’s me. Always on the go, that’s why I’m thin as a stick-insect.’ She laughed good naturedly at herself and glanced over at the pyramid. ‘Crikey, it’s a monster, isn’t it?’ Her face grew serious. ‘I wouldn’t want to be buried in there. Trapped for ever under all that rock.’ She shuddered dramatically. ‘That Pharaoh Khufu must have been a glutton for the dark.’

  ‘It was intended as a gateway to the afterlife,’ Jessie pointed out.

  ‘Huh! The afterlife. Over four thousand years later and we still don’t know any better.’ She looked back at Jessie. ‘We’re useless at learning from the past.’

  Monty immediately became animated. ‘I disagree. Look at my Chamford ancestors. They thought nothing of charging around on horseback, lopping off the heads of their enemies during the crusades or our civil war.’

  ‘So what do you do now?’ Maisie grinned. ‘To those poor ducks who make an enemy of a Chamford?’

  Monty raised an eyebrow. ‘I am at least civilised about it.’

  ‘What? You mean you ask their permission first,’ Jessie teased, ‘before you lop off their heads?’

  Monty let his gaze rest on the shadow that sprawled at the base of the pyramid, where even in the heat of the day it would be chill.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I sit down and discuss any disagreement calmly with them first. Only then do I lop off their heads.’

  They rattled their way into Cairo on the tram.

  A special line had been constructed along the rough seven-mile stretch of Pyramid Road, designed to carry tourists to and from the Giza plateau. At the Giza end a queue of morose camels and brightly bedecked donkeys with long eyelashes waited to transport visitors to the pyramids themselves. The trams ran every forty minutes from outside the Mena House Hotel to the Pont des Anglais in the city, and theirs was packed with a multi-lingual mix of French, English and Germans, red-faced from their exertions. Many had attempted to scale the zigzag line of ascent to the pyramid summit, but not all succeeded. Egyptian guides – dragomen, as they were called – scampered like mountain goats over the face of the pyramid, making it look easy, the wind billowing out their galabayas like sails as they hauled the more adventurous tourists with them up the four-foot limestone blocks that formed each step. The overweight Frenchman sitting behind Jessie was less than enthusiastic about the experience.

  ‘The panorama from her summit is … poof!’ He flicked his fingers. ‘C’est très décevant. Very disappointing. Just more sand out to the west, and the city to the east.’ He shrugged Gallic shoulders.

  ‘Crikey Moses!’ Maisie jeered. ‘What do you expect in a desert? Roses and honeysuckle?’ She prodded
his seat with her furled black umbrella. ‘You saw the Nile and the minarets, didn’t you? Anyway, a bit more climbing and a bit less of your fancy French eating would get rid of some of that …’

  Jessie stopped listening. She was impatient. Her mind was focused on the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. In the Conan Doyle story of The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual it was the crown of King Charles I that was found. Well, there was no Charles I here in Cairo, but there were plenty of kings, including their mummified remains.

  Somewhere there must be something, some sign from Tim.

  She gazed out through the dust-speckled window at the passing landscape. The vivid green cultivation of the irrigated fields along the banks of the Nile was outlined in sharp contrast to the bleak and arid expanse beyond, and it struck Jessie that this was a land of three colours. The sumptuous sapphire blue of the sky that enchanted the eyes. The shimmering emerald green of the patchwork of fields of sugar-cane and of berseem, the Egyptian clover that was grown everywhere for fodder. But overwhelming all else were the soft muted shades of the sand and the rocks, of the dirt and the mudbrick houses, of the men’s galabayas and their warm sun-baked skin. Even the westerners’ clothes tended towards creams and fawns, as well as white or khaki drill shorts, all non-colours that were effortlessly swallowed by the landscape.

  She spotted an egret rising from the river and watched it spread its ragged white wings as it swooped up into the branches of a tree. Such timeless motion. It lay at the heart of this country. The turn of a waterwheel, the soft thud of a shaduf as it emptied its bucket into an irrigation ditch, the rise and fall of the hoes in the fields or the kneading of the dough for eesh baladi. All were unchanged from the days of the pharaohs. No wonder Egypt had cast such a heavy spell on her brother, but Jessie would not let it have him.

  She intended to find him. To bring him home, even if she had to wrestle him from the grip of Osiris himself.

  The centre of Cairo preened itself on its elegance. Broad tree-lined boulevards boasted graceful mansion blocks in French style with wrought-iron balconies and luscious spills of bougainvillea or flame spikes of canna lilies.

  To Jessie it felt European to its core. But no European capital saw donkeys plodding down its main streets, knees buckling, piled to breaking point with gigantic loads of fodder or firewood. Paris was not plagued by gharries, the horse-drawn cabs that jostled and shouted at each other for business; London remained free from the ill-temper of camel-trains, and no one paraded in Berlin in a scarlet tarboosh worn with a trim three-piece suit and a dead chicken under one arm.

  Cairo made Jessie’s heart beat faster. Despite its European pretensions, the city assaulted her senses with its noise and its smells, its streets jammed with pedestrians and vehicles. The traders yelled constantly. The rumble of donkey carts choked the pavements. Men squatted on their heels in the street to be shaved and Jessie could not tear her eyes away from a customer on a stool in a doorway having his teeth ripped out.

  Shoeshine boys kicked dust over passersby to boost business and bright-eyed urchins roamed in packs, besieging unwary tourists with disarming smiles and quick greedy paws. But this time Jessie was prepared. Her pockets were stuffed with piastres. And there was no such thing as road safety or regard for rules or order. It was so blatant it made her laugh out loud. It was quickly clear that she took her life in her hands when she crossed the road, yet at the same time, in all this chaos, there was an ebb and flow to the rhythm of the city that was as natural as the rise and fall of the Nile itself.

  ‘Ready?’ Monty asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He had drawn her arm through his, holding onto her tightly as though he feared some camel-driver might snatch her away. They were walking up from the Pont des Anglais with Maisie Randall stalking ahead, scything out a path with her umbrella and Jessie wanted to slide a hand under his shirt to touch the warm skin of his chest. To say Don’t worry. To say I have faith in you. I have faith in Tim. Together we will find him. I believe – insanely, I know – that this will happen, because we will make it happen. She said all this instead with just an increase in pressure where her shoulder touched his. She heard him say something under his breath, but she didn’t catch the words because at that moment the call to prayer rose in an undulating wail throughout the city.

  It launched itself with outspread wings from the needle-thin minarets, a reminder to the arrogant westerners five times a day that this was not their country. And never would be.

  The museum was as pink as a peony. It stood in a tree-lined square, Midan Ismailiya, in the heart of Cairo, and Jessie liked it on sight. With its sphinxes and lily pond, it was less forbidding than the British Museum.

  ‘I can imagine Tim here,’ she told Monty as they entered through the huge stone archway, ‘like a child in a sweetshop. His mouth salivating at the sight of all this.’

  She could see him. Blue eyes gleaming. Hands touching. Caressing. Mind storing fact after fact as he examined the exhibits. Here she could conjure him into reality and force him through willpower alone to materialise in front of her.

  ‘Where do you want to start?’ It was Maisie, regarding her closely.

  Monty scanned the atrium where they were standing under a great cupola in the roof, surrounded by towering statues of ancient pharaohs and the flamboyant gods of Egypt.

  ‘We intend to view the King Tutankhamen exhibits first,’ he said.

  ‘Not me. Want to save the best till last,’ Maisie smiled, unaware of the striking similarity of her face to a basalt figure just behind her with the head of an ibis. Both long and thin, with a nose like a beak and narrow sharp eyes.

  ‘There’s a lot to see,’ Jessie told her. ‘A hundred and seven halls. The huge statues and sarcophagi are on the ground floor, the smaller treasures upstairs.’

  ‘Why don’t we meet you here in an hour?’ Monty suggested to Maisie. ‘Then we can decide how much longer we’ll need.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘We’ll see you later,’ Jessie confirmed and set off at speed towards the first hall.

  ‘Jessie!’

  She stopped and turned. Maisie was still standing in the middle of the vast atrium, her arms folded, sunhat in hand and umbrella hooked over one wrist.

  ‘Jessie, my girl, whatever has got you all fired up this morning, you watch your step. I bet me best titfa that this place is just crawling with snakes.’

  Jessie shook her head. But her eyes instantly fell on a stone statue of Ramses II, wielding the crook and flail, symbols of authority. On the front of his headdress sat the uraeus, the royal cobra poised ready to strike.

  ‘Slow down.’

  Jessie was hurrying through the gallery of the Old Kingdom. Almost running.

  ‘Slow down,’ Monty said again. ‘You are drawing attention to us.’

  She slowed. Not much.

  ‘Tutankhamen is going nowhere,’ he reminded her. ‘There’s no rush. Take a look at some of these exhibits, they’re so amazing the way they—’

  ‘I’m not interested in them.’

  ‘Jessie!’ He gripped her arm, forcing her to slow to a tourist’s amble. ‘The king in your story might not mean Tutankhamen. Look at them all.’ He waved a hand at a towering grey statue of Amenhotep III and the severed head of another wearing the tall slender crown with the rounded top which signified a ruler of Upper Egypt. ‘It could be any of them.’

  ‘No. If there’s anything here from Tim, it’s with King Tutankhamen.’

  ‘Why? How can you be so sure?’

  She hesitated. She wanted to tell him. But her mouth went dry at the thought. She could feel the warmth of his fingers through her sleeve and hear the concern in his voice as he asked the question. How can you be so sure?

  But she couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t bear to see in his eyes the thought that she was crazy – which is what she would see if she told him it came to her in a dream. He may manage not to laugh at her, but he wouldn’t manage to keep the pity from his
voice.

  ‘I just know,’ she replied. She shrugged and started up the wide stairs.

  The dream had come immediately her head hit the pillow in her own room. She was in the vaulted crypt of a church – it looked like the flag-stoned one under St Martin-in-the-Fields, but they probably all looked alike. Tim was there in black shorts and black shirt, sitting on top of a gigantic marble sarcophagus, as big as a train carriage, dangling his legs over the edge and swinging them back and forth like a child.

  ‘Look at me,’ he called to her, laughing. His blond curls were dirty as if he’d been scrabbling underground. ‘Look, Jessie.’

  He lifted from behind him a mask and held it over his face. Not any old mask. It was the solid gold death-mask of the Egyptian boy king, Tutankhamen. She could tell it was heavy because his wrists shook with the weight of it.

  ‘Tutankhamen is me,’ Tim said in a muffled voice and she ran towards him, crying with relief.

  She woke with tears on her face.

  Tutankhamen is me.

  T.I.M. Even to her it sounded crazy.

  31

  Georgie

  England 1930

  ‘How are you today?’ you ask.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I reply, quick as a flash.

  Hah! You cannot catch me out. I have learned too well. But you stand silently. I realise you are waiting, and I feel the familiar flutter of failure in my chest.

  ‘And how are you?’ I ask in a rush. Too late.

  ‘I’m well,’ you say.

  I do not understand. We are both lying, so why do we have to say the words? You have explained to me again and again that when someone says ‘How are you?’ they do not want to hear that each of your heartbeats makes a noise in your head like a balloon popping or that your toes have started to smell like mothballs. Or that you believe that both these occurrences are caused by Dr Churchward and his pocketful of new drugs. But what is the point of lying? If you do not want to know how I am really feeling, why ask?