Shadows on the Nile

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Here, Malak, take this,’ she told him outside their hotel. ‘Catch the first train home to Cairo in the morning.’

  The boy had let his gaze rest on the money she was offering, his mobile young face a mix of emotions. Desire to pocket the Egyptian pounds struggled against his disappointment at being forced to leave her. He wiped his palms on his grubby striped tunic, as though wiping their greed away. He shook his head melodramatically and applied a soulful droop to his eyes.

  ‘Missie Kenton, I help you. I stay.’ He nodded so enthusiastically, his head was in danger of bouncing off. ‘I stay yes.’

  ‘No,’ Monty declared sternly. He flipped at the boy with the fly-whisk. ‘Skedaddle! Shoo! Off with you.’

  Malak started to do what he was told, but with sagging shoulders and walking backwards, his sad eyes fixed pleadingly on Jessie.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she sighed and he hopped back to her side, grinning broadly. ‘But just one day, that’s all. You can fetch and carry for us tomorrow, but then,’ she wagged a finger at him and pushed the money into his hand, ‘back on the train to your family.’

  He danced around her. ‘I much help. Good boy. You kind and beautiful. You goddess angel from the sun. You lovely lady. You …’

  ‘Enough,’ Monty roared at the boy. ‘Go!’

  ‘I find uncle. I come back.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Jessie told him.

  He vanished into the gloom. Monty gave her a look.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she shrugged. ‘I’m stupid.’

  ‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘I think the little brat got it right. You goddess angel from the sun.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ he laughed, ‘when the little blighter robs you blind and parades around Cairo in your new sunhat.’

  ‘You never know, he might come in useful. He knows Luxor.’

  Abruptly the laughter drained out of them. Jessie felt it puddle in the dirt road at their feet, as the thought of what tomorrow might hold brought them back to reality.

  Reality was Tim.

  Monty came to her room that night. His skin wrapped itself around hers, warm and inviting, his hands explored her body bringing forth strange unfamiliar sounds that ripped from her throat. Startling her.

  They took their time, lingering over kisses and over the discovery of what pleased, what roused and what drove each to a frenzy of need. He demanded more of her this time, she could feel it, a kind of pulling at her from within. So that she found herself releasing the locks she had put in place for so many years. Opening doors to him. Clinging to the heart of this man. Breathless and consumed by a heat that scorched her. They stretched time. Elongated it. For what felt like hours they luxuriated in each other, and no other moment existed for them. So it sent a ripple of shock through them both when the dawn call of the muezzin drifted through the shutters, calling the faithful of Luxor to prayer.

  Jessie lay contentedly with her head nestled on Monty’s shoulder, their bodies and limbs locked together. Hearts slowing to a steadier beat, as thin threads of sunlight reached for the bed and started to creep up their naked legs.

  Monty’s lips touched her forehead. ‘Tell me something about you that I don’t know.’

  It was another step. Another flinging wide of a door. Jessie smiled and opened her mouth to tell him of the day when, as a child, she went scrumping apples in a neighbour’s garden very early one morning. While she was perched up in the tree, her mouth full of apple, her feet balanced on a lichen-tufted branch, a mother fox had pranced daintily into the garden. Behind her scampered a shadow of three young cubs. The vixen proceeded to frolic, there was no other word for it. She leapt and gambolled, chased her cubs, bowled them over and nuzzled their pointy little faces. Lovingly she washed their ears and nibbled dirt from their tails. At that moment Jessie wanted more than anything in the world to be one of those cubs.

  She opened her mouth to say all this to Monty. To open that door. But those were not the words that came out.

  ‘I had another brother,’ she told him. ‘Called Georgie. He disappeared.’

  She heard his breathing slow.

  ‘When did he disappear?’ His voice was quiet. Flat as glass.

  ‘When I was seven. He was five.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was a very difficult child. I think my parents couldn’t cope with him any more and they put him in a home of some sort. They would never tell me.’

  ‘You didn’t see this Georgie again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Oh, Jessie.’

  ‘I’ve never told anyone before.’

  He wrapped his arms more tightly around her and pulled her against his bare chest, as though he could thrust her behind his ribs to keep her safe. They lay like that for a long while in silence, except for the wailing call to prayer dying away.

  ‘Now,’ she said firmly after a while, ‘let’s talk about where we start today.’

  He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her face, studying it minutely, as though committing every line of every feature to memory.

  ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s not hard to guess.’

  ‘The king’s tomb? King Tutankhamen’s resting place.’

  She stretched up and kissed his strong chin. Felt the early morning stubble against her lips. ‘Right first time. Nothing gets past you.’ She smiled. To show she was under control once more.

  ‘Promise me one thing,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That you won’t leave my side this time.’

  She rested her cheek against his chest, listening to the relentless beat of his heart. ‘I promise.’

  The Valley of the Kings was nothing like Jessie expected. It was a bleached barren rocky hell-on-earth, where life was not welcome and the sun’s heat roared off boulders and crashed against any uncovered flesh. The sky was an immense blinding blue, the brightness an assault on the eyes. Nothing lived here. Nothing. Even lizards and scorpions thought twice. But flies came, swarms of them drawn by the sweat of the men and women brazen enough to venture into the valley of death and by the steaming dung of the donkeys and camels that brought them here.

  Malak had been waiting outside their hotel, crouched in a sandy patch of shade with a patience that struck Jessie as far beyond the grasp of English children.

  ‘Good morning, Malak.’ She had brought him flatbread rolled around goat’s cheese from the breakfast table.

  ‘Ahlan, lovely lady, hello.’ He accepted his breakfast with grace, not with greed, and eyed Monty with respect. ‘Good sir,’ he salaamed politely, ‘I have boat for you, best felucca on Nile, yes sir yes.’ He waved his bread in the direction of the river. ‘My cousin, he sail, cousin Akil, very good sail yes.’

  Monty flipped a coin at him. ‘Good lad. We intend to visit the tombs on the West Bank, so …’

  ‘Akil, he sail you to cross river.’

  Monty gave a wry smile and flipped a second coin, that Malak snatched out of the air. ‘My uncle rich rich man. He own boat and many many horse. Camel? You want camel?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Jessie said. ‘Horses will do.’

  She saw Monty’s eyes brighten at the prospect of a ride and, surprisingly, Malak arranged it all beautifully. The felucca spread its giant triangular sail like a great white swan and Akil steered them across to the opposite bank of the Nile, the wide river brown and turbulent beneath them at this time of year. It was not long since the inundation when the Nile floods and spreads its rich black silt over the land. Waiting for them on the West Bank were two bay mares with black manes and tails, in slightly better condition than many of the gaunt hollow-ribbed creatures that ambled listlessly through the streets, pulling carts and carriages.

  Monty fondled their ears and scratched their dusty necks, and from his pockets produced an ap
ple for each of them that he had snaffled from the breakfast table. The animals munched contentedly but Malak pulled a face at the indulgence of wasting a good apple on a horse. They swung into the rough saddles and rode up from the river through green strips of fertile fields of sugarcane and cabbages, then up a dusty track past mud-brick houses into the bleak desert hills. The relentlessly harsh landscape was carved up by dry valleys that cut through the Theban Hills, and it was into the east valley that they turned, the Valley of the Kings – Wadi Biban el-Muluk – where the pharaohs’ tombs lay hidden.

  Jessie was overwhelmed by the place. It seemed to throb with heat and silence. Above it all loomed a great limestone escarpment whose cliffs were painted rose-pink in the morning light.

  ‘Look,’ Jessie pointed out, but in the kind of hushed voice she used in church. ‘There’s the Qurn.’

  It was a pyramid, but a naturally formed one on the peak of the escarpment, and dedicated to the goddess Hathor.

  ‘It gives me the creeps,’ she muttered. ‘Faintly sinister.’

  ‘Don’t get carried away,’ Monty chided.

  But when two kites effortlessly dipped their wings and circled the peak, she noticed that Monty turned his back on their eerie piercing cries. A number of other tourists were already tramping the valley, all pestered for business by dragomen from the local villages, but Monty brushed the guides aside and headed straight for King Tutankhamen’s tomb. The tombs of many great pharaohs had been excavated in the valley, their entrances marked by clearly outlined square doorways cut into the face of the limestone cliffs; some open to the public but some with metal gates barring access.

  As they approached the small opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb Jessie was disconcerted by a sudden racing of her pulse. She was nervous. But there was no reason to be. It was just a hole in the ground, for heaven’s sake, decorated with paintings. It was absurd to be nervous. But there was something about the place, something unreal and something unnervingly powerful.

  ‘Ready?’ Monty asked.

  ‘Of course.’ She faked a smile.

  As she stared into the darkness, she was blinded after the scorching brilliance outside. The entrance was low and immediately descended a flight of steep steps cut into the rock. The tunnel down to the Tomb itself was dimly lit and so close and narrow that Jessie experienced a rush of claustrophobia. It was as though the walls were coming at her, preparing to crush the air out of her lungs under tons of rock, but she fixed her eyes on the figure of Monty in front of her, bent over to avoid the low roof, and kept going. She placed each foot where he had placed his on the sandy path and eventually found herself entering the sunken burial chamber.

  She gasped. Every fear and uncertainty that had plagued her since she’d entered this valley of death fell from her like dead leaves. Her heart was pounding. Her mouth was dry. But this time it was with excitement. The interior of the chamber was the most achingly beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Vivid colours and images of life-size figures decorated each wall from floor to ceiling, all painted on a background of vibrant gold. Even in the dim light of the tomb it was breathtaking.

  Oddly, the tomb was unexpectedly hot, not like the cool caves of Britain. It felt like the breath of the dead, making the air thick and heavy, but the silence within the tomb was so deep it did strange things to her mind. It penetrated her brain. She realised she was holding her breath, unwilling to ripple the smooth surface of the silence by moving the air. Time seemed to stop in the tomb. It became irrelevant, unwanted and unheeded. The watch on her wrist became an obscenity.

  She stood transfixed in front of the western wall where paintings of baboons, twelve of them, were crouched ready to leap out on her. Vaguely she was aware behind her of a guide entering the chamber with a group of chattering tourists whom he started to regale with the story of the baboon wall. Together they represented the twelve hours of the night through which Tutankhamen must pass before reaching the afterlife. But the boy king had fortunately been presented with a boat in the top right hand corner to assist him on his journey.

  She thought for a moment about that boat. In it stood a scarab beetle, its big horny body supported on spindly legs, and it occurred to her how much a small boat can carry, even a small boat like a felucca on the Nile. How easy it would be for someone to travel through the baboons at night.

  ‘Excuse me, madam?’

  Jessie became aware of a slightly built man standing at her elbow in the dimly lit corner of the tomb, a grey galabaya swamping his figure and a white turban wound around his head. The scent of cinnamon hung around him. His dark eyes were serious, his manner deferential. He did not seem like one of the persistent beggars, yet he stood too close the way they did and she had the feeling he wanted something from her.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You are interested in tomb?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My brother is a learned man. He knows much about tombs. He would be willing to give you a tour of …’

  She stepped back from him. ‘No, thank you.’ She turned to walk away but he held onto the strap of her handbag that hung over her shoulder, preventing her from leaving.

  ‘I am Ahmed,’ he said softly. ‘I can help you.’

  She glanced over at Monty who was listening to a guide pointing out the depiction of Tutankhamen in the form of Osiris with his vizier, Ay, dressed as a priest. The guide was describing in detail the performing of the opening of the mouth ceremony to bring the dead king to life.

  ‘I do not want your help,’ she said in a curt tone and removed her bag’s strap from his grip.

  He said something soft in Arabic. She paused, expecting him to translate, but when he didn’t, she moved away to study another section of the tomb wall. As she stood facing the eastern wall, a painted image of the mummified body of the king beneath a canopy floated unseen in front of her eyes. All she could focus on was the man Ahmed’s serious eyes and his serious words, I can help you.

  Could he help her? Could he mean something other than as a tour guide?

  On impulse she turned quickly. She would speak to him again. But her eyes sought in vain for the white turban among the shadows of the tomb. He had gone. She hadn’t seen or heard him move, yet he was no longer there. Despite the heat of the place, her skin grew cold.

  She let her hand find the warmth of Monty’s broad back and he turned instantly.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded. ‘Fresh air, I think.’

  His eyes narrowed, then he scanned the people in the tomb. After a moment’s consideration, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ He steered her towards the exit.

  But it was already too late. She sensed that something had changed in some subtle way that she didn’t quite understand. She could feel the air heavy in her lungs, smell the cloying scent of the cinnamon that had marked out Ahmed, and she experienced an odd reluctance to touch her bag because he had touched it.

  As she climbed the steep steps hewn into the rock, ducking her head to avoid the sloping roof-line of the tunnel, she knew something had happened inside the golden tomb, but she didn’t know what.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Jessie sipped her glass of lime juice.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She didn’t look at Monty. She didn’t know how to explain what had happened in the tomb this morning. It would be like trying to explain the wisps of a dream, too insubstantial to put into words.

  They were seated at a bamboo table in the tiny perfumed garden at the back of their hotel in Luxor, where palm trees offered cooling shade and a profusion of oleanders and zinnias tumbled from pots and well-watered beds, providing a riot of pinks and reds in this muted world. It satisfied Jessie’s innate desire as an artist for colour and she was delighted when Monty plucked a scarlet blossom and tucked it behind her ear. Malak, after returning the sweating horses to his uncle, was squatting under one of the tables, tucking into falafel and pita bread, licking the greas
e from his fingers with relish.

  Monty drew out two cigarettes, lit them both and handed one to Jessie. He kept his gaze on the boy as he said casually, ‘But something upset you in there. You say you found nothing in the tomb that could give you a clue about Tim, no trace of him, and I understand that must have been distressing for you.’ He exhaled a string of smoke at a passing butterfly. ‘But there was something else.’ He glanced across at her. ‘Wasn’t there?’

  A small silence drifted onto their table. For a few seconds they let it lie there, but when the gut-wrenching groan of a camel somewhere nearby disrupted the moment, Jessie took a mouthful of lime juice and nodded.

  ‘Yes, there was something else, you’re right. But it was too insignificant to mean anything, and I was stupid to get upset over it.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  So she told him. About Ahmed. About his hand on her bag and his murmured I can help you. What she didn’t mention was the intangible sense of something having happened.

  ‘Did you see him outside the tomb?’ Monty asked. ‘Touting for business with other tourists, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  Monty looked from Jessie’s face to her handbag that hung on the back of her chair.

  ‘May I?’ he asked, indicating the bag.

  Without a word Jessie unhooked it from the chair and handed it over to Monty as cautiously as if it contained a hand-grenade. The bag was a good-sized tan leather one in which she carried her sketchpad and pencils, a set of chalks, a pen and a purse, plus the usual female detritus of powder compact, lipstick, handkerchief and hair comb. In addition there was a small penknife and a chiffon scarf to cover her hair if needed. Monty inspected the fastening. The bag had a flap that folded over the top and was secured by a press-stud fixing. He popped it open. He glanced over at Jessie and raised one thick eyebrow in a question.