by Paula Guran
“Ah! Now, you just look at this!” he cried triumphantly, holding up for Bigham’s inspection the shilling he had found. “Tell me how you account for this coin, not so lately removed from my own purse! No, I tell you, these are our own men, this is my servant Ahmed. Something—I’m not saying any supernatural agency, I’m not saying that, but something has done this to them! A geologic or atmospheric event from which we were protected by our tents.”
Bigham, with ill grace, discontinued asserting his own theory of the events. Together they moved out across the sands of the camp, counting the mummified figures strewn about the place.
“Fifty-six of them,” Bigham said at last.
“And the rest?”
“Why, run away! The cowardly beggars ran away! I had four hundred men and boys crawling this wadi. Now this! A camp full of worthless corpses and the rest of them all skulked off in the night!” Bigham’s sullen tone made it clear that he knew this was all some sinister, if yet unexplained plot to deprive him of his workers. “Listen, Wordsley, I’ll make a deal with you. You go back to Tukh, tell those Arabs that I’m expecting them back here, working, just as we agreed. They can have their wages, as before, and I’ll pretend that none of this ever happened.”
Under his breath he muttered, “None of your she-demons, your ghûl. None of that bunkum.”
Wordsley stared at the face that might have been Ahmed’s, then at Bigham’s, not entirely sure which made him more uncomfortable. “That is your deal with the Arabs. What is your deal with me?” He wasn’t certain that he wanted to hear it. That dream of his. The temptation, the serpent’s voice.
But while the Arabs might not have liked Bigham’s price, the American certainly knew Wordsley’s. “Every scrap of papyrus I find. Any trinket with the littlest bit of glyph that is not museum-worthy. It’s yours. Crated up and shipped wherever you wish. Ink and paper to do your drawing. Candle, lamp, whatever you want to work with. And you may have inspection of everything: reliefs, inscriptions, coffins, whatever. Copy it all. Publish it all, if that’s what you like! Send the printer’s bill to me. There may even be a job for you in Philadelphia, if you want it.”
Wordsley stared at the hills that held—what? He still had the bookplate in his pocket, the half of it. What would he give for the rest! What he would give for the scroll to which it had once been tied! Sell his soul for a papyrus?
“It is agreed, then. Give me your donkey, or did the ghûl take that too?”
Wordsley returned three days later. Besides the ass given to him by Bigham, he had a string of six donkeys with him, and half again as many men.
“The rest are coming tomorrow?” Bigham demanded.
“The rest are not coming tomorrow or the next day or ever again,” Wordsley sighed. “They are too frightened of the ghûl. I went to the Copts, too, but none would approach the Hill of Lilith. I even offered them more wages—”
“What? You offered the beggars more? And they still won’t come?”
“They’re afraid!” Wordsley exclaimed, weary and exasperated from his futile journey. “Do you blame them? There are fifty men dead in this camp, and no way to account for it.”
“Bogeys and boggarts!” Bigham howled, throwing up his hands. “Well, that does it! I can’t do anything with nine men. Have them crate up what we’ve got now and load it on the donkeys. What a poor-looking team they are too—men and beast, matched!”
“You are quitting, then?” Wordsley could scarcely believe this, or the pangs of regret that he himself felt. He might have saved the hills from rape, but he was losing his papyri.
“No!” Bigham swelled with determination, and Wordsley found himself brightening, hating himself for it. “No tribe of flea-bitten Arabs is going to get the better of Phineas Bigham! They’ll see what American ingenuity can do! I’ll show them! I’ll show the whole world! Damned if I don’t!”
The army had gone. The lady had defeated them, drunk their lives, until she was full and sated. If only she had been able to lay her touch upon their king, but he was protected by the Oppressor’s sign.
Still, he had gone and taken his army with him. She had won, she had conquered. Her concern had been groundless, after all. They were after all no more than any other host that had invaded the Red Land and the Black over the centuries.
She lay beside her lord that night, kissed his fettered limbs, each so perfect and fine. She wept for him, for his pain, for his suffering. But the lives she had taken would spare him for two cycles of the moon, for that many sunrises, each time the Serpent woke.
He at once sought her comfort and comforted her. So it had always been between them. So it would be until the end of time.
Wordsley gave little thought to Bigham’s whereabouts. The American had taken himself off, removing all temptation with him, and it was just as well. The secrets of the desert remained inviolate and undespoiled, and it was surely just as well.
He had done as agreed, with the assistance of those few Arabs he had convinced to return with him, offering them doubled wages. Bigham’s few initial finds had all been gathered up, boxed and bundled, loaded on to the donkeys for transport. There was nothing the American had valued sufficiently to take with him, nothing except for the golden pectoral which had once belonged to a king—that, Bigham kept on his person always.
But Wordsley had been conscientious. All the spoils of the American’s dig were currently reposing in the potter’s house, as carefully stored as if they had been the most costly and delicate antiquities. He was cataloguing them now, in Bigham’s absence, labeling each piece and taking thorough notes, copying all inscriptions.
The finds, despite the initial promise of the golden pectoral of which Bigham was so fond, must have been a disappointment to the hopeful collector. Tonight so far, Wordsley had catalogued a dozen scarabs, an ivory statuette of a king or god (it was too crudely done to be sure) wearing the White Crown and a false beard, a necklace of amethyst beads. Curious, he thought, that they were found so scattered, not as if placed in some ancient cache by grave-robbers to hide their crime or priests to hide their sacred objects. He had counted items from no fewer than twenty different tombs, but it seemed inconceivable that they could all be in those hills. There was nothing else like them in the area, nothing at all.
Ah, well. There was much to learn, so very much. And that finished one crate.
He stood, stretching cramped muscles, and crossed the room to brew himself a fresh pot of tea. Since Ahmed’s death, he had no servant; none of the Arabs would hire themselves to him, and he was aware that they made gestures to avert a curse whenever he crossed their path in the streets or marketplace. Of course Wordsley was as little susceptible to such a notion as Bigham had been, but still, when he considered the mystery, it was hard to account for so many sudden deaths among the workers. Sunstroke, he supposed it must have been. What other explanation could there be?
Refreshed by the tea, he pulled another crate out from the heap and carried it to his worktable. Inside, he found a bundle of rags and heard the unmistakable clink of broken pottery as he began to unwrap it. The object inside was a clay jar in fragments, a piece of no intrinsic interest to any collector with Bigham’s tastes, but Wordsley’s attention was piqued as he saw it was filled with scrolls. Poking out through the still-intact mouth he could see the broken end of a wooden tile, a bookplate.
He sprang instantly to his feet to rummage among the items on a shelf. Ah! Yes! There it was! The other half of a bookplate he had encountered in the camp. Fetching it to the table, he matched it to the broken bookplate in the jar. Despite the worn edges, they clearly fit together into a single whole.
The bookplate, now reunited, now revealed the complete title: The Chapters of Lying Bound in Darkness and of Coming Forth by Night. Wordsley’s heartbeat quickened. Indeed, this must be a new funerary text! Not merely a new chapter of the Book of the Dead or of the Book of Breathings, but a genuinely new text!
He worked methodically, never hurryi
ng the task in his excitement, putting aside the pottery fragments and removing several scrolls from the broken jar. The papyri were old and brittle and crumbled into fragments at his touch. He kept each in its own box, so that they would not become confused like a jumble of so many jigsaw puzzles.
With hands that threatened to tremble, he assembled his ink and paper and several lamps. Where to start? At the beginning, surely, but which scroll was first? It did not really matter. Order would come from chaos soon enough. He lit all of the lamps, that he might see very trace of ink on the ancient, yellowed surfaces of the papyri. They were old and exceptionally fragile; once, surely, they had been very fine. Along the top of the text ran a register of repeated solar barques painted in gold.
It was near dawn by the time he began his transcription, murmuring as he wrote: “The Chapter of Binding the Limbs . . . ”
At that very moment, as the desert stirred with the presentiment of sunrise, a vagrant breeze swept the sand and sifted a few grains into the abandoned excavations. In time, the sand would cover it all once again, and the newly made dead would sleep alongside the old.
The desert would prevail, as it always had. Even more than gods, the desert was immortal.
Wordsley stirred in his sleep, lying half-clothed and sweating on his rumpled cot. What was that infernal din? Jackals—no, no, it was the Arabs and their dreadful noises.
Suddenly, his eyes flew open. There was a sound he knew! That piercing shriek—it could only be a steam whistle!
The Arab ululation rose to an answering wail.
Fearing the worst, fearing riot and chaos, Wordsley flung on his clothes and rushed toward the marketplace. The stalls were all deserted, but ahead, along the riverbank, he could discern the mob gathered. He pushed his way through, hearing as he did the repeated: ferengi! ferengi! And other words as well: monster, demon . . . machine . . .
But even Wordsley was taken aback when he finally saw the apparition that had come up the river. A monster indeed! A veritable behemoth of mechanical monstrosity.
As if to answer him, the thing whistled again. That it was a steam engine of some sort, he was well aware. But a sort that he had never seen, or imagined seeing, in all his life. A massive boom swung out from the base, supported by a system of beams, pulleys and chains, and from it was suspended the maw of a giant scoop.
Though he had never seen one before, Wordsley instantly grasped what it was, what it was meant to do. A shovel! A giant, steam-powered shovel! “Bigham!” he cursed out loud, and began to shove through the native throng with no regard for the persons he might displace.
His worst suspicions were realized as soon as he came closer to the riverbanks. Aboard the barge in all the puffed-up pride of ownership stood the American under his customary parasol.
Wordsley shook his fist. “Bigham! We had a gentlemen’s agreement, Bigham! You’ll not cheat me out of it, you colonial cretin!”
The American, on board the barge and too far to hear Wordsley’s maledictions, returned a wave of exuberant misunderstanding.
Under the direction of several Europeans, native workers on the boat were sliding a massive gangplank into place. Then, with another blood-curdling whistle, the machine began to move!
The mob onshore shrieked. The Egyptians turned to flee, trampling one another in their panicked rush to escape the advancing behemoth. Wordsley gave thanks that he had by this time pressed forward toward what had been the front of the crowd, or he might surely have been caught in the midst of it. As it was, he was now well placed to watch the huge, ungainly machine as it clanked and clattered inch by inch down the sagging gangplank, moving quite under its own power!
Wordsley had heard of such marvels, had read of them in the London papers, but never, never had he expected to see one, not here, in this benighted, backwards part of the world, where donkeys still turned water-wheels in just the same way as they had done since the days of the pharaohs! He had a moment of hope, when it seemed that surely the vast weight of the machine would crack the gangplank and send the monstrosity to the muddy bottom of the Nile, but no, it continued to inch forward until it stood at last safe on the quay, shuddering and clattering and belching smoke and steam.
“Wordsley!” came a shout over the ungodly din. “Wordsley!”
With an effort, he stood still to let the American approach.
“There you are! I thought it was you! So, you’re still here! Well, what do you think?” Bigham turned to gesture with expansive pride at his appalling mechanical prodigy, and without waiting to hear a reply, “It’s an Otis shovel. Built in Philadelphia, by God! I told you American ingenuity would show them! It can do the work of a hundred men, Wordsley! One machine, the work of a hundred men! I tell you, this is the future!”
He shook his parasol at the distant crowd of natives, whose fearful wailing was drowned out by the roar and clatter of the machine. “I’ll show them! They think they can hoodwink Phineas Bigham, do they? Filthy beggars, deserting me, leaving mummies all over the camp—so they want more wages, do they? Why, then let them take a look at this! A hundred men, Wordsley, and it isn’t going to strike for more wages, or take sick in the middle of a work day, or start gibbering any superstitious bunkum about she-demons!
“American know-how! I’ll tell you, Wordsley, for years and years we Americans stood by the sidelines as you Europeans grabbed it all: Greece, Rome—all of it. I hated that. So I earned my fortune in steel and whiskey, and came here to bring America something of a past our ancestors left behind for freedom. It’s not necessary to trade off history for liberty, you know. It’s not. And so now in Philadelphia the Sphinx’s head sits a block away from the Liberty Bell. And this, this fine Otis Shovel, is what they cast in Philadelphia nowadays! Oh, I’m not finished, Wordsley, not by a long shot. I won’t let those black beggars beat me, I’ll be damned if I will!”
“You had this shipped all the way from Philadelphia?” Wordsley asked, distracted by wonder.
“From Russia! From the Crimea,” Bigham boasted. “It was shipped there in ’41 to dredge the harbors. I had my agents locate the nearest available machine and offer the highest price for it. Telegraphy, Wordsley! Dynamite! Steam power! They can lick any of your she-demons ten ways from Sunday, and you can bet on that!”
Wordsley cleared his throat. “I’ve sorted and catalogued those pieces you left with me—”
“Trash!” Bigham dismissed it with a snort. “All of it, worthless! Keep it, if you want it—keep it all! Now that I have old Otis, here, I’m going to find those royal tombs! See if I don’t! Treasures that will dazzle your eyes! They’re out there, Wordsley, I know they are! And I’m going to have them! America, by God, is going to have them!”
This time the approach of the invading army was signaled not by a cloud of dust, as it had always been before, but a dark cloud of smoke, not by the braying of asses but the clang of metal and the hiss of steam. Of all the most hideous monsters of the Underworld, there was nothing to compare with this smoking beast, but she was certain that it must have been spawned in the pits of fire where the enemies of the Oppressor were sent to be consumed. Its teeth were of iron, and its breath was flame.
She looked upon it, and she uttered a spell of protection:
Now though I stand in fire,
yet I am not consumed,
For the fire shall not harm me
Nor shall the flame of the fire touch me
Nor shall the heat of the fire burn me,
And the Fiend shall be powerless before me
And my enemy shall be powerless to destroy me,
As I pass through the fire unconsumed.
Yet still she was afraid.
If Wordsley had only consulted his better judgment, he would have left Bigham and his steam juggernaut to enter the desert alone, with only the dour Scots engineers he had hired to minister to the needs of the iron beast and tend to the crates marked Giant Powder Company. His better judgment wanted nothing more to do with the American a
nd his grandiose, demented notions. He had escaped once already, and brought forth a treasure vastly more precious than any gold or lapis or electrum that Bigham might find in the tombs of kings: the manuscript, previously unknown, rescued from the destruction of Bigham’s vision of the future.
During the months of the American’s absence, he had spent hours, countless hours, meticulously copying, transcribing and translating the hieroglyphs, committing them to memory. He had done what he could to restore the original brittle, crumbling papyri. But the text—so distinct with its frieze of solar barques—had broken off abruptly, and nowhere in all the boxes, bundles and crates he’d brought back with him from the desert had there been another scroll to complete it. The rest of it had to be out there, still!
Yet what hope was there of retrieving it from out of the iron maw of Bigham’s mechanical monstrosity? The steam excavator would scoop up sand by the ton, bite through explosive-shaken stone, devour a complete necropolis in a single day, in search for treasure Bigham considered worthy. The devastation would be incalculable!
He must stop him!
At first, he had entertained the hope that the behemoth might collapse of its own weight into the desert. The steam shovel was designed to propel itself, but not for vast distances over such ground. Bigham would not be thwarted. His engineers designed a portable wooden roadway, and he hired a team of workers to set each section in place ahead of the iron wheels of the moving behemoth, then run back and pick up the next section as it passed. The steam boiler devoured water, it consumed wood, but Bigham had these supplies brought up in donkey carts and by porter, declaring he would be damned if he gave a pin for the expense. In such a way, a mile or so closer every day, they approached the site where he supposed lay the royal tombs.
The American, Wordsley concluded, was obsessed. There was no other name for this condition. What havoc might he not wreak, if someone were not there to prevent it!
