The Tomb and Other Stories

by Stanley Salmons

  “Well?” I said. “What was that all about?”

  “I told them to cancel the camera team and summon the police.”

  “Why, what’s happened to Kutawi?”

  “I’ve no idea. There’s no sign of him.”

  I managed not to laugh. “What are you talking about? – he must be in there somewhere. We saw him go in and he didn’t come out. Is there a passage to another chamber or something?”

  “Not that I can see. Come on, you can have a look yourself.”

  I followed him inside and stood for a moment to let my eyes adapt. A shiver ran down my spine but whether it was the chill in the air or something else I couldn’t say. The space around me began to acquire form. The chamber was little more than a large square room hacked out of the rock. The only illumination came from the lantern, which had been set on the floor some distance away, but in its light I could see no decoration, no ornaments or funerary jars, no inscriptions or wall paintings of any sort. I’m no scholar but to my eyes it was an unbelievably plain tomb, and quite unlike any Egyptian burial chamber I’d ever seen on television or in photographs. In the centre there was what appeared to be a large stone sarcophagus, also undecorated, topped with a massive slab of stone. The tackle was still attached to it, but the ropes were slack. Presumably the handclap noise we’d heard was the lid dropping back into place. Of Kutawi there was not the slightest sign. Geoffrey picked up the lantern and started to go around the walls with it, running his fingers carefully over them. I assumed he was looking for some sort of secret entrance, but if he was he didn’t find anything.

  I said, “I don’t get it. He just vanished. ”

  “Well, maybe he’ll turn up somewhere. Meanwhile we’ve got a nice opportunity. While he’s gone we can open that sarcophagus ourselves without his bloody interference. Over here; you can help.”

  He took hold of the rope on the pulley system and started to haul. The ropes became taut, shedding a little rain of dust or sand, and started to take the strain. The pulleys creaked and presently there was a low grinding sound and the slab began to lift. Geoffrey had obviously performed this manoeuvre before because when it was a couple of inches clear of the rest of the sarcophagus he tied the rope around a cleat and with my help swung the lid slowly to one side and used another two ropes to hold it there. Then he picked up the lantern and we looked inside.

  There was a mummy in there all right, wrapped in bandages. In fact that’s all there was, no valuables, no vessels, no tokens of office, nothing. Whoever had put this person in here had made sure that, according to their beliefs at least, he would not be transported into the afterworld to trouble them there. Even the thickness of the sarcophagus and the slab on top of it suggested to me the idea of containing something malevolent.

  Geoffrey stepped back, then he appeared to notice something. He crouched down and rubbed his hand over a patch on the side of the sarcophagus. It revealed an inscription.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  He ran his finger over the hieroglyphics. “It’s a warning. Loosely translated, I think it says: ‘For any man who shall enter this my tomb there will be judgement… I shall cast the fear of myself into him.’”

  I swallowed. “Just as well we didn’t see that before we opened it up.”

  He got to his feet and glanced around the chamber. “I have to say I’d expected a bit more than this. I thought there’d be some sort of goods with the body, and rather more in the way of inscriptions.”

  We squeezed back through the doorway and down the corridor and emerged into the heat and blinding sunlight. Then the police arrived and everyone spent the rest of the day being interviewed, not once but many times, which was a longish job in my own case, as I spoke no Arabic.

  The dig itself was over and the workmen dispersed to their homes. I didn’t feel ready to go back yet and neither did Geoffrey; we were sharing a profound sense of anticlimax. Academically speaking, it had been a disappointment. I had my radon results, of course, and no doubt we’d get a paper out of that, but despite uncovering an intact tomb we’d found nothing that could have shed light on the life of its occupant other than the mysterious inscription Geoffrey had spotted on the side of the stone sarcophagus. There was, however, one last chance to retrieve something from the entire exercise and we went up to Cairo for it. The Acting Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, Dr. Aarifah al-Bihar, recognized that, as the ones who’d discovered the tomb, Geoffrey and I had a legitimate interest, and she invited us to be present when the mummy was unwrapped.

  We all gathered in the special environmentally-controlled room, togged up like surgeons at a sterile operation, which in a sense was what it was. Then we watched anxiously as the wrappings slowly came off. Gradually our spirits sagged. Geoffrey had hoped to see objects of value or interest secreted between the layers, but there was nothing. The final layers came away and revealed the dark, leathery skin beneath. The body was that of a man, strongly built and quite well preserved. Then they started to unwrap the head and everyone froze. Dr. Bihar met our gaze across the table, her dark eyes wide above the surgical mask. The face of the mummy, though severely dessicated, bore an uncanny resemblance to that of Muhammed Kutawi. The brow was prominent, and below it the nose, often damaged or missing in these cases, was intact, a thin replica of that beak-like nose with which we were only too familiar.

  The resemblance was so striking that the forensic people were called in. They took samples for DNA testing and compared them with Kutawi’s son and daughters and with traces of hair found in his office. Dr. Bihar was good enough to give us the results, in strictest confidence, and they confirmed what we’d all suspected. We had discovered the missing Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt.

  “You know,” Geoffrey said, “if you’d related this incident to me, I’d have laughed in your face. How does a mummified corpse swap places with a living person who happened to get too close?”

  “I suppose we’ll never know. But if the old magicians had skills like that, maybe it’s just as well their line died out.”

  *

  Somehow they managed to keep the details from the Press. Initially Kutawi was declared missing, no more than that. With his death now confirmed the media were allowed to say that their revered scholar had been killed in an accident. Some reports suggested it was a rock fall in an archaeological excavation, which appeared to satisfy everyone’s curiosity, as it would also account for his prior disappearance.

  Geoffrey and I arrived early at Cairo International Airport for our flight back home. To pass the time we ordered coffee in one of the snack bars, and Geoffrey picked up an English language newspaper, the Daily Egypt News, which someone had left on the table. He leafed through it, then folded back a page and read more attentively.

  “This is interesting,” he said. “There’s an obituary here for Muhammed Kutawi – very detailed, very fulsome. It refers to his long interest in Egyptian history. Apparently he’d traced his own ancestry back to one of the High Priests of Amun, a man called Osorkon.”

  He looked up and our eyes met.

  “Well,” I said. “Wakheteb had to wait a few thousand years but it looks like he finally got his revenge.”

  Geoffrey nodded. “You know what worries me?”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “Where in hell’s name is Wakheteb now?”

  [The Tombwas awarded third prize at the Cowbridge Festival 2012]

  Homecoming

  Just north of Barnsley, a Jaguar sped up the M1. In the back, the portly figure of T. Stafford Pike lounged comfortably, legs crossed, a red briefcase open on the seat next to him..

  He gazed absently out of the window, enjoying the soothing hum of the tyres on the tarmac. A smile of satisfaction puckered his cheeks. When he ordered the car the party mandarins tried to intervene. It wasn’t appropriate, they said, Jaguar XJs were for the Prime Minister. He got his way. And he had all the extras. The fini
sh – the colour of vintage burgundy – went nicely with the interior. His stubby fingers spread and contracted on the cream leather upholstery.

  He glanced back at the papers he was holding in his other hand. Printed on the familiar ivory stationery, with the Westminster portcullis at top centre, it was headed “Ministry of Housing and Urban Renewal”. His Ministry.

  And quite right too. Who else would have pushed it the way I did – writing memoranda, grabbing every opportunity, bending ears at the Party Conference, cultivating anyone with influence?

  It had paid off. With an election coming up they could see votes in it, and they’d asked him to draft the appropriate part of the manifesto. After that there was no stopping him. His speeches on the campaign trail had been plangent with political conviction.

  “Of course we are an expanding population! Of course we need more residential accommodation! Of course we need to expand our industrial base! But not at any cost! For too many years the developers have been allowed to take the easy way, building estate after estate, offices and factories, shops and hypermarkets, around the edges of our towns. And the result? The built environment has spread like a cancer. Our green fields, our parks, our farming land – our very heritage – all disappearing under a creeping tide of urbanization.” (He rather liked “creeping tide of urbanization”; it had a good ring to it.) “And while the developers line their pockets, our inner cities remain an abomination, an affront to civilized people! How can we hold our heads up and say we are a technologically advanced nation when we still have rows of back-to-backs, substandard buildings, cramped and dismal houses, the mean streets of our industrial heritage?” (He knew someone else had coined the phrase “mean streets”, but that didn’t stop him from using it as his own.) “My friends, from now on you’re going to see a change. We will ensure that development is restricted to brownfield sites. For every new building that rises from the ground, old and decrepit housing, vacant warehouses and boarded-up offices must first fall. We will rejuvenate our cities. We will make them places we are proud to live in, proud to work in, and proud to show to our visitors, wherever in the world they come from.”

  It had all gone down very well with the greens, the environmentalists and the rural lobby. They’d picked up a lot of votes that way. The developers hadn’t been too delighted, but once he’d explained his scheme for providing government assistance with buying out existing residents, even they’d come round. At least they hadn’t withdrawn campaign contributions, and that was all that mattered; in terms of votes there weren’t enough of them to worry about. When the government was re-elected, he was put in charge of the scheme. And now the time had come to implement it.

  He shifted in his seat and his gaze strayed to the front, past the grey cap of Patrick, his chauffeur, to the occupant of the front passenger seat. Pike didn’t know his second name, and had no interest in finding out. All he knew was that Vincent was a good man to have around in case of trouble. Not that there’d been any trouble so far. The tour had gathered strength, and Sheffield had been a positive triumph. Now they were heading for the last stop, Bodlington, in North Yorkshire. This would be the pivotal event, the launch of the entire scheme. To T. Stafford Pike, however, it was going to be very much more than that.

  He studied the back of Vincent’s blunt head, the hair close-cropped, army-fashion. The young man could handle himself all right, and he looked the part, which was just as important. Would he be needed there? It was hard to know. The local organizers had said there was nothing to worry about, that the deputation who’d come to lobby him at the House represented no more than a disgruntled group of old fogeys who couldn’t cope with change. They were a truculent lot, all the same. No respect at all for his position. He fidgeted a little as he recalled the encounter.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he’d said affably, “what can I do for you?”

  “I’ll tell you what you can do. You can bloody forget demolishing Station Terrace, that’s what. Them’s our ’ouses, not yours, and you can bloody well keep your hands off.”

  The speaker looked to be well over sixty, to judge by the thin grey hair and the slackness in the throat, but he was strongly built and his face was flushed with anger. Pike felt a trickle of unease.

  “Now, now, let’s not get excited, Mr…?”

  “Byrne. Stan Byrne.”

  “Well, Mr Byrne, you know as well as I do that those terraces don’t meet the minimum building regulations. They were all right in their time, thrown up cheaply to accommodate the work force. But they’re falling apart. There are no damp proof courses, no cavity walls, mould everywhere, inadequate light and ventilation. The wiring’s unsafe. They didn’t even have inside toilets until a few years ago, when the Council put up the conversion money. You people were still managing with an outside privy.”

  Outside privy. He shuddered, then quickly shifted in his seat to conceal the involuntary reaction. Once again he was young Thomas, waiting outside the little hut, hopping from one foot to another, while his father sat inside, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper. To say “Hurry up, Dad” was more than his life was worth. His father spent a lot of time in that privy. Motivated by pure self-interest, he’d rigged it up with an electric light. The unsupported cable swooped from the house to the privy, and it would swing about in the wind, pulling the bare bulb to one side and the other, creating a cast of moving shadows that frightened Thomas almost more than the darkness.

  “Look here, Pike.” Another man broke into the Minister’s thoughts. This one was of a similar age to Byrne, but he was heavily overweight and a little breathless. “I’m Jack Seaton. I dare say you’ll remember me. You used to live just four doors up from us.”

  Pike shook his head. “Sorry…”

  “Well it makes no odds. I don’t know what your game is, and I don’t care. What I want to say is this. I’ve lived in Station Terrace all my life, and I like it just the way it is. It was good enough for my parents, and it’s bloody well good enough for me.”

  The others grumbled their agreement.

  Pike surveyed the man’s beer belly, which almost overlapped the broad leather belt supporting his trousers. It was a belt just like his father’s. He should know, he’d seen it often enough, both when the man wore it, and when he drew it out of the loops on his trouser-band and doubled it in his hand. He’d used it on young Thomas and he’d used it on his mother when he wasn’t punching her as well. His father was a foreman – at least he had been when the coal was still being mined. His temper had been bad enough then; it was more foul than ever when the mine closed and the men were laid off. Thomas and his mother had lived with it, day in, day out. He was sure now that the man had never wanted a family; it was a mere byproduct of his animal urges. Perhaps his mother thought that it would have a civilizing influence on her husband if he became a father. It didn’t, and she made sure it never happened again. The poor woman couldn’t take the constant violence and by the time Thomas was six, she’d disappeared into a sherry bottle. That earned her yet more abuse, but it anaesthetized the pain of being alive. Thomas couldn’t protect her any more than he could defend himself, but it didn’t matter: no one existed in her dazed world, least of all Thomas. Pike felt bile rise into his gorge, and he realized he’d not been listening to anything these people were saying. He took the lead again.

  “Look, the government is trying to help you, trying to give you a decent life.”

  “Oh, don’t give us that rubbish! What – like you helped us when the mine closed? It were you lot in power then, you know. The bloody electricity companies bought cheap coal in from Europe, and you just let us go to the wall.”

  “Well, you know, the Government can’t interfere with private enterprise. The companies have to make profits, otherwise none of us would have electricity, would we now? In any case we subsidized that Japanese firm to move in and provide some employment.”

  “Oh yes – a bloody semiconductor factory! That were a whole load of help! What did we
know about semiconductors? They bussed in young girls from Wexley. The whole town were unemployed, them that didn’t move away. All on the dole. Working men like us. It takes away a man’s self-respect, does that.”

  “I still say we’re doing our best to help you. Look, you’d never have been able to sell those decrepit old houses. This way you’ve got a fair market price...”

  “So what are we going to buy with it? Not the fancy houses you’re going to put up – we could never afford ’em.”

  A wiry individual, older than the rest, stepped forward. The creases in his face were tattooed indelibly with coal dust.

  He must be a tough old bird to have survived this long.

  The man poked the Minister’s lapel with a bony finger.

  “Young man,” he said. “People like us have lived in street for years. We know each other; we help each other out. It’s not just a row of houses you’re destroying; it’s a whole community.”

  He sighed. This had gone far enough. “Well, I hear what you say, and I’ll take it forward but I have to tell you I don’t hold out a lot of hope. This is Government policy, and it’s not in my hands to change it. Well now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have a meeting to go to...”

  “Now just a minute. We’ve come all the way down here...”

  “I’m sorry, I am busy and I can’t give you any more time. If you have something more to say I suggest you put it in writing.”

  He would not, of course, be taking their views forward. It was Government policy all right – his policy, and he wasn’t going to change it, least of all for this town.

  Needless to say, they didn’t write. If they had, he would have binned it.

  The Jaguar negotiated an interchange and switched to the M62 motorway, travelling east. Familiar landmarks came into view, landmarks he hadn’t seen in more than thirty years. Until this moment he’d never been back. When they buried his father he didn’t attend the funeral; he didn’t even respond to the request to help them with the expenses.