“I think they understand that they’ve been tricked.”
“Well, too bad for them,” Russell said. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Now I wouldn’t normally say this to a civilian, Wall, but you’re living in a rough patch, and I think you should know. I’ve been getting signals from London—nothing concrete mind you, straw in the wind—that I’ll receive orders to arrest Zaghloul and his pals before long and ship them far enough away that we’ll never be troubled by them again.”
“I’m sure the natives will just roll over and give up at that point,” Augustus said, sarcasm lacing his voice.
Sir Russell either ignored his tone or was oblivious to it. “There’ll be protests, of course, and perhaps some unfortunate incidents. I’ll try to give you a warning if I’m given the time myself. Oh, there’s polo at the Ghezireh Sporting Club this Saturday. Good group of chaps. I’m sure they’d lend you a horse. I heard you played at Oxford.”
“I did.”
“Well, if you’d like—”
“That’s quite all right.”
Russell chuckled and lit a cigarette. “Davison told me you were a bit of work.”
Davison was the police commandant in Alexandria.
“Davison is a good man in his way, but he’s damned hard to shake,” Augustus said.
“You’re not supposed to shake a police officer. Look here, Wall, it’s bad enough that you’re living in the Old Quarter, but that’s no reason to go completely native.”
“I’m not one for showing my face at social events.”
Russell shifted uneasily in his seat, then put on a smile. “I know something you would like. Have you met Pierre Dupris? He’s excavating a mastaba at Giza and has found quite a bit of note. He sent a message this morning that he wants to see me. There’s been a theft.”
Augustus must have betrayed a flash of interest because the commandant’s smile broadened. “Ah, two bull’s-eyes in one, eh? I heard how much you helped Davison out of a tight spot.”
“He would have solved that case without me.”
“I daresay he would have, but perhaps the khedive’s jewels wouldn’t have been recovered in time. That was more than some little police matter you untangled. Unfortunately, this case is merely routine, but since I wanted to see the diggings in any case, and I know you do, would you care to join me? My driver is waiting.”
“So what’s missing?” Augustus asked.
Sir Russell set his cigarette in an ashtray and rummaged around inside his jacket. The ashtray was adorned with the Shepheard’s logo showing the silhouette of an Arab on a camel in front of the pyramids, now smudged with the ash from the policeman’s cigarette. Augustus had noticed one of the Americans pocketing an ashtray a few minutes before. He hadn’t bothered to speak up. The management at Shepheard’s assumed their ashtrays would be stolen. They adorned drawing rooms from Nice to New York. It was a form of advertising.
Russell retrieved a notebook from inside his jacket and flipped to a page. “A slab of highly polished white limestone carved with some hieroglyphs. The inscription is fragmentary and obviously part of a larger text. No one has offered you anything like that, have they?”
“No. What did the inscription say?”
“Dupris didn’t say. By the way, about that matter with the khedive’s jewels, I meant it when I said the government was in your debt. Enough in fact,” the policeman said, lowering his voice, “that I won’t make a fuss about your living here under an assumed name.”
Augustus lit a cigarette and studied the policeman for a moment, then exhaled the smoke slowly. “I suppose you would have found out eventually. I’m not on the run from the law.”
“I know. I checked.”
“I want to be left alone. That’s all.”
“I think I’ve heard you mention that before.”
“Sometimes I feel like I say it all day,” Augustus muttered.
“Look here, Sir Wall, and I shall call you ‘sir’ because I checked on your knighthood, and it’s certainly more real than your name. You are part of the British community here whether you choose to be or not, for the simple reason that the natives see you as such. We must be a bastion, my good fellow, a bastion against the anarchy that threatens to engulf this country. Zaghlul Pasha and his independence cronies badger the high commissioner every day for permission to go to Versailles, but London simply isn’t interested. The prime minister listens to his colonial officers, and he knows that if we give these people an inch of rope, they’ll only hang themselves with it, and us too in the bargain.”
A waiter bent over him. “More coffee, Russell Pasha?”
“No, thank you. And put this on my account,” Sir Russell said, waving him away. “Now as I was saying, you have to stand with us. All the British do. One of the only good things to come out of the Great War is that we finally wrested Egypt away from Johnny Turk once and for all, and we’re not about to give it up to a bunch of Mohammedans who will be too busy cutting each other’s throats to keep up the cotton exports.”
The police commandant glanced at Augustus’s hands. He followed his gaze and saw he was gripping his chair, knuckles white. Augustus forced himself to let go and fold his hands on his lap. Sir Russell quickly changed the subject.
“Let’s go see that excavation. Even an amateur such as I finds such things interesting, and perhaps Dupris will have a few little knickknacks to sell you.”
“It’s illegal for him to sell any of his finds without first getting permission from the Egyptian courts.”
Sir Thomas Russell laughed. “I only fight real crime.”
Augustus jabbed his cigarette into the ashtray with some force.
As they got up, Sir Russell asked, “By the way, howsoever did you get a false listing in Debrett’s Peerage?”
“Their pay isn’t at a parity with their reputation.”
The policeman looked shocked. “I thought they were incorruptible.”
“Everyone’s corruptible.”
Sir Russell clicked his tongue with disgust. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
***
The road to Giza was barren and dusty. The sprawl of Cairo came close to the plateau on which the famous pyramids stood but did not quite reach it before breaking up into scattered villages and fields. Fellahin toiled in the fields while their children tended herds of sheep and goats.
At the wheel of Russell’s vehicle sat a colonial policeman who honked at the lines of donkeys and camels carrying European visitors toward the pyramids. The policeman seemed to enjoy driving as close as possible to the animals and letting out a sudden blast with his horn, inevitably making the animals buck and shy.
“Mind that you don’t kill anyone, Aziz,” Russell told the driver.
“Mind that you do,” Augustus said.
The driver turned around in his seat and grinned at him.
“Does the good sir not like European tourists?” Aziz asked.
“They are Moses’s final curse on Pharaoh. You might want to watch the road, my good fellow.”
The driver turned back just in time to spot a tiny donkey carrying a fat, sunburned blonde woman in a white sundress and parasol. Aziz twisted hard on the wheel and missed the woman by inches. She disappeared in a cloud of the car’s dust.
“Good show, Aziz. Carry on,” Augustus said.
Sir Thomas Russell shook his head in dismay. “Davison warned me about this. Must you hate everyone?”
“I don’t hate Aziz. I think he’s a splendid fellow.”
Pierre Dupris’s excavation lay in the very shadow of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, just to the east of the pyramid of Queen Hetepheres, the famous pharaoh’s mother. The three main pyramids were only a part of a much larger funerary system, which included numerous temples and several smaller queen’s pyramids, plus smaller tombs called mastabas for the high nobility. These took their name from the Arabic word for bench, because the rectangular structures, not much taller than the height of a man, looked like
oversize benches of the kind Egyptian farmers put outside their front doors. A whole field of mastabas lay in orderly rows next to the Great Pyramid. The desert sands had covered up most of them, and years of excavation by British, German, French, and Austrian Egyptologists had uncovered several. Others were only visible as low hummocks in the sand, awaiting exploration. Like their greater cousins the pyramids, most mastabas had been looted in antiquity, but they still offered up interesting bas-reliefs and wall paintings, plus the occasional stray find of value.
A team of native workmen had uncovered about half of the mastaba Russell and Augustus had come to see. The top was entirely exposed to about the top three feet and showed the mastaba to be eight feet wide and about twenty long. The entire northern part had been uncovered, and a row of fellahin hacked away at the sand on one side with hoes, quickly filling straw baskets that were removed by a long line of village women in voluminous robes, who carried the baskets on their heads about a quarter of a mile to dump them well away from the site. Aziz stopped the car far enough away that he didn’t send a cloud of dust into the faces of his countrymen.
“That’s all right, Aziz. We can walk from here,” Sir Russell grumbled.
Aziz stayed with the car as Russell and Augustus got out.
As they walked away, the police commandant said in a low voice, “A good man, Aziz. It’s all right to grant him a bit of fun.”
A young, petite, energetic Frenchman with a bandaged right hand was overseeing the work on the mastaba. Despite a broad pith helmet, his face was red, highlighting his blond hair and bright blue eyes. When he spotted his two visitors, he waved and walked over to meet them.
“Sir Wall, I’d like you to meet Cavell Martin, Dupris’s assistant director,” Sir Russell said in passable French. “Monsieur Martin, this is Sir Augustus Wall, an antiquities dealer.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir. I hope you forgive me for not shaking hands,” Cavell Martin said, smiling sheepishly and raising his bandaged hand.
“In the process of mummifying yourself, are you?” Augustus asked. His French was perfect.
“Ah no, a little accident with a shovel. Occupational hazard, as you Englishmen say.”
“So what have we here?” Augustus asked, pointing to the mastaba with his cane.
“A fine discovery. Come. Let me show you the entrance.”
They approached the mastaba, a low limestone structure a bit taller than a man. Many of the stones were missing, probably from ancient or medieval quarrying. It was common for people of later periods to use the prepared blocks of earlier structures for their own use, rather than going through the trouble of creating new ones. This generally did not happen until medieval times, when the religious system of the ancient Egyptians had broken down and people no longer revered the cults of the pharaohs or respected their relations and prominent officials. To steal stones from a mastaba in ancient times would have been a sacrilege punishable by death.
Despite the missing stones, the mastaba’s portal was well preserved, standing exposed at the bottom of a great hole the workers had excavated in the sand. A narrow, low door was topped by a lengthy hieroglyphic inscription on the lintel.
Augustus studied the inscription, slowly working out the words.
“Idu, son of Qar. Inspector of the um, something, priests—”
“Wab-priests,” Martin interjected.
“Thank you. For the pyramids of Pharaohs Khufu and Khafre and um—overseer? inspector?—of scribes.”
“Overseer. So you read Old Kingdom hieratic!” Martin said, obviously impressed.
“Not as well as I should. Ironically, my work takes up so much of my time that it keeps me from making a proper study of it. I’m afraid I don’t know what a wab-priest is, for example.”
“A wab-priest was responsible for the purification of any objects such as sistra or vessels used in religious ceremonies,” the Frenchman explained. “There were several subclasses involved in various parts of the ritual process. It appears our man Idu managed all of them for the pharaoh.”
“An important post then. I congratulate you on your find. What’s this inscription on the doorjamb? I can’t quite puzzle it out,” Augustus said, pointing to another hieroglyphic text above the figure of a guardian carved in low relief into the jamb on the right-hand side. The guardian stood facing out, toward anyone entering, and held a staff in his hand as if to bar the way. Augustus had seen this figure on numerous tombs.
“Ah, it’s a curse! It says, ‘As for every man who shall enter this tomb, without purifying himself as the purification of a god, one shall make for him a painful punishment.’”
“Charming. May we go inside and see if it still works?”
“You are most welcome, and have no fear of any curses,” Martin said with an easy laugh. “I was the first to enter the mastaba when we uncovered the doorway, and so the weight of the curse will fall heaviest on me.”
The Frenchman ushered them through the narrow doorway and turned on an electric torch so they could see. Augustus fished another out of his pocket and added some more light.
The doorway was made of thick slabs of stone. Both the right and the left were carved with the figures of guardians, straight-backed men holding tall staves who were supposed to protect the tomb for all time.
“Excuse us, gentlemen,” Augustus said, passing between them.
There were a couple of steps down, and they entered a long, low room. Sand crunched under their shoes, and a heap of it against the back showed the mastaba hadn’t yet been fully cleared. Augustus shone his torch on the right wall and saw more hieroglyphic inscriptions above a depiction of Idu himself seated in front of a table piled high with the offerings that would sustain him in the afterlife. Various carvings showed typical scenes for a tomb such as this—men slaughtering bulls, servants carrying food to Idu, and similar images. Beyond was a false door for his ka, his spirit, to pass in and out of the tomb. Unusually, the tomb had a second carving of Idu, this one almost fully in the round, facing toward the inside of the tomb with his arms outstretched, palms up. On the left wall stood a series of statues in little niches. The paint was remarkably well preserved in spots, with the copper red of the statue’s skin especially clear.
“Not a bad place to end one’s days, eh?” Augustus said.
“Bit gloomy, but more elaborate than a coffin I suppose,” Russell sniffed.
“So what do you think you’ll find beyond this?” Augustus asked Martin.
“Just the rest of this room. As you can see, it takes up most of the space already, so there aren’t any more rooms on this level. Once we’ve cleared it, we’ll break through the floor and search for the burial chamber.”
“You think perhaps it’s undisturbed?” Augustus asked.
Martin shook his head sadly. “Unfortunately no. The paucity of the finds so far indicates it was looted in antiquity. The reliefs alone, though, make for a fine discovery.”
“Indeed. You’ll have tourists snapping pictures here a hundred years from now,” the antiquities dealer said.
Sir Russell cleared his throat.
“Well, this is all very interesting, Cavell, but we best get down to business about that theft,” the police inspector said.
Martin’s eyes brightened. “Ah, we already have identified the culprit, a big buck of a Soudanese foreman named Moustafa. He doesn’t suspect we know his game. So let us surprise him, eh? Then we can recover the piece that he stole.”
“How do you know it’s him?” Russell asked.
“He was caught in the find tent when he shouldn’t have been there, and even worse, he was spotted coming out of Monsieur Dupris’s tent.”
“Sounds like our man. Let’s go see your boss and have a talk with this Soudanese fellow.”
Martin shook his head as he led them toward a cluster of large tents on a low rise overlooking the excavation. “It’s a pity. He was a good foreman and quite bright for a native, but he had a habit of talking back. I can’t s
ay I’m surprised it was him.”
They went up to the find tent and met the dig director, Pierre Dupris, a tall, spare man in his late forties with a calm and serious demeanor. He sat at a long table examining several broken bits of masonry and taking notes while a young French draftsman sketched the more important pieces. A few native workmen sat in a circle cleaning artifacts nearby. A wink and a nod from Martin told the Englishmen that the large black man directing them was the foreman he had mentioned.
Augustus studied the Soudanese man. He was tall and powerfully built, a hulk of a man, although Augustus got the impression that not an ounce of it was fat. He had an intelligent, open face and seemed entranced with his work.
Augustus’s attention then had to shift to the Frenchmen. Augustus was already vaguely acquainted with Dupris from a lecture series the Egyptologist had held in Alexandria the year before. The draftsman he did not know. He was a studious younger man who greeted them with quiet courtesy and immediately went back to work. The four remaining men spoke in French. After the usual pleasantries, they got down to business.
“So, Monsieur Dupris, your assistant says you have discovered the thief,” the policeman said in a low voice.
“Indeed we have. It’s that fellow over there. Don’t look or he might suspect something. Let us continue in French, if you please. The foreman speaks English but no French. We can switch to English for the cross examination.”
Augustus glanced at Moustafa and saw he had slowed down his work and appeared to be listening. Augustus wondered if the Soudanese might understand French after all.
Sir Russell nodded. “Before we clap him in irons, can you tell me how you know he’s the one?”
Martin answered the question. “We found the missing inscription the day before yesterday. I and the thief were overseeing the workmen as they uncovered it. Quite an odd piece, I must say, with very large writing for some sizeable monument. Our foreman seemed most interested in it for some reason and asked me all sorts of questions about it. I was preoccupied with my work and didn’t pay much notice to his behavior. I didn’t think until too late that he had been seen on numerous occasions lingering around the find tent when he was not on duty. I should have been suspicious, but I’m afraid neither I nor Monsieur Dupris thought much of it.”
The Case of the Purloined Pyramid Page 3
