The Case of the Purloined Pyramid

by Sean McLachlan

  Best not to take those. He didn’t even know what they were worth. Faisal needed to find something he could sell easily or use for himself.

  He hadn’t looked downstairs yet. Perhaps he should start there and work his way up.

  Faisal went downstairs and discovered a hallway leading to a large, dark room. The size of it and the near complete darkness made him pause. The thoughts of all the jinn hiding in the shadows came back to him. His heart started beating fast again, but he summoned up his courage and tiptoed in.

  Faisal shivered and looked around him. The shelves along the walls had strange shapes on them. In the middle of the room were more strange shapes. He couldn’t make anything out. Faisal felt an urge to run. What if one of those shapes moved?

  Some light would harden his courage. Since the Englishman obviously wouldn’t wake until tomorrow, Faisal felt confident enough to pull the stub of a candle out of his pocket, strike a match, and light it.

  The first thing he saw was a huge man with a crocodile head leering down at him.

  Faisal screamed and fled the room, and screamed again as the candle blew out in his hand. He raced up the stairs and into the Englishman’s room.

  “Wake up! Wake up! The jinn are going to kill us!” he shouted as he pounded his little fists against the man’s back.

  The Englishman muttered something in his sleep and turned over. A shaft of moonlight illuminated the terrible wound on his face. Faisal screamed for a third time and fled the room, streaking upstairs, scrambling up the archway, and forcing himself through the narrow opening, not caring that he ripped his jellaba and scraped both knees.

  Within moments, he scampered down the side of the building and ran off into the night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Moustafa Ghani El Souwaim could not believe his good fortune. It had been a long journey from his village in the Soudan to this wonderful private library in an Englishman’s house in Cairo. Born the third son in a respectable family, Moustafa had experienced little of the suffering growing up that so many of his countrymen had. But even so, his options had been limited and uninteresting. His eldest brother had inherited the land. With the little money left over, his father had been able to buy and stock a market stall in the village for his second brother and provide dowries to his two older sisters. That left Moustafa with nothing other than the choice of which brother to work for.

  Moustafa had taken a different choice than had been expected of him—at the age of sixteen, he had broken his parents’ heart, and his own, by leaving his village. It was the first of many untraditional choices, and making untraditional choices had become his habit.

  When he told them of his decision, his mother wailed and covered herself in dust as if she were mourning by his grave. His brothers tried to dissuade him. His father got angry and then burst into tears. Moustafa cried too, because he knew he might never come back, and even if he did someday, so much would have changed in his absence. Despite all this grief, his resolution never faltered. He knew there was something else out there beyond the palm trees and herds of sheep and the cluster of mud and thatch huts that made up his village, and he wanted to see what it was.

  For a year, he worked as a porter loading goods onto the boats heading up the Nile. Once he saved some money, he found work on a boat heading to Khartoum, where he got odd jobs and lived hand to mouth before having his first stroke of luck. A foreigner standing by the riverfront picked out the strongest of the young men from Moustafa’s work team and hired them for a strange job—to go into the desert where there were some old ruins and dig them up.

  Moustafa didn’t understand what it was all about, but this man, who turned out to be the famous English archaeologist Somers Clarke, paid well, and so Moustafa was happy with the work. Soon they were uncovering statues and stones with strange rows of pictures carved on them. Mr. Clarke seemed very happy with the result. Mr. Clarke spoke Arabic, and one day Moustafa plucked up the courage to ask why they were digging in the ground where the pagans had once lived.

  What Mr. Clarke said in reply changed his life.

  “Once there was a great civilization here, the greatest in the ancient world. You have heard of the pyramids of Egypt to the north, yes?”

  Moustafa nodded. He had heard of them but didn’t really know anything about them.

  “Well, the people here at one time ruled over the land of the pyramids.”

  That impressed Moustafa greatly, because in all their wars, the Soudanese had never conquered the Egyptians.

  “So who were these people? Where did they go?”

  Mr. Clarke laughed. “Why, they’re you, Moustafa! They’re your ancestors.”

  Moustafa thought Mr. Clarke was teasing him and got angry. He was careful not to show his anger, though, because his job paid well. Instead he didn’t say a word and got back to work.

  Two days later, they found the statue.

  It was Moustafa’s own shovel that clunked down on something hard in the sand. He already knew from experience that sometimes Mr. Clarke gave a bonus to men who discovered something he liked, so he eagerly brushed away the sand . . . and uncovered the face of a Nubian pharaoh.

  If Moustafa lived to be a hundred, he knew he would never forget that moment.

  The statue was hewn from black basalt. It lay on its back, and its powerful face looked up at him with features much like his own. Seventeen-year-old Moustafa stared down at the face of a man who could have come from his village, and yet it was the face of a king, a king from an ancient kingdom that Mr. Clarke said had once ruled over Egypt.

  He later learned that the statue depicted the great Pharaoh Taharqa of the XXV Dynasty. It was this dynasty that moved northward to occupy Egypt, but it was not the first or last great dynasty of the Soudan. Other pharaohs had built great cities and pyramids of their own to rival the Egyptians. He learned all this and much more, because after he uncovered the statue, he bombarded Mr. Clarke with questions. At every opportunity, he would find an excuse to work by his boss’s side and find out more about this civilization. He also began to ask about the sketches Mr. Clarke made and what he wrote in the notebooks he always carried around.

  Some of the older workmen warned Moustafa that Mr. Clarke would get annoyed with all this pestering, but in fact, the Englishman found it amusing. He took on Moustafa as his personal servant.

  Moustafa did everything he could to make himself invaluable to Mr. Clarke. He worked from right after the dawn prayers to well after dark, cleaning Mr. Clarke’s rooms, taking care of the artifacts, making the tea, everything. Within a few months, he could carry on a conversation in English and had learned the names of all the principle types of artifacts and their uses in ancient times.

  Mr. Clarke was amazed by Moustafa’s ability with languages and started teaching him French as well. That, too, Moustafa picked up with startling rapidity. Mr. Clarke began to bring his friends over to show off his prize servant, betting them that Moustafa couldn’t speak English, French, and discuss Egyptology all at the same time. So Moustafa would stand in the middle of Mr. Clarke’s drawing room while the European men sat around and fired questions at him about Egyptology in English and French.

  Mr. Clarke always won these bets. Mr. Clarke did not share his winnings with Moustafa.

  Moustafa knew this was unjust, but he didn’t mind so much, because Mr. Clarke shared something far more valuable than money—he shared knowledge.

  It didn’t last. After another year, Mr. Clarke returned to England and dismissed all his servants. Moustafa begged to go with him, but Mr. Clarke refused with a derisive chuckle. He paid Moustafa the last of his wages and left with a curt goodbye. The young Soudanese man was quite sure that the famous English archaeologist had forgotten all about him by the time he boarded the train for Cairo.

  Now without a job, Moustafa went from door to door in Khartoum’s European quarter, calling on the gentlemen he had so impressed at Mr. Clarke’s dinner parties. The house servants turned him away. The o
ne time he managed to catch a European on his way out the door the man claimed never to have met him before.

  Then Moustafa remembered that one of Mr. Clarke’s friends was director of the French Institute. Moustafa squatted in the shade of a palm tree all day waiting for the man to come out of his office.

  When he did, he introduced himself in his best French and asked for a job. The man remembered him and gave him a job as a night watchman. Moustafa thought this beneath him, but at least he would eat.

  And then he discovered an unexpected bonus to his work. The French Institute had a library. Once the last foreigner left at night, it was only him and his fellow watchman Mohammad until the next morning, and Mohammad always fell asleep promptly after evening prayer.

  Moustafa didn’t mind, because it gave him free run of the library. He devoured books on every subject, from geography to philosophy to linguistics, but always left time for his favorite subject of all—the wonders of his ancestors’ civilization.

  That job lasted four wonderful years, until a new manager came in and changed all the native workers for ones he had brought with him. By then, Moustafa had enough money saved for his next move, to go to the center of Egyptological research—Cairo.

  There he soon got places on excavations, working for various foreigners and building up his knowledge. The researchers always ended up returning to Europe, leaving Moustafa without a job, but Moustafa got good at anticipating what foreigners wanted and never stayed out of work for long. The work was rewarding and paid enough for him to find a good wife and support two sons and three daughters.

  And now he was working for his latest foreign boss. Moustafa had long since become accustomed to the strangeness of Europeans, but this one was stranger than most. That mask must hide some terrible injury, probably suffered in the war that had ripped Europe apart. The war and the injury had twisted Mr. Wall’s mind. It hadn’t made him brutal or a drunkard like he had seen with other Europeans who had come through that war, but it had made him shut himself away. He seemed to hate his fellow Europeans, and yet here he was opening up a store for them.

  Moustafa suspected that Mr. Wall didn’t really hate Europeans, but rather hated that they reminded him of the war. His hatred also had the strange effect of trying to understand and sympathize with Africans. Of course he didn’t really, but he tried, and that meant that unlike with all his other bosses, Moustafa could sit down at a table in a European home with a European book open in front of him and read it without constantly looking over his shoulder in fear of getting caught.

  That bought a lot of loyalty from Moustafa.

  Currently he was studying a field report of a survey of Saqqara and its stepped pyramid, believed by some scholars to be the earliest pyramid of all. It made for fascinating reading.

  But now it was time to stop reading and start working again. He shut the report with a sigh. This Englishman was kinder than most, but he demanded hard work like the rest of them. To be ruled by Europeans meant being ruled by their worst invention—the clock. It was time to open up the shop for its first round of guests, and he had been warned to keep a sharp eye out for anyone trying to leave the front hall and sneak into the back rooms or upstairs. Mr. Wall had told him about the German man snooping around upstairs. If he caught anyone doing that, he’d beat him within an inch of his life, European or not. No one was going to endanger the man who allowed him access to such books.

  ***

  Augustus Wall knocked back a scotch and soda, considered having another, and decided against it. He hated these soirées, but in his business, there was no avoiding them, and if he wanted to sell a few things tonight and make good connections, he’d have to pace himself.

  Besides, he was worried about the other night. He had dissolved some opium in a glass of wine as he usually did so that he could sleep without nightmares. He had only drunk the one glass, he was sure of it, but the next morning he awoke to find the entire bottle empty. He must have drunk it in that hazy period between when the opium began to take effect and when he drifted off to an untroubled sleep.

  He had never done that before. It must have been the stress of moving into his new house, along with that little brat knocking his mask off. That had shaken him badly—the way those children screamed, and that pesky one’s (what was his name? Farouk?) look of terror. The amusing little street fight with that band of thugs later that day hadn’t eased the tension nearly enough.

  So apparently he had downed an entire bottle of wine along with his daily dose of opium, all with no hangover. That truly was disturbing. He hoped he wasn’t turning into a dipsomaniac.

  So only one drink, and the inevitable champagne toast as everyone gathered around to cheer on his new venture, whether they gave a damn about his success or not. What a bore. At least he could rely on Heinrich Schäfer to be there, a fine old colleague and expert on Egyptian art who was the closest thing to a friend he had in Cairo. Schäfer was of limited means and so wouldn’t buy anything, but he could be relied upon for excellent conversation. The German had been too old to fight, the lucky devil, and had sat out the war in Egypt working on a vast treatise on Egyptian art. It was a good thing he’d confirmed he would come because Sir Russell had pulled out at the last minute pleading urgent police work, and Zehra Hanzade had not replied to his invitation. That bothered him more than he cared to dwell upon.

  He came down to his front room to find everything in preparation. The electric lights were all working (something never guaranteed in Cairo), Moustafa manned the door in a brilliant new white jellaba and skullcap, a pair of servants on loan from Schäfer had already set up the table with the snacks and drinks, and Schäfer himself sat smoking a pipe in a corner with that faraway look he always got when communing with the pharaohs.

  “Hello, Heinrich, how goes the book?”

  “I’m busy with hunting scenes at the moment. I’ve found the most fascinating details in some of the tombs excavated in Upper Egypt,” the art historian replied in heavily accented English.

  “Glad to hear of it. When do you think it will be finished?”

  Heinrich sighed. “There are times when I think it will never be finished. The pages just keep piling up. But what can I do? The topic is vast. I notice you have quite a selection of art from the Saite Period. Quite rare.”

  “Ah yes, the last native dynasty of Egypt,” Augustus declared. “I’ve always had a fondness for last things, especially dynasties and the fall of empires. Romulus Augustulus, the Palaiologoi, and of course our own empires in Europe are crumbling away. Most refreshing.”

  Heinrich Schäfer took another puff from his pipe. “But endings always lead to new beginnings. Have you turned into an optimist since we last dined?”

  “You’ll have finished ten books before that happens, my friend.”

  “Too bad. These pieces are quite nice, though. For example, that sarcophagus lid. Quite typical of the period with its wide features and somewhat squat appearance. I know of a similar one uncovered in the Delta last year.”

  Heinrich launched into an informative lecture of the minutest detail, needing little prompting to continue. Augustus noticed that Moustafa was listening, no doubt absorbing every word.

  The guests started to arrive, and reluctantly Augustus had to cut his friend short. Soon he was mingling with various near strangers whom he’d rather avoid, but the necessities of business forced him to accept the inevitable. Just as a conversation with three members of the Imperial Cotton Exchange couldn’t get more tedious, he noticed Moustafa beckoning him over to the front door.

  “Boss! Look at this.”

  Moustafa pointed down the street, where a pair of Egyptians bearing torches walked ahead of an ornate wooden litter carried by four burly Turks. The litter was entirely enclosed except for small mashrabiya windows on the front and each side that hid whoever sat within. Intricate mother-of-pearl inlay glimmered softly in the torchlight.

  One of the other guests noticed, and soon everyone crowded at th
e door. The Turkish bearers stopped in front of the entrance and gently laid the litter on the ground. A little door opened, and Zehra Hanzade alighted.

  Unlike many high-society Turkish and Egyptian women attending functions that were predominantly European, she had made few concessions in her apparel. She dressed in a flowing peach robe tied with an Imperial waistcloth from which hung a series of tassels that swayed as her hips moved. The sides of the robe were open to reveal puffy red-and-green-striped pantaloons and white silk shoes with upturned toes. This high-class Ottoman look was broken by a delicately crafted diamond and gold Rolex on her wrist and the fact that she did not wear a headscarf. She did not even tie her hair up and inside a hat like a European woman would. Instead her black ringlets flowed free over her shoulders like a girl.

  She also broke another tradition—she came unaccompanied by her husband.

  As she alighted from the litter, Augustus went to greet her—a little too quickly, he had to admit, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “Augustus,” she said, “how delightful to see you again! Suleiman sends his regrets, but he is engrossed in his work. Artists unfortunately cannot be relied upon to keep social engagements.”

  She hooked her arm around his, and they walked together into the house as the guests gaped.

  “I’m so glad you could make it,” Augustus said in all honesty.

  The crowd parted for them like the Red Sea.

  A servant came up with a tray of glasses, some with champagne and others with mango juice. After the slightest hesitation, Zehra took a mango juice.

  “How goes our business?” she asked, gazing at him over the rim of her glass.