by Ben Stevens
‘Well?’ Samad’s voice came irritably along the tunnel behind me.
‘Come,’ I called back, suddenly no longer feeling afraid, or even in the slightest bit nervous. ‘Come, and see for yourself.’
Shortly, Samad and a trembling Fouad were also crouched down in the tunnel.
‘Careful now,’ breathed Samad, as we advanced slowly forwards, the nighttime breeze blowing in from the desert slowly displacing the fetid atmosphere of this tunnel set in the pyramid, meticulously designed by some architect of ancient times. ‘Careful we don’t activate any sort of trap…’
At this, Fouad gave a whimper, and my opinion of him sank even lower. Both he and Samad also had their mouths covered, although there was no evidence of any dung lying on the smooth, sandstone floor.
Of what happened, there inside that pyramid, I could say a million words, and still not come close to describing everything that I saw and felt. But in time, using our tools, we forced our way inside the tomb that was at the end of the long tunnel. It seemed almost too easy: no dead-ends, traps or even other tunnels to navigate.
Piled furniture in this small tomb, wooden statues of dogs and all those other animals and servants who would serve Mehuit, the entombed wife of the pharaoh Teput (as Samad had already taught me), in the afterlife. For whatever reason, it seemed as though Teput’s own burial chamber lay elsewhere…
But there were also gold ornaments, silver objects and precious stones. These Samad greedily gathered up, throwing them into a large sack he’d brought with him.
‘We’ll break open this sarcophagus, the one with the queen’s body inside it. There’ll be more precious objects in there, that’s for sure.’
But staring at the outer stone sarcophagus, I at once felt a chill seize my heart. There upon it was written something in the ancient language of that time, the one with the pictures which no one can now read.
Yet, the meaning of this particular message, at least, was clear. I knew, as did most Egyptians, just what the ostrich feather of truth, the scarab, the jackal-faced man, the long-beaked bird symbolized… Even if I could not read or speak what the message actually said, still I knew it to be a curse, upon whoever broke open the ancient queen’s sarcophagus…
I almost said something – but already Samad and Fouad were attacking the stone object with their metal bars. There was no time to waste, after all; anyone venturing out in the desert, walking among the pyramids, might see the hole we had made a little way up, and investigate themselves or else alert the authorities. We would then be caught red-handed, as it were.
So we broke open the stone sarcophagus, the lid breaking as it hit the floor. Inside was the wooden sarcophagus, which Samad immediately set about smashing apart. At once the light from the three lamps we had burning dimmed, nearly going out and thus leaving us in pitch-darkness. Fouad again gasped – and this time, so did I.
‘Fools!’ spat Samad, sweat dripping from his brow as he fast exposed the shrouded body of the ancient queen. ‘Help me!’
We saw at once – the flames of the lamps again inexplicably growing brighter – that various golden trinkets, and other such ornaments, had been placed at various points around the preserved corpse.
Samad grabbed at them, again putting them in his bag, and after a moment Fouad and I assisted him.
And then I saw what was held in the mummy’s hands, joining them together, as it were, on top of its belly. A simple length of rope, folded in a round shape. Confused by it – its purpose I mean, just what it was supposed to signify – I tried drawing Samad’s attention to it.
In return, he merely slapped me hard around the head, by now consumed with this desire to plunder everything of value from this burial chamber, and then to get immediately away.
‘Fool, what do we care about a simple piece of rope? What does it matter? Take one lamp, scour every inch of this small burial chamber, see that we have missed nothing of any value! This is hardly the grandest of resting places – the reason, perhaps, why it was relatively easy to gain entry here – but still, we are all going to become rich men…’
It was this final observation that galvanized me to overcome the deathly chill I still felt in my heart, which had caused something like a fog to cloud my mind, almost paralyzing my limbs. I knew that Samad sneered at talk of curses, Dark Magic and the like; and as I obeyed his order to search this small burial chamber, I attempted to do the same.
Still, within this great triangular-shaped mausoleum constructed so long ago, with who knew how many tons of rock above and all around me, this was not so easy to do…
Eventually, dragging the full bag of gold ornaments and other objects behind us, we made our way back along the twisting tunnel, the air growing ever-fresher as we approached the hole we’d made in the side of the pyramid.
Behind us, we left a looted burial chamber and two smashed sarcophagi – the stone one and the one made of wood. The shrouded body of Queen Mehuit lay where Samad had thrown it, once he realized that he’d found every precious object secreted within the layers of cloth covering the desiccated corpse.
And the piece of rope, that had been held in its hands… Brown, and almost turning to dust through sheer age… A simple piece of rope, there among the gold, silver and jewels the Queen was intended to take with her into the afterlife…
Why – what had been the purpose of placing that length of rope in the dead Queen’s hands…? And the curse, the words I could not read written upon the top of the stone sarcophagus – but whose meaning I’d still instantly been able to realize…
Then I had no more time for such thoughts, as I helped Samad and Fouad put the pieces of stone back into the hole we had made in the side of the pyramid. We made a good job of it. You’d have to have looked closely to realize that this pyramid had been broken into – and not many people went scaling the pyramids on a whim…
Samad had been meticulous in his planning. He’d already found a small cave, set in one of the natural sandstone walls of the desert near the pyramid, where we could temporarily hide the treasure we’d looted.
‘We are not finished yet,’ he cautioned us. ‘First I have to find a metalsmith I can trust, who can melt down the gold and silver. This may take some days – go now, and I will find you when I am ready.’
This last instruction hardly seemed fair, after all the efforts Fouad and I had made. But as we both hesitated, clearly unhappy at this order, Samad’s eyes gleamed danger and we realized that it would be far wiser to obey him. We did not think he would cheat us, anyway. We would hardly get as big a share of the profits as him, of course, but if we got nothing we might just go straight to the authorities. We would almost certainly get immunity from our own crimes, and perhaps even a reward, by telling on him.
The only alternative was that Samad could try to kill us – silencing us through death. Still he’d know that, formidable a man as he was, two such murders would still be much easier said than done. The jackal-like Fouad, especially, would be highly alert to any attempt on his life…
No, we all knew – without us once actually mentioning such a matter, of course – that the simplest thing would be just for Samad to give us our share of what we had stolen, and then for the three of us to go our separate ways. I’d already decided to venture up along the Nile, staying in whatever villages I passed.
And maybe I’d try to persuade Aui to come with me…
I have not spoken of Aui until now – the girl I fully intended to marry. She had a fiercely protective father, with whom she lived there in the City of the Dead, not too far from my own tomb. Her mother and elder sister had died in the plague that had ravaged Cairo, and so she was all her father had left. She was truly beautiful, with large green eyes and long flowing black hair, about my own age – fifteen, or thereabouts.
I knew that a man had attempted to take her by force a year or so before, so besotted with her had he become. Aui’s screams had brought her powerful father running… and now her would-be rapist no l
onger had the use of his legs, and he merely dribbled when he tried to talk…
So I feared for myself, as I had secretly become Aui’s boyfriend. Not that I had the slightest intention of doing her any harm, of course. Entirely the opposite, in fact – despite my criminal activities, I was still a serious-minded Muslim male, and once I had wealth I fully intended to treat Aui like the Egyptian queen she truly was.
But her father, I suspected, might have had a somewhat different opinion concerning the matter, if he ever found out about the two of us…
I returned to my family tomb with such thoughts running through my mind, and though I lay down there in the darkness with a blanket, besides the large, square-shaped stone structure which contained the bodies of my parents and my grandparents, plus a number of other relatives, it was a long while before I slept…
‘We have been cheated.’
The words were Fouad’s. The jackal-like man had actually taken it upon himself to come and find me, the third day after that evening we broke inside the tomb contained within one of the pyramids. Neither of us had seen or heard from Samad since.
‘How do you know this?’ I demanded, the pair of us squatting down in our dirty robes by the side of the road. We looked just like many other males there in Cairo – poor, but not quite beggars. Day-laborers, perhaps, or something of the sort. Certainly, no one would suspect us of being tomb raiders…
Fouad looked cautiously at me. He had a slight squint, and a weak jaw. I knew he was afraid of me, although he was several years older. He was one of those people who you instinctively know will take a blow, rather than give one. Yet for all of this, there was a certain cunning in him; the necessary knowledge, and essential suspicion, of human nature that enables a man to exist in such a place as the slums and backstreets of Cairo.
‘That talk of finding a metalsmith,’ Fouad continued, ‘it was a lie, to buy him time. He has already gone, along the Nile probably, taking all what we stole with him.’
I felt that maybe Fouad was right. What fools we had been, to have trusted Samad so readily! And yet… Still part of me did not believe that he would have cheated us so. He was a harsh man, but such an action was not in his nature – of this I was suddenly certain. There truly is some honor among thieves, after all…
As I then told Fouad, the simplest thing to do would be to return to that desert cave – where Samad had said that he’d stay with the looted treasure, until such time as he was able to get it melted or sold – and see if he and everything we’d risked our very lives for really had just upped and vanished.
In the scorching midday heat, then, we traipsed out to the desert, passing those great silent pyramids and checking behind us before venturing towards the sandstone cave.
In it we found both the treasure and Samad – but he stank a little, for the day was hot and I suspected he’d already been hanging from the ceiling of the cave for several hours, perhaps since morning. Flies buzzed around his head. A rope was tied around his neck; dark brown, like the one I’d seen in Queen Mehuit’s mummified hands…
Scarcely knowing what I was doing, oblivious to Fouad’s petrified whimpering, I reached up and touched this rope… And it at once turned to dust and so the already-putrefying body of Samad the master-thief fell to the rocky ground… I observed the look upon his greenish face; the sheer expression of horror and the bulging eyes, the blackened tongue protruding from the mouth… And all around lay the treasure we had stolen, tipped out of the sack Samad had brought with him…
I joined Fouad in bolting from that cave, both of us terrified almost out of our wits.
‘Suicide?’ gasped Fouad finally, once we were back within the somehow protective noise, bustle and stench of the city. ‘Samad – he… he hanged himself?’
‘Idiot,’ I returned, and so cold was my tone that I was almost shocked myself to hear it. ‘Did you not see that rope, tied around his neck?’
‘It turned to dust, the moment you touched it!’ cried Fouad, so that I looked around, concerned someone might hear him. ‘How can such a thing be, if it was previously strong enough to hold up his body?’
‘It was the same rope we saw in the hands of Queen Mehuit,’ I said, and again I felt as though someone else was speaking the words – through me, as it were. ‘The one she’d been holding for a thousand years or more, there inside her sarcophagus.’
‘How can that be? What does such a thing mean?’
I shook my head. The moment had passed, and I had no ready answer to his frantic questions.
‘It is the curse, surely,’ I said at length; and my voice was now as feeble as Fouad’s own. ‘The one written upon the top of Mehuit’s stone sarcophagus. The one you and Samad smashed into pieces, like the wooden one within, then throwing her body aside, like so much garbage, after you had looted her body for the treasures it held.’
‘Hey!’ said Fouad, suddenly turning to face me, his eyes bulging and spittle gathered around his mouth. He reminded me of one of those wild dogs you sometimes saw; the ones with that strange sickness, which they can give a human through a single bite.
‘You were in that tomb, also!’ declared Fouad. ‘Do not speak as though you are somehow innocent of the crime we committed.’
‘The one which we will shortly be charged with, and punished for – with a hand or two lopped off, perhaps, if we somehow manage to escape execution – unless you lower your voice,’ I said coldly, my wits returning.
Fouad nodded, his expression reposing, and we continued walking, heading towards the City of the Dead where Fouad also resided.
‘I suggest we just… just forget everything that has happened, and carry on as we did before. I do not expect to see you again; and make sure you never talk to anyone else about what happened, as you value your life.’
At this, Fouad nodded again, and shortly afterwards we went our separate ways. I did not know where he resided within that sprawling maze of tombs, nor did I care. I was mindful of only two things: Aui, and that sum of money – earned through the crimes I’d previously committed with Samad – that was still buried within my family’s own tomb.
Really, these were the only two things essential to my existence. With them, I might still succeed in doing something meaningful with my existence here in this world…
But Fouad did not intend to let me go. Somehow, he discovered where I resided within the City of the Dead, and the very next day he sought me out, unshaven and shaking.
‘Such dreams…’ he murmured, within the gloom of my family’s tomb. ‘Nightmares, I should say… I have barely slept a wink, for every time I closed my eyes…’
‘You should not be here,’ I said severely, clenching my fists as though I meant to attack him. ‘Go, now.’
‘But I saw – her,’ murmured Fouad, his voice shaky with fear, sweat coursing from his face. He stank, like an old goat.
‘Who do you mean – her?’
‘Her – the Queen Mehuit,’ he returned, his voice rising. ‘She… her face… swimming in-and-out of the darkness, behind her the… jackal-headed one…’
This might have described Fouad himself. But something in what he was saying prevented me from feeling any amusement at this thought.
‘Anubis?’ I heard myself mutter.
‘Yes… yes… and… and her smile…’ whimpered Fouad. ‘Her eyes so… dark, so cruel… delighting in my terror… Her head was shaped, like they used to shape their heads, from infancy… It was her…’
This last word came almost as a squeal, and at once I slapped him across the face.
‘Go now, and don’t return again. You have weak nerves, and they have been strained by what happened recently. That is all. Samad hanged himself, for whatever reason. The gold and all the rest of it must remain beside his decaying body, which is already doubtless attracting everything within the desert that feasts upon carrion. I would not go back to that place for all the treasure that was in ancient Egypt.
‘As I said to you yesterday – go,
and never try to communicate with me again…’
But he came again the following morning. Crying this time, puffy-eyed and pale as a corpse. He stank even worse, stank of sheer terror…
‘The dream again, but this time she spoke – spoke to me in that dead tongue, and somehow I understood her every word. And her voice… a hiss, like a serpent…’
I stared at him, trying to ignore the creeping sensation of absolute terror growing within my chest. But I had seen the rope from which Samad’s body had been suspended – it was certainly the same one I had seen in Queen Mehuit’s brown and claw-like hands. And had it not turned to so much dust, after I had just touched it…?
‘She told me’ – Fouad’s voice went whimpering on – ‘she told me that she will return for me tonight, again in my dreams, and that this time she will have a gift for me.
‘Then she vanished, and I awoke just as dawn was breaking… Dear Allah the Most Merciful, was that the last dawn I am ever to see…?’
‘Where is it you live, here in el’Arafa?’ I demanded.
Fouad told me – it was about as far as you could go from my own tomb, and still remain within the City of the Dead.
‘Return there,’ I said then. ‘I will come by and visit you, later on.’
‘But I – ’
‘Enough!’ I cried, my own, lurking feeling of terror quickly giving way to anger. ‘What would you have me do, exactly, about these ‘bad dreams’ of yours? Give me time to think, at least…’
‘Maybe there is someone we can find, here in Cairo, who knows of the Dark Magic – and so can undo a curse that was made using its ancient power,’ babbled Fouad.
‘Possibly,’ I murmured, more in an attempt to calm him than anything else. His voice kept rising with fear, and I was still concerned that someone passing by my tomb might hear some reference to the grave I had so recently helped rob. As I say, the authorities gave a generous reward to anyone whose information helped convict a tomb raider.
