THE TOURIST TRAIN, A special air-conditioned express that made the trip to Aswan once daily, covered the distance in four hours. But the tourist train did not carry natives; Nikos rode the afternoon train along with the other fellahin. The windows were thrown wide, admitting dust and hot air. The seats were rude wooden slats, worn smooth by thousands of sitters. It was packed with men in galabas and women in black malaayas, veiled. Some wore ornaments of gold through their noses, and one or two young girls of marriageable age had bright red shawls.
Nikos sat at the far end of one car, leaning over and looking out the window. He was unshaven; his face was smeared with dirt and grime. At his feet was a crate of clucking chickens. If anyone asked him, he would have explained that he owed them to his brother in Darawa, outside Aswan.
But nobody asked him. He was allowed to sit in peace, staring out at the monotonous countryside. The train passed down the east bank of the Nile, stopping at each small village along the way. The villages were all the same—mud huts, dusty streets, and date-palm trees, stately camels and barking, hungry dogs. The people were animated and talkative; riding the train was obviously an event in their lives.
Abdul Badia, born in Alexandria, 1919. Lived in Luxor since 1938, fought with the British during the war. Occupation: shipbuilder. Not a very profitable occupation these days, since wood was so scarce.
He repeated these facts over to himself, again and again. For the next two weeks, he was Abdul Badia. The man at the Luxor train station had not blinked when he had purchased a ticket to Aswan, but sooner or later he was bound to be stopped. When that happened, he would need this information at his fingertips.
Abdul Badia.
Nikos had made up the biography himself; it had the virtue of being partially true. He had been born in Alexandria in 1919, the son of a Greek merchant sailor and an Egyptian whore. His father had apparently been quite taken with the woman; he spent eight years in Alexandria with her, until she died of influenza. Then, he returned to his home in Patras, taking young Nikos with him.
Giorgio Karagannis was the acknowledged black sheep of his family and was never quite accepted on his return to Greece. Nikos, the illegitimate son by a foreign woman his father never married, was not accepted at all. In fact, he was totally disregarded. His father returned to the sea, leaving him in the hands of unwilling relatives for months at a time. For nearly a year, at the age of eight, he spoke little Greek. It was a difficult time. Finally, when he was twelve, he ran away from Patras. He had never returned.
Like his father, he became a sailor, and he soon learned to supplement his meager pay by smuggling goods from the ship to sell ashore. He became familiar with all the countries of the Middle East and learned all the languages. When the war broke out, he was nineteen and in Alexandria. The British Army badly needed interpreters, and he was hired immediately. For reasons which he dimly understood, he never fought, never held a rifle in his hands. The last thing he did before leaving Egypt in 1948 was visit the cemetery at El Alamein, where the tombstones stretched for acres across the desert.
Madness.
He sighed and watched as the train pulled into the next town. He was bored, that was why he was thinking this way. Before he had left Luxor, he had picked up a book, intending to read it on the way up. Pierce had, fortunately, stopped him.
The fellahin did not read. He would have stood out like a sore thumb on this train.
He looked at his fellow passengers. A woman feeding her baby, staring off into space; two men engaged in animated conversation, laughing; an old man, his face a wrinkled prune, his ankles spindly beneath his robes, looking disconsolately at the floor. A young boy with eye disease, turning one eye milky white and outward. (The gift of the Nile—what did they call it? Trachoma.) An infant, sitting quietly in its mother’s lap, while the flies crawled around its nose and mouth.
It was hot on the train. He pressed his legs firmly against the chickens so that no one would steal them. And through his robes, he felt the slight bulge of the scarab. It was a small thing he had picked up from the floor of the tomb, a personal memento of no consequence. It was a habit of his: he always kept a souvenir from each of his jobs. He still had a hubcap from the Aga Khan’s car.
And the scarab, though pretty, was a minor thing. It was cut from pale amethyst and nicely done, but there were thousands of scarab beetles in Egypt, and tens of thousands of fakes.
A small thing.
Still, one never knew…
He touched the bulge absently and drifted off to sleep.
Aswan.
Once, it had been the limit of the Lower Kingdom, the farthest outpost of civilization, the frontier town. From Aswan, the endless desert began, and only a few daring caravans set out across it, into Nubia, the “Land of Gold.” Savages lived to the south, the wild tribes of Wawat, Arthet, and Iam, often attacking Egypt in hope of conquest, never succeeding.
In those days, it had been two towns, like Luxor: one for the living and one for the dead. Souanou, on the east bank, was the marketplace of the twin city; Elephantine, an island, had been the spiritual center.
In more recent history, Aswan had been a minor town en route to Khartoum, which was then the center of commerce, exploration, and slave trade. Aswan never lost importance, however, for the First Cataract of the Nile was here, marking the first major obstacle to navigation for a boat traveling south.
The Nile at this point was broad but shallow, with bare rock outcroppings and two large islands in midstream, Elephantine Island and Kitchener’s Island. The first was massive, formed from black granite in odd, smooth shapes that, seen from a distance, resembled a herd of elephants in the water. Kitchener’s Island contained the home and tropical gardens of Lord Kitchener, the English general who conquered and rebuilt Khartoum after the Mahdi’s whirling dervishes had destroyed it in 1885.
Aswan was situated in an area of excellent granite, and the Egyptians cut Aswan granite for all their important monuments and buildings. The stones were floated downstream for use in the major temples; one large obelisk could still be seen in the quarries outside town. Had it been fully removed, it would have been the largest single block of stone ever used by the Egyptians; it was estimated to weigh one thousand tons. Three sides of the column had been cut free before a flaw was discovered in the granite, rendering it useless.
Nikos had not visited Aswan since the war, and he was astonished to see the changes now. White and shining, the New Cataract Hotel stood out on Elephantine; other modern hotels stood on the east bank. The town had a new, prosperous look. From conversations he heard in the street, he learned that two new universities were located there.
But the real source of wealth was unmistakable: the dam. Aswan was a boomtown, thriving on the money brought in by the workers on the High Dam, seven miles south. Begun in 1960 the dam now employed thirty-three thousand laborers in three round-the-clock shifts. As summer approached, most of the work was done at night under floodlights.
He walked along the river’s edge, carrying the chickens on his head. It was cooler here than in Luxor, and a strong breeze kept the flies away. He looked out at the feluccas, the sailboats with triangular sails, moored at the shore. They had been built in all shapes and sizes and stood in various degrees of disrepair.
Tonight, he thought. Tonight is the time.
As night fell, the bazaar came to life, and he sold his chickens without difficulty. He ate a dinner of ful, the national dish of beans in oil, and hoped he would not be sick.
The bazaar had a strangely cosmopolitan look. Wandering through it, he felt he was standing in the Egypt of the future, a new country, more politically aware, more prosperous and proud. He noticed little things—a barbershop with newspaper pictures of Nasser on the walls; a stall where books and magazines in foreign languages were sold; students passionately arguing philosophy; foreign women shopping, particularly heavy-set, red-faced women with net shopping bags.
He wondered about them, until he heard the language they spoke. They were Russians, the wives of engineers flown in to work on the dam. Aswan was a Russian colony with five thousand technicians in residence, a carpet-seller explained to him.
Egypt is changing, he thought.
Around ten, he returned to the Nile’s banks and walked down past the rows of feluccas. A few sailors sat by their boats, smoking and talking quietly; otherwise, the area was deserted. He picked out a likely boat, one unusually large and sturdy-looking. Then, he lay down on the ground and pretended to sleep.
“I say,” Lord Grover said, as they sat around the evening fire. “I heard a rather remarkable story when I was in Tangier.”
The others looked over.
“I happened to meet a relative of Lord Carnarvon, and he described two incidents that occurred when Carnarvon died. Apparently, he died of an insect bite here in Egypt.”
“A mosquito,” Barnaby said. “He was taken to Cairo and died there.”
Grover nodded. “There was a great fuss at the time, about the curse of the pharaohs.”
“Surely you don’t—”
“Oh, certainly not. But the stories are interesting. He seemed to be recovering from his bite, when he developed pneumonia and died in April. Supposedly, at the precise moment that he died, all the lights in the city of Cairo went out and did not come back on for several hours. Allenby was High Commissioner in those days, and he investigated the power failure. He found no reasonable explanation.”
Pierce shrugged.
“You’ve not heard it all. In England, Carnarvon’s dog howled pitifully and died at the exact moment his master died in Egypt.”
He sat back and folded his hands and waited.
“Worried?” Conway said.
“Of course not,” Grover said. “Just interested.”
“You have a dog?”
“No.”
“Then you’re safe,” Conway said.
Grover sipped his gin.
“Tell me,” Conway said, “Does the curse work on the rich people, or does it hit the poor ones, too?”
Grover snorted and lit a cigar.
“There’s no basis for all this,” Barnaby said. “There is no ‘curse of the pharaohs’ inscribed in any tomb. On religious monuments, there are a few vague warnings against the living who violate the peace of the dead, but they are hardly blood-curdling curses. When Carnarvon died in 1923, the newspapers leaped onto the story and interpreted it as reporters will.”
“I resent that,” Pierce said.
“When the tomb was discovered,” Barnaby said, “the publicity was immense. It was the first major archaeological find in the days of mass communication, radio and newspapers. Reporters swarmed over the site—and so did visitors, at the rate of four thousand a month. Carter received fifteen crank letters a day; he once joked about a letter he was sent asking if information from the tomb would shed light on the fighting in the Belgian Congo.”
“When was this?” Pierce asked.
“1923.”
“Nothing changes,” Lisa said.
“Certain things are preserved in those tombs, of course,” Barnaby said. “Wheat, for example. You’ve heard of mummy wheat? Two and three thousand years later, you can plant it, and it will grow.”
Grover snorted again.
“But I wouldn’t worry about the curse,” Barnaby said. “There’s nothing to it. Of course,” he added, “twenty people connected with the Tutankhamen tomb have died under mysterious circumstances. But other than that—”
“What? What?”
“Twenty people, the man said twenty people,” Conway said. “Twenty,” Lord Grover repeated. “Better enjoy life while you can.” Lord Grover stood. “I believe you are right.” He returned to his tent. Soon after, they heard giggles.
Pierce turned to Barnaby. “You remember those urns which you said contained the king’s viscera? Why did they do that?”
Barnaby smiled, obviously pleased with the question. “It is all involved with the process of embalmment. The word ‘mummy,’ for instance, is derived from an Arabic word, mummiyah, meaning bitumen, or ‘Jew’s pitch.’ In certain places, this pitch used to ooze out of rocks. There’s a Mummy Mountain in Persia. The Egyptians had access to natural supplies, since they drew resources from a very large area. They used to mine gold and copper in Palestine five thousand years ago, remember.
“To us, of course, mummy means a preserved body. Natural conditions can preserve them on occasion.”
“Sure,” Conway said. “There was a fella in Denmark who was strangled and thrown in a peat bog. The bog tanned his skin and clothes and preserved it all for a thousand years.”
“In Egypt,” Barnaby said, “with a dry, hot climate, bodies could literally be buried in the sand, without artificial treatment, and be well preserved. This happened with many peasants, who could not afford costly embalmment and were maintained by the climate. In fact, it is now generally agreed that the chemical treatment of mummies had little preservative effect.
“In the case of a pharaoh, the mummification process took nearly three months and was very expensive. First, the brain was pulled through the nose with a metal hook. Then, the stomach was cut open with a stone knife and the viscera removed. Sometimes, they were dragged out through the anal aperture, but—”
Lisa got up and walked off.
“Anyway, the viscera were placed in four urns, the so-called canopic jars. The heart went into one, the lungs in another, the liver in a third, the stomach in the fourth. In the cadaver, the heart was replaced by a stone scarab beetle. Sometimes, the actual heart was returned, since the Egyptians felt the heart was the seat of the soul, not the brain.
“Finally, the remains were washed and soaked in salt water for a month. Then the cadaver was dried out for a two-month period. By now, it was thoroughly pickled. The body openings were plugged with linen or resin to prevent the entrance of bacteria, and then, the pharaoh was wrapped in linen and pitch poured over the linen.
“Hapy, the baboon-god, and Anubis presided over embalmments. In some pictures, you can see Anubis watching as the embalmers weigh the Pharaoh’s heart on a gold balance. Needless to say, each step of the embalmment was accompanied by rituals and rites. It was a very complex process.”
“Seems like a hell of a lot of trouble,” Conway said, “just to keep the worms away.”
The boats were not left unguarded for the night. A young boy of fifteen or sixteen was assigned to watch them; the sailors went home when he arrived about eleven-thirty.
Nikos sighed and hoped the boy would fall asleep. That would be the simplest way. If there were trouble, he could be hurt—and he was, after all, just a boy.
Nikos lay on the ground, feigning sleep.
An hour later, the boy came around to check the moorings. He did it leisurely, going from one boat to the next. When he came to Nikos, he bent over and shook him.
“Hey,” he said, “you can’t sleep here.”
Nikos shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “What?”
“You can’t sleep here.”
“Why not?”
“The police will—”
Nikos swung. The punch was low, striking the boy in the chest. He coughed and fell backward. Nikos was up instantly, moving toward him.
Something glistened in the moonlight. A knife.
“Careful,” Nikos said, “You can hurt yourself.”
The boy laughed tensely. He got to his feet and held the knife in his left hand. He glanced up the hill at the road.
In a few moments, Nikos knew, he would call for help.
He lunged.
The boy was frightened, too scared to use the knife. Nikos caught his hand, kicked him in the groin, and punched him viciously in the face. He felt something snap, probably the jaw.
The boy crumpled without a sound.
“Sorry, little one,” Nikos said. “It is unfair, eh?”
He shook the boy. He was unconscious, but breathing.
Nikos scooped up the knife and headed for the boats. He began to cut one free, when he felt something smooth and cold in his back.
“Very slowly, my friend,” said a voice. “Take one step forward, and drop the knife. Very, very slowly.”