In the end, eleven died, including three women. Thirty-four all told were wounded (fourteen seriously), out of a total of ninety-seven passengers and crew. The last three coaches of the Star of Egypt, including the lounge car, were overturned and damaged beyond repair. Not having been disconnected, they toppled together, each dragging the next, thereby increasing the number of injured. With the rear of the train thus disabled, in theory we could go forward; in fact, we could not possibly go back.
By my watch, it was almost noon under a windless azure sky when, singly or in small clusters, passengers and staff descended or tumbled uncertainly from the train to take stock of the situation and themselves. The air was now so still and the temperature so mild, it was as if “Allah’s Breath” had never happened. We had been lucky. The big wind had not lasted fifty hours, let alone fifty days.
In the event there were six doctors aboard the train; seven, if one includes an Alienist from New York. Most, like myself, had not thought to bring medical bags or instruments on the journey. Fortunately, the Star of Egypt did boast a rudimentary stock of emergency supplies in the larder next to the galley and these, accessed with some difficulty, proved largely intact. There was nothing like enough bandages but plenty of compartment bedsheets, made, as luck would have it, of that same Egyptian linen in which their mummified kings were shrouded. These, to coin a phrase, were pressed into service on behalf of the injured—and the dead.
The wood-burning galley stoves were still in working order and these were used to sterilise what instruments could be conjured into being, most of them adjusted cutlery or Sheffield dining car utensils. If, as must inevitably be the case, the galley’s supply of wood gave out, engine coal being unusable for lack of ventilation, destroyed items of the train’s burnished wood trimmings could feed the oven fires and water from the locomotive’s boiler siphoned off and re-boiled in the galley for purposes other than locomotion. Needles and thread would prove essential. Women, who (like my wife) typically never travel without sewing kits, were asked to donate these to the medical rescue effort and willingly did so.
Because of injuries suffered by my hands, I was scarcely able to assist in caring for other wounded, but I did attempt to function in an adjunct advisory capacity as best my own condition would allow.
Holmes’s situation I judged tolerable. He was exhausted, to be sure, his face and forearms black with grease from the couplings and pockmarked all over with sand grains, as was Professor Tewfik, who marched beside him as they strode the length of the Star of Egypt ascertaining our state of affairs.
Behind me, the creaking of a platform door torn off one of its hinges and hanging by the other drew my attention. I turned in time to see the duchess, haphazardly dressed, but with a certain undeniable rag-tag flair, descending our car with assistance from one of the porters. She now stood irresolutely below our behemoth wagon-lit with its shattered windows. Though several of the gilded letters above her head were missing, I now recalled our carriage had been called Hatshepsut, who I’d read somewhere was an Egyptian queen, an irony I judged inappropriate but inescapable. Lizabetta del Maurepas, like everyone else, I knew, was attempting to understand what might or must happen next.
For the moment, our happenstance community remained immobile, stranded amid motionless waves of piled-up sand, with no means of communication at our disposal. My earlier assumption about moving forward I now realised had been ill informed. The metals immediately before us were obliterated for who knows how many miles. Any thought of progress in that direction was out of the question.
There was, to be sure, some food in the pantry, though it would not suffice were our circumstances to remain prolonged.
“That will not be the case,” Basil, our Maltese steward, assured us. He had suffered a broken arm which I directed others to set and bind as we spoke. “When the khamsin struck and we failed to arrive, our plight would quickly be understood in Luxor.” Basil winced but did not cry out as I felt clumsily to inspect the splint. “They will dispatch help from along the river, as it is close by our route. But they also have a sixteen-wheel engine with a snowplow for use in just such cases. She is probably already on her way.”
“And from Cairo?” I enquired, thinking suddenly of Juliet for the first time in hours. “Surely, as we failed to arrive, Luxor will have telegraphed word.”
He shrugged. “If the wires were not severed by the storm, effendi.”
The stoker, with whom I exchanged a few words, calculated we were somewhere in the vicinity of Girga and thus assured me not far from the Nile itself, as our route consistently parallelled the river.
His estimates, overheard, raised some spirits, if not mine, and indeed some half-dozen stalwarts made preparations to leave the train and trudge across the Sahara for the Nile, where they anticipated river traffic would pick them up and carry them either up- or downriver to safety. This struck me as a problematic, not to say foolhardy enterprise, as no one could say how far we were from the river or what conditions might be like between the train and the water.
Holmes had returned in time to hear the stoker’s assessment and I knew it was in his mind to undertake the exploit, but felt bound to caution him on behalf of the duchess. It was one thing for the detective and the professor to try the expedient, but she was hardly in a position to do so. As my own weakened condition would preclude such a stratagem, it was obvious I could and should remain with Her Grace. Realising all of this in less time than it takes to describe it, the detective ultimately discarded the entire proposition. Detectives are not physicians, but Holmes regarded his client as the equivalent of a patient and now understood we must stay with her and the train to await rescue. He attempted to pace, kicking furiously at the sand that surrounded his ankles. As a rule he was patience itself when pondering a problem or, like a hunter, when he stalked or waited motionless for his prey to break cover, but passivity in the face of difficulty or danger was anathema to his temperament.
“But there’s nothing stopping you from joining the river party,” he informed Professor Tewfik, who was not only unscathed by our experience but whose wiry frame remained trim and energetic.
“Nonsense,” the latter replied. “In due course we shall reach Luxor safe and sound, join Howard Carter, and learn what has become of the Duke of Uxbridge.”
“There’s a good fellow,” the detective proclaimed.
Holmes was not infallible.
As we stood deliberating these courses of action and their possible outcomes, we were approached by a small deputation that included the conductor and some of the train’s crew, as well as a score of passengers. All appeared in tattered garments and filthy bandage wrappings, mirror images of ourselves.
“I am begging your pardon, effendi.” The Levantine touched two fingers to his cap, addressing Holmes. For having taken the initiative in decoupling most of the cars, the detective had, by default, seemingly assumed a mantle of leadership, if not authority. “What do you propose regarding the burial detail?”
In our eagerness to deal with the wounded and survivors, we had not confronted the grisly reality of eleven bloating corpses.
Holmes, finally at the limit of his endurance, dragged a blackened hand across his blackened forehead.
“Is there no way they can be stowed abroad the train until we reach Luxor?”
“Impossible, effendi, je regrette infiniment. They would never make the journey in their condition and no one would ever board this train again if they did.”
“But your brochure says you carry ice to cool the coaches,” the detective recollected. “Could it not be diverted on this occasion to a more humane use?”
“We only carry such ice in summertime, effendi.”
Holmes and I once more exchanged beleaguered looks. “Some of these passengers may refuse to leave their loved ones behind,” I speculated quietly.
There were murmurs of agreement from several hovering nearby.
“I won’t leave Harry in the middle of nowhere,” a woman declared.
“We can bury them temporarily,” Holmes suggested. “Leave markers and return with coffins to recover their remains as soon as we can.”
“In a mass grave?” a German wondered.
“Unmarried men alongside women?” objected an American.
“Beg pardon, effendi, but one of the deceased is a Muslim female.”
This intelligence elicited further murmuring.
“Wogs, too?” now scornfully chimed in an English voice.
“How many shovels have we?” the detective enquired of the stoker, as questions and objections continued to rain down.
“Just the two from the tender,” the man, an Australian, answered.
“Unless you count soup ladles,” the chef added. I couldn’t tell if he was attempting to be humorous.
“We’ve not sufficient tools for more than a single pit,” Holmes endeavoured to explain. “One temporary grave it must be.”
“That won’t happen!” threatened another.
At which point Sherlock Holmes, at the end of his resources, lost his temper, a thing I rarely recall seeing him do before.
“Very well,” he returned, raising his voice as if the khamsin were still screeching. “Sit here. Do nothing. Or construct pyramids, if you please. Perhaps the rescue engine will arrive with room for the dead before they explode. Perhaps not. In the interim you can inhale the stink of your relatives and hope for the best.”
With which malediction, he stalked off, his back to us.
His blunt ultimatum shocked all to silence. I could not in that moment decide whether it was my friend’s crass behavior or his brutal truth that distressed me most.
The others stewed for a time, some glaring furiously at his retreating form, others at the ground, and some at the bodies laid side by side in the shade of the overturned cars.
In the end, however, the detective’s argument proved irresistible. Grumbling among themselves, they took the shovels, retreated to the rear of the train, and there angrily took turns heaving sand over their shoulders.
I watched their labour in silence. More bed linens were now brought forth from the train and used for the same purpose they had been put to three thousand years earlier, as winding sheets for the dead. One of the passengers—I was standing too far off to make out which it was—appeared to be delivering some sort of prayer or collective eulogy for which the others, doffing hats and bandanas, stood respectfully still, but I could not make out his words. His talk was accompanied by a number of emphatic hand gestures, after which the digging resumed.
After a time I trudged to the front of the train, where I found Holmes standing beside the belching locomotive, his face still turned away, but from long familiarity between us he soon sensed my presence.
“Watson, what on earth have I said?”
“It’s not what you’ve said but what you’ve done,” said the duchess, who had followed me, laying a hand on the detective’s shoulder. “You’ve saved most of this train and those on it. You made the only logical suggestion.”
He turned slowly—reluctantly, I judged—and regarded her with a hangdog expression, somewhere between gratitude and bewilderment.
“You have nothing with which to reproach yourself, senhor.”
Without replying, the detective now cast about him as if searching for another topic of conversation.
“I wonder if there’s enough water in our carriage for me to have a wash.”
It was after three when, preceded by puffs of black steam, the oversized snowplow engine from Luxor finally crept cautiously into view, pushing aside mounds of sand and clearing the metals as she approached. As Holmes feared, the heavy locomotive brought no carriages or freight cars in tow. With only sand—sand again!—to support the metals and ties, Egyptian engines and rolling stock could never exceed a certain weight for fear of dislodging the alignment of the tracks on the unstable rail bed. Nonetheless, faint cheers greeted its arrival and in another hour or so, with steam up and our train reboarded, the Star of Egypt slowly followed the retreating snowplow, leaving behind three overturned coaches and eleven fatalities in shallow graves. We passed Karnak, stared at by workers on the station platform as we made our way south, and I thought briefly of Professor Jourdan, who had met his death here from decidedly unnatural causes.
It was nearly six before we pulled into Luxor. Immediately the seriously injured were taken off to the town’s small hospital in a variety of improvised conveyances. The most serious cases were placed in such motorcars as were to be had. Others rode in wagons and still others in the local version of rickshaws. It was understood that in due course the train’s abandoned coaches would be righted or destroyed and the dead exhumed and packed in ice-filled coffins for interment elsewhere. The ancient Egyptian art of embalming, even if its secrets were known today, would have been too late to preserve the remains of those unfortunate souls. In all probability it would be difficult, if not impossible, to inter them in their countries of origin. The Coptic cemetery in Cairo would become the final resting place for most.* Needless to say, the arrival of the overdue Star of Egypt after her harrowing encounter with the khamsin occasioned much excitement in the Luxor station and its environs. The khamsin had spared the city, but news of the storm had been received from Karnak before the telegraph went down in midtransmission. As it happened, many folk, both the relatives of tourists or guides or hotel greeters, had arrived hours earlier to meet the expected train, only to learn what had befallen. In an agony of suspense, not daring to leave, they had been obliged to wait here long hours, trying now and then to nap on uncomfortable wood benches or pacing for news of the lost express.
Vociferous cheers heralded our entry into the shed behind the plow engine, but the scene shortly disintegrated into a miasma of confusion and emotion. On learning the details of our experience and, in some cases, the fates of friends or family, lamentations grew clamorous.
A relieved Howard Carter, forcing his way through the distraught mass, was on hand to greet Holmes, the duchess, Professor Tewfik, and myself.
“Are you alright, Colonel?” he asked, signalling his bearers to collect our bags.
“We seem to be,” was the detective’s terse comment.
“Good lord, what has happened to your hands?” the expert exclaimed on beholding my bandages.
“Dr. Watson was injured saving the train,” Professor Tewfik informed him.
“I need to send a telegram,” I said.
“You’ll find a shorter queue at the hotel,” the Egyptologist assured me, pointing to the line outside the telegraph kiosk, “and perhaps by then the lines will have been repaired. Presently, Luxor is cut off.”
“Can we go now?” asked the duchess.
“Of course. This way, Your Grace. What a perfectly dreadful business,” Carter did his awkward best to soothe the exhausted woman. “I expect you’ll want to rest and clean up after your ordeal,” said he. “As the Winter Palace is chockablock, I’ve managed to book rooms for you at Amenhotep House.”
“I want to sleep,” was her curt rejoinder.
“We must thank the crew,” Holmes said, looking about him as if waking from a dream.
Carter was solicitous, to be sure, parting the undulating throng with his boys to usher us from the place, but also, I could not help noticing, impatient. He was clearly on fire to communicate something but aware that given what had occurred and the condition of the detective and myself, this was hardly the moment.
But Holmes, as it proved, was equally impatient to learn his news. “Did he find it?” he brusquely demanded as we finally began to wedge our way into the mass of jostling bodies.
Carter’s eyes widened at this and he looked briefly over his shoulder.
“He did,” was all he said, laying a finger on his lips.
As I was struggling amid the press, it was difficult to detect the effect this news had on our party. As Holmes was walking before me, I was unable to see his reaction. Tewfik’s eyes did their usual trick, but it was the duchess, by my side, whose response most intrigued me. Her husband’s horse had apparently come in, albeit the bet he placed on it was likely made with another woman’s money. From the duchess’s frozen features it was impossible to say what she was feeling. I knew from previous experience (was it only at dinner the night before?) this was an expression she could sustain for hours on end.
Squeezed into the Lancia Epsilon sent by Amenhotep House, with the boys running behind, our bags balanced on their heads, Holmes thought better of his question.
“This matter will have to wait ’til morning,” he realised, looking at the duchess, whose eyes were already closed. “We will need clear heads but presently are at the ends of our tether. Certainly I am,” he conceded with a remorseful glance in my direction. “A hot soak and a deep sleep is the first order of business.”
Carter, who was intelligent enough to perceive both necessities, nonetheless greeted the reality with exasperation. “That will entail a twenty-four-hour wait,” he muttered.
“Why so long?” I demanded. “Surely we can set out in the morning.”
The expert shook his head. “When your train was scheduled to arrive this morning, I allowed the day to rest, for we can only visit the place by night. You’re arrival now in your present condition rather alters things.”
“Why can we only go at night?”
He looked at me as one might regard a simpleton. “For the simple reason that the dig in question was illegal. As I direct another dig not far off for Lord Carnarvon, I have the paperwork that will allow us to enter the valley after hours and grant us access to the site. But whatever VR 61 proves to be, for the present only we may see. Therefore it must be at night or not at all,” the archeologist repeated firmly. “When word gets out, and it will, the wrangling will begin between Egyptians, British, and Turks over digging rights and it will be the End of Days before any of us ever get to view, let alone catalogue, what’s inside.”
“Then you’ve not opened it?” Holmes asked.
Carter shook his head. “That seemed inappropriate. We have found the flight of steps where the duke anticipated. They lead down to an ancient door where the original seal remains unbroken, so there I stopped and posted guards with signs warning of ‘hazardous ground.’”
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Holmes repeated.
“Yes, they are all susceptible to baksheesh,” he conceded, “but there was no other way. The duke’s instinct proved correct, but illegal or not, with His Grace not present, clearly the duchess, his wife” indicating the sleeping woman with a tilt of his head—“has the right to be present when we first go in.”
“That is the proper way to do such things,” Tewfik, turning back from his seat beside the driver, agreed.
I said nothing but privately wondered whether a woman with a terror of closed-in spaces would be prepared to undertake anything of the kind. Had she not endured enough by this point?
Luxor, compared with Cairo, was a provincial town, whose revenue largely depended on only two related sources beside the always beneficent river: Egyptology and tourism, the former obviously fomenting the latter. In either capacity, Luxor did most of its business during the cooler, winter months and hotel space was consequently at a premium.
Unlike Shepheard’s or Luxor’s newly opened Winter Palace, each with almost three hundred rooms, Amenhotep House boasted a mere tenth that number, and these were booked. We were then surprised when Howard Carter informed us there were in fact beds for us all, if the colonel and I doubled up.
“How can this be?” the professor wondered. “At the height of the season.”
Carter appeared embarrassed, awkwardly explaining the rooms had been held in the names of two families who did not survive the storm. These were certainly sobering tidings, but under the circumstances there was little choice but to make use of the fortuitous vacancies.
Before ascending to our rooms, I went to the desk with the intention of asking the concierge to send my telegram the moment service was restored, only to find Holmes in the queue before me, evidently with a telegram of his own.
“Holmes, please let me go first. Juliet must be frantic.”
“My message is terribly important, Watson.”
“More important than my wife’s peace of mind?” I demanded tetchily.
He looked at me, hesitated a moment, then stood aside.
It was a concession that almost cost both of us our lives.
I wrote to Juliet, thus:
DARLING DONT WORRY. IN LUXOR WITH HOLMES. ALL WELL HOME IN A FEW DAYS. MISSING YOU TERRIBLY J.
When the man had finished writing, I thrust some Egyptian pounds at him according to the local custom. “Very important,” I emphasised. He nodded and swept the money from the counter, whether into a drawer or his pocket I could not see.
I did not remain for Holmes’s telegram and in truth now felt rather ashamed of my impatience, but told myself that Holmes, a perennial solitary, had no one (possibly Mycroft or Mrs. Hudson?) waiting on news of his well-being.
The rooms at Amenhotep House more resembled my accommodations at the Khedivial than the lavish appointments offered at Shepheard’s. The small place was simply decorated in what I suppose was the Egyptian equivalent of French provincial; the rooms and amenities were spare and small, such wood as was in evidence, sere and unvarnished.
Filling the tin basin with water from a terra-cotta pitcher designed to evoke ancient Egyptian antecedents, I gingerly unwound my bandages and tenderly bathed my hands. Once the blood had washed away in soap suds, I was surprised to note the damage far less severe than the pain I had endured at the time it was inflicted.
My Harris Tweed Norfolk was less lucky. As I’d feared, those stains would never come out. Holmes and I unpacked in silence, both dead on our feet.
“I say, Holmes.”
“Yes, my dear fellow.”
“I am sorry to have jumped your place in the queue. It was entirely unnecessary. I didn’t wish to give Juliet an extra moment’s anxiety.”
“Don’t give it a thought, old man.”
The detective had begun to pace. I knew all too well that once he began, it was difficult to stop.
“Sit down, Sherlock.* I have a tweezers.”
After the briefest hesitation, the detective obeyed and sat backward in a chair, remaining stoically motionless as we faced each other. Employing expertise from campaigns of yore, I extracted grain after grain of sand from his face as if it were so much shrapnel.
It was about nine in the evening when, our ablutions completed, we piled into that bed and were both soon fast asleep. Or at least I was. It was some time later when I woke to realise the detective was lying next to me, wide awake.
“You can’t sleep?”
“Apparently not.”
“You should, you know. Tomorrow night promises to be…” I searched for the right word. “Demanding.”
“Yes,” said he. “I expect it will be.”
With that he rolled away from me and was soon snoring.
We were both more spent than either of us imagined and did not wake until after ten the following morning, only just in time to breakfast before the little dining room closed ’til luncheon.
It was a an odd, disorienting day as Holmes, Carter (who had his own lodgings in town), the duchess and myself sought ways to pass the time until four in the afternoon, when Carter judged it time to leave. It was some twenty-five miles to the Valley of the Kings, including the river crossing, and Carter wished to time our arrival by dark. I took a short walk in the vicinity of the inn, for in reality it was little more than that, then sat in our room and arranged these notes. It was while I was performing this chore I heard a knock on the door and the boy presented me with a telegram.
DEAREST BRING BACK AU 79 LOVE J
I stared at the message in some confusion. “What the devil?” I exclaimed.
“What is it?” Holmes asked from across the room, where he was studying hieroglyphs.
I handed him the telegram. “I don’t know what she means.”
Holmes read the telegram and offered a faint smile. “You’ve forgotten your chemistry.” Using the smallest finger of his right hand, he pointed to the message. “The fact that teletype is all capitals doesn’t help. A lowercase u, which is how it should correctly be written, is the proper element designation for gold. And seventy-nine is the element’s atomic number. ‘Bring back gold,’ your missus urges you. Your wife has a wit worthy of a Shakespearean heroine.”
“You don’t say.” I had to laugh. “What a clever girl she is.” I was so relieved to hear from my wife in good spirits that it was a moment before I looked back at the detective, who had returned to his study of the ancient symbols. “No answer to your own telegram, I take it?”
“Unfortunately.” He did not look up.
Later we met the duchess and Professor Tewfik for tea. We were all in better spirits for having had a good night’s sleep, but Holmes felt it important to be candid.
“Your Grace, it is my recollection from our conversation at the Great Pyramid that you have a fear of closed-in spaces.”
“My condition is technically termed ‘claustrophobia.’”
“Professor Tewfik can correct me if I am wrong, but I believe there is every possibility that where we are going this evening may prove to be just such a space.”
“That is so,” echoed Tewfik, his blue eyes protruding briefly once more.
“This being the case”—Holmes smiled—“are you sure you wish to accompany us?”
She smiled in turn, quite unlike the woman I had first met.
“Colonel Arbuthnot, yesterday you and Dr. Watson showed me what bravery is. I don’t know what my nerves can withstand, but I haven’t come all this way to back out now.”
Holmes did not often regard women with more than skeptical or professional interest, but I could see her remarks impressed him. But then she went on in quite another vein:
“Besides, my husband spent a large part of my fortune these last years in pursuit of his own. If he has in fact found something of value I am at least entitled to share in it. I intend to have something to show for this madness.”
Holmes said nothing to this but looked at the floor.
Shortly afterwards, Howard Carter, dressed for the evening’s events and with a dark jumper draped over his shoulders, joined us.
“The desert will be chilly at night,” he warned. “Dress accordingly.”