SHADOW CAPTAIN

Originally published in Speed Mystery, July 1943.

CHAPTER 1

The Khamsin

They say in the desert that if the khamsin blows three days without interruption, a man can justly kill his best friend; if five days, his wife; if seven days, himself. And Captain Tod Rowan had for ten days faced the furnace blast which swept the Libyan Desert.

He could not tell when day ceased and night began. The sun was scarcely visible. It was not plain whether the desert was underfoot or overhead; the sand was all in motion, a satanic conspiracy against every living thing which invaded the land of the dead.

This was the western land, where Egypt for centuries had buried her uncounted generations. And now Rowan was no longer certain what lived and what did not. He crouched there, squinting through reddened eyes; his blackened lips moved, and he muttered, “This blasted khamsin, why can’t it stop and give Rommel a chance…”

Rowan watched the marching drifts, watched them form as the khamsin stripped the sand away, uncovering rocky ridges and burying others. His company was entrenched among tombs which no archeologist’s spade had ever found. Here, miles west of the charted cities of the dead, the khamsin exposed Egypt’s most ancient necropolis.

He held a scorching hot canteen to his baked lips, and muttered, “Necropolitan Police Force directing traffic, clubbing the mummies into line. Move on, you!”

The fancy was growing into a fact. But thus far, Rowan had not asked Higgins, his orderly, whether people actually were coming out of the city of the dead. Better wait till one of the men reported the procession.

As the murky daylight dwindled, the figures became clearer: men in robes, wearing tall miters. And there were women; shapely creatures, their hair tightly twisted into compact curls.

They were dressed like tomb paintings he had seen in a museum during that last leave in Cairo.

The bewildered dead milled about. Their tombs, exposed by the khamsin, had been plastered by artillery and by dive bombers during lulls in the murderous wind. Sculptured and painted fragments littered the ground about Rowan’s shelter. There were flakes of mummy cloth, there were bones to which dark long dried bits of flesh still clung despite the force of the blasts. He was thinking, “They’ll be in a hell of a fix, they were embalmed and wrapped, and put to bed in deluxe underground hotels so they’d be safe until resurrection.”

A girl was coming toward the trench nearest Rowan’s command post. She was speaking; that much was plain from her gestures, and it was clear that none of the half-blinded men saw her. Then she rounded the end of the unstable slit in the desert, and approached Rowan. Her supple figure was white, almost luminous in that fast failing light.

She spoke to him, and he looked up, licked dust from his lips, and tried to answer, though he could not understand a word she said. With a gesture, he invited her to come down out of the wind which whipped biting sand against her.

Her gratitude was beautiful to see. A smile lighted her face, and made a splendor of her almond-shaped eyes; they were very dark, and the lashes were so long and thick that they made as it were a smudge along the edge of the lids.

“Your eyes aren’t red.”

She shrugged, shook her head, so that the tightly twisted curls which cascaded to her shoulders rippled a little; even in the stench of battle, he caught the heavy sweetness which her hair and garments exhaled as she came closer.

Since she moved, she wasn’t dead; his logic made him feel better. He asked in halting Arabic, “’Ism-ak?”

Apparently she did not know the language, but when he pointed and repeated the query, she answered, “Maatkara.” And then he guessed that Maatkara wanted to know his name, so he told her.

More than that, she wanted him to go with her. The touch of her hand on his arm, the gentle but insistent tug at his sleeve gave him a strange thrill; but when she pointed, and he saw the tomb shapes which were receding in the distance, a wavering file scarcely visible in the failing light, Rowan was frightened, and he shook his head.

But Maatkara pressed closer, and he could not repel her; instead, he caught her with both arms. He knew that the act was a fatal error, yet there was no resisting the urge. She was more than a woman in his arms; Maatkara had all the fascination of old Egypt on her lips, and all its lure in her eyes.

He forgot the khamsin, his thirst, and even his horror of combat duty. In all this hell of sand and death, there was nothing but himself, and Maatkara, and the loveliness of her upturned face.

Maatkara’s features were finely modeled, with cheekbones just prominent enough to be piquant; and her nose had a hint of the aquiline: high bred, and proud, and now abandoning her pride. Since he would not go willingly, she would persuade.

“I can’t leave,” he protested, when he contrived to break free. “I’m on duty—” He made a gesture. “All along here.”

Pebbles slid into the shelter; a man came stumbling in, and Rowan leaped to his feet. His orderly, having entered without knocking, drew back, made a fumbling salute, and stuttered, “I didn’t know, sir—”

Higgins was embarrassed. His glance shifted, then he made a resolute effort to ignore Maatkara. Rowan was now certain that his orderly had seen the girl, yet he had to make sure. He demanded, “What didn’t you know, Higgins?”

“Er—uh—that you weren’t—alone, sir. I came for the—canteen, sir. Water will be issued.”

Maatkara came from the corner, and stood a little to one side of Rowan; but she addressed Higgins.

The soldier gulped, and said, “What’s she saying, sir?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Have you seen anything else…er…anything unusual, I mean, along the line?”

“Yes, sir. A good many people like—like this lady. And some odd looking men.”

“Did you mention them to anyone?”

“No, sir. It seemed—well, I wasn’t sure—I thought it was the heat. We were all looking, but no one else sounded off, so—”

Rowan nodded. “But you’re sure I’m not alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’d swear to it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s all, Higgins.”

As the soldier saluted and turned to the entrance, Maatkara called to him, and would have overtaken him. He halted, helplessly regarding the girl and the officer. Rowan repeated, “That’s all, Higgins.”

CHAPTER 2

Everything’s Crazy!

The desert was now a howling darkness of hard driven sand. As long as the khamsin persisted, Rommel could not attack, so when Maatkara caught his arm, Rowan followed her into the gloom. He could not see, and when the contact wavered, he stumbled blindly.

Her grip tightened; he hesitated, and groped with his foot. There was a step, sand-clogged, like the one which followed. Rowan feared for a moment that Maatkara had led him into an adjoining command post, and then he saw the misty glow, a bluish light which dimmed and strengthened in the depths below.

Thin-faced men in robes and tall miters rose from carved benches aligned against the painted walls. One, unlike the others, wore a black cape and a tall Coptic hat. His beard was white, his eyes were deep-set –the only part of him which seemed alive, for he was little more than skin and bones. Rowan shrank from him, for he was more unreal than the phantoms which, seen so often in the madness of the khamsin, had become real to him.

The old man advanced, shakily. No one helped him. All his strength was centered in his gleaming, deep-set eyes.

He said, in English which for all its heavy accent was intelligible enough, “Captain Rowan, I could not face the khamsin, so I had to send Maatkara.”

Rowan’s sigh was a shuddering sound. “Who are you and where am I, and what is all this?”

The old man smiled reassuringly. “I am Senusert, a Copt, and supposedly a Christian. But the old faith has never died, and we have borrowed a faith to serve as a protection and a disguise.”

A Copt—one of the original inhabitants of Egypt; one of those who had ruled the land long before the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs had come, wave after wave of conquest. Rowan demanded, “Even so, how is it I can see her and them? My orderly saw them. But no one else did.”

Senusert carefully picked his way to a bench. The others ignored them, and seemed to be conferring in an undertone. Maatkara, however, stood by, as if uncertain whether to retire or to join the two.

“They want you to help them. They are bewildered, terrified. Century after century, the khamsin has uncovered, then buried their everlasting homes, always leaving them secure. And now comes this war, the one and only war of all these ages which has violated the tombs of my ancestors. How old do you think I am?”

Rowan groped for a guess. “Perhaps a hundred, perhaps a little more, I’d say more, except that—well, it’d just be improbable.”

Senusert smiled. “I’m younger than you. Look now.”

Rowan followed the gesture of the skinny hand. The men in miters had become very thin and tenuous and hazy, and then they winked out as candle flames expired. “They take my life and vital force so that they can become visible to some few of you. You alone could see—”

“My orderly also saw. I thought I was crazy. But why—”

“Your weariness, your misery, your exhaustion,” Senusert went on, “pierced the veil. Just as liquor or drugs do when they make you have what the doctors call hallucinations. One man could not furnish enough vital force to materialize these people so that everyone could see them. And you had to see. Otherwise, you could not believe.”

Rowan mopped sand and sweat from his face. “I still can’t believe. I still don’t know why this is.”

“We want you to advance. You must advance.”

Rowan laughed crazily. “Tell Montgomery! Tell the VIII Army—Why pick on a captain? I’m not even a soldier, I’m a refrigeration factory specialist, and they put me in charge of combat troops, when I was to be an inspector in airplane production, some fool blundered, and here I am, and now you ask me to advance! Why—why should I advance, when there’s an entire army which retreats for lack of supplies?”

“The general,” Senusert answered, “isn’t sensitive enough to see us. Few fighting men are. You’re not a fighting man, so you have the vision.”

“But you’ve not answered me!”

Maatkara came nearer and spoke in that strange tongue which had all the stateliness and resonance of Arabic, but which was nevertheless different. She pointed at Rowan as she spoke, and then Senusert said to the captain, “This is the further west—beyond this, our ancestors never went to bury the dead, where they could safely wait for the expiration of the 8000 year term before they regained their bodies and came to live on earth again. But those bombs—those shells—the earth shakes and shudders, and the destruction of mummies is such as no earthquake has ever equaled. Advance—advance—drive them back, so that those not already destroyed will have a chance to live when their turn comes.”

Rowan’s laughter shook the vault. “They want me to push Rommel back! Oh, God, it’s as crazy as everything else!”

Maatkara was near him now, but her touch was too light to be felt; he could hardly smell her perfume, and his fingers closed on emptiness. The bluish light wavered, and he was alone in a spinning roaring darkness.

Silence finally awakened Rowan. The khamsin had ceased howling, and the sun blazed down into the mouth of the crypt. Rowan’s mouth was dust-dry. He sat up among shreds of mummy cloth and shards of plaster painted with hieroglyphics. One of the unbroken panels pictured a girl surrounded by servants.

The girl was Maatkara.

He scrambled up the stairs. He saw footprints; Senusert’s, beyond any doubt. The old man had left after the dying down of the hard wind, or else sand would have blotted his tracks.

Then the earth shuddered. Rowan heard the crrrrrumppp of shells, the whine of diving planes, the roar and thunder of many tanks; anti-tank guns made their murderous whacking blasts, machine guns chattered and drummed all along the line.

There was a general advance, or, a general retreat. It must be the latter, for only Rommel advanced, and only the VIII Army retreated. He bounded to the surface, and into the hell glare of the Libyan desert.

Massed artillery was pounding, roaring, hammering, a hell of sound which had the impact of a physical blow.

Tanks were coming up. Infantry came out of trenches, to follow the counterattack. Scarcely visible against the ferocity of the rising sun, he detected the moving dark blots in the east: Rommel was driving through the moment that the khamsin subsided enough to progress.

But Rowan’s men were not advancing. They had no captain. Higgins came from cover, racing toward him. “I looked, sir,” he gasped. “I couldn’t find—”

Rowan did his best. But that was not good enough. A field officer and a captain came riding up in a motorcycle with side car, and saw that an entire company had lagged.

The major said, “Captain Rowan, report to the rear.” Then, to the other officer, “Take over his command.”

But an ambulance carried Rowan to the rear.

He knew that his absence had not hurt the day’s evil prospect, for the counterattack had crumpled; it had fallen back to the original line, and only artillery kept Rommel’s tanks from breaking through. Yet, absent from his post, he was guilty of a grave offense.

They would ask for an explanation. Whether he refused to offer one, or whether he told his story, he was damned in either case. Then he thought of Private Higgins, who had seen the weird people who paraded along the line. Higgins might save him.

CHAPTER 3

Insubordination

Anything can happen to a man during the khamsin, and Rowan had not, after all, been out of his company sector; it was clear that he had not been drinking, and it was just as plain that sheer exhaustion had whipped him down, so that he had to be hauled to the rear. But during the ride he had muttered something about Maatkara.

And that started Major Crane wondering. He had a bleak, bitter eye, he had good intentions, and absolutely no imagination; he was all soldier. And of course, he wanted a full report. So Rowan, remembering that Private Higgins had clearly seen Maatkara, told Crane what had happened.

“And Private Higgins was a witness, sir,” Rowan concluded.

Major Crane shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t take his testimony, captain.”

Rowan flared up, “I think I’m entitled to his testimony. I’ve tried to be frank. Now my sanity is in question—”

“Just a moment,” the major cut in. “Let’s not put it exactly that way. Neither your sanity nor your veracity. It is merely a matter of having the board determine whether your hallucinations are…ah…likely to be recurrent, and to the prejudice of your usefulness with combat troops. No officer or enlisted man, other than you and Private Higgins, saw this Egyptian girl.”

“And that is why I demand—I am entitled to demand a witness—”

“I am sorry, Captain Rowan, but Private Higgins died in action, very shortly after you were relieved of command. I judge from your tone and expression that you did not, could not have known of it.”

Rowan felt sick, and he looked it. “I did not.”

* * * *

So they kept Rowan in Cairo for observation and treatment.

Getting away from the front was, in itself, splendid. The army had from the start defrauded and tricked him; he had been accepted for technical supervisory work, and here he was, with combat troops. He had bitterly resented this, though he had tried to do his best. But now, he found, they did not want him in the ordnance shops where he could be useful in salvaging equipment.

That was the army: seeing apparitions not only makes you unfit for command, but unfit for everything else. And so, with nothing to do but mull over the final injustice, Rowan found a large supply of excellent brandy…

* * * *

It was no secret that he was tossing them off heavily. Army opinion, in fact, considered that such relaxation might help. Aviators cracked, good ones. So did line troops, in spite of every effort to weed out those whose nerves were too highly keyed for the strain. The new army didn’t bandy “cowardice” about as the old armies had. A man of given nervous strength can bear just so much shock, just as a man of given bulk cannot lift more than a certain weight. And maybe they could finally salvage Rowan for duty.

They told him all this, but it did not help. He repeated, over and over again, “They claim I’m wacky, only not enough so to be locked up.”

All that soothing stuff about recuperating did not fool Rowan. He knew they doubted his sanity. But smooth old brandy helped. Sometimes, its bouquet was like a memory of Maatkara’s perfume. Sometimes, far gone in the peculiar intoxication of brandy, he heard voices. The veil which divides the seen from the unseen became very thin, so that at times he saw her, and the solemn priests and dignitaries. But he could not understand what their gestures and their scarcely audible words meant.

Then Senusert came to see him. The Copt now looked scarcely sixty. He wore a black robe, and high hat, as before. And he said in his stilted English, “I have heard. Maybe I can do something for you.”

“You’ve done plenty,” Rowan growled.

“It is not our fault that you are one of those people who are sensitive to psychic influences. We hoped that some officer would be.”

“You can see the invisible,” Rowan said, bitterly, “but you couldn’t see that this hocus-pocus would ruin me and not help you!”

“No man can see the future,” the Copt protested.

“Then go away and leave me alone!”

“I am only trying to repair the damage. Now, the real trouble is that you are not really sure that there was a Maatkara, that you did not have a hallucination. If you knew, positively knew, it would—”

“It would not,” Rowan cut in, “help me one bit! They’d still think I was nuts.”

But Senusert shook his head. “If you really knew, instead of merely believing, you would quit drinking, you would recover, and the army would know that you had recovered. But before they can know, you must be sure.”

This made sense. He had relied so much on the evidence of Private Higgins, even before his sanity had been questioned. Rowan began to gain hope from the smooth, even voice and the intent eyes of the strange old Copt, who had actually become younger looking as nature repaired the damage done by furnishing vital force for those phantoms seventy miles west of Cairo. So, Rowan brightened.

“Let me hear it.”

“You are alone with an idea which you cannot believe. But there are other ways of being alone, and these are just as deadly. A bottle is never good company.”

The peculiar accent on bottle made Rowan straighten up. Senusert conveyed more by what he did not say than by what he did speak.

“Let’s hear it.”

The priest rose. “Come with me. You have been alone too long.”

When Rowan went with Senusert, he was almost sure that he would again see Maatkara. And his eagerness shocked him, though it was stimulating…

They went into an ancient house in the quarter which is near the citadel. At the narrow door which pierced the wall, Senusert paused, and fumbled with a key. Before Rowan could quite guess what had happened, he was in a small courtyard, and behind him, a latch clicked. He was locked in.

Then he saw the girl who arose from the rug which was spread out between the basin of the little fountain, and the clump of jasmine in the corner. For a moment, he thought he was back in the desert, looking into the fierce, weird light of the sandstorm, for it seemed that he was facing Maatkara, and that she was again coming toward him, eyes aglow and arms extended.

There was that familiar and blood-stirring sweetness, the ripple of shoulder length curls, but this exquisite creature spoke something which resembled English, pieced out with Arabic which Rowan understood in spots. But it did not make any difference what she said, for the recognition and welcome in her splendid eyes made trifles like sanity quite irrelevant.

Taking her in his arms was so natural that he did not even think of telling himself that he based his move on a phantom which only he and the late Private Higgins had seen. He could not quite tell whether he smelled jasmine, or Maatkara, or a strange and new and lovely creature who looked like the girl from the desecrated tombs, out where the new dead began to outnumber those who had died in the ages when war was a gentleman’s business.

That was the trouble with war: a dirty business that got one down. War used to be a simple matter of not fearing to die for a cause; now, it simmered down to fearing that one would not die soon enough. In the tomb paintings, they quit fighting each Spring to do the ploughing, and they quit each Fall to bring in the harvest. But this was the kind of war invented by a grotesque little man who sat behind the lines and let others wonder if they, or all nature had gone mad.

The painted kings on the temple walls went out in front, the first to fight. This was otherwise: a third rate corporal started it, and then watched from far behind the lines…

The girl had a strange name, so it was natural to call her Maatkara. She accepted his whimsy. He walked on air, not tiles, when he followed her into the ancient house in the shadow of the citadel. And he was at home in the stuccoed room, where a Kurdish rug glowed in shimmering scarlet and unbelievable blue – a long narrow rug spread out on a long bench.

Senusert was right, Rowan told himself as he sat down. He no longer cared who thought him crazy. Maatkara was better than brandy, and ever so much more fragrant.

But Maatkara evaded Rowan, and slipped shadow-like from the bench; and in the deepening dusk of the thick-walled room, she stood poised on her tiptoes for a moment, her skirt swirling as she turned.

“You must help my people, captain. Until you help them, I can think only of their woe and their despair. Senusert, my uncle, has done all he can, but—”

A great weariness made Rowan’s shoulders droop. “What can I do? I, with one company—when a whole army, a grand army, a fighting army, couldn’t advance?”

But Maatkara was as patient as she was alluring, and she came closer. “The Gods move in strange ways, Captain-With-Double-Sight. We need one who can see through the veil, and these other captains can see only one of the seven forms.”

Her voice was lower than most women’s; it did not irritate, it soothed and it exalted him, and he could not let his logic rise up in laughter. “What seven forms, Maatkara?”

“Each human being is far more than you people dream, more even than you suspect. There is a Name, a Power, a Shadow, a Spirit; an Astral Double, the Conscious Soul, and then, the Body which we of Egypt have embalmed as from ancient days.”

He had heard something of that sort before. The Astral Double, for instance, was that shadow-duplicate of the body, a link between visible and invisible, without which the flesh could not take nourishment from food, or win vitality from the sun. And the Name was merely “identity,” that which kept one separate from all else; not a thing, not an attribute, but rather, the awareness of consciousness. And Maatkara was trying to explain these things to him, and he began to understand.

“You can help us, you can be one of us,” she concluded, “if you will give us your Shadow.”

He frowned. “What good will that do?”

Maatkara smiled mysteriously. “That is hard to explain. But if you give us your Shadow, you can help yourself, and us also.”

Something made him recoil. A man without a shadow—the idea seemed logical, and also, it disturbed him as much as did the picture of being without a leg, or without an arm. And then he asked, “But how can you take a shadow? As long as the sun shines—”

Maatkara came nearer. “Do not try to understand how it can be done. But if you give away your Shadow, you can help us. Though you will not be one of us, you will not be so separated from us.”

At the courtyard gate, men were pounding. The bolt yielded, and the intruders burst into the garden, and kicked open the door of the house. Major Crane headed them. His gesture made the others retreat. He said, “Rowan, I don’t like this, following you around, but you’re under observation, and we were worried. I might as well talk to you here, now, as well as any time.”

Maatkara regarded the major with wide eyes, and tried to intervene. Crane shifted, turning his back toward her, so that he was between her and Rowan.

“See here, Rowan,” he said, “tossing off a few noggins is really a good idea. A bit of feminine society probably has its place. But the way you’re playing it—listen, there are girls of your own kind.”

Rowan did not quite know what to say. He was entirely too angry. A surge of fury made his head feel as though he were again in the Libyan Desert, with the khamsin whining, burning, choking, driving men mad, making them pray for a lull, even a lull in which Rommel would come pounding from the west.

“Why—damn it, sir—this is meddling—in my personal affairs—” That was not quite the thing to say to one’s superior, but Rowan said it.

Though the major made a grand effort to control himself, his outraged sense of discipline took command. “You might at least be discreet about—about—these native wenches.”

So Rowan measured the major and cut loose with a punch that would have stopped an armored column. When Crane went glassy-eyed and collapsed, Rowan was surprised.

And then he saw the men who, hearing the raised voices, had entered the court. They were military police. They had seen him strike his superior officer, and in the course of what was strictly line of duty.

The enormity of his offense shocked the military police into a moment of stupor, but Rowan was keyed up. Maatkara, it seemed, had vanished during the clash. That was good, too. He darted to the rear, and barred the first door after him; he did this quickly enough to block the rush of the police in khaki.

His problem now was to outrun them, outwit them. There was only one possible result if he let them catch him…

CHAPTER 4

The Greatest of Sins

Striking an officer in time of peace, even under the most extenuating circumstances, meant being cashiered; in time of war, a firing squad would almost certainly be mandatory. So Rowan moved, and with agility which amazed him. He bounded up a stairway, while the military police were still pounding the door he had barred. By reaching the roof, he could leap to the adjoining building, or into an alley.

What would follow, he could not even guess. In uniform, he would be conspicuous; civilian police would readily pick him up. Somewhere, in the next few minutes, he had to find a djellab, the ankle length Egyptian outer garment, and improvise a turban.

He cleared the stairs, and glanced about the room, looking for the flight which led to the roof. He saw it, and then cast about him for some garment, any garment at all to conceal his uniform. And the sounds below told him that he did not have long to look.

Then he saw Senusert come running from the front. The old man cried, “Just a moment, just a moment! I will fix it. I saw.”

He turned to a chest, and found a long black cape and a Coptic hat. “Quick, quick!”

He was wasting words. Rowan did not miss a beat, getting into the somber garment. Senusert snatched his cap, and put on his head the tall Coptic headgear. Then he said, “This way!”

They raced to the roof. They leaped to the adjoining roof. Rowan flattened out, in the shelter of the parapet, as the soldiers charged to the top of the house which he had just left. He followed the Copt, crawling toward a trap door. Senusert said, as they bolted down the stairs, “Less hurry needed now. Before they search the place, they need Egyptian police. You now have a chance.”

The Coptic priest rearranged Rowan’s garments. He led the way to a rear court, and after a moment of cautious observation, stepped into an alley which wound in and out among the ancient dwellings; the nearest end was blocked by a wall. Cairo’s thousand years of crazy architecture delayed the army, and helped Rowan. Things moved so fast that he had scarcely time to think of his next refuge, or of the girl he called Maatkara.

Senusert guided him. By dusk, they had not covered much ground, yet the intricacy of their course gave the effect of miles.

Meanwhile, hidden Cairo was whispering. Bearded men came into the house where Rowan hid. They brought news. The police, civilian and military, were putting a cordon about the Citadel district. The closer they narrowed the circle, the more difficult for Rowan to escape arrest. And Senusert knew this, so he said, “Get out of town while we can.”

Coptic cunning, and lifelong knowledge of the city, got Rowan through the lines. But the problem was just beginning. Senusert said, “Outlying villages are far worse than what we have left. There is only one way to save you.”

“What is that?”

The priest answered, “Only by giving your shadow can you evade them.”

And by now, a shadow seemed unimportant.

* * * *

Rowan was not surprised when, finally getting into the open, his guide took him west of the Nile, and into one of the subterranean places which, stripped of all their loot, had no longer anything of interest.

He went down into a dusty darkness; ghost fires, wavering and vague, outlined his guide. Bit by bit, he could pick out the sculpted and painted figures of men who had lived forty centuries previous. Time, archeologists, and prowling Arabs had scarred and defaced what had once been sacred to the dead. An empty sarcophagus of red granite yawned.

Yet the place was not vacant. Though he could see them but dimly, Rowan could nonetheless perceive the hierophants of old Egypt. Their figures wavered, blended into each other, then separated again, so that he could not even guess how many there were. Senusert whispered, “That is the vagueness and fluidity of the astral world. You are not yet in tune. Do not worry.”

Out of the half luminous shapes which undulated in the gloom, he picked a woman: but by now, he was beyond guessing whether this was the Maatkara whose fatal kisses had brought him to this pass, or whether she was the Coptic girl he had called Maatkara for lack of a better name.

The other figures vanished, and Rowan wondered what had become of Senusert. Suddenly, he had the feeling that in this darkness of mummy dust and antiquity, he was alone with a woman whose beauty was a dream more gripping than any reality. As the loveliness of that face and form solidified before his eyes, Rowan knew that he could do without his guide.

She came to him, head high; her smile and her splendid eyes were clear now, and her figure was half visible through her filmy garments.

“Are you,” he groped, “Maatkara—which Maatkara—you look different—and still—the same?”

“Names are few,” she murmured, coming nearer. “But we are many. Trust me, do not fear me, and you will know and learn.”

A familiar fragrance filled the vault. Yet he was not quite sure that he had a familiar figure in his arms, or that his arms actually enclosed anything but an idea.

For a moment, he wondered when a bugle would blow and awaken him.

And then he remembered that if ever again he heard a bugle, it would be the sound of trumpeters playing a march for him as he went to the firing squad.

She seemed to sense his dismay, and whispered, “There is a way. You did your best for us, and you failed, as we failed. More than ever, the barbarians shell our tombs, and each day, more of us lose all hope of rising to greet the dawn. But there is a way for you.”

“A way to what?”

She sighed. And in the silence which followed, Rowan was gripped by a sadness such as he had never known before. Whatever the cost, he had to save himself for the day when Maatkara became arm filling and substantial.

“A way to what?” he repeated.

“To me. There are seven parts of a living body. You know them, I told you, back there. But until you give us your shadow, you live on one plane and we’re on another, and there is something between us, so that we see each other—that our senses meet each other as through a dense mist.”

He began to remember. “My shadow?”

“Give your shadow, and be one of us.”

“Of you—but you’re dead!”

Oddly, he could understand Maatkara; he was not aware of any difference in language. One Maatkara he had not understood at all; another had labored in stilted English. But now, there was not any language, or else, he and she spoke the same.

“Oh, I’ve been dead for more centuries than you could count, and I’ve lived for more years than you could imagine. There isn’t so much difference between being dead and alive. There is no completeness until the final day. I can’t touch things of earth, you can’t touch things on which the Gods have breathed, each is handicapped.”

“But I’m not dead—not yet. And you are. One of you are.”

“And so you’re afraid to give the shadow which will keep them from ever finding you? Afraid to give that bit which exists only by day, when by giving it you can know me by night, and always?”

He had not so loved life that duty in the combat lines had appalled him; his aversion to duty had come mainly from a sense of injustice. He, a technical expert, sent to do what any fool could do. Yet now that he faced one who did not live, he had a fear of yielding even his shadow.

Maatkara said, “But you won’t die. You can’t die until the day ordained for you. By giving your shadow, you won’t become less real—but I shall be more real—more real than any woman you have ever imagined. And you’ll live—I swear—”

She spoke words which his mind could not understand, yet they did register; deeply within him, at the bottom of depths whose very existence he had not thus far suspected. He had to believe Maatkara. She swore by things which made falsehood impossible. There was a phrase, “…in the face of the gods, the greatest sin is a lie…”

Maatkara had taken the ultimate oath, and he had to believe.

So he said, “Then let them have my shadow…”

“You believe me, and you mean what you say?”

He repeated, “Take my shadow, and let me cross the border.”

He had scarcely spoken when a biting chill stabbed him, and he whirled in a darkness all shot with flame: and then, a curious lightness buoyed him. Yet all that was about and near him became definite and solid. The plaster on the walls showed no cracks, nor were any parts of the painted figures missing.

Nor was any of Maatkara missing…there was no longer any emptiness in his arms, and for the first time, his mouth pressed against lips, and not a vision…

“They cannot ever see you,” Maatkara murmured, when she finally sank back to her heels. “Egypt is yours, Egypt by day and by night, and there is no more flight and no more hiding.”

He could not account for the sudden even light, the brilliance which came from no discernible source, but he did not try. He followed Maatkara down a passageway, and into what was like buildings which rose above the ground.

Nor did he have any misgivings, nor any premonition when she said, a long time thereafter, “And in the end, you will help us now as you were not able to help us then…”

He had no misgivings, because his eyes were full of Maatkara…

CHAPTER 5

No Shadow

For a while, down in that vault which mimicked an Egyptian palace, Rowan enjoyed his escape from injustice. The people of the shadow land did not eat nor drink in the sense that Rowan did; they took symbolic freshment from the images of foodstuffs. Senusert, bringing him groceries from the material plane, explained this very plausibly, though there were various loopholes and contradictions which the old man evaded.

Maatkara, for instance, though she did not eat, was nonetheless substantial enough for kisses distinctly on the earth-plane of existence.

Yet it was disconcerting when, at times, Rowan’s contact with those beyond the border seemed to slip, and Maatkara vanished, leaving him half way between the seen and unseen. Worse than that, however, was being out of touch with the world he knew. Lovely though Maatkara was, he began to sense that an undiluted diet of Egyptian loveliness was unbalanced: or so he explained his vague but ever increasing uneasiness and discontent.

He blamed it on the other inhabitants of the astral world. He had nothing in common with them. Though he could follow their interminable conversations, he would have much preferred a deck of cards and a chance to beat the Chinaman.

They had funerals on the brain. They wrangled about embalming technique. They debated the XVIII Dynasty versus the XVI. They split hairs four ways in predicting what Osiris, King of Gods, would do and say on the day of judgment. It was an eternal round of shop talk, by a people who had made a cult of After-Death, rather than of the life before death. It seemed that an ancient Egyptian started almost at birth to prepare himself for a grand burial, for better and more elaborate ceremonies. And while foresight had its merits, the concentration of necropolitan discussions began to grate and jar.

Even Maatkara, a notable exception, forgot herself, one night as they sat in the moonlight which filtered down into the vault. She was especially fascinating; her long lashes fluttered, and there was ecstasy in her sigh when she tilted back her lovely head, and pillowed it against his shoulder.

“Darling,” she murmured, “I wish I could be sure—”

The beauty of her upturned face made him forget his discontent. Her voice thrilled him anew. “Yes, sweetheart?”

Her dropping lids rose, and her smile blossomed as she looked up. “I wish,” she resumed, “I could be sure you’d have as nice a funeral as Uncle Maku.”

He stopped kissing her. She was pained and puzzled…

When she left him, he growled to himself, “These blasted funeral-minded Egyptians!”

He began to see himself as never before: he knew now that he had been sorry for himself, up there at the front, because he had thought that an engineer with a string of degrees should not be wasted as a bomb-target; that without doubt someone had to squat in a trench of blistering sand and curse the khamsin, but Joe Doakes could do the job, there were plenty of Joes anyway.

He began to think of Private Higgins, somewhere beneath a little white cross. Whether in heaven or hell, it was a cinch that Higgins was not mooning around about the way the embalmer had skimped on linen, and chiseled on amulets.

* * * *

When old Senusert came in, one night, with canned goods, cigarettes, razor blades, and other odds and ends, Rowan thought it was time for a showdown. He said, “I’ve had a nice rest. But these people are driving me dizzy. You said once, or someone said, Lord, I don’t know who said what these days, that in time I could help you people. What’s been happening, and where’s that radio you were going to get me?”

Senusert smiled that tomb-painting smile. “Be patient, my son. All will be worked out in time.”

“What’s happening in Cairo?”

“They are looking for you.”

“Who the devil is this girl? The one from the courtyard, or the one nobody believed I saw?”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Well, to blazes with it all! I know the language now, I want to go back to Cairo, I’ll take my chances.”

Senusert smiled some more. He yawned a little. “I hope you like your cigarettes,” he said, and went up into the desert.

Rowan opened a can of meat loaf. But the talk of funerals, and Amen-Hotep’s coronation spoiled his appetite. Maatkara was one of the group. It was worse than tuning in on a handful of middle-aged dames discussing operations, or the improper conversation someone had made in a cocktail lounge…

Rowan rose. He said, aloud, and in English, “When I am dead, I want to stay dead.”

He headed for the stairs, and stepped out into the bitter moonlight of the desert. Far overhead, a plane droned; a flight of planes, westward bound. The khamsin had long since subsided; though the sands were hot, the breeze was chilly. He took a long, deep breath, and it dizzied him. He looked back at the black mouth of the crypt from which he had come.

“I’m as bad as they are. I’ve been so afraid to die that I didn’t take any time out to live.”

He started for the Nile.

Each step invigorated him. The further he went from safety and a cozy tomb, the stronger he felt. To hell with safety! The swirling sand, the khamsin, the dive bombings, the artillery—messy, but better than the safety of a tomb!

His thoughts and the air made him drunk. His feet tramped on clouds, his head brushed the stars. He said to the silence, “I’ll surrender. I’ll tell ’em I was wacky when I slugged the major. Either they’ll believe me or they won’t. Either they’ll shoot me, or ship me back home.”

It was nearly sunrise when he crossed the big bridge which spanned the Nile. A three hundred pound Egyptian almost knocked him into the gutter. “Where you think you’re going?” Rowan demanded. “Wake up!”

The man looked blank. He looked as if he had seen nothing, heard nothing.

Rowan halted. He glanced about. Something was odd. And then he caught it: despite the brilliance of the sun, he cast no shadow, though everything else did.

“Funny,” he muttered. “They actually did take it. Clever fellows, those Egyptians, but dull as you find them.”

CHAPTER 6

Advance

When Rowan reached army headquarters, he tightened up. Two sentries guarded the door. He had discarded his uniform, and he expected difficulties at the entrance; natives did not have the run of things. But no one stopped him.

He barged into the adjutant’s office, finally. No one had noticed him. That took some of his high purpose, it deflated him, but he stalked up to the desk and saluted. “Sir, I am reporting for duty, after absence without leave—”

He had the days all calculated, but he did not name them. The adjutant was signing papers, and at the same time, talking to a staff sergeant. Rowan repeated the salute, raised his voice, and got a fresh start. But no one answered.

The adjutant’s shadow reached across the desk. So did the sergeant’s. But Rowan cast no shadow.

He began to get the truth: he was invisible. He could see the invisible, but the visible could not see him. Except perhaps Senusert, who had Egyptian tricks. And he began to wonder if the old Copt was visible to normal persons.

The let-down stunned and weakened him. A captain rushed in, went to his box for orders; but the adjutant checked him. “It won’t be in writing, Carson! I’ll tell you—come here.”

Rowan heard it all. A convoy was going to the front. Troops and tanks and artillery were going to reinforce the concentration which had brought Rommel to a halt; men and material which had arrived in Egypt, and so secretly that talkative Cairo had not suspected.

He spent several hours testing his invisibility and inaudibility. He tried to deny the fact. It was impossible to any known science. But at last he realized, and with growing terror, that he had fallen in with a science hidden and unknown for centuries; that Senusert’s rituals had removed some essence whose absence left the body incapable of casting a shadow.

Otherwise, Rowan told himself, he was normal. He deliberately barged into several pedestrians and heard them gasp from the impact. Some, believing they had stumbled, cursed the paving. Others blamed some visible passerby, and once a near riot blossomed out.

“I can see Senusert, he can see me. But others apparently can’t see us. I can feel it when I butt into people, and so can they.” He doubled up his fist, considered it thoughtfully. “Chances are Senusert could feel this.”

He shrank from the idea of ingratitude, and particularly from the thought of giving an old man a brisk third degree; but something had to be done.

Walking out to find Senusert would take too long. By the time Rowan made his decision, darkness had fallen, and army trucks, British and American, were slipping out of Cairo, to assemble far out in the desert. Their departure was so unobtrusive that no spy could have suspected that this was a good time to radio Rommel, but Rowan had heard, and he knew what was cooking.

So he hopped over the tail gate of a truck.

No one noticed him. With everyone jamming everyone else, and in the darkness, there could not be any sense of discrepancy.

The soldier talk was good to hear. He had never before appreciated the straightforwardness, the saltiness of it. Nor were all soldiers loutish fellows. Private Higgins, after all, had had that sensitive touch, enabling him to penetrate the veil which divides seen and unseen. And Rowan, uneasy from the weight of new thoughts, saw how he had made too much of a trifle, perhaps even made a virtue of a weakness. When the truck came to the palm cluster and the mud huts which were Rowan’s landmark for the swing out into the empty desert and the nearby tombs, he recalled that he might for some days have to wait for Senusert, and meanwhile, listen to tomb-talk.

“Maatkara—if she could only think of something else—she’d not be bad—”

But he did not climb down over the tail gate as the truck pulled up for a deep rut. Before he gave Senusert the third degree, regained his shadow, and surrendered to the provost marshal, he wanted a look at the big things which would happen at the front: jammed shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers, he caught their grim enthusiasm, their confidence. As an officer and a super-educated man, he had never before been so close to soldiers. Disliking his duties, he had commanded his company by remote control, always seeing himself as an engineer shamefully wasted. But now he began to wonder whether, instead of being too valuable to waste on line of duty, he had actually been not quite good enough for his assignment…

Whether the gods of chance or the gods of Egypt, he did not know, but somehow, he had picked a truck whose destination was very near the tomb-dotted waste held by his former company. His one-time men were again in the lines, and under an officer who liked his work. Rowan, stalking about, unseen and unheard, sensed that these men had changed. Where before they had been willing, now they were eager.

Then he saw Maatkara, lovelier than she had ever been before. Her skin gleamed silvery white, and her long legs twinkled through the filmy skirt which swirled in the breeze. She clung to him, and said, “So you’ve found a way to help us?”

“What do you think?”

“Let’s go away,” she urged. “All these soldiers—this time, they’ll win—you don’t have to help—you may get hurt—”

He broke her grasp, thrust her away, though it was difficult not to draw her back. “I’m going with them,” he said.

And when the show opened, he went.

Tanks lumbered forward, leading the way, just as the sun rose behind them. The troops trotted along, well spread out, following the lumbering monsters. Turret guns blazed. Machine guns drummed and rattled, kicking up sand. The tanks shifted, blasting to dust the Nazi strong points in the crags which cropped up out of the hot sand.

Smoke veiled the sun: gun smoke, and the smoke of blazing tanks and crashed planes. The wind whipped up clouds of hot sand. Mine fields had blocked the advance; snipers and machine gunners had picked off the sappers whose duty it had been to discover and detonate the cunningly concealed mines which the enemy had set in anticipation of counterattack.

What was happening on the right or left, Rowan did not know. But he was certain that his company had been stalled when artillery and mines had blasted the protecting tanks to junk. The new captain was down. The walkie-talkie set was riddled. Though runners raced through the hell of sand and smoke to regain contact with the battalions to the right and left, it was not certain if any got through to ask for more tanks.

Another attack stalled among half-buried tombs. The 105 millimeter German howitzers had the range, and they pounded the line with shrapnel, and with high explosive. Looking back, Rowan saw the dark masses of reserve tanks on the way. They would be delayed and shelled to junk while men went out to search the field and clear it.

A courier came up on a motorcycle. “Who the hell’s in command?”

Nobody knew. The last officer was down. Rowan took the captain’s blouse, but no one noticed him. If they did not get going quickly; the outfit would be wiped out. Rowan yelled, “Let’s go!” He snatched a bag of grenades and set out, but no one followed him. For a moment, he had forgotten they could neither see nor hear him.

Maatkara was beside him again. “Oh, you can’t go alone,” she gasped, as she stretched her stride and attempted to catch his arm. “No one’s following.”

Without breaking his stride, he straight armed her, knocked her tumbling, in the hot sand. His vision had strangely sharpened, or perhaps it was his wits. Maybe he did not actually see what was concealed beneath the sand; he may only have judged, from the positions of the stalled tanks, what the mine pattern was. But while sappers might have done as well, they could not have done their job as quickly.

He halted in the bullet-swept emptiness, and deliberately placed a grenade. He had barely leaped back to what he considered a safe distance when a blast blotted out the sun. Recovering, he raced to where the next hidden mine must be.

Again, the grenade explosion touched off the peril which waited to blast whatever man or tank disturbed the sand.

Behind him, men were yelling. The tanks he had seen from afar were now rumbling so that all the other noises were blotted out. Another mine went up and another—Dizzied by repeated concussions, winded by his exertion, Rowan was slow in regaining his feet. A wave of men enveloped him: what remained of his old company was advancing.

“To hell with the tanks!” they howled, “The mines are blowing up from the heat! Make it hotter!”

Rowan stretched his legs. Unhampered by equipment, he gained on them. They were through the mine field. Instead of tanks clearing the way and leading the men, it was the other way about.

Rowan was still wondering why troops had followed an invisible man when a hammer impact knocked him down. He knew that he would never report to Cairo, visibly or otherwise. He was not bullet proof, after all. He’d just been lucky, lasting long enough to place every grenade without having been picked off.

The yelling troops hurdled him without a look. They had business ahead, and wounded men were no novelty to them. He began to wonder if this had all been planned by Senusert—and whether he would ever again see Maatkara…

Then the stretcher bearers came along, almost on the heels of the assault; men armed only with courage, and facing as much danger as the combat troops.

One of them said, “Hell’s fire, another captain; they’re getting knocked off like flies!”

Rowan heard this, and tried to explain, but could not. He tried desperately, choking and struggling as they lifted him. Then he heard one of the squad say, “I’ll be—! That crazy school teacher got out in front. Who’d ever thought that guy was a soldier!”

By now, Rowan sensed that death was cracking Senusert’s magic, and that he had regained his shadow, that he must be visible again; that he had outwitted Egyptian magic. Rowan heard nothing else. He did not know that one of the squad added, “Move on, get him later, can’t do him any good.”

Neither did Rowan know that Rommel kept running; that, hours after the first wave of the attack, Major Crane was saying, “General, here’s our deserter. The men of his old company insist he blew a road through the toughest mine field on the front. Poor devil was crazy. Glad we didn’t catch him.”

The general stared for a moment. “Jaw still hurt, Crane? Hmm…you can’t try a dead man, but you can damn well decorate one.” He sighed. “Hope the lad is having lots of fun with those Egyptian ladies he was muttering about.”