The Illusion of Murder (10 page)

A shadow passes over the sands as a falcon gracefully glides above us, blue-gray feathers glistening in the sunlight. He slants his body to the left and dives. Just before he appears certain to crash into the ground, his claws come out and grab something from the sand. When he soars back up into the sky a rodent is struggling in his grip. I’m in awe that the raptor has spotted such a small thing in this vast ocean of sand, yet at the same time I feel pity for the little critter.

The two Bedouins riding as our escort to the rear had also watched the falcon and smiled when it captured its prey. With their head cloths around their faces, leaving only a narrow slit for vision, the men appear unfazed by the cloud of dust kicked up by the carriage.

In their desert robes, mounted on camels that appear clumsy yet seem to move with the grace of the wind itself, these desert warriors are romantic figures to a young woman.

“My brothers and I against my cousins … my brothers, cousins, and I against the world,” Von Reich says.

His comment catches me by surprise. “Excuse me?”

“The Bedouins have a view of the world that is narrowly restricted to their own families, which is the meaning of the phrase. It’s often spoken by them as the code they live by. It’s said that a Bedouin owns only three things—his clothes, his animals, and his women.”

“What do the women own?” pops out before I can control my tongue.

“A lifetime of misery.”

Lady Warton gives our escorts a frown. “Bathing water is definitely not on their list of possessions. They smell worse than their camels.”

*   *   *

W
E BOARD A SMALL STEAM LAUNCH
that huffs and chugs across the lake. I would prefer a sailboat, but Von Reich says the steam launch is faster and we don’t have the time to spare.

With my practical traveling cap attached securely on my head, I have a hard time not laughing as Lady Warton struggles to keep her dainty canary feather hat attached to her head with a veil as winds skipping across the water pummel us. I’m envious of the pith helmets the men wear, smartly secured with a chin strap. The lightweight hats made of a corklike material provide shade and holes for heat to escape.

In their pith helmets and white linen suits, the two men look very much like white colonials coming to do their duty as masters. Lady Warton also wears white, an unfortunate color for all of them since the damp wood seats leave a brown patch on an unmentionable area.

When the sun comes up, they glow like snowballs.

Our boat passes a long narrow craft loaded with bales of cotton; men aboard chant as they row with long oars, a rhythmic song of labor carried by the breeze to us.

It takes little to imagine Cleopatra and her court attendants instead of cotton bales and a slave master cracking a whip over the heads of the rowers.

“What are you smiling about?” Von Reich asks.

I just shrug my shoulders because I can’t explain. The gentleman from the city of Mozart and Strauss, the Vienna waltz, and the glittering court of the Hapsburg emperors, would not understand how different this strange land is to a young woman who once thought she would spend her entire life underpaid and worked to the bone in an industrial town factory.

11

Ruins of the ancient city of Tanis are visible as our steam launch brings us to a dock in the late afternoon. I am more eager to see the antiquity site than to sit down to a meal with a sheikh. The thought of having come nearly six thousand miles and not getting a glimpse of the remnants of the golden civilization along the Nile would have been a thorn in my claw.

A servant is waiting to escort us to the sheikh’s tent. “A short walk,” he says.

My eyes light up as I step back in time to the ancient city.

“Tanis was built a thousand years before the birth of Christ,” Von Reich says, “around the time God sent plagues to punish the pharaoh who wouldn’t let the Jews return to their homeland and parted a sea for Moses.”

Always the showman, Von Reich adds, “We are walking in the footsteps of mighty pharaohs who were worshipped as living gods. The great civilizations of Greece and China had yet to arise when the monuments that you’re about to see were made—temples and tombs and statues that have excited and puzzled people for thousands of years.”

He leans closer and speaks in a confidential tone so as not to be heard by the others. “Do you know what I like most about you, Nellie? How little things excite you so much and make you smile so brightly.”

Little things?

“You’ve missed your calling, Von Reich,” Lord Warton says. “You should have been a tour guide. Tell us about Tanis.”

“Tanis was capital of Egypt several thousand years ago. The city had access to the sea and was an important port until it was finally abandoned because of the rising waters of the lake. Its most important complexes are the Temple of Amun, the king of gods, who is usually represented as a man with a ram’s head, and that of Horus, a god of the sky and war.

“The city has been ravaged by time and by tomb robbers, and much of the area has gone back to desert, but be aware—the spirits of gods and kings still walk among the stone vestiges of its magnificent past.”

Scattered about like the stone garden of a giant are granite statues and monuments, some colossal in size, many lying prone, all radiating the exotic and mysterious with their strange shapes and sacred writings.

I’m already writing in my head the story that I will send with my cable back to New York.

“Some very fine artifacts were found here by an English Egyptologist who spent several years working the site,” Von Reich says. “There are probably many more, but excavation is time-consuming and expensive, so it comes in spurts.”
*

“He must cry,” I say.

Lady Warton asks, “Who’s crying?”

“Him.” I gesture at a fallen statue of what appears to be a pharaoh. Standing upright it would be several times my height.

“He has had to lie there and just watch over the ages as thieves carry away the treasures of his city.”

She gives me a look that expresses at the same time both a question of sanity and contempt for my thinking process. I suppose in her world of tea parties and formal balls, stone kings don’t have feelings. But as I stand here, humbled in his presence, and look at his finely chiseled features—large eyes; a bold, almost Roman-like nose; a full mouth, all a bit worn by time—I still sense his power and majesty and can’t help but believe he’s watching.

The beauty and timeless workmanship of all these fallen edifices are testimonials to the greatness of the people who built them.

“It appears to me,” Lady Warton says, “that this place needs masonry work and a good coat of paint.”

I’m choking back a retort that I know I’ll regret when I hear Von Reich shout, “Come here!”

We gather around an obelisk, a tall, narrow, freestanding pillar that has a pyramidal shape at the top. Hieroglyphs cover the granite surface.

“Obelisks were placed in pairs at the entrances to temples with the picture writing we call hieroglyphics on them. Do you know how it happened that we were finally able to read ancient Egyptian glyphs?”

Without waiting for a reply, he launches into an explanation of the Rosetta stone, which I already know a bit about, having seen it at the British Museum in London. The dark, pinkish-gray stone slab that is about four feet tall, two feet wide, and a foot thick, had commands of a pharaoh inscribed on it in both ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs two thousand years ago.

Officers of Napoléon’s army of occupation discovered it at the town of Rosetta, not far from Tanis, about ninety years ago and somehow it found its way to London. I recall a comment from a curator at the museum that the stone was found about the same time Napoléon’s cannoneers were shooting the nose off of the Great Sphinx of Giza during cannon practice.

“By translating Greek,” Von Reich continues, “the lingua franca of the ancient world and a language well known to us, and comparing it to the hieroglyphics, the secret behind the Egyptian symbols was revealed.”

I slip away leaving the others huddled together as the “expert” on ancient Egyptian writing rambles on. I much prefer to walk among the ruins. Maybe I’ll stumble onto some artifact other explorers have overlooked.

Behind the crumbled ruins of pillars, I find a stately granite sphinx. Close by is a statue of another pharaoh and more stone structures.

Something I’ve read comes to mind. “The longer man lives upon the Earth, the more the ground grows ancient beneath his feet…”

Standing on ground where history has been made, I picture men toiling in the scorching heat as whips rain down on their naked backs because they are not working fast enough. Perhaps thousands of people died to build the city and centuries later many of the monuments are still here—a testimony more to the common people who built them, than to the pharaohs.

The huge statue of the long-dead pharaoh intimidates me. The way his penetrating eyes bear down puts the fear of the unknown in me and I’m not one drawn to the occult. Without a doubt, they made him this size so people would tremble before him.

The most menacing feature is the king cobra placed on the front of the crown—its neck fanned into that distinctive cobra hood, indicating that it is ready to strike a deadly blow whenever it desires.

“What do you think about your tombs being looted and monuments broken and scattered like stone weeds?” I ask the pharaoh.

“I am eternal.”

I nearly jump out of my shoes.

A man wearing a long black robe that cloaks him from the top of his head down to his sandals is standing in the shadow of the colossal monarch. A narrow gap in the hood exposes little of his features.

“That is how he would answer your question.”

I glance back to make sure my companions examining the hieroglyphics on the obelisk are still within shouting distance.

“He is eternal, like the Nile.” He steps forward and I can see he is elderly, with wrinkled features and wisdom’s white beard. “He and the river will be here when those who sacked his tombs and cities are dust scattered by the wind.”

“Do you work here?” I ask.

“I am a caretaker for all this.” He waves at the ruins around us. “A city of vanished glories, containing only what the thieves of history have left behind.”

He appears educated; not a fellah farmer or laborer.

“Are you an Egyptologist?” I ask.

He gives me an appraising look. “Nothing so grand. When the Englishman Flinders Petrie was working the site, I had the privilege of overseeing the workers. What little knowledge I have comes not from books, but from working with others, mostly foreigners.” He studies me for a moment. “You are not British.”

“I’m American.”

“An American…” He seems taken back by my nationality and ruminates for a moment before he finally says, “Egypt sees many foreigners, British, French, Germans, Italians, but few Americans. You are the first I have met, though I’ve heard it prophesized that someday your young country will be a great power like the ones in Europe that have colonial empires wrapping around the globe.”

“We don’t need colonial empires. We have strong arms and natural resources aplenty in our own country. America’s very large and we’ve barely scratched our riches.”

Yankee boasting, rather inane, but the hinges of my usually oiled tongue are rusted in the presence of this old man who seems to bear the wisdom of the ages on his shoulders.

“Who is this gentleman?” I gesture at the giant statue of the pharaoh.

“Ramses the Great. Unearthed by my crew while working with the English archaeologist.”

“Ah, Ramses. The pharaoh of the Exodus who caused Egypt to suffer ten plagues when he refused to let Moses and the Jews leave. His army was swept away in the Red Sea when he tried to pursue the Jews after the waters had parted for them.”

I didn’t add that about everything I knew about Egyptian pharaohs was either learned in Sunday school … or came from Von Reich. I nod at the sphinx. “What a magnificent creature.”

The sphinx is six feet high and about twice that long; its body is taut, its claws extended, giving the impression of being ready to leap.

Von Reich had explained that sphinxes with the heads of people, rams, or even birds of prey were often lined up as sentries to protect temples. This one has the head of a pharaoh, perhaps Ramses himself. I’ve never seen a picture of one of these enigmatic creatures without experiencing a sense of awe, and now I’m actually standing before one.

I walk around the sphinx as I speak to the man. “I think I saw his brother in the Louvre museum in Paris.”

“Yes, one of the sphinxes from Tanis is held prisoner in the French museum.”

Held prisoner?
An interesting way to put it, but I suppose if a foreign country removed the Liberty Bell from Philadelphia I would view the act in much the same manner.

“He must also cringe at how the city has crumbled,” I say. “I’ve heard the winds that swept off the desert can be brutal.”

“It’s the sea breezes that have blown invading armies to Egypt’s shores that have ravaged the remnants of our past. The great powers of Europe have plundered the treasures of Egypt since Roman times,” his hoarse whisper tells me. “There are more obelisks and sphinxes and treasures of the pharaohs in London, Paris, and Rome than in Cairo or Alexandria. Some of them got there because of the greed of my own people. Even our kings filled their coffers with monies they obtained selling our treasures to foreigners.”