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It had puzzled Cleo, too, but she was not going to admit it. ‘They are intent on assisting all of les savants. They appear to consider my father as one of their own. After all, he had a French son-in-law.’
‘Positively Romeo and Juliet,’ Quin observed. She glanced at him sharply, but he was studying the temple now they were close. ‘And this is currently the subject of your father’s study?’
‘He copies the inscriptions and measures it.’ Father measured everything obsessively, as though the figures could unlock some key to the mysteries of the past.
‘And that is helpful?’ Quin stopped and studied the great golden columns rising from the piled sand.
‘Apparently. I like to look at the wonderful pictures on the walls—you can just see the top of some of them if you climb right up. The soldiers have carved their names along the topmost frieze. I wish they would not.’ She shivered. These things had stood here for millennia, so some scholars said.
‘Sacrilege,’ Quin murmured and touched her arm. ‘I think you have a greater sympathy for these monuments than your father has, for all his scholarship.’
‘For the people that created them, perhaps.’ She made no move to shake off his hand. Men and women had stood and looked at these buildings since time immemorial, perhaps touching as she and Quin were, supporting each other, perhaps in fear, perhaps in awe. It seemed a small miracle that she had found someone who understood that.
The donkey moved, tugging the rein and with it, her arm. The moment was gone into the hot air, just like every moment evaporating in the heat and dust of this place.
‘Come, we need to get to the camp before the sun gets too high.’ She began to walk without looking back, listening to the familiar soft footfall of the little donkey and the faint slap of the leather sandals worn by the man who walked with her. It had been a long time since anyone had kept her company. It was strange that it should make her feel lonelier than ever.
Chapter Four
‘Do you want to stop and rest?’ Cleo glanced back at Quin. ‘There is shade just ahead and another mile to go.’
To her surprise, he nodded. ‘Yes, that would be welcome.’ Then, when she continued to stare he added, ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. Nothing beyond the fact that an adult male is prepared to admit to a woman that he would like to rest.’
‘You think I am betraying weakness?’
‘No, I think you are showing common sense,’ she retorted and led the donkey down to the river’s edge. ‘There is a fallen column from some monument in the shade of those palms. A good place to rest.’ She leaned on the donkey’s rump while it drank and watched Quin covertly as he sat. His pace had not flagged, although he was pale under his eyes and around his mouth. Considering that he had been prostrate with heat-stroke, and was still carrying a wound that had been seriously infected, it would seem that Quin Bredon was both fit and hardy.
‘Men do sometimes demonstrate common sense,’ he said mildly when she rejoined him. ‘Thank you,’ he added as he took the proffered water skin and tipped it expertly so the water arced into his mouth without the neck touching his lips. ‘How long does it take to get used to the taste of goat-flavoured water?’
‘You never do.’ She drank and pushed the stopper into the flask. There were boys herding cattle on the opposite bank and a flock of egrets flew upstream, their white plumage brilliant in the sunlight. A large pied kingfisher landed on a branch nearby and squawked loudly, claiming its stretch of riverbank before diving into the brown water and emerging with a fish. A few hundred yards beyond the ribbon of green on the opposite bank the sand dunes formed a glittering golden ridge.
‘This is very beautiful. Timeless. One half-expects to see the pharaoh’s daughter find Moses in the bulrushes or for a great barge to float downstream with banners flying and trumpets sounding,’ Quin said. He leaned back on a palm trunk, eyes slitted against the sun dazzle on the water.
‘It has always been beautiful. And hot, dry, poor and dangerous,’ Cleo said. Egypt was somewhere to be endured, battled, overcome. It was a place where men fought to extract something, as miners struggled beneath the earth in heat and danger. Only here there was an ancient civilisation, not diamonds, political advantage, not coal. ‘You relax and enjoy it and it will kill you.’ She pointed to a small snake slithering into cover.
‘I hope your army friends will have more information about the movements of the Mamelukes,’ Quin said. ‘I have no wish to encounter Murad Bey. He is rather more lethal than that snake, I think.’
