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In a haze, she remembered the streets she had glimpsed earlier, full of great rumbling monstrous things made from metal; full of foul smoke and deafening noise. Who were the people she had seen around her? Women in dresses such as she wore.
She'd been terrified then; but her body had been full of aches and misery. Now her body was full of cravings. She must not be terrified. She must go.
She went back into the bedchamber. She opened the "magazine" called Harper's Weekly and looked at the drawings of pretty women in these strange dresses that pinched them in the middle like insects. Then she looked at herself in the mirror on the cabinet door.
She needed a covering for her head, and sandals. Yes, sandals. Quickly she searched the bedchamber, and found them in a wooden closet--sandals with gold worked into the leather, and small enough for her feet; and a great strange thing with silk flowers all over it, a thing such as one would wear to keep off rain.
She laughed as she looked at it. Then she put it on her head, and tied the ribbons under her chin. Now she looked very much like the women in the pictures. Except for her hands. What was she to do about her hands!
She stared at the naked bones of the first right finger. A thin covering of skin overlaid them, but it was like silk, more sheer than the dress. She could see blood in it; but it was transparent. And the mere sight of the bones caused her to become dizzy, confused again.
A memory--someone standing above her. No, don't let it begin again. She must wrap her hand in something, a bandage. The left hand would do well enough. She turned and began to search through the cabinet of female clothes.
And then she made the loveliest discovery! Here were two little silk garments made for hands. They were white; they had pearls sewn on them! Each had five fingers and had been cut to fit closely over the hand. This was perfect. She slipped them on; they hid the naked bone completely.
Ah, the wonder of what Lord Rutherford had called these "modern times." These times of music boxes and "motor cars," as he called them, the things she had seen this morning, all around her, like great roaring hippopotami from the river. What would Lord Rutherford call these things, these clothes for hands?
She was wasting time. She went to the dressing table, gathered up a few small coins that lay there and put these in the deep hidden side pocket of the heavy skirt.
As she opened the front door of the house, she glanced over at the dead body, out in the courtyard, heaped against the wall. Something, what was it, she had to understand it, but it simply would not come clear to her. Something ...
She saw again that hazy figure standing over her. She heard again those sacred words. A tongue she knew speaking to her. This was the tongue of your
forefathers, you must learn it. No, but that had been another time. They had been in a bright room full of Italian marble, and he had been teaching her. This time, it had been dark and hot and she'd been struggling upwards as if from deep water, her limbs weak, the water crushing her, her mouth full of water so that she couldn't scream.
"Your heart beats again; you come to life! You are young and strong once more; you are now and forever."
No, do not weep again! Do not struggle to grasp it, to see it. The figure moving away; blue eyes. She had known those blue eyes. As soon as I drank it, it happened. The priestess showed me in the mirror ... blue eyes. Ah, but whose voice was this! This voice that had said the prayer in the darkness, the ancient sacred prayer for the opening of the mummy's mouth.
She had called out his name! And here, in this strange little house, Lord Rutherford had spoken the name also. Lord Rutherford was going ...
Be back before dark.
It was no use. She stared through the archway at the dead body. She must get out into this strange land. And she must remember that it was extremely easy to kill them, to snap their necks like brittle stems.
She hurried out, without closing the door. The whitewashed houses on either side of her looked familiar and good to her. She had known such cities. Maybe this was Egypt, but no, that could not be.
She rushed along, holding the ribbons tight so that the strange headdress would not fly from her hair. So easy to walk fast. And the sun felt so good to her. The sun. In a flash she saw it flooding down from a high portal in a cave. A wooden shutter had opened. She heard the creak of the chain.
Then it was gone, the memory, if it had even been a memory. Wake, Ramses.
That was his name. But she didn't care now. She was free to roam this strange city; free to discover, to see!
AMIR PURCHASED several Bedouin garments in the first shop in old Cairo that sold such clothes. He ducked into a small restaurant, a filthy alleyway of a place full of down-on-their-luck Frenchmen, and there put on the loose, concealing garb and tucked the other garments--those he'd bought for Julie--under his arm, inside his robes.
He liked this loose peasant costume, which was infinitely older than the tailored robes and hats which most Egyptians wore. In fact, it was probably the oldest mode of dress still in active existence--the long, loose drapery of the desert wanderers. He felt free in it, and safe from all eyes.
He hurried along through the winding honeycomb streets of Arab Cairo, towards the house of his cousin Zaki, a man he disliked dealing with but one who would give him exactly what he wanted more easily and efficiently than anyone else. And who knew how long Ramses must hide in Cairo? Who knew how these murders would be solved?
When he reached the mummy factory of his cousin--surely one of the most distasteful places in the entire known world--he entered by the side gate. A load of freshly wrapped bodies baked in the harsh afternoon sunshine. Inside, no doubt, others were being stewed in the pot.
A lone worker dug a trench now into which these fresh mummies would be laid for a few days, "browning" as it were in damp earth.
It disgusted Samir completely, though he had come to this little factory as a boy long before he had known there were real mummies, the bodies of the ancient ancestors to be studied, to be saved from theft and mutilation, and preserved.
"Look at it this way," his cousin Zaki once argued. "We are better than the thieves who sell our ancient rulers bit by bit to the foreigners. What we sell isn't sacred. It's fake."
Good old Zaki. Samir was about to signal to one of the men inside the place, a man who was in fact engaged in wrapping a body. But then Zaki himself emerged from the reeking little house.
