The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (30 page)

On one very eerie morning, Elliott entered the ballroom to see a handful of musicians playing steadily for Ramsey, who danced alone, a curious slow and primitive dance much like that of Greek men today in their seaside tavernas. The figure of the lone dancing man, his white long-sleeve shirt open to the waist, had torn at Elliott’s heart. It seemed a crime to spy on such a thing which came so totally from the soul. Elliott had turned away, going out on the deck to smoke in his own solitude.

That Ramsey was so accessible, that was a great surprise. But the oddest part of the whole exhilarating affair was how much Elliott was coming to like this mysterious creature.

In fact, if he dwelt on that aspect of it, he would feel real pain. He thought back many times on his hasty words before they’d left—“I want to know you.” How true that had been. How tantalizing all this; how wondrously satisfying.

And then the agony; the fear:
something beyond all imagining is here!
Elliott did not wish to be closed off from it.

And how remarkable that his son, Alex, found Ramsey only peculiar and “funny” and not at all genuinely intriguing. But then what did Alex find intriguing? He’d made fast friends of the type of fast friends he always made with dozens of other passengers. He was having a good time, it seemed, as he always did, no matter what else was happening. And that will be his salvation, Elliott thought. That he feels nothing too deeply.

As for Samir, he was silent by nature; and he never said much no matter how the conversation raged between Elliott and Ramsey. But there was an almost religious quality about his attitude towards Ramsey. And he had become a complete servant to the man, that was obvious. He became agitated only when Elliott pressed Ramsey for opinions on the subject of history. And so did Julie.

“Explain what you mean,” Elliott asked when Ramsey said that Latin made possible a whole new kind of thinking. “Surely the ideas came first and then the language to express them.”

“No, that’s not true. Even in Italy itself where the tongue was born, the language made possible the evolution of ideas which would have been impossible otherwise. Same partnership of languages and ideas in Greece as well, undoubtedly.

“But I shall tell you the strange thing about Italy. It is that culture developed there at all, for the climate is so pleasant. One must usually have a radical change of weather during the year for civilization to progress. Look at the people of the jungles
and the far north, utterly limited, because the climate is the same all year round.…”

Julie would almost invariably interrupt these lectures. Elliott could hardly bear it.

Julie and Samir also became uneasy when Ramsey burst out with statements from the heart, such as “Julie, we must be done with the past as quickly as we can. There is so much to be discovered. X-rays, Julie, do you know what they are! And we must go to the North Pole in an aeroplane.”

These remarks amused other people mightily. In fact, other passengers, charmed and seduced to a one, seemed to regard Ramsey as not a superintelligent being so much as one who was slightly retarded. Overly sophisticated themselves, never guessing the reason behind his odd exclamations, they treated him tenderly and indulgently, never availing themselves of the information he would give out at a moment’s provocation.

Not so with Elliott, who pumped him mercilessly. “Ancient battle. What was it really like! I mean, we’ve seen the great reliefs on the temple of Ramses the Third.…”

“Ah, now that was a brilliant man, a worthy namesake.…”

“What did you say?”

“A worthy namesake of Ramses the Second, that’s all, go on.”

“But did a Pharaoh himself truly fight!”

“Oh, yes, of course. Why, he rode at the head of his troops; he was symbol in action. Why, in one battle, the Pharaoh himself might crush two hundred skulls with his bludgeon; he might make his way across the battlefield, executing the wounded and dying in the same manner. When he retired to his tent, his arms would be drenched in blood to the elbows. But remember, it was expected, you see. If the Pharaoh fell … well, the battle would be over.”

Silence.

Ramsey: “You don’t want to know these things, do you? And yet modern warfare is ghastly. That recent war in Africa; men were blown apart by gunpowder. And the Civil War in the United States, what a horror. Things change, but they do not change.…”

“Exactly. Could you yourself do such a thing? Crush skulls one after another?”

Ramsey smiled. “You are a brave man, aren’t you, Lord Elliott,
Earl of Rutherford. Yes, I could do it. So could you, if you were there, and you were Pharaoh; you could do it.”

The ship plowed on through the grey sea. The coast of Africa loomed. The party was almost over.

It had been another perfect night. Alex had retired early, and Julie had been left alone to dance with Ramses for hours. She’d drunk a little too much wine.

And now as they stood in the tiny low-ceilinged passage outside her stateroom, she felt as always the wrenching, the temptation and the desperation that she mustn’t give in to it.

It caught her utterly off guard when Ramses spun her around, crushed her to his chest and kissed her more roughly than usual. There was a painful urgency to it. She found herself fighting, then drawing back on the edge of tears, her hand raised to hit him. She didn’t.

“Why do you try to force me?” she said.

The look in his eyes frightened her.

“I’m hungry,” he said, all semblance of courtesy lost, “hungry for you, for everything. For food and drink and sunshine and life itself. But above all, for you. It is a pain in me! I grow weary of it.”

“God!” she whispered. She put her hands up delicately to cover her face. Why was she resisting? For the moment, she didn’t know.

“It’s what it does to me, the potion in my veins,” he said. “I need nothing, yet nothing fills me. Only love, perhaps. And so I wait.” His voice grew quieter. “I wait for you to love me. If that is what is required.”

She laughed suddenly. How clear it all was.

“Ah, but with all your wisdom, you have it backwards,” she said. “What is required is that you love
me
.”

His face went blank. Then slowly he nodded. He seemed utterly at a loss for words. She could not guess what he was really thinking.

Quickly she opened the door and went inside and sat down alone on the sofa. She put her face in her hands. How childish it had sounded. And yet it was true, it was heartbreakingly true. And she began to cry softly, hoping Rita would not hear her.

Twenty-four hours, the navigator had told him, and we shall dock in Alexandria.

He leaned on the railing of the deck. And peered into the thick mist which covered the water completely.

It was four o’clock. Not even the Earl of Rutherford was about. Samir had been fast asleep when last Ramses visited their rooms. And so he had the deck to himself.

He loved it. He loved the deep rumble of the engines through the great steel hull. He loved the ship’s pure power. Ah, the paradox of twentieth-century man amid his great machines and inventions, for he was the same two-legged creature he had ever been, and yet his inventions were begetting inventions.

He drew out a cheroot—one of the sweet, mild smokes which the Earl of Rutherford had given him, and cupping his hand around the match carefully lighted it. He could not see the smoke as it disappeared, yet the thing tasted divine. He closed his eyes and savored the wind, and let himself think of Julie Stratford again now that she was safely barricaded in her little bedchamber.

But Julie Stratford faded. It was Cleopatra he saw.
Twenty-four hours and we shall be in Alexandria
.

He saw the conference room in the palace of long ago, the long marble table, and she the young Queen—young as Julie Stratford was now—conversing with her ambassadors and advisers.

He watched from an antechamber. He had been gone for a long time, wandering far to the north and to the east, into kingdoms that had not been known to him at all in earlier centuries. And returning the night before, had gone directly to her bedchamber.

All night long they’d made love; the windows had been open to the sea; she had been as hungry for him as he had been for her; for though he had had a hundred women in the preceding months, he loved only Cleopatra. So feverish his lovemaking had been that finally he had almost hurt her; yet she had invited him to go on, her arms holding him tight, her body again and again receiving him.

The audience was over. He watched her dismiss her courtiers. He watched her rise from her chair and come towards him—a tall woman with magnificent bones, and a long slender neck beautifully exposed, her rippling black hair swept back from her face into a circle on the back of her head in the Roman manner.

There was a vaguely defiant expression on her face, and a lift
to her chin which accentuated it. It gave an immediate impression of strength, badly needed to temper innate seductiveness.

Only when she had drawn the curtain did she turn to him and smile, her dark eyes firing beautifully.

There had been a time in his life when dark-eyed beings were all he knew; he alone was the blue-eyed one because he had drunk the elixir. Then he traveled to distant lands, lands of which Egyptians knew nothing; and he met pale-eyed mortal men and women. And dazzling though these things were, brown eyes for him remained the true eyes, the eyes he could fathom instantly.

Julie Stratford’s eyes were deep brown, and large, and full of easy affection and response, as Cleopatra’s eyes had been that day when she embraced him.

“Now, what are my lessons for this afternoon?” she’d asked in Greek, the only language they spoke to each other, something in her gaze acknowledging the long night of intimacy.

“Simple,” he said. “Disguise yourself and come with me and walk among your people. To see what no Queen can ever see. That is what I want of you.”

Alexandria. What would it be tomorrow? It had been a Greek city then of stone streets and whitewashed walls, and merchants who sold to all the world—a port full of weavers, jewelers, glass blowers, makers of papyri. In a thousand marketplace shops they worked above the crowded harbour.

Through the bazaar they had walked together, both of them in the shapeless cloaks all men and women wore who did not wish to be recognized. Two travellers through time. And he had spoken to her of so many things—of his wanderings north into Gaul, of his long trek to India. He had ridden elephants and seen the great tiger with his own eyes. He had come back to Athens to listen to the philosophers.

And what had he learned? That Julius Caesar, the Roman general, would conquer the world; that he would take Egypt if Cleopatra did not stop him.

What had her thoughts been that day? Had she let him ramble on without absorbing all the desperate advice he gave her? What had she seen of the common men about her? The women and children hard at work at the laundry tubs and the looms? Of the sailors of all nations searching for the brothels?

To the great university they had wandered, to listen to the teachers under the porticoes.

Finally in a dirt square they’d stopped. From the common well Cleopatra had drunk, from the common cup on its rope.

“It tastes the same,” she had said with a playful smile.

He remembered so clearly the cup dropped down into the deep cool water. The sound echoing up the stone walls; the hammering that came from the docks, and the vision through the narrow street to his right of the masts of the ships, a leafless forest there.

“What is it you really want of me, Ramses?” she had asked.

“That you be a good and wise Queen of Egypt. I’ve told you.”

She’d taken his arm, forced him to look at her.

“You want more than that. You’re preparing me for something much more important.”

“No,” he said, but that had been a lie, the first lie he had ever told her. The pain in him had been sharp, almost unbearable.
I am lonely, my beloved. I am lonely beyond mortal endurance
. But he didn’t say that to her. He only stood there, knowing that he, an immortal man, could not live without her.

What had happened after that? Another evening of lovemaking, with the sea beyond turning slowly from azure to silver, and finally black beneath a heavy full moon. And all around her the gilded furnishings, the hanging lamps and the fragrance of scented oil, and somewhere in an alcove just far enough away, a young boy playing a harp and singing a mournful song of ancient Egyptian words that the boy himself did not understand, but which Ramses understood perfectly.

Memory within the memory. His palace at Thebes when he had been a mortal man, and afraid of death, and afraid of humiliation. When he had had a harem of one hundred wives to pleasure, and it had seemed a burden.

“Have you had many lovers since I left?” he had asked Cleopatra.

“Oh, many men,” she’d answered in a low voice that was almost as hard as a man’s voice for all its feminine resonance. “But none of them were lovers.”

The lovers would come. Julius Caesar would come; and then the one who swept her away from all the things he’d taught her. “For Egypt,” she’d cry. But it wasn’t for Egypt. Egypt was Cleopatra then. And Cleopatra was for Antony.

It was getting light. The mist above the sea had paled, and he could see now the sparkling surface of the dark blue water.
High above, the pale sun burnt through. And at once he felt it working on him. He felt a sudden breath of energy pass through him.

His cheroot had long ago gone out. He pitched it into the void, and drawing out his gold cigarette case, took another.

A foot sounded on the steel deck behind him.

“Only a few hours, sire.”

The match came up to light the cheroot for him.

“Yes, my loyal one,” he said, drawing in the smoke. “We wake from this ship as if from a dream. And what are we to do in the light of day with these two who know my secret, the young scoundrel, and the aged philosopher who may pose the worst threat of all with his knowledge?”

“Are philosophers so dangerous, sire?”

“Lord Rutherford has great faith in the invisible, Samir. And he is no coward. He wants the secret of eternal life. He realizes what it really is, Samir.”