The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (60 page)

It was a flask bottle, the kind used for vodka or whisky, but with no color to the glass. And it was filled entirely with a milk-white liquid, which gave off strange, almost luminescent glints in the light.

“I’d be careful of that, my lord,” Walter said, opening the door, “if it’s some kind of Egyptian thing, I’d watch my step.”

Elliott almost laughed aloud. There was a note by the bottle with his name on it. He sat up and remained there motionless until Walter was gone. Then he reached for the note, and tore it open.

It was printed in block letters very like Roman printing, angular and clean.

He couldn’t absorb it. No, he simply couldn’t believe it. He stared at the note for a long moment; then he looked at the flask.

She lay in half sleep on the pillow. When she opened her eyes, she realized that it was her own voice that had awakened her. She’d been calling Ramses. She rose from bed slowly and pulled on her robe. Did it matter if anyone saw her out on the deck of the ship in her robe? But it was dinnertime, wasn’t it? She had to dress. Alex needed her. Oh, if only she could think straight. She went to the wardrobe and began pulling things out. Where were they? How many hours had they been at sea?

When she reached the table, he was sitting there staring forward. He did not greet her, or rise to help her with her chair. As if any of that mattered. He started talking.

“I still don’t understand any of it. Truly I don’t. She didn’t seem mad at all, really.”

This was excruciating, but she forced herself to listen.

“I mean, there was something sombre and sad about her,” he said. “I only know that I loved her. And that she loved me.” He turned to Julie. “Do you believe what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“You know, she said the strangest things. She said that she hadn’t planned to love me! But it had happened, and you know, I told her I knew just what she meant. I’d never thought I … I mean, it was altogether different. As if all your life you’ve thought that pink roses were red roses!”

“Yes, I know.”

“And that tepid water was hot.”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a good look at her? Did you see how beautiful she was?”

“It’s not going to help to dwell on it. You can’t make her come back.”

“I knew I would lose her. I knew from the start. I don’t know why. I simply knew it. She wasn’t of this world, do you understand? And yet she was the world more truly than anything I’d ever …”

“I know.”

He stared forward; he appeared to be looking at the other diners; the black-jacketed waiters moving about; maybe listening
to the hushed civilized voices. Almost entirely a British ship. There seemed something utterly revolting about that.

“It’s possible to forget!” she said suddenly. “It is possible, I know that it is.”

“Yes, forget it,” he said, and he smiled coldly, though not at her in particular. “Forget it,” he repeated. “That’s what we’ll do. You’ll forget Ramsey, as clearly something’s happened to separate you. And I’ll forget her. And we will go through the motions of living as if we had never loved like that, either of us. You and Ramsey and I with her.”

Julie found herself looking at him in mild shock. She narrowed her eyes.

“The motions of living!” she whispered. “What a horrible thing to say.”

He hadn’t even heard her. He had picked up the fork and started eating, or rather picking at the food. Going through the motions of eating it.

She sat there trembling, looking down at the plate.

It was dark outside now. A blue light shone through the slatted blinds. Walter had come again to ask him if he wanted supper. He had said no. Only to be alone.

He sat in his robe and slippers, looking at the flask on the table. It shimmered in the darkness. The note lay where he had left it, beside the flask.

Finally he got up to dress. It took him several minutes, because each part of it made some special demand on his patience, but finally it was finished. He had on his grey wool, a bit too heavy for the days here, yet perfect for the night.

And then he went to the table, leaning on his cane with his left hand, and lifted the flask with his right. He put the flask in his inside pocket, where it just barely fit, making a weight against his chest.

Then he went out. The pain in his leg grew worse after he had walked a short distance from Shepheard’s. But he continued, now and then shifting the cane to the other side to see if that made it any better. He stopped when he had to; then when he’d caught his breath he moved on.

In about an hour, he’d reached old Cairo. He made his way through the alleyways, aimlessly. He did not search for Malenka’s house. He merely walked. And walked. By midnight, his left foot was numb again. But it didn’t matter.

Everywhere that he walked, he looked at things. He looked at walls, and doors, and people’s faces; he stopped in front of cabarets and listened to the dissonant music. Now and then he glimpsed a belly dancer going through her seductive little performance. Once he paused to listen to a man playing a flute.

He didn’t linger very long anywhere, except when he was very tired; then he sat, and sometimes even dozed. The night was quiet; peaceful. It seemed to harbor none of the dangers of London.

As two o’clock came he was still walking. He had covered the medieval city, and he was moving back to the newer districts again.

Julie stood at the rail, clutching the ends of her shawl. She looked down at the dark water, vaguely conscious that she was bitterly cold, that her hands were freezing. But it didn’t matter. And it seemed lovely suddenly that such things weren’t hurting her. That she didn’t care.

She wasn’t here at all. She was at home in London. She was standing in the conservatory, and it was all full of flowers. Ramses stood there, the linen wrappings covering him; he raised his hand as she watched and tore them loose from his face. The blue eyes looked directly at her, at once full of love.

“No, it’s wrong,” she whispered. But to whom was she speaking? There was no one here to hear what she said. All the ship slept, all the civilized British travellers going home after their little sojourn in Egypt, so happy to have seen the pyramids, the temples.
Destroy the elixir. Every drop of it
.

She stared down into the turbulent sea. The wind suddenly ripped at her hair, at the edges of the shawl. She gripped the railing, and the shawl was lifted off her shoulders and blown away, rolling into a ball as it was carried up and out into the dark.

The mist swallowed it. She never saw it hit the water. And the sound of the wind and the sound of the engines merged suddenly, and seemed to be of the same fabric as the mist.

Her world, gone. Her world of faded colors and dim noises, gone. She heard his voice speaking to her, “I love you, Julie Stratford.” She heard herself say, “I wish I’d never laid eyes on you. That you had let Henry do his work.”

She smiled suddenly. Had she ever been this cold in her life? She looked down. She was wearing only a thin nightgown. No
wonder. And the truth was, she ought to be dead now. Dead like her father. Henry had put the poison in her cup. She closed her eyes, turning her face this way and that in the wash of the wind.

“I love you, Julie Stratford,” his voice came again in memory, and this time she heard herself answer with the old cliché, so beautiful. “I shall love you till my dying day.”

It was no use going home. It was no use, any of it. The motions of living. The adventure had ended. The nightmare had ended. And now the normal world would be the nightmare, unless she was with her father, or alone sealed off from all reality, her last thoughts only of all the glorious moments that had been.

In the tent with him, making love to him, his at last. In the temple under the stars.

She would tell no children in old age why she had never married. She would tell no young man the story of the voyage to Cairo. She would not be that woman, harbouring all her life a terrible knowledge, a terrible regret.

But this was too harsh, all of this. No need for such literal thoughts. The dark waters waited. She’d be carried far, far away from the ship within moments; there would be no chance of salvation. And that seemed to her to be inexpressibly beautiful suddenly. She had only to climb up, which she did now, and let herself go into the cold wind.

Why, the wind would even carry her partway. It had caught her gown and was blowing it out behind her. She stretched out her arms and pitched herself forward. It seemed the wind grew louder and she was flying out towards the water.
It was done!

In one split second she knew that nothing could save her, nothing could possibly intervene; she was already falling, and she wanted to say her father’s name. But it was Ramses’ name that came to her mind. Ah, the sweetness of it, the utter sweetness of all of it.

Then two strong arms caught her. She hung suspended above the sea, stunned, groping to see through the mist.

“No, Julie.” It was Ramses pleading with her. Ramses who lifted her over the railing and held her tightly in his arms. Ramses standing on the deck with her in his arms. “Not death over life, Julie, no.”

In a torrent the sobs broke from her; like ice she shattered,
the warm tears spilling down her face as she hugged him and buried her face against his chest.

She said his name over and over. She felt his arms closing her off from the searing wind.

Cairo woke with the sun. The heat seemed to rise from the dirt streets themselves as the bazaar came to life, as the striped awnings fell down over doorways, as the sounds of camels and donkeys rose.

Elliott was thoroughly tired now. He couldn’t resist sleep much longer, but still he walked. Sluggishly he moved past the brass merchants and the rug merchants, and the sellers of
gellebiyyas
and of fake antiquities—cheap Egyptian “treasures” for a few pence. The sellers of mummies, who claimed now to offer for a pittance the bodies of Kings.

Mummies. They stood along the whitewashed wall in the burning sunlight; mummies, soiled, worn, in their bedraggled wrappings, yet the features of their faces distinguishable beneath the layers of linen and grime.

He stopped. All the thoughts with which he’d wrestled the night long seemed to leave him. The images of those he loved which had been so close to him suddenly faded. He was in the bazaar; the sun was burning down on him; he was looking at a row of dead bodies against a wall.

Malenka’s words came back to him.

“They make a great Pharaoh of my English. My beautiful English. They put him in the bitumen; they make a mummy of him for tourists to buy.… My beautiful English, they wrap him in linen; they make him a King.”

He moved closer; irresistibly drawn by what he saw, though it repelled him completely. He felt the first wave of nausea strike him as his eyes locked on the first mummy, the tallest and leanest, propped at the near end of the wall. Then the second wave came as the merchant stepped forward, belly preceding him beneath his striped cotton robes, hands clasped behind his back.

“Allow me to offer you a great bargain!” said the merchant. “This one here is not like the others. See? If you look you can see the fine bones of this one, for he was a great King. Come! Come closer. Have a good look at him.”

Slowly Elliott obeyed. The wrappings were thick, moldering, as ancient in appearance as any he had ever seen! And the smell rising from them, the rotting, stinking smell of earth and bitumen;
but there, beneath that thick veneer, he could see the face; see the nose and the broad plain of the forehead, see clearly the sunken eyes, the thin mouth! He was staring at the face of Henry Stratford, and there was no doubt.

The morning sun broke in glorious rays through the round porthole, piercing the sheer white veils of the small brass bed.

They sat together against the barred bedstead; warm from their lovemaking; warm from the wine they’d drunk.

Now she watched as he filled the tumbler from the vial. Tiny lights danced in the strange liquid. He held it out to her.

She took it from him, then looked into his eyes. For one tiny moment she was afraid again. And it seemed suddenly she was not in this room. She was on the deck in the mist and it was cold. The sea was waiting. Then she shivered, and the warm sun melted over her skin, and she saw the touch of fear in his eyes too.

Only human, only a man, she thought. He does not know what will happen any more than I do! And she smiled.

She drank the tumbler down.

“The body of a King, I tell you,” said the merchant, leaning forward in farcical confidentiality. “I give to you for nothing! Because I like you. I see you are a gentleman. You have good taste. This mummy, you can get it out of Egypt, it’s nothing. I pay the bribe for you.…” On and on went the chant of lies, the song of commerce, the idiot imitation of truth.

Henry under that gauze! Henry locked in the filthy bandages forever! Henry whom he had caressed in that little room in Paris a lifetime ago.

“Come now, sir, don’t turn your back upon the mysteries of Egypt, sir, deepest darkest Egypt, sir. Land of magic …”

The voice faded; echoed for a moment as he stumbled a few steps away and towards the full light of the sun.

A great burning disk, it hung over the rooftops. It flashed in his eyes as he looked up at it.

And never taking his eyes off it, he grasped the cane firmly as he reached into his coat and pulled out the flask. Then dropping the cane altogether, he opened the flask and drank the contents in great easy gulps to the very last drop.

Petrified as the chills passed through him, he let the flask fall into the dirt. He felt the heat in spasms. He felt his numb leg
come to life. The great weight in his chest slowly melted; and stretching his limbs with the utter abandon of an animal, he stared wide-eyed at the glaring sky; at the golden disk.

Before him the world pulsed, shimmered, then became solid again as he had not seen it since his middle years when his vision had begun to slowly fail. He saw the grains of earth at his feet.