The Quest of Julian Day (46 page)

I listened intently for any sounds which might indicate that they were still about but once out of the tomb they must have fled up the ladders as though all the devils in hell were after them. Somehow, I had to mount those ladders myself as they were the only way out from the deep rock gully in which I stood; and if I could not secure water the chances were that I should be mad or dead before morning.

How I accomplished it I shall never know. I must have been within an ace of falling and breaking my neck a score of times, but somehow I managed to drag myself out of the deep hole, scale the ladders and reach the cliff-top. The friendly starlight showed me the rough track round the tongue of the gully and across its further precipice. Aching in every limb, my eyes protruding from their sockets, I stumbled along, falling at times and crawling on my hands and knees until, by a new effort which every time seemed the very last, I succeeded in dragging myself to my feet again.

I slid and tumbled the last two hundred yards down into the valley bottom; another hundred yards and I had crossed it. The last effort, which all but finished me, was a fifty-foot climb up a steep slope to the little building above Tutankhamen's tomb where the guardians of the valley have their quarters. Most of them sleep in the village several miles away but a few are always left on night-duty; and, unable to cry out, kneeling there in the dark utterly exhausted, I hammered with my fists upon the wooden door until I roused them.

It was fortunate that they were Arabs. Europeans might have given me the great draught of water for which I was so desperately craving, and that would have killed me. Instead,
knowing the proper treatment for a man found in the desert dying of thirst, they only bathed my face and lips. One of them put some fresh dates in a cup with a little water and pounded them up into a soggy mass, after which he forced small portions of it into my burning mouth.

It was not until, with the most frightful agony, I had swallowed a good part of this moistened mixture that they allowed me to drink a few drops of water from a bottle of Evian taken from the excavators' stores; and then, my pain having eased a little, I fell asleep.

When I woke it was full day. I was naked and lying on a low bed wrapped in blankets. I vaguely remembered, as in some hideous dream, the tomb guardians stripping my pain-racked body the night before in order to sponge it all over with cool water; and the clothes in which I had escaped from the tomb were folded in a neat pile beside me.

As I stirred, an Arab who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed rose and gave me a drink; then he left me to return a few minutes later with an elderly Englishman.

My visitor asked me how I had come to be in such a state but it was all I could do to croak out my name; and in any case I wanted a little time to think out what sort of statement I should make.

‘All right, old chap,' he said kindly. ‘Don't bother to talk just yet.' And taking a bowl of stuff like junket from the Arab who had just come back into the room, he began to feed me with it.

‘When you've had some of this you'll feel better,' he went on. ‘It's
leban zebadi
, the curdled milk of the female
gamoose
. It's light as a feather on the tummy but crammed full of every sort of vitamin; some Arabs have it for their evening meal during the month of Ramadan, when they have to fast from dawn to sunset each day, instead of gorging themselves half the night as the stupid peasants do.'

He gave me another drink of water, then left me to sleep and I did not wake again until late in the afternoon. The Arab was no longer there so I had a chance to concoct an account of myself which would prove adequate for the enquiries which it was certain I should have to face. If I told the truth, it meant charging Oonas with attempted murder and, in spite of the way
in which I had suffered at her hands, that I was not prepared to do.

I had no reason to believe that she would ever have attempted to injure a hair of my head if I had stuck to her and, even after her passion for me had died down, the chances were it would have remained a pleasant memory, so that I should have at least retained her goodwill if I had dealt fairly with her. She
might
have ratted on me and sold us out to Zakri, but I had no proof of that and felt it was only just to give her the benefit of the doubt. As things were, it was
I
who had ratted on
her
by telling her of my intention to leave her at only a few hours' notice. It was not unnatural that a girl of her violent temperament should have been quite convinced that Sylvia was the reason for my doing so.

If Oonas had had more time she might still have plotted my death rather than give me up to another woman, but it would probably have been a quick ending by poison or the knife in the good old Eastern tradition. The torture she had inflicted on me during those incredibly dreadful hours in the tomb was not through any deliberate desire to cause me a slow and painful death, but had occurred because at such short notice she could think of no other way in which to stop my going on the expedition without laying herself open to a charge of murder.

In consequence, when the English excavator visted me again, about five o'clock, I told him that I had made a visit to the Valley with Oonas three days earlier during which I had decided at the last minute not to go with some other friends on an expedition into the desert which was due to set off later in the day. Not wishing to tell them myself of my decision to back out, I had left her to inform them of it and, after visiting the Valley, we had parted on the track which led over the hills to Deir el Ba'hari; our arrangement being that she would return to Luxor at once while I was to wait there until my friends had departed. During the afternoon I had got bored with sitting up there on the cliff-top so I had gone off to explore a ravine some few miles distant. Night had overtaken me before I could get back to the Deir el Ba'hari track and in trying to find it I had got lost and had wandered about without food or water for over sixty hours until, on the third night, when I was
virtually at the end of my tether I had once more stumbled on the Valley of the Kings.

This story seemed to fulfil most of the possible contingencies and the excavator, whose name I learned was Mason, swallowed it readily enough. He then asked me if I felt up to making the journey back to Luxor that evening and when I said I did, he went off to make arrangements.

As I pulled on my things I wondered if he had noticed that, except for my vest, I lacked underclothes but he appeared not to have spotted my strange shortage of garments, and it was a fairly safe bet that it would not have meant very much to the Arabs who had undressed me. Later, of course, the shirt, pants and hat with which I had decked out the effigy of my ghost were certain to be discovered and would doubtless raise some interesting speculations in the minds of the people responsible for looking after the tombs. By that time I hoped to be out of Luxor and on my way to join the Belvilles, if not already with them hundreds of miles out in the desert. If the worst came to the worst and they were found almost immediately, I could always put up a yarn that I had a vague recollection of having found the tomb open during my delirious wanderings and had taken refuge there from the scorching midday sun, not realising how near I was to the Valley of the Kings; but that my undressing there and rigging up a guy with part of my clothing must have been owing to some mad freak of my thirst-crazed brain of which I had no remembrance.

I was still so weak from my ordeal that the journey back to Luxor proved a trying one although the kind Mr. Mason did everything he could to make it as easy for me as possible.

The hall porter at the Winter Palace looked almost comically shocked and upset when I arrived back there at half-past seven, and he certainly had good reason to be so in view of the state I was in. The Arabs had dusted down my clothes as well as they could but they were incredibly dirty and torn in half-a dozen places from my attempts at turning somersaults in my prison and the many falls I had sustained after my escape. As I saw, too, when I had a chance to look into a mirror a little later, my experience seemed to have aged me by ten years, there were great, dark hollows under my eyes while my cheeks and temples had fallen in and the whole of my scalp was
in-grained with dirt. I looked a positive caricature of my former self and I was not at all surprised at his amazement.

On my asking about my room he said at once that they were under the impression that I had given it up four nights before, and my theory as to Oonas' tactics proved correct. The management had received a telegram purporting to come from me instructing them to have my baggage packed and handed over to Oonas' maid who would take it on with her mistress' things to Cairo. I neither confirmed nor denied having sent the telegram but asked to be accommodated as soon as possible; and seeing the state I was in the
chef de bureau
wasted no time but had me taken along to a room where I ordered a light dinner and went straight to bed.

Next morning I had a visit from the manager and set his mind at rest by telling him not to worry about my baggage as the Princess had only carried out my instructions while I, unfortunately, had upset all our arrangements by getting myself lost in the Libyan hills.

I was afraid that I might also receive a visit from the police, whose curiosity might have been more difficult to satisfy, but they did not appear and, after all, there is nothing criminal about getting oneself lost; so apparently Mr. Mason, the excavator, had not considered it his duty to report my misadventure.

Owing to Oonas' maid having made off with my baggage I hadn't a rag to my back except the ruined suit I had arrived in and that afternoon I got the hall porter to send out to the local shops for a few of my most urgent requirements. Having slept the best part of the day I was much stronger by the evening so I had a really good meal sent along to my room and put in another night's sound sleep.

By the following morning it was getting on for sixty hours since I had escaped from the tomb, which was nearly as long as the time I had been confined in it, and as I had spent the best part of the period since my return to the upper world in life-giving sleep I was now feeling much more my own man again The hollow under my eyes had disappeared and having shaved off my five-days' beard I found that my face was nearly restored to normal. My one remaining suit had been mended by the local tailor and cleaned and pressed. It presented a rather
woebegone appearance, but it was good enough to go out in; and my shopping list of the previous day had included a shirt, collar, tie and underclothes, so I dressed myself and left the hotel for the purposes of purchasing a completely new kit.

My first visit was to an Arab tailor and I chose some of his less alarming cloth with which to have some suits made as, unlike European tailors, Arabs will work all night and run up two or three suits in twenty-four hours if it is for a customer who is prepared to pay them well. Even without experience in suit-cutting, the tailors were so proficient that if one could provide them with any sort of garment as a pattern, they will copy it with a faithfulness which would not disgrace Savile Row, and the additional blessing that no time has to be expended on fittings.

I changed into a ready-made suit there and then leaving my own as a pattern for the tailor, and spent the next two hours in making a great variety of other purchases. Owing to the limitations imposed by the small number of shops in Luxor and the lack of variety in their stock, my new kit was almost entirely composed of makeshifts, and as ready-made suitcases were quite unprocurable I had to buy hand-woven native baskets to pack it in; but when it was all assembled in my room at the hotel I felt that it would serve me well enough for the trip into the desert.

The next problem which face me was how to catch up the Belvilles. They had left five nights before, as arranged, evidently after having been informed by Oonas by telegram or some other means that I did not intend to make the trip. There was only one way to do it. I must charter an aeroplane and trust to luck that I should overtake them before they had penetrated very far into the desert. Fortunately I still had plenty of bank-notes stuffed into my money belt and in the afternoon the hall porter sent one of his underlings with me to the Luxor Air Port where I succeeded in chartering a 'plane for the following morning.

The loss of my kit was extremely trying but one thing at least had been salvaged from it—this journal which I had written up at odd moments. Not wishing Oonas to see it, as she might well have done owing to her frequent presence in my room, I had handed it to the manager of the hotel for safe keeping. Having received no instructions about it, he had not
sent it on with the rest of my luggage and it was still in his safe. I wrote it up to date, resealed the package and returned it to him with instructions that if I did not either claim it or write to him within two months he was to destroy the second portion, which I had just written, but forward the first part to Essex Pasha.

It was New Year's Eve but, apart from the gala dinner, I did not participate in any of the festivities. A couple had turned up whom I used to know well in the old days and I did not want to come face-to-face with them as they would certainly have recognised me now that I no longer had my protective beard. I finished my packing, got a good night's rest and was in the air before nine o'clock next morning.

The 'plane which I had succeeded in hiring was a small four-seater of a type which has now been superseded on the Egyptian air-lines run by the Miza Company, but my pilot was a young Egyptian who seemed to know his job. From Luxor we headed south by west following the course of the river, which bends sharply there, for about twenty miles; then leaving it to fly due west over the Libyan Hills until nothing but sandy wastes stretched below us. By 'plane the journey to the Great Oasis is not a long one and in just under an hour we picked up the misty green streak, running north and south in the yellow sands as far as we could see, which is the outer edge of the fertile region of Kharga.