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"I need you, and when I tell you, I may lose you. But so be it. For I have wreaked havoc with your lives."
"You will never lose me," Julie said, but her fear was mounting. A great dread of what was to come was building in her soul.
Until these last few moments she thought she understood what had happened. He had taken the body of his love from the museum. He had wanted to see it properly put in a tomb. But now, faced with the vial and these strange words from Elliott, she considered other more ghastly possibilities, denying them in the same instant, but returning to them again.
"Put your trust in us, sire. Let us share this burden."
Ramses looked at Samir, then at her.
"Ah, the guilt you can never share," he said. "The body in the museum. The unknown woman ..."
"Yes," Samir whispered.
"She was not unknown to me, my dear ones. The ghost of Julius Caesar would have known her. The shade of Mark Antony would have kissed her. Millions once mourned for her...."
Julie nodded, tears rising again.
"And I have done the unspeakable. I took the elixir to the museum. I did not realize how much her body had been ravaged, that whole hunks of flesh were no longer there. I poured the elixir over her! After two thousand years life stirred in her ruined body. She rose! Bleeding, wounded, she stood upright. She walked. She reached out for me. She called my name!"
*
Ah, it was better than the finest wine, better even than making love, racing over the road in the open American motor car, the wind whistling past her, the American shouting convivially as he jerked the "stick shift" this way and that.
To see the houses flying past. To see the Egyptians trudging with their donkeys and camels and to leave them in a spray of gravel.
She adored it. She looked up at the open sky above, letting the wind lift her hair completely as she kept one hand firmly on her hat.
Now and then she studied what he did to make this chariot move. Pump the "pedals," as he called them, over and over again; pull the stick; turn the wheel.
Ah, it was too thrilling; too marvellous. But suddenly that horrid shrill sound caught her off guard. That roaring she had heard in the "railway station." Her hands flew to her ears.
"Don't be frightened, little lady, it's just a train. See there, the train's coming!" The motor coach came to a jerking halt.
Metal pathways side by side in the desert sand before them. And that thing, that great black monster bearing down from the right. A bell was clanging. She was dimly aware of a red light flashing, like a lantern beam. Would she never get away from these hideous things?
He put his arm around her.
"It's all right, little lady. We just have to wait for it to pass."
He was still speaking, but now the great rattle and clatter of the monster drowned out his words. Horrid, the whee
ls rumbling by in front of her, and even the long procession of wooden wagons, filled with human beings who sat inside against the wooden slats as if this were the most simple thing in the world.
She tried to regain her composure. She liked the feel of his warm hands on her; the smell of the perfume rising from his skin. She watched dully as the last of the cars rolled by. Again the bell clanged. The light atop the pillar flashed.
The American pumped the pedals again, pulled the stick; the car began to rumble, and they drove over the metal pathways and on into the desert.
"Well, most people in Hannibal, Missouri, you tell them about Egypt, they don't even know what you're talking about. I said to my father, I'm going over there, that's what I'm going to do. I'm taking the money I've made and going over there, and then I'll settle down back here...."
She caught her breath. She was settling into the pleasure of it again. Then far away to the left, on the horizon, she saw the pyramids of Giza! She saw the figure of the Sphinx coming into view.
She gave a little cry. This was Egypt. She was in Egypt in "modern times," but she was still at home.
A lovely sadness softened her all over. The tombs of her ancestors, and there the sphinx to whom she had gone as a young girl, to pray in the temple between its great paws.
"Ah, yes, that's a pretty sight, isn't it? I tell you, if people in Hannibal, Missouri, don't appreciate it, it's their tough luck."
She laughed. "Their tough luck," she said.
