AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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 nig
htgown. 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 cliche, 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.
