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Julie had laughed softly to herself. "The British Museum is full of dead bodies, Rita."
If only the dead could come back. If only the ghost of her father would come to her. Imagine such a miracle. Having him again, speaking to him, hearing his voice. What happened, Father? Did you suffer? Was there even one second when you were afraid?
Yes, she wouldn't have minded such a visitation at all. But no such thing would ever happen. That was the horror. We went from the cradle to the grave beset by mundane tragedies. The splendour of the supernatural was a thing for stories and poems, and Shakespeare's plays.
But why dwell on it? Now had come the moment to be alone with her father's treasures, and to read the last words he wrote.
She turned the pages now to the date of the discovery. And the first words she saw made her eyes fill with tears.
Must write to Julie, describe everything. Hieroglyphs on the door virtually free of error; must have been written by one who knew what he was writing. Yet the Greek is entirely of the Ptolemaic period. And the Latin is sophisticated. Impossible. Yet there it is. Samir uncommonly fearful and superstitious. Must sleep for a few hours. Am going in tonight!
There was a hasty ink sketch of the door of the tomb and its three broad paragraphs of writing. Hastily she turned to the next page.
Nine P.M. by my watch. Inside the chamber at last. Appears to be a library rather than a tomb. The man has been laid to rest in a King's coffin beside a desk on which he has left some thirteen scrolls. He writes entirely in Latin, with obvious haste but no carelessness. There are droplets of ink all over, but the text is completely coherent.
"Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the
Hittites, Father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years. My monuments are still standing; the stele recount my victories, though a thousand years have passed since I was pulled, a mortal child, from the womb.
"Ah, fatal moment now buried by time, when from a Hittite priestess I took the cursed elixir. Her warnings I would not heed. Immortality I craved. And so I drank the potion in the brimming cup. And now, long centuries gone by--amid the poisons of my lost Queen, I hide the potion which she would not accept from me--my doomed Cleopatra."
Julie stopped. The elixir, hidden amongst these poisons? She realized what Samir had meant. The papers had not told that part of the little mystery. Tantalizing. These poisons hide a formula that can grant eternal life.
"But who would create such a fiction!" she whispered.
She found herself staring at the marble bust of Cleopatra. Immortality. Why would Cleopatra not drink the potion? Oh, but really, she was beginning to believe it! She smiled.
She turned the page of the diary. The translation was interrupted. Her father had written only:
Goes on to describe how Cleopatra awakened him from his dream-filled sleep, how he tutored her, loved her, watched her seduce the Roman leaders one by one....
"Yes," Julie whispered. "Julius Caesar first and then Mark Antony. But why would she not take the elixir?"
There was another paragraph of translation:
"How can I bear this burden any longer? How can I endure the loneliness anymore? Yet I can not die. Her poisons can not harm me. They keep my elixir safe so that I may dream of still other Queens, both fair and wise, to share the centuries with me. But is it not her face I see? Her voice I hear? Cleopatra. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Cleopatra."
Latin followed. Several scribbled paragraphs in Latin which Julie could not read. Even with the aid of a dictionary she could not have translated it. Then there were a few lines of demotic Egyptian, even more nearly impenetrable than that Latin. Nothing more.
She laid down the book. She fought the inevitable tears. It was almost as if she could feel the presence of her father in this room. How excited he must have been, what a lovely scribble his handwriting had become.
And how lovely the whole mystery was.
Somewhere among all those poisons, an elixir that conveyed immortality? One need not take it literally to find it beautiful. And behold that tiny silver burner and the delicate vial. Ramses the Damned had believed it. Perhaps her father had believed it. And for the moment, well, maybe she did too.
She rose slowly and approached the long marble table against the opposite wall. The scrolls were too fragile. There were tiny bits and pieces of papyrus scattered everywhere. She had seen this damage done as the men lifted them ever so carefully from their crates. She dared not touch them. Besides, she couldn't read them.
As for the jars, she mustn't touch them either. What if some of that poison were spilled, or somehow released into the air?
She found herself suddenly looking at her own reflection in the mirror on the wall. She went back to the desk, and opened the folded newspaper that lay there.
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was enjoying a long run in London. She and Alex had meant to go and see it, but then Alex fell asleep during serious plays. Only Gilbert and Sullivan entertained Alex, and even then he was usually nodding off by the end of the third act.
She studied the little announcement for the performance. She stood up and reached for Plutarch on the bookshelf above the desk.
Where was the story of Cleopatra? Plutarch had not devoted a full biography to her. No, her story was contained in that of Mark Antony, of course.
She paged quickly to the passages she only dimly remembered. Cleopatra had been a great Queen, and what we call now a great politician. She had not only seduced Caesar and Antony, she kept Egypt free of Roman conquest for decades, finally taking her own life when Antony was dead by his own hand, and Octavius Caesar had stormed her gates. The loss of Egypt to Rome had been inevitable, but she had almost turned the tide. Had Julius Caesar not been assassinated, he might have made Cleopatra his Empress. Had Mark Antony been a little stronger, Octavian might have been overthrown.
