The Sycamore Song

by Elizabeth Hunter

  “I have so much to learn,” she said. “It seems rather selfish to leave it all to you, though. What will you do?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I shall go with you to Sakkara.” A harsh note entered his voice and she thought he would not be a man to cross lightly. “I shall stick to you like a leech, Victoria Lyle, to make sure you’re not used in any racket with or without your consent, and I’ll tighten up the security until not even a mouse can get in or out without my knowing about it.”

  “But I wouldn’t have anything to do with any racket!” she objected.

  “That, my dear, has yet to be proved to the Egyptian government.”

  He drove well through the dizzy traffic that raced along the streets, hooting at every opportunity as though silence was more than the Cairenes could bear. Victoria had always understood that Cairo was an elegant city, but she thought it had a dusty, unkempt appearance. Perhaps it was tired from the constant battle with the surrounding desert that coloured the buildings and reclaimed the spaces between one district and another. Still, the Nile, surprisingly really the colour of eau-de-nil in certain lights, was a noble ally in keeping the desert at bay, as well as being the source of the city’s prosperity. Its green banks refreshed the eye and formed the central feature of the city, dividing one island from another, entwining the land, as it had entwined and awed men’s hearts for countless centuries in the past.

  “Are you particularly devout, Victoria, that you came first to visit the Virgin’s Tree when there is so much else to see?” Tariq’s voice mocked her.

  “I thought it would be safe to come by myself,” she answered. “I suppose I should thank you for rescuing me from the children there.” The uncertainty in her voice betrayed her doubts as to the wisdom she had displayed in taking him into her confidence. Supposing he was not who he said he was? Supposing he wasn’t taking her back to the hotel at all?

  “I’m only doing my job,” he said.

  Is that how he saw her? As a job and not as a person at all? The idea didn’t please her. It didn’t matter, of course, it didn’t mean a thing, everyone preferred to be seen as themselves, and she was no different from anyone else in that. He was just a man doing his job, and that was how she would see him too from now on.

  “Did the taxi bring you round by the obelisk?” he asked her, a faint glimmer of amusement in his eyes.

  “No. What obelisk?”

  “Heliopolis, which is the suburb where we are, was called that by the Greeks. It is the old city of On, where stood the oldest university in the world, built for the sake of the sun-god Ra, and the seat of astronomy and mathematics. There’s an obelisk that marks the spot where the university stood. It was one of the great centres of the ancient Egyptian religion. As a matter of fact Cleopatra’s Needle in London was erected in On, Beth-shemesh in the Old Testament, or the house of the sun-god, thirty-two centuries ago. What it had to do with Cleopatra isn’t known, but she may have been the one to order its removal to Alexandria where it stood for the eighteen hundred years before it went to England. Obelisks and standing stones were all sacred to Ra.”

  “Was Ra the greatest of the gods.”

  “In Heliopolis he was. He was known there as the creator-god. There was another school of thought at Memphis, the first capital of united Egypt. There Ptah was the creator-god and the most important.”

  “Memphis,” Victoria repeated, an edge of excitement in her voice. “Isn’t that near Sakkara where my father’s dig is?”

  Tariq nodded. “Sakkara is the necropolis of Memphis. The remains of the city, such as they are, are on the east side of the river. Sakkara is on the west side where the dead were sent to reside with the setting sun. The departed were sometimes referred to as ‘westerners’ - a salutary thought, don’t you think?”

  Victoria laughed in spite of herself. “I can’t wait to get to Sakkara and see it all for myself!”

  He smiled at her. “Life isn’t very different here today,” he said. “Or death either. Cairo has its own necropolis to this very day. We go past it on the way back to the hotel. It’s different only that it is on the east side of the city, but it is wholly dedicated to the dead. You see the bare hills of Mokattam over there?”

  “It looks more like a quarry to me,” she responded.

  “It was,” he said dryly. “It was the quarry that provided the stone for the Pyramids at Giza.”

  She was astonished. It looked as though the stone had been wrenched out of the steep sides of the hills only yesterday, or at most the day before.

  “Well,” Tariq went on, “between those apartment blocks over there and the hills lies the city of the dead. It’s not an ordinary graveyard, but it has streets with numbered houses just like anywhere else, only very few of the living live there. Most families have a kind of chalet there, though, quite like an ordinary house, with cooking facilities and so on, and two adjoining rooms with an oblong stone opening in the floor. Under one floor lie the male members of the family and under the other the females. Often, whether the family is Moslem, Copt - that is Christian - or Jew, the family will celebrate a feast of forty days after a death in their house, which is a relic of the time it took to mummify a body before it was entombed in Pharaoh’s Egypt. The Egyptian has always been on very intimate terms with death.”

  The necropolis was lower than the road and the desert was doing a better job of returning the narrow streets to the dun-coloured dust that pervaded everywhere. Watchmen roamed the roads, giving a semblance of life to the place, and there were even small shops selling tea and other necessities to the mourning families.

  “Surely people don’t still rob the dead?” Victoria surmised, wondering why the watchmen should be considered necessary.

  “Why not?” he answered her. “Robbers don’t distinguish between the living and the dead in their search for victims. Most people here tear the shrouds of the dead against them being looted. They don’t bury their dead in coffins, they only carry them from one place to another in wooden boxes, so the dead are rather vulnerable to the attentions of the grave-robbers, just as they were in olden times.”

  “How ghoulish!” Victoria commented.

  “Indeed,” he confirmed. “The superstitious will have it that hundreds of ghouls walk the streets down there every night, and they don’t go near when the sun’s eye isn’t there to protect them. But in the daytime, at all the great feasts of the year, the place is alive with the living visiting those members of their families who no longer ‘smell the air’ or wear new clothes.”

  Victoria made a face at him. She was beginning to feel more at ease with him than she had before. Even when he slowed the car to a crawl she wasn’t worried.

  “I thought you might like to look at Saladin’s citadel,” he said.

  “Saladin? Richard the Lionheart’s Saladin from the Crusades? What was he doing here? I thought he lived in the Holy Land? And wasn’t he a Kurd anyway?”

  He seemed impressed by her last question. She saw his start of surprise and felt a satisfaction that she had at last jolted him into looking at her as a person with her own thoughts and feelings.

  “Yes, he was a Kurd,” he agreed, “and he wasn’t here for very long, but he built the citadel. It’s a magnificent pile, isn’t it? You must go and look at the mosque there some time.”

  Victoria allowed her eyes to dwell on the lion-coloured, massive ramparts that led upwards to the dome of the mosque and the minarets pointing up into the blue sky. “You’re very proud of Cairo, aren’t you?” she said. “You must know it well?”

  “I was born here,” he explained. “My mother died here when I was two weeks old, leaving my father to cope with me and his Army career as best he could. My foster family is Egyptian. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

  She ignored the impatience of that final question. “They’re a handsome people,” she said. “I think I’m going to enjoy my time here very much.”

  “Tell me that in a month’s time,” he retorted. �
�You’ve yet to meet the people who were working with your father. They won’t accept you easily, a complete amateur holding the purse strings. You know that, don’t you?”

  Her mouth twitched into an impertinent smile. “Why should I worry? Or have you changed your mind about protecting me from them?”

  “It’s not a joke!” he said sharply. “You may well come to hate me for what I have to do in the future.” His eyes rested for an instant on her face. “And that would be a pity,” he added. “You’re too pretty for any man to want to quarrel with you for long.”

  “You may be surprised at how quickly I pick things up. I’m not just a pretty face, you know! Besides, you have the advantage of me. You do know my name!”

  “You wouldn’t appreciate my name at the moment,” he told her. “It will have to be enough for you that you met me in the shade of a sycamore tree. The sycamore is a traditional symbol of romance in Egypt, even three thousand years ago: ‘A sycamore sang to a lady fair’—”

  Why, he was flirting with her! Victoria pursed up her lips and glared at him.

  “ ‘Papyri green are my leaves arrayed, And branch and stem like to opal gleam; Now come and rest in my cooling shade The dream of your heart to dream,’ ” he quoted softly.

  “Very pretty,” Victoria said. She thought it beautiful and she was beginning to wish that she had met Tariq under other circumstances, when it wouldn’t have mattered if she had flirted too, just enough to find out if he really liked her. But she had to remember that he was a man on the job and he had to put up with her whatever he thought of her, just as she had to put up with him.

  “I didn’t come to Egypt for romance, or to dream dreams,” she said. “It’s a long time since the Virgin’s Tree had any cooling shade. Perhaps that makes a difference.”

  The glint in his eye was unreadable. “Perhaps one day we’ll find out,” was all he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Victoria’s room at the hotel was on the ground floor. From it she could see the colourful scene of the tables set on the grass for people to take their lunch in the open air and, behind them, the towering triangular shape of the Great Pyramid, the largest in Egypt, the tomb of Khufu, more familiarly known by his Greek name of Cheops. The maid had drawn the curtains, shutting out the view, but Victoria pushed them back with an impatient hand before sitting on the edge of the bed and making an effort to decide if she had been right to accept Tariq as the man from the government, the man who had the right to oversee her every movement on her father’s dig at Sakkara.

  It would have been easier if he had been less attractive. She stared out of the window, remembering in detail his strange yellow-green eyes. No Englishman had ever had eyes like that! She would have liked to be able to attribute them to the great Mameluke dynasty that had ruled Egypt for so long, or even to the Berber tribesmen who still roamed the edges of the Sahara - didn’t they sometimes have green eyes? Yes, she was sure they did, but never yellow eyes. Nobody, but nobody, had yellow eyes!

  Victoria’s experience of men was small. She had been brought up in an all-female household and had gone to a single sex school. Afterwards, when she had held down her first job, she had had several brushes with romance, but none of them had been serious. They had amounted to no more than a pleasant exploration of the possibilities that lay between any two people of the opposite sex; enjoyable, sweet, and holding out a promise of what might be some time in the future with somebody else. None of the men she knew had been anything like Tariq.

  He had said that she might trust him, but he had not trusted her, not even with his real name. Perhaps that was understandable as he only knew her as her father’s daughter and, if things had been smuggled from the site, she could be in the know, in which case he would be her enemy. Only she knew how little she knew of her father’s affairs. If she had known more she might not have cast herself into the breach so willingly - but perhaps she would have done, for she had longed all through her childhood to leave the comfortable existence her mother had carved out for her and share her father’s hazardous, but infinitely more exciting, life in the forgotten places of the world. Yet her first doubts that she would be able to cope with dealing with the finances of the expedition had been strongly reinforced by Tariq’s few remarks on the subject. She would be very glad to have him behind her - though she would have preferred it if he had been more like other men and had not had a pair of fine yellow eyes and a pair of hands that talked with a facility that had never been learned in England.

  She took a deep breath and started to change her dress into one with a wider skirt that would be more practical for visiting outsize monuments like the Giza Pyramids. It was not, she assured herself, because the colour of the dress also set off the shimmering black of her hair and stressed the extreme whiteness of her skin. What did that matter, she asked herself, with only Tariq to look at her, and her without the least ambition to attract him and add to her difficulties in the near future? That, at least, was almost true, for she wanted badly to know more about him, but he rubbed her up the wrong way too, treating her as a dreamy fool who couldn’t be trusted to deal with the realities of life.

  She wandered out on to the balcony, hoping to see Tariq before he saw her. One could tell quite a lot by observing people when they were unaware that they were being watched, or so one of her girl friends had frequently told her. But she couldn’t see Tariq anywhere and she knew a moment’s panic when she thought he might have gone away and left her on her own.

  “Are you ready for lunch, Miss Lyle?”

  She clutched the edge of the balcony, berating herself as a first-class fool for getting upset about nothing. “I wasn’t sure you were staying for lunch,” she said. “Why don’t you find a table?” she added with creditable hauteur as he said nothing at all. “I’ll be out in about ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes? Oh, come on, Miss Lyle, it won’t take you ten minutes to lock your door and come out here.” He looked up at her and smiled. “It would take you even less if you climbed over the balcony.”

  It wasn’t high, but it was high enough to put her off. For most people it would have been quite easy to climb over the rail, avoiding the flowers that were bedded in the top of the marble wall, and jump down on to the ground below, but Victoria had suffered all her life from a fear of heights and even such a small hazard as this one was more than she felt she could attempt.

  “I prefer to be more conventional and use the door,” she told him.

  His expression openly mocked her. “Are you a conventional person, Victoria Lyle?” he asked her.

  “I’ve never had the opportunity to be anything else,” she admitted. “How about you?”

  He shrugged. “It’s difficult to say. What is conventional in Egypt might be considered very unconventional in the kind of place you were brought up. Your independence of any man’s influence is in itself unconventional here, for instance.”

  “Would you rather I had a brother for you to deal with?” she asked, more curious about him than ever.

  His lips twitched. “It might be simpler.” He glanced down at his watch. “I am very hungry, even if you are not, so shall we continue this interesting conversation over lunch?”

  Her eyes fell before the impatience in his and she made a hurried exit from the balcony into her room. Now that she came to think of it, she realised she was hungry too. It would be fun to share a meal with Tariq, and she was suddenly in a great hurry to join him outside, grabbing her handbag and running down the corridor towards the entrance in order not to miss a single minute of his company.

  Tariq was waiting for her. “A brother would be a less attractive proposition,” he murmured. “You are looking very beautiful in that dress!” He put a hand under her elbow and led her through the maze of tables on the lawn towards one which had its own sunshade and which was already laid up for lunch.

  “Is it part of your work to pay me compliments?” she asked.

  “No, that is my pleasure.”

>   “Then you might have lunch with me, even if I weren’t my father’s daughter?”

  “It’s possible,” he agreed.

  “I suppose you’d prefer women to stay out of the public eye, to be quiet and do as they’re told. That’s very Egyptian!”

  He ignored the edge to her voice, smiling fully at her. “Is that how you intend to behave at Sakkara? It would certainly make things easier if you followed my advice without too much argument.”

  She coloured a little. “Oh, I’m not Egyptian at all!” she exclaimed.

  “No, but one can learn something from everyone.” He held her chair for her, easing her into her seat and arranging the sunshade to protect her face from the sun. “I have ordered shish-kebab for you, and some Egyptian wine which I think you will like, and coffee to finish with. Will that suit you?”

  She didn’t know what a shish-kebab was, and she was quite unaccustomed to having wine with her meals as a matter of course, so she gave him a quick nod and tried not to compare how long she had had to wait for service when she had been by herself the night before with the magical way the food appeared now at a mere flick of Tariq’s expressive fingers.

  When the waiter had moved away, Tariq gestured towards her plate, smiling at her. “Itfaddalou! Enjoy yourself!” he invited her.

  The shish-kebab was very good. There were little bits of barbecued lamb, cooked over charcoal in the open air, and some barbecued mincemeat, more properly called kufta, served with chipped potatoes instead of rice, and with a yoghourt sauce that broke up the fat of the tender portions of meat. Victoria ate her lunch with relish. She was surprised that a Moslem country should produce wines when alcoholic drinks were forbidden to them, but it had a pleasant if slightly sweet taste on her tongue and, as Tariq drank it too, she thought he might be an Englishman and a Christian after all.

  The waiter took away their plates and Victoria sat back in her chair to await her coffee, trying not to speculate too openly about the man opposite her, but to enjoy the luxury of the bright sunshine that, even in January, struck warm against her bare arms. It was only the sun which was hot, however. When a cloud crossed its path, it was immediately cold and shivery, and the people all about her began reaching for their cardigans and clicking their tongues in displeasure, only to take them off again the next moment when the sun appeared again.