And the kneeling legionnaires fired as if one, the sound of so many rifles reporting simultaneously like an explosion, a blast of firepower that blew dozens of Tuaregs off their mounts, dead before they hit the sand, their corpses becoming instant barricades over which other horses trampled and stumbled, beasts and riders going down.
O’Connell, kneeling himself now, holding fire, thought, Good volley!, as the legionnaires quickly reloaded, here and there a man falling as a Tuareg bullet caught him.
And O’Connell repeated his command: “Fire!”
This time O’Connell joined the volley, the sound of which was more staggered, but again bullets yanked warriors from their steeds, and men and horses tumbled to the sand, creating chaos.
Another successful volley! O’Connell thought, but he knew, he knew . . .
The legionnaires remained two hundred men, and two hundred men—no matter how brave, however well-trained—facing two thousand, were still two hundred men . . .
And the Tuaregs began firing. The noise of their weapons was not the unified thunder of the legionnaires’ two volleys, rather a rumbling, snapping, cracking, continuous hail of lead that ripped the air of the day, and the flesh of the Tuaregs’ foes; the native warriors, robes flowing, were terrible apparitions moving like the horsemen of the Apocalypse through the clouds of smoke that their own gunfire had fashioned.
At least a third of O’Connell’s men fell under this onslaught, choking on dust and blood, twisting in pain and death.
“Fire at will!” O’Connell shouted, retreating toward the pylons of the temple complex entry. “Seek cover!”
Shooting on the run, the legionnaires headed toward the temple, boots slowed by the sand, but their bullets finding more purchase, sending Tuaregs spinning off steeds, crashing to the sand, small victories, tiny triumphs, in a great defeat. The warriors were on them now, plowing into the legionnaires, wading into them, and the gunfire lessened as the nomads hacked and cleaved with their sharp, curved blades, and the screams that tore the air now were not war cries, but cries of agony, of death, as the blood of white infidels splashed and soaked the sands, as men who had lost their way in homelands they would never see again lost their lives in this strange place.
Within the walls of the temple complex now, where legionnaires were taking cover in the ruins, the Tuaregs on horseback were everywhere, charging through the front gates, leaping partial walls, storming through areas where the walls of Hamanaptra were just a memory. Their blades carved at the air when there was no flesh to cleave, and occasionally a warrior would fall under a legionnaire’s bullet . . .
. . . but O’Connell, still outside the walls of Hamanaptra, throwing down his empty rifle, yanking both revolvers from their shoulder holsters, knew they’d been overrun, knew this was the Alamo, and that he would never see his family again, much less his country. He was just too goddamned busy shooting Arabs off their goddamned horses to worry about it.
He’d been too busy to find cover, as well, and as he tossed away both revolvers, empty, and yanked one from behind his back and Beni’s from his belt, he got a glimpse of Beni, within the temple grounds, crawling on his belly across the sand, like the snake he was, apparently heading for the open doorway of a structure half-buried in the sand.
O’Connell, whose attention was immediately back on a pair of Tuaregs bearing down on him, did not see Beni taking time to lift a watch off the body of a dead legionnaire. Nor did he see Beni getting up and sprinting for that beckoning doorway.
But when another dozen warriors had fallen under his fire, and he was once again out of ammunition, the only legionnaires around him dead ones, O’Connell whirled, tearing ass through the front gate, looking for Beni, who was inside that temple structure now, putting all his wiry muscle behind an attempt to close its massive sandstone door.
O’Connell grinned: Beni had found his hiding place after all, and O’Connell was ready, now, to accept one of his tactical suggestions . . .
“Beni!” O’Connell called. “Pal, wait up! Hey!”
Beni didn’t appear to hear his friend, or if he did, seemed to have no intention of “waiting up.”
O’Connell hurdled a huge stone column, hitting the ground running, his ears pounding with the hoofbeats of Tuareg horsemen in pursuit of him.
“Don’t you close that goddamn door!” O’Connell yelled at Beni, who still seemed not to hear, though O’Connell knew damn well he did.
O’Connell, sprinting like hell for that door Beni was doing his best to close, glanced back and saw the four horsemen bounding over the huge column, charging right after him, yelling their “Ooo-loo-loo-loo!” war cry.
“You little bastard! Don’t you close that goddamned door!”
But the door to safety closed, Beni’s dark unapologetic eyes disappearing behind it, just as O’Connell slammed into its stone surface.
Little bastard closed the goddamned door!
Shoulder aching, O’Connell did a graceless pirouette, looking for another possibility, even as the horsemen closed in on him. Across the courtyard were the massive columns of an open shrine, and on the ground nearby were several fallen legionnaires whose bodies might provide a weapon or two.
He ran in perfect time to the cries of “Ooo-loo-loo-loo!” behind him, running for his life, weaving through the ruins, the Tuaregs getting closer and closer, the pounding hoofbeats louder and louder. In his path was the body of a dead legionnaire and he dipped down to snatch the revolver from the soldier’s limp hand, and wheeled and faced the oncoming horsemen, firing the revolver . . .
Empty.
The horsemen, yanking back on the reins, skidded to a stop right before him, stirring a cloud of sand, in which O’Connell—unarmed—stood and faced the fierce quartet, helplessly.
The Tuaregs raised their shining curved swords, and O’Connell, Chicago boy to the end, sneered at his executioners, raising his hand to his face, placing his thumb to the tip of his nose and waggling his fingers.
Suddenly the horse closest to O’Connell reared back and whinnied, eyes and nostrils flaring, and then the other horses joined in, rearing back, going bughouse, Arabian steeds transformed into Texas broncos!
The steeds screeched, they bucked, they bellowed, they snorted—and then they took off! Took off like somebody fired the starting gun, and their equally alarmed riders made no effort to rein them in; it was as if the devil himself had chased them away.
Wide-eyed, O’Connell looked at his hand as if perhaps it could explain why thumbing his nose had worked with such amazing success . . .
Then he felt the world moving beneath him.
Later, he would wonder if he imagined it; still later, he would know he hadn’t.
But right now, the sands, the earth, were shifting under him, not trembling like an earthquake, something else, something much stranger, something unmistakably evil . . .
. . . and as he glanced around him, he saw the looming ancient statue, just behind him in the remains of that shrine he’d been running toward. He knew enough about Egypt and its history to recognize a statue of Anubis when he saw it.
Was this what had stirred the horses? Or had the beasts, with their keen instincts, simply perceived the shifting sands before he had?
Decrepit, sections of it shattered, half-buried in sand, the jackal-headed statue stared at him with sinister indifference, almost as if Anubis were amused by O’Connell’s startled reaction to the sands beneath him shifting and forming shapes, like snakes wriggling and writhing just below the surface.
And as those sands shifted, an artifact was revealed, a small octagonal gold box that he impulsively plucked up from the squirming desert floor and pocketed.
It was then that he realized something that frightened him more than anything this gruesome afternoon had yet leveled at him: Not just meaningless shapes were forming in the sand, but lines, as if a ghostly finger were drawing a picture!
He had had enough of this terrible place. If there were other rich
es here, beside the golden trinket he’d just tucked away, well let the desert have them.
The Tuaregs, all of them, had ridden off, leaving behind a massacre that would lead to more battles still. But Richard O’Connell would not be part of them. He ran from the ruins, knowing he would never return to the legion, knowing he’d be assumed dead, never dreaming he would return to this ungodly place.
He left without seeing the face that the sands had drawn upon themselves, a screaming face that he would not have recognized, anyway, though the group of riders on horseback high on a ridge, watching him stumble from the fragmented temple complex, would have . . .
. . . Imhotep.
But they did not; they saw only O’Connell, and that was enough.
These observers on the ridge were not Tuaregs though they were indeed Arab warriors, in the loose-fitting robes of their breed.
“He has found Hamanaptra,” one of the riders said to Ardeth Bay, their leader. “He must die.”
“Let the desert kill him,” said Ardeth Bay, tall, sinewy, robed in black, golden scimitar at his waist, crossed by a gold dagger that was nearly a sword.
And the cruel dark eyes set like glittering stones in the face of Ardeth Bay—a face that might have seemed handsome were it not marked with strange tattoos—watched the legionnaire survivor stagger off into the open desert.
4
Another Worthless Trinket
Cairo, capital of the Mohammedan world, the majestic minarets of mosques rising above the squalor of crowded slums, was the African continent’s largest city, and among its oldest. The stars themselves had changed position in the sky since the city’s birth, though in all that time, one thing had not changed: the chasm that yawned between rich and poor, the only two classes into which its eight hundred thousand inhabitants fell.
In this sprawling, teeming city of donkeys and camels, this world of turbaned men and veiled women, the streets of the bazaars were too narrow for motor cars, and a pedestrian might be grazed by donkeys carrying grain or bricks or even a wealthy wife of some rich Egyptian who dwelled in a mansion behind high, solid stone walls, gates guarded by eunuchs, as the rest of the master’s harem strolled a great tropical garden within.
The modern section of Cairo, with asphalt streets as wide as any in Paris and a beautifully landscaped park alive with flowers, shrubs and trees, offered electric streetcars and automobiles for hire, magnificent hotels, beautiful villas, modern apartment houses, and the Mouski, its main business street, was lined with fine European shops.
But Evelyn Carnahan, who—though schooled in her native England—had spent much of her childhood here, never deluded herself into thinking that Cairo was becoming a Christian city, that the Arab element was giving way to the European. She, perhaps more than any other white woman of her age in this city—or anywhere, for that matter—knew that she lived in an Egypt as ancient as civilization itself.
Her parents, who had died several years ago in a plane crash, had not been as wealthy as some supposed, and at any rate had left the bulk of their estate to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, leaving her brother, Jonathan, and herself only the house and an allowance of a few hundred pounds a year each. This Jonathan greatly resented, though Evelyn did not: Her great love for this land and its history had been learned at the feet of her late archaeologist father.
Howard Carnahan, son of an English painter of birds and himself a gifted watercolorist, had joined Sir Gaston Maspero—before the turn of the century—in the Egyptian government’s Department of Antiquities and made his reputation with his celebrated detailed drawings of important objects and murals found in the Valley of Kings. And, of course, his crowning achievement had been his role in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.
The loss of her parents—the press had insisted upon connecting their accident to the Tutankhamun “curse”—was still keenly felt by her. In her small way, however, she hoped to follow in her father’s legendary footsteps, though she had chosen archival work and had no real longing to go out on digs—she was a librarian, not an Egyptologist. She was, as might be expected, rather torn between her passion for history and a respect for those bygone people who had, with their lives, written it.
Her father had certainly suffered pangs of conscience over his work, feeling the success of the Tut dig had opened the door on wretched excesses tantamount to grave robbing. Just a year before his death, he had precipitated the firing of the curator here at the museum who had rather notoriously been selling mummies excavated in the valley of the Nile for one hundred dollars each (in cash), complete with certificates of authenticity as to age and nobility.
Evelyn felt rather in her father’s shadow, and her position here at the museum—under the next curator—might have seemed obligatory, granted out of some sense of posthumous nepotism, if she were not so supremely skilled in the reading and writing of ancient Egyptian. Few could rival the young woman’s ability to decipher hieroglyphs and hieratic, and perhaps no one anywhere was better suited for the proper coding and cataloguing of the vast library deep in the recesses of the museum.
Still, as much as she loved this place, she hoped to move on, and on this afternoon a month and two days after the legionnaire massacre (an event of which she had no knowledge, incidentally), Evelyn Carnahan was perhaps off her form, suffering from the disappointment of the rejection of her application by the Bembridge Scholars.
The second rejection, actually.
The tall, slender young woman—her Nefertiti-like shapeliness lost in a long cream linen skirt, mannish white pinstriped shirt with brown scarf, and oversize tan cardigan—was atop a tall ladder between two of the many towering rows in the “stacks,” the museum’s extensive collection of volumes pertaining to the history and culture of ancient Egypt. Her long brunette hair was tucked into a bun and her almond-shaped blue eyes lurked behind the eyeglasses she used for close-up work. None of this served to heighten her attractiveness, but could not wholly disguise the lovely features of her heart-shaped face, either. Her love for Egyptian antiquities was her father’s doing; but her looks had come from Mum.
The glasses did cause certain misjudgments of distance, as was about to become evident. She had just discovered a book on Tuthmosis, improperly shelved among the “S”s, and was attempting to reach across to the adjacent shelf, just behind her, where the “T”s would find the volume a rightful home.
She had to stretch a little to reach it, and pulling on the top rung of the ladder, she leaned across the aisle. Almost there, a little closer now . . .
And suddenly the ladder pulled away from the shelf and Evelyn, who prided herself on her composure, on her cool handling of any problem, yelped and flung the Tuthmosis book as if it had caught fire. The volume sailed, then fell, pages fluttering like a bird with too many wings, and landed with a thunk on the floor below—far below.
Instinctively, she latched on to the top rung with both hands, only to find herself on a ladder that was standing straight up, precariously so, as if she were standing on one stilt. Teetering there, she drew a slow, steady breath; there would be no more undignified yelps, thank you . . . and then she lost her balance.
Stilt-walking down the aisle on the ladder, Evelyn did not yelp; it was more of a prayer: “Please! God!”
Swaying, she rode the ladder across the main aisle, struggling for balance, to no avail: The ladder crashed into the next bookshelf . . . and came to a stop.
Evelyn heaved a relieved sigh.
Which preceded the bookshelf falling away from her, crashing into the bookshelf behind. This produced two results, one being helpful: The angle allowed Evelyn to slide down the now slanting ladder to plop unceremoniously, but none the worse for wear, to the floor.
The other result, however, was most unpleasant, and the term “domino effect” should suffice, here. She chose to close her eyes through much of it, and so spared herself the sight of one bookshelf toppling into another, and another, and another. But she did not think to cov
er her ears, so was privy to the sounds of thousands of precious volumes flinging themselves off shelves and scattering to the floor. When the last bookshelf crashed into the far wall, and emptied its books to the floor like a wagon dumping coal down a chute, the worst was over.
Almost.
When she opened her eyes—one at a time, as if that would lessen the blow—she saw not just a librarian’s worst nightmare in the jumble of fallen shelves and spilled books but the wide-eyed presence of her boss, the museum’s curator, Dr. Bey.
She looked up at him timidly, ventured a tiny smile.
“Oops,” she said.
The curator was a small round man with a small round face in a dark suit with a black string tie; his black hair sat upon his skull like a spreading spider.
“Oops?” he asked, black eyebrows climbing a high forehead, his black mustache lost in his curled-back upper lip.
“I didn’t hear you come in, Dr. Bey.”
“Perhaps it was the books crashing to the floor.”
Quickly, she got to her feet, smoothed out her sweater and skirt, adjusted the scarf at her open collar, and began picking up books, as if implying this was a mess easily cleaned up, when it would obviously require months of her time.
Dr. Bey was shaking his head. “Give me frogs, flies, locusts! Compared to you, Miss Carnahan, the other plagues were a joy.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It was an accident.”
“No. Rameses destroying Syria, that was an accident. This is a catastrophe.” He shook a thick finger at her. “I only put up with you because your parents were our finest patrons . . . Allah rest their souls.”
She had long suspected the curator resented her presence, and knew she had irritated him with various misjudged attempts to offer him “valuable artifacts” her brother, Jonathan, had bought from barroom archaeologists.
“Dr. Bey,” she said, “anyone could have made this mess. But not just anyone could put it right.”
That stopped the fat little man cold.
The Mummy Page 4