by Mike Ashley
MADE IN EGYPT
Michael Pearce
We end our exploration of ancient Egypt with a new Mamur Zapt story by Michael Pearce. Captain Gareth Owen is the Mamur Zapt, or head of the secret police in Cairo, in the years leading up to the First World War. At that time the British retained a strong hold over Egyptian affairs, but there were continuing tensions with the Turks and other nations, such as the French, who believed that they had controlling rights in the region. Pearce writes with a sharp and caustic eye and his wry observations bring a suitable end to over four thousand years of Egyptian history and craftsmanship.
“It is not in the bazaars, Captain Owen,” said Miss Sharpnell severely, “that one will find the true indigenous art of Egypt.”
“No,” said Owen, heart sinking. It had been a mistake coming. When Paul Trevelyan had invited him to the presentation, he had agreed in the interests of making up the numbers. He had not bargained on Paul inviting other people for the same reason; such as this formidable group of ladies newly out from England to study the Egyptian Arts and Crafts Movement. He had foolishly referred to the appliqué canvases of the Tentmakers Bazaar.
“Meretricious!” pronounced Miss Sharpnell with a sniff. “Surely Egypt has something better to offer? What is going on in the villages?”
“Well, they all work very hard –”
“Pots?”
“Pots?”
“They make them, I presume?”
“Well, yes, but –”
And used them. Sometimes, for example they embedded them in the dried mud of the village dovecote and pigeons rested in them. Did that count as indigenous art?
“One looks for the skill of the craftsman,” said Miss Sharpnell in the same unforgiving tone.
“Quite so.”
Over at the front of the terrace, where the flower-sellers pushed their roses and carnations through the railings at the tourists, and the pornographic postcard merchants hung their pictures – indigenous, possibly, but was it art? – an ushapti vendor was proffering a little wooden image to another of the formidable ladies.
“But is it authentic?” she demanded.
The ushapti vendor was shocked; or affected to be.
“Madame,” he said, “go to the Museum. And if they do not say it is worth at least ten pounds, come back to me and I will give you ten pounds!”
And if he’s still here when you get back, thought Owen, I will give you ten pounds. He saw an opportunity of escaping from Miss Sharpnell, however, and excused himself and went across.
“Actually,” he said, “it would be worth your going to the Museum anyway. They always have surplus ushaptis for sale. Genuine ones.”
“Well, I’m not really –” the lady was beginning, when Paul Trevelyan clapped his hands.
“I wonder if I could have your attention, ladies and gentlemen, for the actual presentation?”
The reception was being held on the terrace of the Hotel Contentale, and the presentation was to the Consul-General in recognition of his services to Egypt in the prevention of illegal exports of works of art.
Old Gasperi, the Director of the Museum, was making the presentation. He went up to the table at the back of the terrace which held the gift that was being presented and drew off the cloth which covered it. A little mutter of appreciation ran round the spectators.
“And I can assure you,” said the Consul-General, smiling, “that it will remain at the Consulate. I have no intention of taking it back to England, illegally or otherwise.”
Old Gasperi took the mask in his hands.
“A fine piece!” he said lovingly. It, too, had come from the Cairo Museum. The Museum had so many objects in its care that it could afford to let some of them go. He fondled it for a moment and then suddenly removed his spectacles and peered closely at it.
“But, one moment!” he said. “This is not the original. It is a copy!”
“But, Owen, you were there!” said the Consul-General accusingly.
Owen was only too well aware of this. Various people, including Miss Sharpnell, had already pointed it out to him.
“What did you say you were? The Chief of Police?”
“The Mamur Zapt. Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police,” said Owen sulkily. “A quite different thing.”
The difference, however, was lost on Miss Sharpnell. She pursed her lips.
“Under your very nose!” she said.
“Never mind the difference,” said Paul Trevelyan, who had been organizing the reception and therefore felt responsible. “It’ll be ages before the Parquet arrive.” The Parquet, the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice, and not the Police, much less the Secret Police, which concerned itself only with political activity, was the body which handled criminal investigation in Egypt at that time. “Get on with it without waiting for them!”
“But I brought it myself!” cried old Gasperi. “Only half an hour before!”
“But which did you bring? The original? Or a copy?”
“The original, of course!”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I looked at it when I picked it up at the Museum. And Morpugo looked at it too.”
“Morpugo?”
Morpugo was the Deputy Director of the Museum, a tall, thin, rather aesthetic-looking Levantine, with a large silk handkerchief, red to match the pot-like tarboosh, which, like all Egyptian civil servants, he wore on his head, overflowing from the breast pocket of his immaculate suit.
“Copy?”
Morpugo took umbrage.
“We don’t deal in copies here, my man. If any copies turn up, we give them away. To people who can’t tell the difference!”
“But might not the copy have been substituted? Without your knowing!”
“I took the mask out of the glass case myself. And I can assure you that it was not an imitation.”
“I can confirm that,” said Gasperi. “We looked at it together.”
“And then what did you do with it?”
“Put it on my desk. Where it remained for the rest of the morning. Until Monsieur Gasperi collected it.”
“And you yourself? Where you at your desk all the morning?”
“All the morning,” said Morpugo triumphantly.
“All the morning,” echoed the Coptic clerk who shared the office with him, glumly.
The guests had already been gathering on the terrace when M. Gasperi had arrived and placed the golden mask on the table that had been provided. It had at once been covered with a white cloth and had remained like that until the moment of unveiling and presentation. There had been people present the whole time.
But had anyone been actually keeping an eye on the mask?
“A general eye,” said the maître d’hotel.
“But a more particular one?”
“Well, Mustapha –”
Mustapha, the waiter, had been charged with responsibility for the table; that is, with standing near it and seeing that nobody bumped into it and knocked it over. It was a particularly flimsy table with rickety folding legs and might well have been.
“Well, we didn’t want a table which took up too much room,” said the maître d’hotel defensively.
“And Mustapha had been standing by it the whole time?”
“Not for a moment did my eye waver, Effendi!” Mustapha declared.
“Except –” said Miss Sharpnell, who was standing nearby and listening to every word.
“Except when I went to fetch a glass of his special for Gasperi Effendi,” said Mustapha, injured.
“Weren’t there drinks on the terrace?”
“Yes, but he prefers seventeen years.”
“Seventeen years?”
“Glenlivet,” said the maître d’hotel. “It has to be the seventeen-year-old one. And while Mustapha was away,” he added, giving Miss Sharpnell a baleful look, “I myself stood here engaging Gasperi Effendi in conversation.”
“But while you were talking –
?”
“I kept my hand on the mask.”
“That is so, Effendi,” said Mustapha. “And when I returned I saw the signor with his hand on the mask and thought: that is the way to do it. And after that I, too, put my hand on the mask.”
“The whole time?”
“The whole time.”
This time even Miss Sharpnell did not demur.
“It must have been before,” said Owen.
“It could have been any time,” said Mustapha.
“But how –?”
“Magic,” said Mustapha. “There is some conjurer abroad.”
As a matter of fact, there was a conjurer abroad; down in the street along with the other jugglers, acrobats, snake-charmers, musicians, dancers, flower-sellers, peanut boys and exhibitors of monkeys and stuffed crocodiles. Owen went down to him and found his hand taken confidingly by a tame, dog-faced baboon dressed in little red trousers.
“I wish I knew, Effendi,” the conjurer confessed. “If you find out, Effendi, perhaps you could tell me. Then I could use the trick myself.”
Owen had not really expected otherwise, but it had occurred to him that those below in the street would certainly have been keeping a hopeful eye turned up towards the terrace and might have seen something.
Alas, no. And the same went for the guests on terrace. No one had seen anything. Indeed, the consensus was that no one had gone near the table.
“Not after the first minute,” said another of the formidable ladies, the one who had queried the ushapti’s authenticity.
“But in the first minute . . .?”
“A little, bald-headed man went up to the table and nearly knocked it over.”
“It was after that,” said the maître d’hotel, “that I stationed Mustapha beside it.”
“A little, slinky man,” expanded the formidable lady breathlessly, “with crooked eyes.”
Owen recognized at once from this description the identity of the possible malefactor.
“Well, the damned table was in the way,” said the Consul-General. “It wasn’t my fault!”
“Yes, it was,” said his wife. “You know how clumsy you are.”
And after that she had taken care to see he didn’t do it again.
“I think everyone saw it,” she said. “Because after that everyone gave the table a wide berth.”
“It was a silly table to use,” said Miss Sharpnell. “Anyone could see that it was unstable. They ought to have used one of those nice woven stands you see the peasant women in the market using to put their things on. A good example of indigenous –”
“Do you think,” said the Consul-General, “that you could get that woman away from me? Right out of Cairo, preferably. As far away as possible. One of those villages in the south –”
It would certainly be a week, thought Owen gloomily. However you travelled, it would take at least two days going there and two days coming back. Not to mention the bit in the middle. What could he do with her?
And what, meanwhile, about the mask?
“What about the mask?” he said.
“Damn the mask!” said the Consul-General.
“Dead!” said Miss Sharpnell decisively, and dismissively.
“Well, isn’t that what you would expect?” said Owen. “After all, they lived three thousand years ago.”
“Life goes on,” said Miss Sharpnell, “and a people moves on. And we must move with them. It is at the living Egypt that we should be looking.”
He had taken her to Karnak and to Luxor; to the Valley of Kings and the Valley of Queens; to the Ramesseum and the Medinet Habu; to Der el Bahari and to the Temple of Mut. And in the end, on a lovely evening when they were standing together on the river bank, and the setting sun was reddening the Nile, and Miss Sharpnell had taken off her eye-shade to study the effects, and Owen had suddenly noticed that she was younger than he had thought, and the fragrance of jasmine was in the air, she had allowed herself to be softened.
Possibly alarmed by this lapse, she had, however, on the following morning, pulled her eye-shade back firmly over her face and retreated again into her angular self.
It was then that she had pronounced her dismissal. “Dead,” she said, “all dead.
“Cannot you take me,” she went on, “to some village where I can see the ordinary life of Egypt, the craftsmen at their work? It is only out of that that a true, living indigenous art can arise.”
Stung, he took her to the village at Der el Bahari. Spread out on the ground in front of the houses were mummy hawks, bits of mummy cases, little clay soul-houses, ushapti images of soldiers and workers in the field, mummy beads and scarabs.
Behind the houses, in caves in the rock, were the workshops where men were making the bits of mummy cases, the mummy hawks, the models, the ushapti images etc. Their heads were bent over their work and their faces frowned with concentration.
“A high standard of skill, I think you’ll find,” said Owen. “Of course, the elements of the craft are passed on from generation to generation.”
Miss Sharpnell was silent.
They wandered into a workshop where men were busy making old bangles with fine, multi-coloured enamel bands running round them and little enamel discs dangling from golden chains, perfect replicas of Pharaonic jewellery.
“You wouldn’t be able to tell them from the original,” said Owen. “The gold is genuine.”
He picked one up and showed it to Miss Sharpnell.
“This is work for the upper end of the market,” he said. “They send these to the big jewellers’ shops in Cairo.”
“Where they are sold as replicas?”
“In the most reputable shops, yes. But the temptation to do otherwise is considerable. As replicas they would sell at about twenty pounds. As originals it would be more like a thousand.”
“And which do they make them as?”
“I don’t think they would understand your question. They make them, that’s all.”
Miss Sharpnell moved on to the next workman, who was making a Pharaonic mask. She touched it, almost lovingly.
“It is beautifully made,” she whispered.
“How many of these would you do in a year?” Owen asked the workman.
The workman looked up briefly.
“One,” he said.
“It’s not just the work, it’s the gold,” explained the overseer.
“And who does it go to?”
The overseer named one of the big shops in Cairo.
“Usually,” he said.
“Usually?”
“Not the last one. A man came down from the big Museum in Cairo and said the workmanship was so good that it ought to be shared. He bought it for the Museum.”
“Did he so?”
“It was a Mask of Thutmose.”
“Yes,” said Owen, “so it was.”
“I don’t agree with this policy of selling off surplus exhibits,” said Morpugo, “even if it does raise money for the Museum. No exhibit is surplus. All are part of Egypt’s heritage and should be kept in Egypt. In public hands, too.”
“You mean the Museum’s hands?” said Owen.
“Certainly.”
“Of course, the Mask of Thutmose wasn’t actually being sold.”
“It was being given away,” said Morpugo, “which almost makes it worse.”
“But to a worthy recipient?”
Morpugo sniffed.
“A man who could not tell the difference between an original and a replica,” he sneered. “On whom the original would be wasted. So why give it him?”
“That’s what you thought, is it?”
“Yes.”
“And switched the replica for the original while it was on your desk?”
“Yes.”
“What about the clerk?”
“I did it while he was opening the door for Gasperi.”
“Tell me, when did the idea come to you? Before you went to Der el Bahari? Or when you went in to the workshop?�
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“I had objected to the idea in the first place, when Gasperi had first proposed it. But he had overruled me. ‘We have plenty of Masks of Thutmose,’ he said. ‘That is not the point,’ I retorted. ‘Every one is original and therefore should be kept.’ But, as I say, he overruled me. I was still smarting when I went to Der el Bahari. I go down every six months to examine the latest finds. I knew about the workshops, of course, everyone does. The quality of the work in Der el Bahari is very fine. You can sometimes pick up some lovely things there. For oneself, you know. Well, I saw the mask, the work was breath-taking. And then the idea came to me: let Gasperi give this to the Consul-General, if that was what he was so keen on, and let us keep the original. If no one could tell the difference, what would it matter. I forgot about Gasperi himself, unfortunately.”
“At least I can take it out of the country now,” said the Consul-General.
The presentation had been reheld inside the hotel, as it was thought that, given the circumstances, more private proceedings this time might be preferable. Again, though, but this time deliberately, it was the replica and not the original that was presented.
“Actually, I’m happier with that,” said the Consul-General, looking down at the mask in his hands.
“I think I’d better take that from you, dear,” said his wife, hastily coming forward.
“I shall regard it as a tribute to Egyptian workmanship,” he said, handing it over.
“But it’s not authentic!” cried the formidable lady in anguish.
“But it is indigenous,” said Owen. “An excellent example, don’t you think,” he said, looking at Miss Sharpnell, “of the work of the Egyptian Arts and Crafts Movement?”