Most tourists traveled the Nile by boat between Luxor and Aswân, but the train was faster and cheaper. The town of Aswân didn’t have much appeal to me—it wasn’t the Riviera, Egyptian or otherwise—but it was a gateway to one of the most stunning artifacts in the world, the colossi of Ramses at Abu Simbel.
“Lana is waiting for us at Aswân,” Rafi said. He was referring to the edgy assistant that picked us up from the airport when I arrived in Cairo. “She’ll drive us to Abu Simbal.”
He still hadn’t explained the reason for our trip, but now that there were no killers in sight, I wanted to know.
“So tell me why we are going there?” I asked, yawning.
I had come down from my hyperadrenaline and was starting to feel a little tired as I finished my second glass.
“Some fellahs digging an irrigation ditch near Lake Aswân have uncovered a burial tomb of a wealthy Twenty-ninth Dynasty merchant. It had already been looted, probably soon after it was created over two thousand years ago, but there was enough left behind for these poor peasant laborers to have become rich if they had had more sophistication.”
It was an old story heard over and again in the antiquities-rich Mediterranean area—workers digging a ditch, a road, or basement stumble upon a piece of history and grab it for themselves rather than turn it over to the authorities.
There was little temptation for these men to turn in the artifact. Desperately poor, even the small amount they received from a local antique dealer could equal years of income for them.
The piece would then make its way up the food chain of antique dealers until the artifact finally got smuggled out of the country and sold at auction in London, New York, or Hong Kong, often for millions of dollars.
When everything went to hell, it would be the poor workers trying to get some extra food and necessities for their families who would end up getting punished.
“The sudden advent of having more money brought the workers under the scrutiny of the local police chief,” Rafi said.
“Of course, he didn’t get a piece of the action, so he busted them,” I said.
Rafi looked at his daughter. “Isn’t she cynical?”
“That’s what you said, too.”
“Whatever.” I laughed. “It’s a good reason to see Abu Simbel again.” And for me to stay out of Cairo until I figured out how to keep alive.
“Well, Dalila, I think it’s time you finish your schoolwork and then to bed,” Rafi said, his way of telling me he wanted to discuss what had happened between me and Kaseem.
We had two cabins next to each other with a connecting door in between. Rafi was to sleep in one, Dalila and I in the other. I initially had the cabin to myself, but Dalila asked if she could share it with me and I said sure, we’d have a pajama party.
Not exactly the sleeping arrangements I thought would work to my advantage, but the girl seemed like a nice kid.
Before we talked business I wanted to know more about Dalila’s medical problem. As soon as he closed the adjoining door, I asked Rafi about her condition.
“What is Dalila suffering from?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment but I could see from the way tension gripped him when I asked that it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about.
“I don’t mean to pry—”
“No,” he interrupted, “it just makes me angry when I talk about it because I’m so helpless. There’s nothing I can do to help her. She always had a weak immune system and was always sick.” He stopped for a moment to get his emotions under control. “She has leukemia. The doctors say she needs a bone marrow transplant. If they don’t find the right donor soon, then…” He looked away and didn’t finish the sentence.
The prognosis sounded bad. I could see the agony on his face as he talked.
He obviously wasn’t a donor candidate.
“You’ll find a donor if you keep looking,” I said.
“It wouldn’t matter even if I found one. I don’t want to discuss it.”
“I’m sorry.” What do you say to a father whose daughter is going to die?
What would I do if I were in his position? Everything that was humanly possible, I thought.
I felt his pain.
It was cruel punishment for any person, knowing that someone you love is facing death and there’s nothing you can do about it. You still hope for a miracle but know in your heart it won’t happen.
I held back the tears that were about to come, and changed the subject. “I’m sure you want to know about Kaseem.”
He cleared his throat. “Yes. Tell me what happened.”
I told him about the incident at the marketplace.
This time I was completely honest with him. I owed Kaseem nothing and I needed Rafi on my side if I was to stay alive and get back my passport.
“Are you sure it was a replica? You said the light was bad—”
“I could smell the paint. It would take scientific tests to distinguish it from the original, but I’m sure it was a reproduction.”
He lowered his voice and leaned closer to me. “What you have admitted to me about working for Mounir Kaseem, you must never speak of it again while you are in Egypt.”
“I didn’t know what he was up to.”
“It doesn’t matter. He is a threat to the government. Your association with him is enough to get you imprisoned here. Maybe worse.”
The threat gave me a prickly sensation down my back. I had read about police brutality in Egypt, especially when it came to political opposition.
“This is insane,” I said. And that was an understatement.
He spread his hands on his knees and looked down at them. “This is life. But yours is not the only death sentence.”
I knew he was talking about Dalila.
“I’ll help you all I can,” he said. “Do you have any idea where Kaseem is hiding?”
“He could be back in New York for all I know.”
“No, he is here in Egypt. His time has come.”
“His time for what?”
“As he would say, ‘The time to answer the call of destiny has arrived.’ But it’s a call for blood that will be resisted by my government.”
“Where does that leave me?”
“Collateral damage.”
55
As the train neared Aswân in the morning, I left Rafi and Dalila eating breakfast in the club car and returned to my room to freshen up.
Opening my makeup bag, I froze as I saw a folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, I found a rough sketch of a scarab with an imperial cobra on its back. Nothing elaborate, just a simple freehand drawing, but done with a professional flair.
Rafi had said the heart scarab was the symbol of Kaseem’s Golden Nile fascistic political group.
The message of the drawing wasn’t lost on me—it was a warning, one that could have been left by anyone on the train.
Kaseem wanted me to know that I was being watched.
How he tracked me was beyond my grasp of spy apparatus.
I once knew an art dealer who lined the inside of his hat with aluminum foil whenever he went outside. He claimed “the government” was keeping track of him with satellites. It was his way of thwarting the government as to his whereabouts.
I could use some foil right now.
I thought I had protection with Rafi. I was wrong. Kaseem indeed had a long reach. We were more than five hundred miles from Cairo.
The drawing presented another problem to me—an incriminating one. The last thing I needed was to be caught carrying the symbol of the outlawed group as if it were a membership card.
I was biting my lip and still mulling over the warning when Dalila entered the cabin.
“Are you all right, Maddy?”
“Yes, fine. I was just thinking that my feet are always carrying me into situations that make my head swirl.”
I slipped into the bathroom, tore the drawing up, and flushed it down the toilet.
56
&nbs
p; Lana brought a long face with her when she came to pick us up at the train station.
I don’t know what she did in her life—or had done—to make her such a bundle of doom and gloom, but I hoped it wasn’t my presence that was bringing it on.
I didn’t need another enemy in Egypt.
Whatever it was, I noticed that Lana was angry at Rafi for not paying attention to her and not responding the way she wanted him to.
Rafi was a good-looking, unmarried guy; Lana was unmarried and worked closely with him and no doubt was in love with him. If she caught him making a play for me, she would definitely cause trouble.
Since she worked for Rafi, I wondered if she was aware of my connection to Kaseem. I had to assume that she knew, which meant she could bring hell down on me with a phone call to the Egyptian political security police.
I was beginning to think that I would’ve been better off hiding in a room at a busy hotel in Cairo and never leaving it.
Or better yet, I should never have left home.
The antiquity site of Abu Simbel was located nearly two hundred miles southwest of Aswân on the western bank of Lake Nasser.
Other than the Ramses colossi being among the world’s most sensational remnants of the ancient world, the location had little else going for it, mostly desert sand and blazing sun, even though the Temple of Ramses II and neighboring Nefertari’s Temple were a stone’s throw from Lake Nasser, a body of water formed by the Aswân Dam.
More than three hundred miles long, the lake extends into the Sudan. Abu Simbel itself was at the extreme southern end of Egypt, only about twenty-five miles from the Sudanese border.
Something truly magnificent on the shores of a lake in the middle of nowhere and almost completely surrounded by trackless desert was the best way to describe Abu Simbel.
Visitors got there from Aswân by bus or plane because private cars weren’t permitted to make the trip for security reasons. Usually a convoy of vans and buses left in the wee hours, between three and four in the morning.
Knowing that the trip was made in convoys for security like Old West wagon trains wasn’t the most comforting thought after witnessing what a single burst of automatic weapon fire can do to a human being.
Hopefully the official emblem on the van that we were in, and the guns I assumed Rafi and Lana carried, provided enough protection for us to travel safely without a convoy.
We arrived at Abu Simbel after a long ride that Dalila and I both found uninteresting and tiring and that made us sleepy. She had leaned against me, her head resting on my shoulder for half of the trip. I was afraid to move for fear of waking her up.
I was bonding with the child and wondered what could be done about her condition. There had to be a donor candidate somewhere. I didn’t know how that sort of thing worked, but I’d be willing to be a donor if I was a match.
Tour buses had left hours earlier than we did because the heat during the day becomes unbearable.
We arrived at midday under a baking sun and retreated quickly into a shady garden of a picturesque villa near the lake and walled all around.
The house belonged to Rafi’s friends, Amir and Noor, both of whom were archaeologists. The couple also had a sailboat tied up at a pier on the lake.
The two of them were attractive, in their thirties, very urban professionals even though their careers stuck them in what must be utterly boring isolation.
No neighbors, no shops, no Starbucks within hundreds of miles, not even a bagel shop or a Thai restaurant. How did they survive? I didn’t even see a satellite dish.
I wondered what people had done in rural areas at night before the arrival of cable and satellite TV and the Internet. I didn’t watch much television myself and was criminally ignorant of things like texting and putting my picture on Internet social sites, but I at least turned on the TV when I woke up in the morning just to see if the world had ended while I slept.
Despite the abundance of water that flowed from deep in Africa to Lake Nasser, Aswân was considered one of the driest places on earth, often going years between rainfalls, while summer temperatures could reach more than 120 degrees. It was so hot and dry that many poor people lived in houses that didn’t have complete roofs.
Lana joined us for lunch and cold drinks and left soon after. She told Rafi she was meeting a friend in the village. They arranged to meet in the morning to interview the villagers who had traded in antiquities.
Her coolness toward Noor hadn’t gone unnoticed by me. Did she dislike women in general? Or was it just certain people who she saw as a threat when it came to her relationship with Rafi?
She certainly didn’t like me.
With Dalila going on an overnight camel outing to an antiquity dig with Amir and his daughter and son who were about the same age as her, that left Rafi and me with Noor who invited us to watch the evening light show at the Ramses colossi from their sailboat, a felucca with a triangular, lateen sail.
“Rafi tells me you’ve visited Abu Simbel before,” Noor said.
“I did, many years ago and just for the day, but I’ve never seen the light show. Or the temples from the water.”
“Then you’re in for a treat. To watch the light show from a boat is enchanting, especially when you already know the history.”
I found the body language between Noor and Rafi interesting. They were so formal with each other.
They completely ignored each other, as if the other didn’t exist and seemed careful not to meet each other’s eyes. Also, the slight hug they had exchanged when we first arrived seemed purely perfunctory.
I had to wonder what the arrangements would have been if I hadn’t suddenly been thrown into the equation. Dalila had mentioned to me that her outing with Amir and the kids into the desert had been planned weeks ago. Noor and Rafi would’ve been left alone, tending the home fires.
Maybe my imagination was running wild, but I had the feeling the two of them had something going on.
Or maybe it was just my dirty mind. Or my own past transgressions of a carnal nature. I instinctively thought of men and women in sexual terms.
Same people might say there’s nothing wrong with leaving a good-looking guy like Rafi and a sensuous woman like Noor alone together, literally on a deserted island of sand in the middle of nowhere, on a hot night with a full moon and …
Oh, hell, having a little experience in such things myself, I was sure the two of them had something going on.
Which, of course, made me wonder about the role of Noor’s husband in the ménage à trois. Was he intentionally taking the kids out for a field trip to let the two have at it … or was he completely in the dark?
57
Noor handled the thirty-foot sailboat expertly, with Rafi managing the lines and sails with equal skill. I just held on, letting my hand dangle into the cool water when the boat heeled on its side.
Night was falling and a light breeze flowed over the water, bringing a little relief from the stifling heat of the day.
Noor brought the boat around a bend and we came into sight of the temples. The light show hadn’t started yet.
While Rafi put out an anchor to create a drag so we wouldn’t drift too far, Noor brought out iced lemonade for all of us. After the first sip, I realized the lemonade carried a punch—the alcoholic kind.
Obviously, Noor was a modern Egyptian who didn’t adhere strictly to the Muslim prohibition against alcohol.
The view of the temples from the lake was nothing less than spectacular.
I still wanted to visit the site very early in the morning to beat the merciless sun and tourist buses.
Although the site was commonly referred to as Abu Simbel, there were actually two temple complexes: The Great Temple faced by the four statues of Ramses at Abu Simbel itself, with a doorway into the inner chambers in the middle, and the Small Temple a short distance away dedicated to Hathor, the goddess of love and joy, and Ramses’ wife, Nefertari, with smaller statues walling the temple.
/> The four sitting Ramses statues, each about as tall as a six-story building, not counting the bases, were among the most impressive artifacts in Egypt—which meant they ranked high among the wonders of the world itself.
“We really don’t know why these colossi were built here,” Noor said, “so far from the heart of Egypt. The best explanation seems to be that Ramses built them to intimidate potential invaders coming from the south.”
“How big is the Nile?” I asked.
“It’s the longest river in the world,” Rafi said, “about four thousand miles, and less than a quarter of it flowing in Egypt itself. That made it a natural pipeline for invading armies to follow into Egypt.”
“A good reason to have built a monument to impress them that the pharaohs of Egypt were god-kings of awesome power,” Noor added.
I knew a good deal more about Abu Simbel than they realized, but I listened politely as they described one of the great engineering feats in history: Salvaging the two temples from what would have been a watery grave.
Back in the 1960s, the Aswân Dam was built to control the annual flooding of the river that had caused havoc since time immortal. Lake Nasser was created as a result, with the temples doomed because the waterline would be above them.
An international relief to save the temples was organized and millions of dollars raised. It took about four years, but piece by piece the giant statues and all the other parts of the temples were cut into pieces, lifted, and put back together again above the waterline.
Pieces weighing twenty and thirty tons were lifted by cranes, with the most stunning sight being the giant head of Ramses, lifted three times before it finally was put on the statue’s shoulders. There were actually four Ramses colossi, but one had lost its upper body during an earthquake two thousand years ago.
“There’s a legend about the toppling of Ramses’ head,” Noor said.
I already knew it but let her continue.
“It’s said that a Sudanese king invaded Egypt with a vast army and that he stopped at Abu Simbel to slap the statues of Ramses with his whip to show his army that the Egyptians were not as mighty as they appeared.
The Curse Page 20