Mr Impossible (36 page)

He looked toward
the sound of her voice. He could barely make out her shape against
the surrounding darkness.

“
Behind the
coffin,” she said. “There’s a hole.”

Chapter 16

THE PASSAGE WAS
SMALLER AND MORE IRREGU-lar than the shaft to the burial chamber. At
some points Rupert had to crawl on his belly. It was also a great
deal longer.

At one point during
the interminable journey, he called a halt for rest. “Are you
all right?” he said.

“
Don’t
waste breath being solicitous,” she said crossly. “We
haven’t enough air as it is. And I don’t need to rest.
Can you not go faster?”

“
Mrs.
Pem—Dash it, I don’t even know your given name.”

“
Daphne,”
she said.

“
Daphne,”
he repeated. “That’s lovely.”

“
Ye gods,
what does it matter? Will you please
move
?”

“
You need to
rest,” he said. “You sound short of breath.”

“
I want to
get out,” she said. “
Now
.”

It was then he
remembered her morbid aversion to closed spaces. He started crawling
again, this time as fast as he could. She was probably near hysteria,
with good reason. The tunnel was hot, and what air it held was stale
and foul. He wanted to be out of it, too.

He crawled on,
hoping for fresh air at the end, if not light. Above all, he hoped
they hadn’t leapt out of the pan into the fire.

AT THE TOP of the
burial shaft, Khareef discovered that brandy did not always give men
courage. None of the others was willing to follow Omar and Amin down
the shaft.

It was too quiet
down there, they said. Something bad was down there.

“
This place
is evil,” said one coward. “The donkey is possessed.”

A distance behind
them, near the mouth of the tomb, the foreigners’ donkey
continued its wild braying.

“
We made too
much noise,” said another. “The English heard us coming
and ran away.”

“
Where can
they go?” Khareef said. “There is but one way in and one
way out.”

“
What about
the thieves’ hole?” another asked.

Khareef laughed.
“If they’ve found it, they won’t get far. It’s
falling in. They’ll have to turn back.”

“
Perhaps it
will fall on their heads.”

“
Then they
will die.”

“
Duval will
not be pleased.”

“
The woman
was not to be harmed.”

Khareef, like the
others, was drunk. The mention of Duval sobered him. The woman was to
be Duval’s hostage. For what purpose Khareef neither knew nor
cared. He did know and care what would happen to him if he bungled
this assignment.

He grabbed a torch
from one of the men and started down the shaft.

The others squatted
at the mouth of the shaft and waited.

After a moment,
Khareef’s voice wafted up, filling the air with curses. “Come
down, you cowards,” he called. “Come down and help your
brothers.”

One by one, the men
began crawling down the shaft.

They found Khareef
bending over a stone coffin. “See what the swine of an
Englishman has done,” he said.

It took two men to
move the broken pieces of lid enough to get their battered and
terrified friends out.

“
Why didn’t
you call for help?” Khareef demanded. “These old women
thought a ghoul had eaten you.”

“
Englishman,”
Omar gasped. “Demon. Rocks.” He clutched his bloodied
head.

“
The woman,”
Amin said. “Fearless and fierce like a lion.”

“
She is only
a woman,” Khareef said scornfully. “She threw rocks at
you, as naughty boys do. The man is only a man. But you will all see,
when they come out of this hole.” With his pistol he pointed at
the thieves’ tunnel.

He leant against
the sarcophagus and waited.

DAPHNE WAS NOT
fearless.

She was, in fact,
on the brink of babbling in terror.

She’d not
altogether willingly or happily traversed pyramid and tomb shafts.
Those, however, were spacious promenades compared to this roughly
hewn tunnel. She doubted it was part of a tomb complex. It was more
likely the work of robbers.

They’d
certainly done a great deal of work, because it seemed longer than
any of the endless passages in the Pyramid of Steps at Saqqara.

But perhaps it
seemed longer than it was. She had no idea how far they’d gone
when Mr. Carsington stopped again abruptly. She had an unhappy
suspicion why he’d stopped.

In the course of
the last few yards, bits of debris and dirt had been falling on her
head. Now the floor of the tunnel was rough with rubble.

“
Is it bad?”
she said.

“
It isn’t
good,” he said. “The way is blocked.”

Judging by the
sounds, he was shifting rocks.

“
Looking on
the bright side, it’s loose,” he said.

Bright side,
indeed. The thing could cave in, burying them alive.

“
On the other
hand,” he went on, “I can’t tell how far the
blockage extends.”

If she had to go
back the whole long, suffocating way she’d come, she’d go
mad.

“
The ancients
dug into rock using primitive tools,” she said. “Surely
we can make a way through loose rabble, using our hands and our
knives?”

“
We can try,”
he said. “But it could take a very long time, and it might be
more densely packed farther on. Are you sure you don’t want to
turn back?”

“
I have the
greatest confidence that they’ll be waiting for us,” she
said.

They would kill
him.
Kill the man first
, one of the men had said.
Once he is
dead, she will give us no trouble
.

But others said the
Englishman was more valuable alive: they could hold him for ransom or
make him into a eunuch and sell him as a slave. Someone brought up
the difficulties of finding a suitable buyer; another pointed out how
much easier it was to dispose of a corpse than to conceal a large,
ferocious Englishman. And so on.

They had haggled
about Mr. Carsington’s life as they might have haggled over the
price of a pipe bowl.

She would not let
him fall into their hands.

“
If I squeeze
up alongside you,” she said, “I can help move the debris
out of the way. We’ve a better chance using two pairs of
hands.”

And if they were
buried alive, she’d be close to him at the end at least.

“
Say no more,
m’dear,” he said. “You had me convinced the instant
you suggested squeezing your magnificent body alongside mine.”

“
You’re
impossible,” she said. “I’m filthy. And I smell.”

“
Me, too,”
he said cheerfully. “Yet you offered anyway. I can’t
decide whether you’re desperately brave or desperately
infatuated. Perhaps both.”

She squeezed up,
forcing him to draw aside. “When we get out of this, if we get
out of this, I shall box your ears,” she said.

“
We’ll
get out of it,” he said.

“
Stop
talking,” she said. “Start digging.”

RUPERT STOPPED
THINKING, too, and started pulling rocks out of the way. As in the
tomb they’d escaped, the debris was mostly chunks of rubble. It
might have been far worse, he told himself. The collapse must have
happened fairly recently. It was not packed down. It wasn’t
sand. As soon as he shifted some of the rubble out of the way, he saw
the tunnel was of wider dimensions here than previously. They must be
near the end.

He said nothing of
his hopes, though, but worked silently and steadily with her* hip to
hip, he tackling one side, she the other. His mind worked, too,
reviewing these last hours, this day that seemed to compass a
lifetime: the sandstorm, his fear and rage about her, the
lovemaking—ah, that was well worth remembering—her
passion, her courage.

Daphne.

It was one of those
Greek names. A goddess? A nymph?

“
Which one
was Daphne?” he said.

She paused in her
work. He felt rather than saw her rub her face. “Which one
what?” she said.

“
In the Greek
myths. Which one was she?”

“
The daughter
of the river god. She’s the one who turned into a laurel tree
to escape Apollo.”

“
Ah, yes, now
I remember. Those Greek females were always doing that sort of thing.
Turning into trees, flowers, echoes. Excessive, I always thought.
What’s wrong with ‘I have a headache’? And what
sort of missish creature runs away from Apollo, anyway? Wasn’t
he one of the good-looking ones?”

“
I always
thought she was a fool,” Daphne muttered. “Apollo, of all
gods. But there’s no rhyme or reason to those myths. You have
one woman accepting the attentions of a swan, another of a bull. On
the other hand, there’s… Mr. Carsington, what’s
that smell?”

“
I was Rupert
before,” he complained. “Why am I Mr. Carsington now? Is
it my fault our escape route’s caved in? In any case, if I
smell worse than before, it’s on account of the digging and the
fact that this place must be close to ninety degr—” Then
he caught it: the distinctive odor of long-dead Egyptian.

It was very strong,
stronger than anything he’d encountered before.

He dragged away
stones faster now, despite the revulsion and dread.

The smell grew
stronger still.

But the way was
clear. He reached ahead, into emptiness. He set his hand down.
Something cracked under it.

“
I think
we’re at the end,” he said.

He felt her move
beside him, advancing into the space ahead.

“
It
definitely smells like a tomb,” she said.

“
I don’t
suppose you have any candle left,” he said. ‘The floor
seems to be… rather crowded.“

He heard rustling.
“I’ve a stub in my girdle,” she said. “But I
can’t find my tinderbox.”

He found his, and
after several failures succeeded in lighting the bit of candle.

It did not produce
much light. There was enough, though, to show him they’d
entered a sepulchral chamber whose floor was covered with broken
mummies.

HE MADE DAPHNE keep
the candle lit until they’d found the opening to the shaft.

He didn’t
want to step on the mummies, he said.

They were hard
not
to step on. The sepulchral chamber had housed a large family. They’d
been torn apart, limbs and skulls strewn about the floor. The search
for treasure must have occurred fairly recently, Daphne guessed.
Either that or someone else had tramped through here not long ago,
because mummy dust still hung in the air. It clogged the nostrils and
scratched the eyes.

But rock dust
already coated her nose and eyes, providing a degree of insulation
from the mummies’ emanations.

At any rate, they
didn’t linger.

Thanks to recent
excavations and plundering, the way out was clear, and it was a short
way out. This tomb wasn’t as deep as the one they’d left.
Once they were away from dismembered mummies and well clear of the
shaft, they put out the candle.

Moonlight showed
the entrance not many yards distant. They hurried that way, past
crudely hewn walls bare of decoration.

At the entrance
they paused.

In Egypt the moon
seemed to cast a deeper, more illuminating glow than it did in
England. They looked out.