The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (28 page)

“Brian! Brian!”

Again it came, more intimately, that sweet, uncanny crying of his name.

“Brian! Brian!”

Making for the moon-white angle of the great ruin, Desmond set out at a rapid pace. The woman, whoever she was, must be approaching by the path which skirted the temple—approaching from the valley below El Kurn, the Valley of the Queens.

He had almost gained the corner, wherefrom he could command a clear view of the path, when suddenly he pulled up. The icy finger of superstition touched him.

Who, or what, could be coming from the Tombs of the Queens at that hour of night? Breathing checked, muscles tensed, he stood listening.

Not a footfall could be heard, the very insects were still.

Deliberately, putting forth a conscious effort, he took the six remaining paces to the corner of the temple enclosure. No living thing was visible. Again a horrific tingling crept all over his skin and into his scalp. The opinions of the unknown stretched over him, and he stood in the shadow of fear.

“Is any one there?” he cried.

He shrank from the sound of his own voice, for it had a sinister and unfamiliar ring. The voice of the Thebaid answered him—the voice of the silence where altars were, of the valley where queens lie buried.

Panic threatened him, but he grimly attacked the ghostly menace, and conquered. His natural courage returning, he paced slowly forward along the silvery road that stretched to the gorge in the mountain. He stopped.

“My God!” he cried aloud. “What is the matter with me? What does it all mean?”

The moon-bathed landscape was swimming around him. A deadly nausea asserted itself. He had never swooned in his life, but he knew that he was about to do so now.

He turned, and began to stagger back to the tent.

* * *

Music aroused him—a dim chanting. Wearily he opened his eyes. Reflection was difficult, memory defied him; but he seemed to recall that at some time he had returned to the tent.

Yet he found himself in the temple!

That it
was
the Temple of Medinet Habu in which he stood, he was assured, although, magically, its character had changed. Yes—this was the Treasure Room, the scene of his excavation; but it was
intact!
The roof had been replaced. The apartment was filled with ancient Egyptian furniture. The air was heavy with a strange scent.

He was crouching like a spy, concealed behind a sort of screen. It was of carven wood, not unlike the
mushrebiyeh
screens of later Arab days; and through its many interstices he had a perfect view of the apartment.

Two women and a Nubian eunuch were in the room. The women were dressed, as Desmond had never seen living women attired in his life; yet he knew and recognised every ornament, every garment. The exquisite enamel jewellery, the scanty robes upon their slender ivory bodies, belonged to the Eighteenth Dynasty!

One, the small and more slender of the two, was of royal blood. This he knew by her dress. She spoke urgently to the other, whose face Desmond had not seen.

“Be quick, Uarda! I distrust him! Even how he may be spying upon us!”

The woman addressed turned—and he beheld Mme. de Medicis!

“Give me tile casket!” she said.

The first speaker took up a beautifully carven box of ebony and ivory, and placed it in the hands of the woman whom she had addressed as Uarda. Perhaps the judgment of Paris, the immortal shepherd, might have awarded the golden apple to the royal lady; but in the eyes of Desmond, watching, half stupefied, the movements of these two lovely Egyptians, incontestably the fairer was she whom he knew, in life, as Mme. de Medicis. He watched her greedily.

Somewhere in the great temple palace voices were chanting, sweetly.

The Nubian took the casket from the hands of Uarda and descended into a pit revealed by the displacement of a massive couch. Desmond, watching the women as they bent anxiously over the cavity, fell forward.

“Desmond Effendi!”

Desmond raised himself. Ali Mahmoud was supporting him.

He looked out from the tent to where rosy morn tinted the rugged lines of Medinet Habu.

“Effendi! I warned you! I warned you! And now you are stricken with fever!”

Desmond got to his feet. Clutching the tall Egyptian, he stood swaying for a moment, striving—wildly, at first, but with ever increasing self-control—to assemble the facts—the real facts—of the night.

Fever? No! In a flash of intuition the truth came to him. While he and Ali Mahmoud laboured through the previous day, some one—
some one
—had found and doctored his whisky. Even now he could recall the queer tang of it, which, in the tumult of mind that had been his at the time, he had ignored.

He had been drugged! But his dream—his dream of the Princess Taia and of her confidante?

His strength was returning with his clarity of mind. He shook off the supporting arm of Ali Mahmoud. He uttered a loud cry, and went staggering madly through the mighty courts of the temple.

His excavation below the floor of the sanctuary had been completed during the night. It opened, as he had conjectured, into a small square chamber—which was empty!

* * *

Paul van Kuyper stepped from the small boat to the deck of the dahabeah, bowing low to his beautiful hostess. Even in the desert, Mynheer van Kuyper contrived to preserve the manners, and, in a modified degree, the costume, of a fashionable boulevard lounger. As he stood there in the blaze of noonday sun, he was as truly representative of one school of archaeology as Brian Desmond, Working barefoot with his Arabs at Medinet Habu, was representative of another.

Van Kuyper’s brown eyes flamed with admiration as he bent over the little white hand of Mme. de Medicis. She was seemingly unaffected by the great heat; she looked as cool as a morning rose. Hers were the toilet secrets of Diane de Poitiers, and the love lore of Thais.

Attended by four waiters from the Winter Palace, they lunched, and talked of many things; but always Van Kuyper’s brown eyes spoke of passion. Yet when at last they were alone, with coffee such as may only be tasted in the East, and cigarettes of a sort that never leave Egypt except to go to Moscow:

“Quick—tell me!” he whispered, and glanced furtively around him. “What occurred last night at Medinet Habu?”

“How should I know what occurred,
monsieur?
”

Languidly Mme. de Medicis swept her black lashes upward, and languidly lowered them again, veiling the amber eyes.

“Ah!” Van Kuyper laughed. “But we understand each other! We are old allies, it is not so? When I learned from Abdul, who had been watching Desmond’s camp since the work began, that the shaft was an old one, I followed the arranged plan. On Tuesday night he was nearly shot by Ali Mahmoud—Desmond’s headman; but he brought great news! You received my letter?”

Madame
inclined her head languidly.

“I have it in my bureau.”

“Good! You had worked wonders thus far. Nearly a week ago the camp at Medinet Habu became deserted at night. Even the
ghafir
fled. How you worked upon the fear of the natives I do not know, but you succeeded. Only Ali Mahmoud and Desmond remained. As I told you, I took a double precaution. Desmond’s buried bottle is a byword among the excavators. While he completed the clearing of the shift, Abdul dealt with this matter!”

“Excellent!”
madame
murmured.

“Your reports of Desmond’s progress reached me daily, and last night, I acted. Abdul and Hassan es Suk were watching. Ali Mahmoud came to you here with a note. It was genius!”

“It was merely coincidence.”

“What? You did not contrive it? No matter—it was good. Shortly afterward, Desmond succumbed to the drug, and Hassan came to fetch me.”

“So?”
madame
murmured, dropped her half-smoked cigarette into the little brass tray.

Van Kuyper glanced at her uneasily, but proceeded:

“We opened the door. It was stiff work; but what we found, you know. I merely peeped at the contents of the casket, but
madame
—he seized and kissed her hand—“the cheque for a thousand pounds which reached you recently was not too much! Sail for Cairo in the morning. There will certainly be the usual official inquiry. I saw the casket safely on board your boat, and returned to my camp. Transport has been arranged to Alexandria, where my patron has a yacht lying.”

“So?”
madame
murmured again, and delicately lighted a fresh cigarette. “Those Arabs are such liars!”

Paul van Kuyper bent forward, resting his manicured hands upon his knees. He had detected a coldness in the attitude of the beautiful woman. Always she was difficult, but today she was incomprehensible.

“Your meaning,
madame
?” he asked, and sued the glance of the amber eyes, but was foiled by lashes imperiously drooped.

“My meaning?” she returned. “It is so simple! What is this casket which you say you placed in my boat? And why do you refer so strangely to a cheque paid to me for a card debt?”

Van Kuyper came to his feet as if shot out of a trap. Every vestige of colour had fled from his flabby cheeks. A small table, with the coffee cups upon it, crashed over upon the carpet. He sought to speak, but she forestalled him.

“Your incorruptible Abdul is probably on his way to Persia,” she said scornfully. “Why do you try to weave romances for
me?
You seem to suggest that I am here as your ally in some scheme to smuggle relics out of Egypt. I have a most damaging letter from you touching this plot!”

“By God!” Van Kuyper burst out hoarsely. “The police shall search this boat from stem to stem!”

“They will find your correspondence, my friend!” said Mme. de Medicis, and rose, queenly, sweeping the speaker with a glance of high disdain.

* * *

In the long, low cabin of the dahabeah
Nitocris
, Mme. de Medicis reclined upon a divan, its mattress gay with many silken cushions. Her flawless figure was draped wondrously in a robe conceived in Deccan gauzes. A cloud of delicate green caressed the pure modelling of her form, which shimmered alluringly as through the phantom haze of a Fayum sunset quickened to greater tenderness by an ultimate veil like the blush in the heart of a tulip. Keats’s
Lamia
was not more magically lovely. The long, amber eyes were soft as enchanted lagoons; the shadows of the curved lashes rested upon flower-fresh cheeks.

Silver incense burners filled the air with the sensuous perfume of ambergris.

Brian Desmond entered, peering eagerly into the shadows cast by dim mosque lanterns swung from the ceiling. A casket of ebony and ivory, wrought with ancient Egyptian astronomical subjects, stood in the centre of the apartment. Beside it, heaped upon the carpet, lay ornaments richly chased and inlaid with strange gems.

“The ritual jewels!” he whispered. “The treasure of Princess Taia!”

“‘Such things belong neither to the Egyptian government nor to any purse-proud collector,”’ she whispered. The words were his own. “They belong to you!”

From the deck above to that perfumed cabin below stole the sound of a softly beaten
darabukkeh
and the mournful sweetness of a reed pipe. The tender-voiced singer of ghazals began, so softly that the music seemed indeed a ravishing sigh, to render the love plaint of Hafiz.

* * *

“If a cup of wine is spilled, and I have spilled it, what of that?”

There was no one in sight in the narrow street. Nothing stirred its shadows; black shadows in contrast with blazing sunlight which touched the gallery of a tumbledown minaret rising above the squalor.

“Blessing and peace… O, Apostle of God.”

A
mueddin
had just come out onto the gallery, chanting the
selam
as his kind have done on every Friday of the week for generations. It was half an hour before noon.

Blessing and peace! Shaun Bantry smiled a wry smile. To call for blessing and peace in a world which ignored blessings and had forgotten what peace meant rang the wrong bell. He paused at the door of the mosque, a modern, shabby, neglected, little place, and looked in. A very old beggar, blind in one eye, was entering. Otherwise, inhabitants of this quarter of Port Said remained undisturbed by the call of the Prophet.

What had become of the man wearing that unusual white coat with the faint pink stripe? Definitely, his car, an antique French sedan, had come this way. He pushed on, trying to ignore the mingled smells from the gutters.

Perhaps the description of Theo Leidler’s attire which he had received from the porter at the Eastern Exchange Hotel that morning had been wrong. In chasing the man in a pink-striped coat he might be chasing a myth. In that one glimpse of him in the car Shaun hadn’t had a chance to see his features.

He was wasting precious time. Ten minutes had elapsed since he lost sight of his quarry. A turning just beyond the mosque showed him an even narrower and, if possible, dirtier street. A little way along he saw two or three tables outside a native café. And in front of the tables, so as to fill up the rest of the thoroughfare, a grey sedan waited!