The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur. Страница 2

their education at universities in England and the United States, so far

from this very Egypt of theirs. Royan loved the expression "This very

Egypt' that Taita used so often in the scrolls.

She felt a peculiar affinity in so many ways with this ancient Egyptian.

After all, she was his direct descendant.

She was a Coptic Christian, not of the Arab line that had so recently

conquered Egypt, less than fourteen centuries ago. The Arabs were

newcomers in this very Egypt of hers, while her own blood line ran back

to the time of the pharaohs and the great pyramids.

At ten 'clock Royan made coffee for them, heating it on the charcoal

stove that Alia had prepared for them before she went off to her own

family in the villa . They drank the 9 sweet, strong brew from thin cups

that were half-filled with the heavy grounds. While they sipped, they

talked as old friends.

.. For Royan that was their relationship, old friends. She had known

Duraid ever since she had returned from England with her doctorate in

archaeology and won her job with the Department of Antiquities, of which

he was the director.

She had been his assistant when he had opened the tomb in the Valley of

the Nobles, the tomb of Queen Lostris, the tomb that dated from about

1780 BC.

She had shared his disappointment when they had discovered that the tomb

had been robbed in ancient times and all its treasures plundered. All

that remained were the marvelous murals that covered the walls and the

ceilings of the tomb.

It was Royan herself who had been working at the wall behind the plinth

on which the sarcophagus had once stood, photographing the murals, when

a section of the plaster had fallen away to reveal in their niche the

ten alabaster jars. Each of the jars had contained a papyrus scroll.

Every one of them had been written and placed there by Taita, the stave

of the queen.

Since then their lives, Duraid's and her own, seemed to have revolved

around those scraps of papyrus. Although there was some damage and

deterioration, in the main they had survived nearly four thousand years

remarkably intact.

What a fascinating story they contained, of a nation attacked by a

superior enemy, armed with horse and chariot that were still alien to

the Egyptians of that time. Crushed by the Hyksos hordes, the people of

the Nile were forced to flee. Led by their queen, Lostris of the tomb,

they followed the great river southwards almost to its source amongst

the brutal mountains of the Ethiopian highlands.

Here amongst those forbidding mountains, Lostris had entombed the

mummified body of her husband, the Pharaoh Mamose, who had been slain in

battle against the Hyksos.

Long afterwards Queen Lostris had led her people back northwards to this

very Egypt. Armed now with their own horses and chariots, forged into

hard warriors in the African wilderness, they had come storming back

down the cataracts of the great river to challenge once more the Hyksos

invader, and in the end to triumph over him and wrest the double crown

of upper and lower Egypt from his grasp.

It was a story that appealed to every fibre of her being, and that had

fascinated her as they had unravelled each hieroglyph that the old slave

had penned on the papyrus'

It had taken them all these years, working at night here in the villa on

the oasis after their daily routine work at the museum in Cairo was

done, but at last the ten scrolls had been deciphered - all except the

seventh scroll. This was the one that was the enigma, the one which the

author had cloaked in layers of esoteric shorthand and allusions so

obscure that they were unfathomable at this remove of time. Some of the

symbols he used had never figured before in all the thousands of texts

that they had studied in their combined working lives. It was obvious to

them both that Taita had not intended that the scrolls should be read by

any eyes other than those of his beloved queen. These were his last gift

for her to take with her beyond the grave.

It had taken all their combined skills, all their imagination and

ingenuity, but at last they were approaching the conclusion of the task.

There were still many gaps in the translation and many areas where they

were uncertain whether or not they had captured the true meaning, but

they had laid out the bones of the manuscript in such order that they

were able to discern the outline of the creature it represented.

Now Duraid sipped his coffee and shook his head as he had done so often

before. "It frightens me," he said. "The responsibility. What to do with

this knowledge we have gleaned. If it should fall into the wrong hands

He sipped and sighed before he spoke again. "Even if we take it to the

right people, will they believe this material that is nearly four

thousand years old?"

"Why must we bring in others?" Royan asked with an edge of exasperation

in her voice. "Why can we not do alone what has to be done?" At times

like these the differences between them were most apparent. His was the

caution of age, while hers was the impetuosity of youth.

"You do not understand," he said. It always annoyed her when he said

that, when he treated her as the Arabs treated their women in a totally

masculine world. She had known the other world where women demanded and

received the right to be treated as equals. She was a creature caught

between those worlds, the Western world and the Arab world.

Royan's mother was an English woman who had worked at the British

Embassy in Cairo in the troubled times after World War II. She had met

and married Royan's father, who had been a young Egyptian officer on the

staff of Colonel Nasser. It was an unlikely union and had not persisted

into Royan's adolescence.

Her mother had insisted upon returning to England, to her home town of

York, for Royan's birth. She wanted her child to have British

citizenship. After her parents had separated, Royan, again at her

mother's insistence, had been sent back to England for her schooling,

but all her holidays had been spent with her father in Cairo. Her

father's career had prospered exceedingly, and in the end he had

attained ministerial rank in the Mubarak government. Through her love

for him she came to look upon herself as more Egyptian than English.

It was her father who had arranged her marriage to Duraid Al Simma. It

was the last thing that he had done for her before his death. She had

known he was dying at the time, and she had not found it in her heart to

defy him. All her modern training made her want to resist the

old-fashioned Coptic tradition of the arranged marriage, but her

breeding and her family and her Church were against her. She had

acquiesced.

Her marriage to Duraid had not proved as insufferable as she had dreaded

it might be. It might even have been entirely comfortable and satisfying

if she had never been introduced to romantic love. However, there had

been her liaison with David while she was up at university. He had swept

her up in the hurly-burly, in the heady delirium, and, in the end, the

heartache, when he had left her to marry a blonde English rose approved

of by his parents.

She respected and liked Duraid, but sometimes in the night she still

burned for the feel of a body as firm and young as her own on top of

hers.

Duraid was still speaking and she had not been listening to him. She