The Salt Road Read Free Page A

a dig in Egypt in the fifties he barely had the price of a meal. She, however, came of aristocratic French stock, with a smart house in the first Paris arrondissement and a small chateau in the Lot. They travelled together all over the world, from one ancient site to another. They visited the excavated ziggurat at Dur Untash and joined for a while Kelso’s dig at Bethel. They saw the Neolithic plastered skulls unearthed at Jericho and marvelled over the rose-red city at Petra. They saw Imhotep’s stepped pyramid and the city of the dead at Saqqara, spent time walking amid the Roman ruins of Volubilis and visiting the ancient capital of the Hoggar at Abalessa. They were, as they loved to tell me, academic nomads, always on the trail of knowledge. And then I came along and put a stop to their joyous quests.
    My father got work as a researcher just as the new medium of television was taking off; soon every family in Britain was basing its evening life around its television set. Not long after, he got a lucky break and ended up presenting an hour-long segment when the regular presenter fell ill. He was good at it; he was an immediate hit with the public, with his slightly old-fashioned academic air. He was handsome without being overly distracting, a man whom women enjoyed watching and men would listen to, and infectiously enthusiastic about his favourite subjects. He was the David Attenborough of archaeology: he made history entertaining, and the British have always loved history – they lay claim to so much of it. On the screen he radiated bonhomie and a generous delight in sharing his passion. I remember him on one programme horrifying a British Museum curator by trying on the Sutton Hoo helmet and getting it stuck on the crown of his head. Ancient peoples were smaller than we are today, he spluttered, struggling to wrestle it off, leaving his dark hair standing up in tufts. People loved him for gaffes like this: they made him human and accessible, and by association brought the subjects of his programmes closer to them. It was exceedingly odd to see him still walking and talking on television even after he’d left us, as if nothing had happened. The worst of it was that you never knew where he’d pop up next: he was a public institution, a national treasure. It was easy enough to avoid programmes about history and archaeology, but turn over to watch a charity appeal for some godforsaken corner of Africa and you’d suddenly be caught out as he appeared, running a hand through his increasingly mad hair and making an impassioned plea for funds.
    ‘Come on,’ Eve said, leaping to her feet and grabbing up her handbag. ‘We’re going to the house.’ She saw my face and added quickly, ‘We can make an assessment in preparation for the sale. Instructions for the agents, stuff to be cleared, that sort of thing. You’re going to have to do it some time or another, so why not now, while I’m here? Bit of moral support, remember?’
    I stared past her shoulder into the rain-sodden courtyard, where a pair of cats were squaring up to one another, one on the wall, the other on top of the shed. The one on the shed roof had its ears laid flat to its skull; the tabby on the wall looked ready to spring. I walked quickly to the window and tapped on the glass. Both cats turned to stare at me, their yellow gazes inimical. The cat on the shed stood up and stretched its back legs, then its front legs, and leapt neatly down on to the patio. The tabby started unconcernedly to lick its paws. Humans: what did they know?
    Abruptly, I remembered the cat we had owned in my youth – Max, short for Doctor Maximus ibn Arabi, a lithe beast with huge ears and a sleek, sandy-brown coat like a fennec fox – and how he would lie stretched out in my sandpit at the bottom of the garden, blinking at the sun as if he had located himself in a tiny yet infinite desert. At the age of eight I asked my father why our cat had such a strange name. My