The Visitors Read Free

In some other century, some other world… Smoke coiled in my brain: I watched the lovely Eugénie dance a graceful if unlikely gavotte on the desert sands with Napoleon Bonaparte; they both turned to bow obeisance to a pharaoh who’d died three thousand years before. This pharaoh was wrapped in a swaddling of death bandages. As I watched, his ka detached itself from his body, turned to beckon us sternly towards the perils of the underworld, then stalked off down the allée ahead. We followed. A bird cried out forlornly from the branches of the acacias. Somewhere in the darkness a jackal howled.
    I crept closer to Miss Mack’s reassuring warmth and bulk. She hesitated, then put a comforting arm around my shoulders. If I fell asleep, I knew what dreams would come. I resisted for as long as I could, but after a brief fight the tiredness and darkness claimed me. Fast as anaesthetic, equally irresistible: I went under within a quarter of a mile.

2
    ‘Lucy, dear – you’re looking exhausted,’ said Miss Mack, later that morning. ‘Perhaps all three pyramids were too ambitious? After all, one pyramid is much like another, and we’ve done Cheops most thoroughly. Maybe we should have our luncheon a little earlier? You’re so pale and washed out. I think I’ll park you by the Sphinx, dear – just for a second while I tell Hassan our change of plan. If you stay in the shade, here behind her left paw… There’s no better place for a picnic than the Sphinx’s paws. Some people favour the tail area, but I cannot agree.’
    I sat down obediently on the camp-stool provided. The pyramids, a dark sapphire when I’d first glimpsed them against the citron of the desert sky at dawn, were now glittering painfully. Groups of camel touts were arguing at a distance; an intrepid male tourist, assisted by Arab guides, was clambering up the Great Pyramid to laughter and cries of encouragement from a group of smartly dressed young Englishwomen standing below. ‘Keep going, Bertie,’ one of them called, her voice carrying clearly across the sand. ‘Nearly there, darling one. Only another eighty thousand feet to go… ’
    ‘The water flask, Lucy,’ Miss Mack said, inspecting me intently. ‘I’ll leave it with you – are you feeling thirsty? You’re very white . Are you sure you’re all right, dear?’
    ‘Truly, I’m fine. I’ll just sit here and read the guidebook.’
    ‘Very well. I’ll be two ticks, and I’ll stay in sight all the time.’
    Miss Mack scurried off across the sand towards the palm trees in whose shade Hassan had laid out a mat and was praying; it was two hundred yards away. Such guardianship! I considered the flask, which I knew contained water that was absolutely safe : Miss Mack had supervised its purification, its boiling, cooling, filtering and bottling – ever-vigilant, she left nothing to chance. I unscrewed and uncorked it, took a swallow of water, felt nauseous at once and spat it out on the ground.
    Nine months previously, walking across fields in Norfolk on a hot perfect May day, my mother and I had stopped to ask for directions and glasses of water at a remote farm. We had been visiting my father’s sister, Aunt Foxe, and exploring the area on the coast still famous as ‘Poppyland’; wandering inland, we’d become lost. The farmer’s wife had brought the glasses of water to us on a tray, and we drank thankfully, sitting in the shade of her apple orchard. The trees were in blossom, hens pecked at the grass: my mother Marianne, revived by our holiday, had lost the careworn look she so often had at home in Cambridge; she looked pretty and young again. ‘This is idyllic, Lucy,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this the most marvellous place to have happened upon? How clever of you to spot it, darling. And isn’t this the best water? How pure it tastes. So cold and refreshing – it must be straight from their well.’
    And so it was – that was established later, when enquiries were made. By then, my