The Visitors Read Free Page B

hot if you insist on gymnastics. Try sitting down.’
    ‘May I climb a pyramid before lunch?’
    ‘Don’t be fresh, Frances. That’s not funny and no, you may not. Neither before lunch, nor after it. It’s vandalism, as you very well know. Now sit down and eat your sandwiches. I’ll test you on your hieroglyphs when you’ve finished. Did you learn the six I set you?’
    ‘Kind of.’
    ‘Kind of won’t do. Accuracy is all. Helen, is that confounded picnic ready or not? This was a damn-fool idea – I’m due back in Cairo in an hour… ’
    Their voices faded; they withdrew out of sight behind the palm trees. I was wondering dreamily if they too were apparitions, when Miss Mack, followed by Hassan, rejoined me. The table was unfolded, a cloth spread upon it; baskets were opened, and the bounty of a Shepheard’s packed lunch was revealed. Cold roast quails and a pilaff; sweet quince pastries, dates and greengages. Miss Mack and I ate in state at the folding table, with plates and knives and forks and linen napkins; Hassan, who, at Miss Mack’s insistence, shared this plenty, squatted on the ground. He had brought with him some flat Egyptian bread, which he unwrapped from a cloth bundle. He then shinned up the Sphinx’s foot, placed the bread carefully in full sun on the paw-knuckles, allowed it to warm through, and shinned down again. Explaining that his wife had made it for him, he offered it to us to share. Miss Mack froze: seeing I was about to accept some, she shook her head at me.
    ‘Excellent bread,’ Hassan said, somewhat mournfully: I felt he was used to such offerings being refused. ‘ Shamsi , you see? Sun bread. You will like it – that is sure.’
    ‘Indeed we would, Hassan,’ Miss Mack said firmly. ‘But my friend Lucy has been ill, you see, so we have to be very careful what we eat. That is tremendously kind, but we have so much already, and we wouldn’t dream of depriving you.’
    Hassan gave up with melancholy grace. He seemed saddened – I hoped not affronted. I scraped at my plate, pushing the food back and forth into little piles. I could eat very little. The meal took an age. We were still scarcely halfway through when I heard voices, then a car engine. The acrobat girl was departing. I watched her disappear in a shimmer of light and a cloud of dust – and she couldn’t have been an apparition since Miss Mack also registered the exodus.
    ‘Automobiles,’ she remarked, with a frown. ‘At the pyramids! Some people have no sense of respect. They might remember – this is a holy place. It’s a burial ground.’
    We inspected the burial ground again when lunch was finally finished. Miss Mack was reinvigorated, determined to evoke some spark. All three pyramids and no escaping them: kingdoms, dynasties, reigns; probable building methods; alignment with compass points and stars; number of pharaonic wives and daughters buried in adjoining necropolis… The sun was now directly overhead. I squinted at the wives’ section of the necropolis. It was only partly excavated, and the sands were encroaching on its rough jumble of stones. Any decoration or inscriptions they might once have had, had been long scoured and obliterated by millennia of desert storms.
    Wandering away, I leaned over one of the burial pits. Miss Mack, reading from her guidebook, had informed me it was an unknown princess’s tomb, stocked with wine, fruit, and grain to sustain her in the afterlife. Now it was about ten feet deep – a dazzle of debris. An emerald-green lizard darted for a wall crevice. A faint breeze brushed my skin. I watched the sands shiver beneath my feet – and realised that this burial place was not deserted after all: moving in the shadows below me was a girl. She was about my own age, thin, wiry and alert. I could see she was trying to escape the pit. She made a series of nervous runs at its encircling walls, as if meaning to climb or jump them. She advanced on its boundaries, then backed off