In fact not until 1914 did he decide to act, and even then he did so in a roundabout manner.
It was during one of Martyr's weekly visits and Ziwar had just finished reading aloud a footnote on the gentle Persian girl whom Strongbow had loved in his youth for a few weeks, no more, before she was carried away in a cholera epidemic. Ziwar sighed and laid aside his magnifying glass. He licked his lips thoughtfully. After the silence had gone on for several minutes, Martyr shook himself and emerged from his trance.
What is it, Menelik?
That recurring phrase in Strongbow's study, a few weeks, no more. Isn't it extraordinary how such a brief period of time could have come to mean so much to him? Think of the tens of thousands of experiences he had in the course of a haj spread over a lifetime, yet always he comes back to those few weeks. Don't you find it odd in a way?
Yes, said Martyr.
So do I, in a way. But then, time itself is odd. I learned that when I was younger than you, working in tombs. Did you know mummies can grow hairs?
No.
They can. All at once you'll find a fresh hair growing right in the middle of a bald head that's three or four hundred years old. Now that's odd too. By the way, Cairo, how old were you when your great-grandmother died and you first came here?
Twelve.
Yes that's right, and now you're already in your middle thirties. A dragoman then, a dragoman still. What should we make of that? Not stuck in time, are you?
I don't know. I seem to be but I just don't know what else to do.
You're not looking forward to becoming the Clerk of the Acts, are you? To be the senior dragoman in the city in your old age? Is that your ambition?
Certainly not.
I wouldn't think so. I would think you'd want something more meaningful in life than that, and if you do it's about time you got started. When I was your age my name was already famous throughout Europe.
Although of course nobody knew it belonged to me.
But you're Menelik Ziwar.
True. And it's also true that notoriety, known or unknown, is worthless. Perhaps no one will ever hear of you when you decide what it is you want to do. Perhaps that's why you'll be so successful at it.
At what, Menelik? What can I do? What should I do?
Hm, let's give it some thought. But in the meantime could you do me a small favor?
Of course.
It concerns a theory of mine. Recently I've begun to wonder whether there isn't a secret cache of royal mummies somewhere. We made a great deal of progress in the last century but it still seems to me the number of pharaohs discovered to date is just too small. Can you get up to Thebes now and then in the course of your work? Luxor, I mean?
Yes.
Well there's a tomb on the west bank that's being excavated. If you can, take your clients there and poke around near the entrance. At night naturally. Unwitnessed. We don't want to alert anyone.
Naturally.
Yes. Just see if you can find anything that looks like it might be covering up a secret passageway. Frankly I'm sure this theory of mine is correct
In the next few months Cairo Martyr took all his clients to Luxor, to the excavation on the west bank where he said the entranceway to a tomb was especially romantic in the moonlight. There, while squatting and standing and crouching in the entranceway servicing his clients, he dug behind their backs and over their heads but discovered nothing.
Until one night a heavy Italian woman turned her face to the mud brick wall and whispered that she wanted him to mount her from behind, which he did. The woman then redirected him higher according to her pleasure and pushed against the wall with her powerful arms for added thrust, the first outward heaves of her huge thumping buttocks so ferocious Martyr had to grab the wall himself to keep from being thrown backward onto the ground.
He grabbed and his fist went straight through a brick into a hole, around something stiff and straight and thick.
He had his balance now, there was no need for a handhold. As the woman bucked and groaned he removed the object from the hole and gazed at the silver rings and wrappings in the moonlight, at the bracelets of gold and cornelian inlaid with lapis lazuli and light green malachite.
A mummy's arm. Perhaps that of a queen?
Cairo Martyr removed his shirt and carefully wrapped the arm in it. Meanwhile the Italian woman went through four or five howling spasms, shrieked her praise for the mother of God and collapsed on the ground, beginning to snore immediately. Cairo Martyr fixed another brick in the hole he had uncovered and filled the chinks around it.
Had he actually discovered a secret cache of buried pharaohs?
Indeed you have, said Menelik Ziwar, so excited he sat up in his sarcophagus to examine the arm more closely through his magnifying glass, the first time Martyr had seen him rise from his pillows since the old scholar had begun reading Strongbow's study aloud to him fourteen years earlier.
To be exact, continued Ziwar, this belongs to a third-ranked concubine of a pharaoh by the name of Djer. Know him? No? Just as well, rather a drunken dolt. Anyway the history of the tomb is this. It became a shrine to Osiris during the XVIII Dynasty, and since then innumerable people have passed by that brick wall where you found the arm and never suspected it was there. Who was your client by the way?
An Italian woman.
Large and heavy?
Very.
Enormous buttocks?
Yes.
Wanting it in the Mediterranean manner?
Yes.
And with that massive hindside suddenly bucking against you, you had to reach out for support? Your fist smashed through a brick into the hole in the wall? That's how you found the concubine's arm?
Yes.
Menelik Ziwar nodded. He laughed. What a fine headline that would make in an academic journal.
Picture it in impressive type.
In hindside, Mediterranean manner leads to most
Important archeological discovery of twentieth century.
Well I congratulate the heavy Italian woman. She's proved my theory.
She has?
Yes. You see the mummies of Djer and his women have never been found. Now that shrine to Osiris is of no interest to us. What is of interest is that around 1300 B.C. grave-robbing was becoming such a problem that the high priests had to take steps, because without his mummy a pharaoh's not a god, he's nothing. So they gathered up all the mummies they could and carried them off for reinterment to a secret chamber they'd dug across from Thebes, the present home of our missing mummies. That was my theory and now it's been proved correct.
But what was the concubine's arm doing out there all by itself?
Waiting for a heavy Italian woman's thrusts and groans in the moonlight to make history. Despite the precautions taken by the high priests in 1300 B.C., chanting sacred texts while they slaughtered the workmen and so forth, some clever grave-robber must have found out about the new secret chamber.
He was making away with a load of loot when the priests surprised him. He stuffed the concubine's arm into a hole and covered it with a brick, intending to return for it later, but instead he was killed on the spot So the secret was kept and that was that for three millennia, until your heavy Italian woman squarely faced the wall and revealed the truth to us.
Exhausted with excitement, Ziwar sank back on his pillows and crossed the concubine's arm and the magnifying glass on his chest.
Now listen to this. If my calculations are correct there'll be no less than thirty-three pharoahs in that chamber, not to mention their women and servants and cats. In short, the greatest mummy cache of all time.