The last fell, it was clear, on deaf ears—the ears of Suzi, at any rate.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Suzi is coming to Luxor.”
S uzi was stupider than I had believed, or else dangerously confident of her powers of seduction. If I had been in her shoes I’d have begun wondering about Schmidt. She had had sense enough to assure him of her complete trust, and she had promised to stay away from us while she was in Luxor. I didn’t believe that promise. It wouldn’t be difficult to follow us unobtrusively; Egyptian dress, for men and women both, involves long flapping garments and a variety of concealing headgear. And most men sport beards. Useful things, beards. Suzi was tall enough to pass for a man.
Feisal had declared his intention of heading for the West Bank the next morning to join the search for Ali. After a somewhat acrimonious discussion we decided to join him. Most of the acrimony came from John, who pointed out that we would only be in the way, since we knew nothing about the terrain and weren’t in fit condition to climb around the cliffs. Schmidt took this personally and started loping around the sitting room flexing his muscles.
I didn’t argue with him. I understood why he wanted to go; action, any kind of action, was better than sitting around stewing and speculating. He even agreed to skip breakfast and head out at sunrise, so we’d have several hours before the heat got too bad.
If Schmidt was going, I was going too. I thought John might try to talk me out of it, but he didn’t. Having lost the argument with Schmidt, he retired to our room in high dudgeon (and John’s dudgeons are extremely high), leaving me to work out the final details. When I joined him he was already tucked up in bed, reading. He put the book down and held out one elegant, expressive hand. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.
It would have been childish to hold a grudge. Besides, the sofa in the sitting room was only five and a half feet long.
S chmidt rousted us out at 6:00 A.M. There was coffee. There was also a heap of square white boxes, the hotel’s packed lunch offering. Schmidt delved into one of them as we left the room, and finished a banana before we emerged from the hotel. He had arranged for a car the night before, tactfully refusing Feisal’s offer of his Jeep. Schmidt doesn’t care for Jeeps, especially the ones that are often in the repair shop. This vehicle was a small van, with plenty of room for us and the lunch boxes. It takes longer to cross the Nile by means of the bridge instead of taking a boat, but Schmidt isn’t crazy about gangplanks either, especially the type used by the launches, which are planks about six inches wide. They don’t usually wobble, but they look as if they might. Schmidt had been a good sport about the gangplanks the day before, so we tacitly agreed to indulge him this time.
Up front with the driver, Schmidt kept up a running monologue of commentary to which I did not listen. The rest of us didn’t talk much. I assumed that John and Feisal, like me, were preoccupied with the ensuing arrivals of a couple of people we didn’t want to see. Suzi wasn’t answering her phone. Ashraf had ordered Feisal to wait for his call instead of trying to reach him. According to Feisal, Ashraf was not in a good mood early in the morning. It struck me as a very civilized attitude, generally speaking, but I would have given a great deal to be assured that Ashraf had Saida under control. Too damn many people were coming to Luxor. I felt like a nanny in charge of undisciplined children, or a guard single-handedly trying to control a prison break.
The bridge was a grandiose affair, with ornamental statues and posters with enormous portraits of Mubarak. Once on the West Bank, the van headed north, past irrigation canals filled with reeds and garbage. Traffic included carts pulled by morose donkeys, bicycles and motorbikes, people riding morose donkeys, and the occasional tourist bus. Schmidt passed a hard-boiled egg back to me.
“Eat, eat, Vicky. You must keep up your strength for the task ahead.”
It turned out to be excellent advice.
Feisal’s squad were waiting for us at a predesignated spot, north of the causeway that led from the road to Hatshepsut’s temple of Deir el Bahri. The temple is one of the most popular tourist spots on the West Bank, but it was still early, and tourists were not yet in evidence.
Feisal gathered the group round him and began talking and gesturing. It appeared to be a group of volunteers rather than an official squad; clothing ranged from the black uniforms of the security police to jeans and T-shirts, to the standard galabiyas and head cloths; ages ranged from graybeards to kids who could have been as young as ten. He finished with a final wave of his arm, and the men started off in various directions. Two of the youngsters squatted down on the ground, waiting for further orders.
“Might one inquire as to your plan?” John asked. “Supposing you have one.”
“I can’t think of any good reason why I should explain to you,” Feisal said.
John raised one eyebrow. Feisal’s emphatic black brows drew together like small thunderclouds. I had a feeling this was going to be a difficult day, in more ways than one. Feisal was drawn tight as a bowstring, hoping not to find what he feared to find, and John had been in a filthy mood for days.
“Now, now, boys, play nicely,” I said.
“I am playing nicely,” Feisal growled. “All things considered. As it happens, I do have a plan, which would take too long to explain even if you had the vaguest notion of what I was talking about. You three will be with me. Don’t wander off.”
He inspected us with a critical eye. I’d seen Feisal under pressure, but never in command, so to speak; he was in his element now, on his own turf, and I had to fight an impulse to stand at attention and salute. I passed inspection; I had had sense enough to wear sturdy, low-heeled shoes and loose clothing, and even a hat. John, hatless and lounging, rated a curt “If you end up with sunstroke, don’t expect us to carry you.”
Feisal snatched a bottle of water from Schmidt, who was trying to insert it into a water-bottle-shaped bag hung on a hook attached to his belt. There were more hooks and tabs all over his vest, one of those khaki-colored garments with approximately a hundred pockets. All the pockets bulged. Most of the tabs were in use—camera, flashlight, Swiss Army knife, compass, and the magnifying glass, among other objects too numerous to mention.
“Don’t load yourself down,” Feisal ordered. “Yusuf and Ahman will carry the food and water. Hand over that magnifying glass.”
Schmidt clutched it protectively. “Will they give it back?”
Feisal replied with another question. “Do you want to set your pants on fire?”
Schmidt gave the magnifying glass to one of the boys, whose grin did not augur well for the return of same, and we set out.
Don’t expect specific details; most of the time I had no idea where I was or where I’d been, much less where I was going. Once we had left the temple and its surroundings behind, there were few conspicuous landmarks, only acres of bare brown sandy ground, undulating indiscriminately, backed by ridges of equally bare cliff. Tracks of paler color rambled here and there, up and down. It was the most indeterminate landscape I had ever seen; I couldn’t imagine how a search party could operate efficiently. We went up low hills and down them, stopping every now and then to look down into a hole or crevice. The air was still cool, and so clear you could make out the forms of some of the other searchers, who had fanned out from the starting point. The sun had lifted over the hills of Luxor; pale sunlight spread out before us, brightening the western cliffs.
The farther we went, the tougher the going became. The sun rose higher and the slope became steeper. Even with sunglasses the glare was hard on the eyes. Heaps of loose scree, ranging in size from pebbles to good-sized rocks, had been rolled down by wind and water, piling up at the base of the cliffs and sliding down the hillside. The other searchers were no longer in sight, but every now and then we encountered a local villager on business of his own; more and more frequently we were forced to circumnavigate piles of rock or declivities of varying depths. When we stopped and passed round the water bottles, Schmidt lowered himself carefully onto a boulder. Glancing at his flushed face, Feisal said, “Rest for a few minutes. It’s all uphill from here on.”