“Under her chair,” said Gargery grimly. “As usual. Madam, what is all this about another cat? We don’t need one. We don’t need that one,” he added, with a baleful look at Horus.
“It is only a little cat,” said Sennia. “It is sick, but Aunt Nefret is going to make it well.”
Her bright, confident face made my heart sink. What she expected, in her innocent fashion, might be impossible, even for Nefret. Emerson cleared his throat. “Er – Sennia, the cat was – er – very sick. It may not…”
“There they are!” Sennia was out of her chair again, running to them. She threw her arms round Nefret’s waist. “Why didn’t you bring the kitty, Aunt Nefret?”
“It needs to rest,” Nefret said, after the obligatory grunt of expelled breath. “But it is better. Much better.”
Emerson’s face displayed his relief. He is such a sentimentalist about children, he could not bear to see Sennia disappointed. He did not even object when the entire conversation centered on the cat, for Sennia would talk of nothing else. She demanded a detailed diagnosis.
“Malnutrition and dehydration,” Nefret said. “With the attendant infections. The little creature has quite a will to live, though. The first thing it did was stagger to the food we put out for it and gulp it down. Then it tried to climb up Ramses’s leg.”
Sennia laughed. “Did it scratch, Ramses?”
“Not really. Its claws aren’t any longer than your eyelashes.”
“It thinks Ramses is its mother,” Nefret said. Sennia chortled, and Nefret added, “He sat up most of the night holding it.”
“It needed to be kept warm,” Ramses mumbled, looking embarrassed. “And it wouldn’t stay in its basket.”
“I am going to see it now,” Sennia announced. “You want to see it, too, don’t you, Gargery?”
Gargery tried to think of something that would express his feelings to the rest of us without betraying them to Sennia. He failed. “Yes,” he said resignedly.
The kitten served one useful purpose. I did not want to take Sennia with us on our first day at the dig, and she would have insisted on coming but for the distraction. Nefret offered to give her her first lesson in bones after the patient had been inspected, and Sennia promised to leave it alone the rest of the day. A convalescent does not fare well with an enthusiastic child poking at it, however good the child’s motives, and I took it for granted that the creature was not housebroken.
Naturally Ramses stayed with them, and Sennia kindly agreed to let Jumana join her biology lesson. They were to bring the horses and meet us later at Deir el Medina, where Selim and Daoud were waiting for us with the men they had hired.
Few tourists visit the site, which is tucked into a little valley in the hills of the West Bank. The only attraction for them is the Ptolemaic temple at the north end of the valley. It is a nice enough temple in its way, but it is too late in date to interest us. The people who do go there follow the route that includes more popular tourist attractions, from Deir el Bahri to Medinet Habu.
There is another path, however, that ascends one of the hills enclosing the settlement and continues at a considerable elevation, passing above the temples of Deir el Bahri on its way to the Place of Truth, as the Valley of the Kings was called in ancient times. We had often followed part of this route, climbing the slope behind the temple and going on to the Valley – or, as we had done two days earlier, striking off on that hair-raising climb over the plateau.
It was not the easiest way of getting to Deir el Medina, but Emerson proposed we follow it that first morning. He wanted to see what condition the southern section of the path was in, he explained. I was reasonably sure it was in exactly the same condition it had been the previous year and for countless years before, but I did not demur. When we reached the top of the hill above Deir el Bahri we stopped for a moment, as Abdullah and I had so often done.
I knew that Emerson was also thinking of Abdullah as we stood looking out across the desert and the cultivation. The air was clear that morning; we could see the miniature shapes of the temples on the East Bank, with the eastern cliffs behind them. However, his only audible expression of emotion was a loud clearing of his throat.
Instead of turning south toward Deir el Medina, Emerson set off along the trail that led to the Valley. He had not gone far before he stopped with a grunt of satisfaction. I could not see what had occasioned the satisfaction; he was looking at what appeared to be a row of tumbled stones, half-buried in sand.
“Emerson, what are you doing?” I demanded, as he knelt and began scraping away sand. “Stop that at once. You aren’t even wearing gloves.”
Emerson rose, not because I had told him to, but because he had had second thoughts. “They will have to be properly excavated.”
“Those rocks? Why?”
“Good Gad, Peabody, what has become of your trained excavator’s eye? That’s a wall, or what is left of one, and there are others hereabouts. I noticed them some time ago, but saw no reason to investigate them.”
“I don’t see any reason to do it now.”
“Think about it. It’s quite a distance from the Valley to Deir el Medina. Wouldn’t it be logical for a gang of workmen to camp here, close to the job, part of the time? A few smallish huts, such as these appear to be, would not be difficult to construct.”
His eyes sparkled. Emerson is one of the few excavators in the business who derives as much pleasure from the humble minutiae of archaeology as from impressive temples and rich tombs. If he was correct, a small bit of the puzzle of the past would be filled in – and he usually was correct about such things.
“Well, my dear, that is very interesting,” I said. “But hadn’t we better be getting on? Nobody is going to bother your – er – huts.”
Emerson tore himself away. The path was well traveled; we met goats and a few Egyptians afoot or on donkey-back. Emerson greeted them by name (except for the goats) but did not stop, though it was clear to me that one or two of the men would have liked to have gossiped a bit. The news of what had happened the day before must be all over the West Bank by now. We had not gone far, however, before we came upon persons of quite a different sort. There were nine of them, six donkey drivers and three people in European dress, and when they hailed us it was impossible to push on past. I recognized the American party we had encountered on board ship and later in Cairo.
Mrs. Albion’s tall, spare frame was clad in garments that were, I supposed, the latest in American notions of sporting attire for ladies. Her linen coat had the fashionable military cut and her skirts were calf-length. Her head was so wrapped in veiling that her features were only a blur. She was sitting sideways on the donkey, her neat boots dangling. A true lady, of course, would rather fall off than ride astride. It probably required two drivers to keep her in the saddle, and the same was true of Mr. Albion, who rolled first from one side and then to the other, with his drivers shoving him back and forth. The process seemed to entertain him quite a lot; he was red-faced with heat and laughter when the little cavalcade halted. The younger man was red, too, but with sunburn, not amusement. He removed his hat and inspected me with cool curiosity.
Emerson, being Emerson, greeted the Egyptians first. “Salaam aleikhum, Ali, Mahmud, Hassan… Good morning, er – um -”
“ Albion,” the gentleman in question supplied, while his son stared curiously at us. “We met on the boat.”
“No, we didn’t,” said Emerson.
Albion chortled. His face turned even redder. “Not for want of effort on my part. Tried to track you down in Cairo, too, but didn’t succeed. Figured we’d run into you sooner or later. How’s the rest of the family?”