briefly over her book. Though small, it would take up valuable space. She took out a bag of dried dates and pushed it hard in.
I may have ridden a quarter of a mile before I fell off. Mine was a bigger and nastier beast than the one Lucas had tied me to. Rather than swear myself blue in the face, I suppose I should have been surprised I got that far.
‘Should I take off the saddle so His Magnificence can ride on his belly?’ the Mistress sneered. She wheeled her own camel round with the merest touch on its reins.
I glanced back to see if anyone was still watching us from the station. We were alone. ‘Where I come from,’ I groaned, ‘we ride horses. These things are wholly different.’ This was true – though I might have given the impression that I was very much better on horseback.
‘Oh, my poor little stray.’ She laughed. ‘Such duties I must assume for your welfare!’ She made a clucking noise, and her own camel immediately knelt. She swung off the saddle and began showing me the basics of riding a camel.
‘Remember,’ she finished as I climbed on for the fourth time, ‘don’t overcompensate for the motion. And do try not to pull hard on the reins. Camels are more intelligent than horses. They don’t appreciate instructions that go beyond the polite request. Now, let us be moving, my blonde barbarian from the West. We have much ground to cover if we are to have any element of surprise.’
Once you overcome the queasiness from the motion, riding a camel isn’t so bad. Just as we reached the limit of the black land, and as the road swung definitely west, we turned off to the south. For a while, there was the same scrubby, rocky terrain that I’ve already described. Then this merged insensibly into the desert proper. I thought of how much water we’d had packed for us on the camels, and felt nervous to be heading straight into this burning waste again. But the Mistress seemed to know exactly where she was going, and seemed – or so I thought from ten yards behind her – to be thoroughly pleased with herself.
Chapter 52
We rode on through the day. Until late in the afternoon, the sun beat down savagely. The camels pressed on across the firm sands, indifferent to the heat. I lost all track of time and fell into a kind of waking doze. I was conscious enough to keep myself on the camel, but not enough to feel worse than moderate discomfort. By now, I thought, it would be out that I’d left Alexandria, though not how or in what precise direction. The Mistress had asked the night before why I should trust her to help get Martin back. I hadn’t asked. I wouldn’t ask. But to have just the two of us, moving at whatever speed through this boundless desert, on our way to challenge a conspiracy that had come close to taking Alexandria from the Empire – and might yet succeed with Egypt – in the flashes when my thoughts moved in this direction, I was glad not to be fully awake.
At last, the sun lost its power as it sank low on our right, and the rocks on the desert floor threw longer and longer shadows.
‘We shall rest tonight over there,’ the Mistress called back.
I looked up and followed her pointed finger ahead to our left. How I hadn’t noticed the temple surprised me once I’d seen it. Built of sandstone, it was the same colour, near enough, as the desert, and the air all about was growing dark. But it was a gigantic structure. It was hard to get its proper scale out here in the middle of nowhere. But it must have been a couple of hundred feet high and five or six times that in length. At the centre of the colonnade that made up the whole of the front elevation, two colossal statues of seated kings or gods towered above the whole structure and framed the entrance.
Once you get off the black land, which is needed for growing food, Egypt is full of these things. The native kings of every generation competed with each other across thousands of years to heap up piles of sandstone more solid and more elaborate than any other. The Ptolemies had joined in the competition as often as they needed to draw notice from the fact of Greek domination. Even the early emperors had made the occasional gesture. Since the abolition of the Old Faith, of course, the temples had all been shut – excepting, that is, the temple at Philae in the south that I had closed. Some of them had been cut up into monasteries. Most had been abandoned. That doesn’t mean they were empty. The less fanatical desert hermits needed somewhere to live. There were wild animals and the rural poor if the floods completely swept their homes away. For months now, I’d been reading complaints to Nicetas about gangs of bandits and runaway slaves who were terrorising the countryside from these places.
‘Are we going inside?’ I asked.
‘Do you propose that we spend the night in the open?’ she replied. ‘You have been once in the desert. You will surely have noticed how cold it can get at night. Or are you thinking of the ghosts and other spirits that are said to haunt the temples of the formerly established religion of this country?’
That wasn’t a challenge I was inclined to refuse. I slid off the kneeling camel to get a light going. I found myself writhing and crying out on the ground. I’d noticed on the saddle how much I ached. Once I was off, my arse felt like I’d been in some brothel game gone wrong.
The Mistress stood over me, laughing cruelly. ‘Poor little Alaric!’ she said in mock sympathy. ‘A fine, young barbarian from the West, sent to put the corrupted Greeks and Egyptians of this land into order, and how sore his bottom must be from the look on his face! Lie on this,’ she added, spreading a blanket on the ground. ‘You’ll feel a little better by and by. But don’t wriggle so on the ground. You will only get sand inside your clothes. And that might bring you out in a rash.’
Burning with shame and annoyance, I made myself sit up. The Mistress turned away and took out the horn lanterns we’d got earlier from the station. She turned immediately back to me with both of them lit. Sore as I was, I had almost to bite my tongue not to ask the obvious question.
‘If you can possibly bring yourself to walk a few steps, shall we go in?’ she asked.
I ground my teeth and stood up. We led our camels through the gateway into what turned out to be the first of the courtyards. Much of the temple, indeed, turned out to be courtyards of various kinds. There was this outer courtyard. Through another massive gateway was an inner courtyard. There were smaller courtyards as well – or these were large rooms from which the roofs had at some time been removed. The covered spaces took up about a third of the total area. Most of them smelled damp; it does rain in the desert, and the rain does collect where no sun ever shines. Most had been used at various times, and put to various uses. For the moment, all that I looked into were empty. I think we looked in every part of the complex. This said, it was very large, and the light was going.
It was hard to see how much of the original colour remained in the fading light. But I could see the reliefs that covered every wall of the courtyards. Every inner wall was covered with paintings in the same style, though the damp had brought down most of the plaster from the walls. Inside or out, it was all in the standard native style: giant kings killing midgety foes, or offering pots and other objects to various gods with animal heads or green faces. Inscriptions in the old picture writing covered every patch of wall not taken up by the reliefs.
It really is hard to look at all this stuff without disgust. What I’d said to Lucas about his old civilisation I really did believe. Having read so much by the Greeks about the grandeur and antiquity of the Egyptians, I’d been shocked in Alexandria at the crude ugliness of their arts. I’d now seen enough outside Alexandria to be impressed by the scale of some of their architecture. But that broken-down Greek building just off the road to Canopus was worth more than all this stuff taken together. With her approving nods as she wandered about inspecting the reliefs, the Mistress appeared to think otherwise. But given her choice of reading matter, I had no respect for her taste. Still, I hadn’t put myself into her hands on account of her judgement as a critic.
‘Can you read Egyptian?’ I asked.
She looked away from an inscription made up more than usually of bugs and crouching women.
‘Do you know how this temple was built?’ she asked. ‘Do you see how these columns are in sections? They were once covered in plaster to hide their method of erection. But the plaster is long gone, and the method of erection is plain to see. Tens of thousands of workers toiled through the flood season to raise the outer walls. Then the column bases were laid out, and the first sections of the columns set on top. Sand was then brought in to fill the whole area. With every new level of columns, the level of the sand was raised. That is how the massive stone blocks of the roof were set in place. Once building was over, the sand was evacuated. Can you conceive anything more simple and more elegant?’
