With an exclamation of relief Victoria struggled to her feet and came towards him. He lifted his head and stared in surprise.
‘Oh please,’ said Victoria. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come.’
He still stared.
‘Who on earth,’ he began. ‘Are you English? But –’
With a spurt of laughter, Victoria cast away the enveloping
‘Of course I’m English,’ she said. ‘And please, can you take me back to Baghdad?’
‘I’m not going to Baghdad. I’ve just come from it. But what on earth are you doing all alone out here in the middle of the desert?’
‘I was kidnapped,’ said Victoria breathlessly. ‘I went to have my hair shampooed and they gave me chloroform. And when I woke up I was in an Arab house in a village over there.’
She gesticulated towards the horizon:
‘In Mandali?’
‘I don’t know its name. I escaped last night. I walked all through the night and then I hid behind this hill in case you were an Enemy.’
Her rescuer was staring at her with a very odd expression on his face. He was a man of about thirty-five, fair-haired, with a somewhat supercilious expression. His speech was academic and precise. He now put on a pair of pince-nez and stared at her through them with an expression of distaste. Victoria realized that this man did not believe a word of what she was saying.
She was immediately moved to furious indignation.
‘It’s perfectly true,’ she said. ‘Every word of it!’
The stranger looked more disbelieving than ever.
‘Very remarkable,’ he said in a cold tone.
Despair seized Victoria. How unfair it was that whilst she could always make a lie sound plausible, in recitals of stark truth she lacked the power to make herself believed. Actual facts she told badly and without conviction.
‘And if you haven’t got anything to drink with you, I shall die of thirst,’ she said. ‘I’m going to die of thirst anyway, if you leave me here and go on without me.’
‘Naturally I shouldn’t dream of doing that,’ said the stranger stiffly. ‘It is most unsuitable for an Englishwoman to be wandering about alone in the wilds. Dear me, your lips are quite cracked…Abdul.’
‘Sahib?’
The driver appeared round the side of the mound.
On receiving instructions in Arabic he ran off towards the car to return shortly with a large Thermos flask and a bakelite cup.
Victoria drank water avidly.
‘Oo!’ she said. ‘That’s better.’
‘My name’s Richard Baker,’ said the Englishman.
Victoria responded.
‘I’m Victoria Jones,’ she said. And then, in an effort to recover lost ground and to replace the disbelief she saw by a respectful attention, she added:
‘Pauncefoot Jones. I’m joining my uncle, Dr Pauncefoot Jones on his excavation.
‘What an extraordinary coincidence,’ said Baker, staring at her surprisedly. ‘I’m on my way to the Dig myself. It’s only about fifteen miles from here. I’m just the right person to have rescued you, aren’t I?’
To say that Victoria was taken aback is to put it mildly. She was completely flabbergasted. So much so that she was quite incapable of saying a word of any kind. Meekly and in silence she followed Richard to the car and got in.
‘I suppose you’re the anthropologist,’ said Richard, as he settled her in the back seat and removed various impedimenta. ‘I heard you were coming out, but I didn’t expect you so early in the season.’
He stood for a moment sorting through various potsherds which he removed from his pockets and which, Victoria now realized, were what he had been picking up from the surface of the mound.
‘Likely looking little Tell,’ he said, gesturing towards the mound. ‘But nothing out of the way on it so far as I can see. Late Assyrian ware mostly – a little Parthian, some quite good ring bases of the Kassite period.’ He smiled as he added, ‘I’m glad to see that in spite of your troubles your archaeological instincts led you to examine a Tell.’
Victoria opened her mouth and then shut it again. The driver let in the clutch and they started off.
What, after all, could she say? True, she would be unmasked as soon as they reached the Expedition House – but it would be infinitely better to be unmasked there and confess penitence for her inventions, than it would be to confess to Mr Richard Baker in the middle of nowhere. The worst they could do to her would be to send her into Baghdad. And, anyway, thought Victoria, incorrigible as ever, perhaps before I get there I shall have thought of something. Her busy imagination got to work forthwith. A lapse of memory? She had travelled out with a girl who had asked her to – no, really, as far as she could see, she would have to make a complete breast of it. But she infinitely preferred making a clean breast of it to Dr Pauncefoot Jones whatever kind of man he was, than to Mr Richard Baker, with his supercilious way of lifting his eyebrows and his obvious disbelief of the exact and true story she had told him.
‘We don’t go right into Mandali,’ said Mr Baker, turning in the front seat. ‘We branch off from the road into the desert about a mile farther on. A bit difficult to hit the exact spot sometimes with no particular landmarks.’
Presently he said something to Abdul and the car turned sharply off the track and made straight for the desert. With no particular landmarks to guide him, as far as Victoria could see, Richard Baker directed Abdul with gestures – the car now to the right – now to the left. Presently Richard gave an exclamation of satisfaction.
‘On the right track now,’ he said.
Victoria could not see any track at all. But presently she did catch sight every now and again of faintly marked tyre tracks.
Once they crossed a slightly more clearly marked track and when they did so, Richard made an exclamation and ordered Abdul to stop.
‘Here’s an interesting sight for you,’ he said to Victoria. ‘Since you’re new to this country you won’t have seen it before.’
Two men were advancing towards the car along the cross track. One man carried a short wooden bench on his back, the other a big wooden object about the size of an upright piano.
Richard hailed them, they greeted him with every sign of pleasure. Richard produced cigarettes and a cheerful party spirit seemed to be developing.
Then Richard turned to her.
‘Fond of the cinema? Then you shall see a performance.’
He spoke to the two men and they smiled with pleasure. They set up the bench and motioned to Victoria and Richard to sit on it. Then they set up the round contrivance on a stand of some kind. It had two eye-holes in it and as she looked at it, Victoria cried:
‘It’s like things on piers.
‘That’s it,’ said Richard. ‘It’s a primitive form of same.’
Victoria applied her eyes to the glass-fronted peephole, one man began slowly to turn a crank or handle, and the other began a monotonous kind of chant.
‘What is he saying?’ Victoria asked.
Richard translated as the sing-song chant continued:
‘Draw near and prepare yourself for much wonder and delight. Prepare to behold the wonders of antiquity.’
A crudely coloured picture of Negroes reaping wheat swam into Victoria ’s gaze.
‘Fellahin in America,’ announced Richard, translating.
Then came:
‘The wife of the great Shah of the Western world,’ and the Empress Eugйnie simpered and fingered a long ringlet. A picture of the King’s Palace in Montenegro, another of the Great Exhibition.
An odd and varied collection of pictures followed each other, all completely unrelated and sometimes
