Review of Science Fiction and in Cemetery Dance Magazine . Terry’s home page can be found at www.terrydowling.com.
T ERRY D OWLING
The Shaddowwes Box
O N THE FOURTH night the dream remained the same: our train ran along the banks of the Nile, its locomotive fired by the mummies of cats and kings. There was Akhmet, yet again, insisting that it was true, leaning forward, bright-eyed, gesturing wildly in our hard-won compartment. A new tomb-pit, shallow but vast, had been unearthed in the sands south of Cairo, he was telling me as if he never had before, hundreds of mummified cats to one side, dozens of human pauper mummies to the other.
“There had to be kings among them, Mr. Salteri,” Akhmet said, eyes flashing with the fine joke of it, exactly as they had on the momentous day itself six years earlier when I had made the fateful journey to the Wadi Hatas. “It’s what the reinterment commissions did back in the New Kingdom. They feared looters, professional tombaroli such as you, so they moved the royal mummies, hid them. This field had a small precinct to the west. Probably special mummies there, possibly nobles, queens, even kings! But so many mummies. Too many, you understand? What to do? Sell to the Americans? They pay well and take everything, but there is no time. The excavation supervisors search for amulets, jewelry, then dispose of the remains with the railway factors before the authorities arrive. Everything goes into the fireboxes. Whoosh! We ride on the burning dead.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, those words again, then as now, largely because Akhmet wanted me to, and once again fancying our own late great Queen Victoria, or even the recently crowned King, giving their all like this, blazing away to help complete the run south from Saqqara.
“Very common now, Mr. Salteri. The moumia burn like sticks. It’s the pitch.”
“Akhmet, Mr. Minchin is aboard, you say?”
“Of course, effendi. Even now he will be making his way here. The carriages are crowded. A few moments more.”
And as if the words were indeed a cue, the door opened and Charles Minchin eased into the compartment, short and florid, grandly moustachioed, looking impossibly crisp in his suntans and solar topee.
In the dream I stood, now as then, allowing that any archaeologist this well turned out might be a stickler for the niceties. “Mr. Minchin, it’s a pleasure.” We shook hands.
“Lucas Salteri, the pleasure is mine. I’ve long admired your work.”
I had to control my smile. To what did he refer? My most recent work had been looting Etruscan tombs outside Veii and Norschia in western Italy. Before that ten years as a West End stage magician, and eight as an engineer before that. My career echoed the great Giovanni Belzoni’s in so many ways. “Our arrangement stands?”
“Of course. We have camels waiting. We will be at the site by early afternoon.”
“But between stations—?”
He consulted his timepiece. “The train will stop in a few minutes. It has been arranged.”
And indeed the train did begin slowing.
Ten minutes later we stood by the Nile amidst a cluster of date palms, watching swifts and martins darting over the fields of maize and sorghum as the train disappeared into the south. Ten more and we were mounted, and Minchin’s three fellahin assistants—accomplices they would soon prove to be, Akhmet, Moussa, and Sayeed, nondescript then but made vivid by subsequent events and the dream’s repetition—had finished loading the pack camels and we were heading off into the western desert.
And that was where the dream ended, always ended, even in the earliest hours of this new momentous day, not at the tomb itself, not when Minchin played his hand, not at the betrayal.
H ERBERT K RAY ARRIVED almost precisely at three o’clock. The bells of St. Paul’s across the Thames had just finished sounding when he knocked at the door, and I heard Mrs. Danvers, my only human servant, hurrying to
T ERRY D OWLING
The Shaddowwes Box
O N THE FOURTH night the dream remained the same: our train ran along the banks of the Nile, its locomotive fired by the mummies of cats and kings. There was Akhmet, yet again, insisting that it was true, leaning forward, bright-eyed, gesturing wildly in our hard-won compartment. A new tomb-pit, shallow but vast, had been unearthed in the sands south of Cairo, he was telling me as if he never had before, hundreds of mummified cats to one side, dozens of human pauper mummies to the other.
“There had to be kings among them, Mr. Salteri,” Akhmet said, eyes flashing with the fine joke of it, exactly as they had on the momentous day itself six years earlier when I had made the fateful journey to the Wadi Hatas. “It’s what the reinterment commissions did back in the New Kingdom. They feared looters, professional tombaroli such as you, so they moved the royal mummies, hid them. This field had a small precinct to the west. Probably special mummies there, possibly nobles, queens, even kings! But so many mummies. Too many, you understand? What to do? Sell to the Americans? They pay well and take everything, but there is no time. The excavation supervisors search for amulets, jewelry, then dispose of the remains with the railway factors before the authorities arrive. Everything goes into the fireboxes. Whoosh! We ride on the burning dead.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, those words again, then as now, largely because Akhmet wanted me to, and once again fancying our own late great Queen Victoria, or even the recently crowned King, giving their all like this, blazing away to help complete the run south from Saqqara.
“Very common now, Mr. Salteri. The moumia burn like sticks. It’s the pitch.”
“Akhmet, Mr. Minchin is aboard, you say?”
“Of course, effendi. Even now he will be making his way here. The carriages are crowded. A few moments more.”
And as if the words were indeed a cue, the door opened and Charles Minchin eased into the compartment, short and florid, grandly moustachioed, looking impossibly crisp in his suntans and solar topee.
In the dream I stood, now as then, allowing that any archaeologist this well turned out might be a stickler for the niceties. “Mr. Minchin, it’s a pleasure.” We shook hands.
“Lucas Salteri, the pleasure is mine. I’ve long admired your work.”
I had to control my smile. To what did he refer? My most recent work had been looting Etruscan tombs outside Veii and Norschia in western Italy. Before that ten years as a West End stage magician, and eight as an engineer before that. My career echoed the great Giovanni Belzoni’s in so many ways. “Our arrangement stands?”
“Of course. We have camels waiting. We will be at the site by early afternoon.”
“But between stations—?”
He consulted his timepiece. “The train will stop in a few minutes. It has been arranged.”
And indeed the train did begin slowing.
Ten minutes later we stood by the Nile amidst a cluster of date palms, watching swifts and martins darting over the fields of maize and sorghum as the train disappeared into the south. Ten more and we were mounted, and Minchin’s three fellahin assistants—accomplices they would soon prove to be, Akhmet, Moussa, and Sayeed, nondescript then but made vivid by subsequent events and the dream’s repetition—had finished loading the pack camels and we were heading off into the western desert.
And that was where the dream ended, always ended, even in the earliest hours of this new momentous day, not at the tomb itself, not when Minchin played his hand, not at the betrayal.
H ERBERT K RAY ARRIVED almost precisely at three o’clock. The bells of St. Paul’s across the Thames had just finished sounding when he knocked at the door, and I heard Mrs. Danvers, my only human servant, hurrying to
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