The Curse by Harold Robbins Page B

she had been a goddess of fertility, which in her mind translated to sex.
    Fuad found the lascivious horseplay between the guests not only offensive to his sense of decency but also juvenile.
    Back in the museum wing, he nodded politely at the two guards who were arguing over a soccer match and went into his office to check the monitors to see if the guards or anyone else had secretly pocketed something while he had stepped out.
    Nothing had been taken and he credited his own doubts about the honest nature of mankind for having never had an item stolen. As important as the security cameras were, anything small enough to be pocketed was housed in locked glass-topped cases.
    The museum was one long gallery, occupying what had originally contained the manor’s armory, military uniforms, and hunting equipment.
    It was an eclectic collection that included several large pieces—a ram’s-headed sphinx from Karnak, the mummified remains of a Twenty-sixth Dynasty high priest in his sarcophagus, a chariot from the Ptolemaic Dynasty—and many smaller pieces, such as weapons, jewelry, amulets like scarabs, gems, stones in the shape of animals, and the like.
    The Radcliff Collection was dwarfed by the Egyptian galleries at the British Museum, New York’s Metropolitan, and the Louvre, but it was unmatched by any private collection in the world.
    How a rich man like Sir Jacob Radcliff had been able to acquire an enormous collection of Egyptian treasures was a reflection of Radcliff’s times and the history of archaeology.
    It was a piece of history that Fuad reflected upon as he hid away in his small museum office and stared blankly at the security monitors. If the Heart of Egypt had been rightfully stored in the Egyptian Museum instead of secreted out of the country by Radcliff, Fatima would be safe now.
    Unlike most of his fellow countrymen who wanted everything ever taken or stolen from Egypt—the incredible collections in the great museums of the world and the countless number of pieces held in private hands—returned to Egypt, Fuad had a sense of history and understood that much of the great treasures of Egyptian antiquity would have been destroyed long ago if the relics hadn’t been stored in museums and with people who could afford to safeguard and preserve them.
    Sir Jacob Radcliff obtained his artifacts by participating in the financing of archaeological digs in countries rich in antiquities and poor in material goods. In countries where artifacts made an eon ago had little meaning to people who grubbed every day for enough to eat, wealthy individuals and museums paid fat fees and fatter bribes for the right to “mine” antiquity sites.
    That Howard Carter had been financed by Lord Carnarvon, Radcliff, and others was well known, but their efforts, leading to the most fabulous find of all—the King Tut treasures—was just one of thousands of times in which people of wealth put up the money to find artifacts and often took half—if not all—of what was found.
    Two famous incidents before the King Tut find were Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy and Lord Elgin’s Marbles, the incredible collection of marble pieces from the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. Those artifacts, probably the greatest left from ancient Greece, now sit in the British Museum in London.
    The process by which Sir Jacob Radcliff built his collection was utilized for a couple of centuries by wealthy foreigners in their efforts to acquire artifacts from Egypt and other poor countries: payments, often in the form of bribes, paid to corrupt officials and at other times to poor governments in need of the funds.
    But wealthy foreigners came late into the game of looting Egypt. The country had been raped and plundered of its antiquities for thousands of years. The Romans did it, the Turks, the French, and the British, with wealthy American, German, and other European museums