The Bride Box

FOUR

They set off early, when the sun was poking up above the horizon, huge and blood-red, like an enormous orange. It shot up with what seemed to Mahmoud, who was not one for sunrises, incredible speed. The redness on the sand disappeared and was replaced by a soothing grey, which soon become less soothing — indeed, so bright and glaring that it hurt the eyes. The morning, which had been pleasantly cool, warmed up. The heat began to press down on his shoulders. Soon after, the first drops of sweat started to fall on the patient neck of the donkey, and at about the same time he began to discover new muscles in his thighs and new sources of pain.

After a while, he realized that the sand had given way to cultivated fields of durra. The green was more soothing on the eye. But then the durra grew taller and he was soon riding through great banks of it, which trapped the heat and attracted the insects. They came in swarms and lay black on the neck of the donkey, on the thighs of his trousers and on his arms. He had to keep brushing them from his face. It was sheer misery. As he had known it would be!

He told himself it was only for a short time, that he would arrest the men and then get back to Cairo. And never, never leave Cairo again! Much less return to Upper Egypt.

The clerk urged his donkey up alongside Mahmoud.

‘Effendi, they will kill me!’

‘No, they won’t.

‘They will see my face and know me.’

‘Cover your face, then.’

‘They will still know me,’ said the clerk despondently.

‘I will find a way that you can see and not be seen.’

Happier, but not happy, the clerk fell back.

Ahead of him, through the sand, he saw a large white house.

He stopped and told the clerk to stay out of sight. Then he went on. There was a bell-rope by the door. He pulled. After some minutes a man came to the door.

‘The Pasha? He’s not here.’

‘Very well, then. Take me to the one in charge.’

The servant slipped away and sometime later another man appeared. He looked at Mahmoud suspiciously and disdainfully.

‘The Pasha is not at home.’

‘No? That is a pity, for there are questions I have to put to him.’

‘You will have to put them in Cairo, then.’

Mahmoud was irked. This was no way to receive a stranger. And most unusual.

‘Perhaps you can help me.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Mahmoud, tired after his long ride, boiled over. ‘This is the Parquet. I come on the Khedive’s business. Summon all the servants!’

The man hesitated. ‘The Pasha …’

‘I am here in the Pasha’s interest. I have spoken with the Pasha.’

‘They are in the fields …’

‘Fetch them from the fields, then.’

‘It will take some time.’

‘I will wait. But I do not propose to wait long. If they are not here shortly I will put you in the caracol.’

The man flinched. ‘They will be here,’ he said.

‘In the yard. I want them in the yard.’

‘In the yard,’ repeated the man.

He did not offer to take Mahmoud into the house and Mahmoud was annoyed about this, too. It was rank discourtesy.

After some time a man came and took his donkey. Mahmoud followed him round the side of the house into a large yard where there was a drinking trough. The donkey bent to it greedily.

Another servant, an older man, came out of the house bringing a jug of lemonade.

‘It is a hot day, Effendi,’ he said. ‘Take some refreshment.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mahmoud. ‘I had begun to think that manners had been forgotten in the south.’

‘Don’t bother about him,’ the man said, jerking his head after his departed superior. ‘He’s always like that. Is it true you wish to speak to the men?’

Mahmoud nodded.

‘They won’t be sorry if it means that they can finish earlier. What was it that you wished to see them about?’

Mahmoud considered; then, thinking there was nothing to be lost, said: ‘It concerns a bride box.’

‘A bride box!’

‘One that was put on the train.’

‘Effendi, I think you must be mistaken. There are no bride boxes here. Nor are there likely to be.’ He stopped short, as if he had been about to say something he shouldn’t. ‘There are no young girls here of the right age,’ he said. But that was not, Mahmoud was sure, what he had been going to say. ‘Why a bride box, Effendi?’ he asked.

‘One that was put on the train. And sent to the Pasha.’

‘Ah. Now I understand. But, Effendi, you are still mistaken. No bride box has been sent from here. I would have known if there had been.’

‘The men who put it on the train said they were from here.’

The servant shook his head. ‘Effendi, I still find that hard to understand. Men do not come and go from here just as they wish. It means a day out of the fields and Ismail would not let that happen.’

‘Ismail is the man in charge?’

‘You have seen what he is like.’

‘Nevertheless, that is what the men said. They even gave the Pasha’s name, Ali Maher.’

‘Ali Maher is certainly the Pasha here. But why, Effendi, would he be sending a box to himself? In Cairo?’

‘That is what I am trying to find out.’

‘Perhaps he intends to get married again? And his eye has alighted on some girl? But if that is so, I do not know of it. And surely I would …’

‘There are questions to be asked,’ said Mahmoud.

‘Evidently,’ said the servant, still shaking his head.

Men began to assemble in the yard. Mahmoud went for a walk around the outhouses. There were quite a few of them. The estate was obviously a large one.

In one of the buildings stood some carts, used for bringing in the durra. One had a half-awning which covered most of the cart. It would do.

He went back round the house to where he had left the clerk. He found him sitting in the shade beneath a bush.

‘Come with me,’ he said and then, choosing his moment when there was no one to see, led him round to the cart with the half-awning and told him to get inside. Part of the awning was rolled back and the clerk could hide under it.

Mahmoud went back into the yard. ‘Are the men all here?’ he asked.

Ismail nodded sourly.

‘Right, I will speak to them.’

He looked at the men. There were about twenty of them, all in short galabeyas, showing their arms and legs burnt black by the sun. ‘I need something to stand on.’

He beckoned to two of the men and then went into the outhouse. ‘This one will do,’ he said.

The men took the cart with the half-awning and the clerk round into the yard.

Mahmoud climbed up on to the cart. ‘Which of you has been to the station at Denderah in the past fortnight?’

They looked at him blankly.

Mahmoud sighed and made them file past him. ‘Can you see them?’ he whispered to the clerk.

‘Effendi, I can see them,’ the clerk whispered back. ‘But the men who came to the station are not amongst them!’

‘Look once more!’

He made the men file past again, but with the same result. ‘Effendi, I do not see them,’ said the clerk worriedly. ‘I really don’t!’

‘Are all the men here?’ Mahmoud asked Ismail.

‘They are all here, Effendi.’

Mahmoud got down from the cart and walked over to the men. ‘Are you all here?’ he asked. ‘No one is missing?’

The men looked at each other. ‘No one is missing, Effendi. We are all here.’

Mahmoud was nonplussed. He had counted on the clerk being able to identify them. He made them file past once more but again drew a blank. He knew he would have to let them go.

He saw Ismail looking at him with an air of triumph, and made one last attempt. ‘None of you has been to Denderah recently?’

They looked at him blankly.

‘It concerns a bride box,’ he said.

There was a flicker of interest.

‘A bride box which was taken to the station in Denderah and put on the train.’

He was losing them. Bride boxes were within their experience; trains, however …

‘And sent to the Pasha,’ he tried desperately.

That was interesting. It was even funny. A bride box! For the Pasha!

But it didn’t register particularly with the men as it should have.

‘They can go now?’ asked Ismail, almost insolently.

Mahmoud made one last try. ‘Have any of you a bride box in your house?’

One or two nodded.

‘And still have? None have been sent away lately?’

They shook their heads.

‘Effendi,’ said Ismail, ‘there is another consideration. To take a bride box to the station at Denderah would require a cart. A cart could come only from here and no cart could be moved without my permission. My permission has not been given. Nor has it been sought. You are asking at the wrong place; asking the wrong people.’

Mahmoud had to let them go. He got four of them to take the cart he had borrowed back to the outhouse. The men went away and shortly afterwards he saw the clerk, standing beside the barn, much relieved. He left the yard behind some women returning to the kitchen who had been interested in the spectacle and could hear them talking.

‘Bride box!’ one of them sighed. ‘I had a bride box once. Ah, those were the days!’

‘Mine was green and orange,’ said another woman wistfully. ‘And blue for the sky.’

‘Mine had birds.’

‘And mine had fish.’

‘I had a bird catching a fish!’

‘Beautiful!’

‘Ah, those were the days.’

The party broke up.

‘Are you coming in?’

‘No, I’ve got to get back to the other house.’

‘Other house?’ Mahmoud, overhearing, asked them.

They turned to look at him.

‘Yes, the other house.’

‘What house is this?’

‘It is where the Pasha’s wife lives now that she does not live with him.’

‘Another house? Does she have servants?’

‘Of course.’

‘Servants of her own? They would not have been with the others?’

‘You asked only for men on the estate.’

‘Why was I not told?’ said Mahmoud furiously.

He knew, really. This was Ismail’s revenge.

‘There is this one, which the Pasha uses when he is here. The other is for his wife.’

‘And the son.’

‘There is a son?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

There was a ripple of amusement.

‘She’s the master there!’ someone said.

Behind the temple were the mountains, pink and as if floating in the air, with satiny sand drifts heaped in the rifts in the rock and lines of soft blue shadow in the more remote crevices. Where the mountain fell back a long vista of desert was revealed.

As Owen approached, by a raised fragmented causeway which linked the temple with some paint down by the river, he found himself in a kind of derelict area, with low half-opened mounds, broken bits of sculptural capitals and mutilated statues buried in tall clumps of rank grass: but also little damaged buildings which might once have been workshops and a vast number of semi-subterranean tanks with black tarry patches inside them which showed that once they had contained nitre.

Egypt is the land of nitre. The Nile mud is impregnated with it. It lies in talc-like flakes upon the rocks, upon the fallen statues. The nitre has been worked for centuries. It is washed and crystallized in the tanks and made workable. In the days of the Ottomans it began to be used for gunpowder.

He stood for a moment in front of the temple, looking up at the great, heavy bulk of stonework. And then he had a moment of shock, for it appeared to be moving! He looked again and saw that it was a swarm of bees, flooding out from crevices in the stonework.

He went into the temple. In the half-light he saw great columns stretching away into the distance. He was in a huge hall, with a line of columns on either side. As his eyes grew used to the darkness he saw that their tops were carved into images of birds: hawks, ibises, bird-faced humans, the traditional figures of the old gods. Here and there was a representation of a cow with horns.

Between the columns, on the roof, were paintings. The paintings were of the holy scarab beetle and some curious winged globes. Looking at them more closely he saw that they were in patterns. Gradually he realized that the patterns were astronomical. He was looking at the famous signs of the Zodiac: Leila’s ‘marks of the giants’.

‘So this is where you came with Soraya,’ he said to Selim, whom he had brought with him.

Selim shrugged. ‘It was a place to go, where we would not be seen,’ he said.

‘And Leila came, too?’

‘She stood outside to warn us if anyone should be coming. She wouldn’t go in. She said it was a bad place and smelt of the dead. However, she agreed to keep watch for us.’

‘And did anyone come?’

‘Once, as I told you. One day the slaver came.’

‘How did you know he was the slaver?’

Selim shrugged. ‘They had spoken of him in the village. I knew he was the man.’

‘What sort of man was he?’

‘A Sudani.’

‘You are sure?’

‘I am sure. I heard him speak.’

‘This was at the temple?’

‘Yes.’

‘You heard them speaking together?’

‘Yes, we were hiding behind the pillars. They had come suddenly and Leila had had no time to warn us.’

‘So you heard what they were saying?’

‘A little, yes. We dared not go too close.’

‘What were they talking about?’

‘There was talk of deliveries.’

‘Slaves?’

‘I do not think so. For they spoke of a consignment and where it could be stored. The slaver said that the temple was a good place because it was big and had many rooms, in some of which, deep inside, things could be stowed and no one would find them. People were afraid of the temple and did not like to go in. The white man said that it sounded ideal, and the slaver said that he would show him a place. Then they both went off deeper into the temple and Soraya said we should go now that there was the chance. Particularly as Leila was sure she had been seen.’

‘So you went and did not see the place they had gone to?’

‘No, but later I went back on my own, when there was no one there. I did not like going; I was afraid I would lose my way and never get out. Still, I went.’

‘And did you find the place?’

‘Yes, I am almost sure. It was in a room at the back of the temple. It was off another one so well concealed that unless you knew it was there and where to look, you would not find it. But I had a torch with me and saw marks in the sand where they had been, and I followed the marks. And when I got there I knew it was the place because I found an old box and in it I found a shell.’

‘A trocchee shell?’

‘No, no. A gun shell. A bullet. One they use in rifles.’

‘That is very interesting. Could you show it to me?’

‘I have it at home.’

‘I would like to see it. And perhaps the place where it was left.’

When they came out again into the sunlight Owen’s eye was caught by a flash from one of the nitre tanks. For a moment he thought there must be some water in it, but then he realized it must be from the tar. Odd, he thought, that the connection between the temple and warfare should be so long-standing and still continuing.

Now that he had emerged victorious, Ismail, the head of the Pasha’s household, was prepared to be conciliatory. He sent a servant with them to show them off the estate. They went by a different route from the one they had come by.

‘It is quicker,’ said the servant.

The path led through a field of berseem, food stuff for the animals of the household, and then through thin acacia shrub. Through the scrub they occasionally caught a glimpse of the Nile. Then they turned away and headed inland. A road forked off, and on it a dead donkey was lying, buzzing with flies.

‘It is to attract the jackals,’ said the servant. ‘For the master to shoot.’

‘The master? He is here, then?’

‘The young master.’

‘Ah, the son.’

‘The son, yes. He stays with his mother.’

‘And he shoots jackals?’

‘What else is there for him to do?’

The servant stopped when they got to the fork. ‘Keep on this way,’ he said, ‘and it will take you back to Denderah.’

‘And the other path?’

‘Leads you to the other house.’

‘Where the Pasha’s lady lives?’

‘That is so, yes.’

The servant turned back and they continued on their way.

For only a little way. Then they stopped, and after a moment or two turned back.

‘What are we doing?’ said the clerk. ‘That is the way to Denderah!’

‘We will go somewhere else first.’

This arm of the fork was more overgrown and they had to push past scrub branches which dangled across the path.

There was the sudden crack of a rifle shot and a branch in front of them jumped suddenly. The clerk hurled himself to the ground.

Mahmoud stepped back behind a tree. ‘Stop shooting!’ he shouted. ‘There are people here!’

There was no reply. And then a man pushed out of the bushes ahead of them. ‘Frightfully sorry!’ he said, speaking in English, not in Arabic. He came forward, one hand held up before him apologetically.

He was an Egyptian, however, not English, a man in his mid-twenties. His hair was already beginning to recede, leaving the top front of his head bald and shiny, and there seemed something odd about him.

He was immaculately dressed in a newly laundered white shirt and newly pressed trousers. ‘Frightfully sorry!’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t know you were there. We don’t get many visitors. And, anyway,’ he said in a puzzled voice, ‘I don’t know how I came to miss it! I don’t usually. I think I may have caught a glimpse of you out of the corner of my eye and been distracted. Yes, that would be it! I don’t see how I could have missed it otherwise. I saw it quite clearly. A big fat one perched on a bough. An easy shot. Frightfully sorry! I hope you’re all right?’

‘No damage done,’ said Mahmoud.

‘Oh, good!’ He looked down at the clerk still lying on the ground. ‘And what about you?’

The clerk rose sheepishly.

‘You look all right. Not a scratch, as far as I can see. But, I say, you must come back into the house! Have a drink or something.’

He went up to the door, which had remained closed, and hammered on it. ‘Yussef! Osman! Wake up!’

The door opened slowly.

‘Come on, Yussef, it’s only me. Except that I’ve brought some visitors. This is …?’

‘Mahmoud el Zaki. The Parquet.’

‘Mr el Zaki. Nearly shot him. And this is his man. Take him into the kitchen and give him some water. Cold water, that’s the thing! On a hot day like this. Especially if you’ve been shot at.’

The clerk, a little hesitantly, followed behind.

‘Don’t worry, you’re all right now. No shooting inside the house, that’s the rule. She’s very strict about it. No shooting inside the house! Mother!’ he called. ‘We have visitors. Come and meet Mr el Zaki!’

He led Mahmoud into what was obviously a reception room, the exact replica of one you would find in a rich man’s house in Cairo, with a marble floor which sloped slightly down to a little indoor pool in which a fountain was playing. At one end of this room was a traditional dais, spread with leather cushions. He sat, or rather lay, on the dais and indicated that Mahmoud should lie beside him.

Then he jumped up to greet an elderly lady who had come into the room.

‘This is my mother. You must meet my mother!’

She came forward. She was dressed in the conventional burka but her veil was pushed aside. She had sharp, intelligent eyes.

‘This is Mr el Zaki, Mother. He has come to visit us.’

‘I heard shots,’ she said.

‘That was me. I nearly shot Mr el Zaki.’

‘It was as well that you didn’t.’

‘He came by the back path, you see, and I was not expecting him.’

‘Even so, you should be more careful.’

‘Sorry, Mother! I saw a great fat pigeon-’

‘Where is the gun now? Have you put it away properly?’

‘Left it at the door.’

‘Unloaded?’

‘Yes, Mother. Unloaded. I made sure.’

She nodded. ‘Good.’ Then she turned to Mahmoud. ‘And what brings you here, Mr el Zaki?’

‘I am from the Parquet.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘The Parquet! This is an honour. It is not often that Cairo remembers us.’

‘I am investigating a case.’

‘Down here? I thought the Parquet never stepped out of Cairo!’

‘We do occasionally. When the case is important.’

‘So this one must be.’

‘Yes, it is. It concerns something sent to your husband.’

‘A bomb, I hope?’

‘Not quite, no. But equally shocking. A bride box.’

‘Are you insane?’

‘No. It was sent from Denderah. By people from this estate.’

‘Now I know you are insane! A bride box? To my husband? I would have thought he’d had enough of marriage. And should it be going to him anyway? I would have thought it would be sent to her. Whoever she is.’

‘The thing is, you see, the bride box was not empty.’

‘Well, no, it wouldn’t be.’

‘It contained the body of a young girl.’

The woman’s hand flew up to her throat.

‘A young girl?’

‘Whom I think you know,’ Mahmoud added.