Free The Deceit by Tom Knox Page B

fought the desire to compare her feisty beauty to his wife’s, or even his dead daughter – would she have looked like this? He banished the thought and continued, ‘You don’t need a calculator to do the equations. Let’s say Egyptians died at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand a year, which is about right for a population of three million on average, with a life expectancy of twenty or so. Take a hundred and fifty thousand deaths a year and multiply it by more than three thousand years and you get … at least four hundred and fifty million dead. That is to say,
half a billion mummies
. Some estimates go even higher.’ He pointed at the western cliffs, behind which the sun was reluctantly declining. ‘Basically, when you walk on Egyptian soil, you are walking on the dust of the dead.’
    Lopez looked up. ‘Eww.’
    Harper laughed. ‘Yes. Maybe I won’t mention the way we have used human and animal mummies in the past: as fertiliser, medicine, machine oil, pigment and fuel.’
    ‘Medicine?’
    ‘OK, we’re done, guys.’ Harper liked to end the day with a question hanging in the air. Politely he dismissed the tiny study group, who seemed just a bit too keen to get back to their rented apartments and have a clandestine beer. But then he shrugged. So what? Good for them. They were young.
    Ryan’s walk home was agreeable in the cooling twilight: this was his favourite hour of the day. Boys played football under ragged, sun-bleached posters of a long-deposed president. Little girls skipped happily next to their mothers, carrying wicker shopping baskets way too big for their tiny hands; their mothers were shrouded entirely in black niqabs.
    And of course the old men with the white
keffiyehs
were smoking their
shisha
pipes outside the dusty tea-house. One or two raised a hand or an eyebrow in greeting, as Ryan keyed his latch. But then he saw an even more familiar face. It was Hassan, sitting outside on the terrace.
    Ryan waved hello. ‘Hassan.
Ahlan!
I’ll be down in a minute.’
    His apartment was welcomingly cool and dark. As he splashed water on his face, Ryan considered Hassan. Their revolving lives.
    There was a time when Hassan Elgammal had been Ryan’s assistant: a keen young student aiding the rising young American Egyptologist. Now, fifteen years later, Hassan was in charge of all Egyptian antiquities in the Abydos region, and he was therefore, by a distance, Ryan’s superior.
    Ryan didn’t much care about this inversion in their roles. Ambition had left him when his wife had died in childbirth. It had literally flown his soul, like the living spirit – the
ka
– that fled the corpse of an ancient Egyptian when they died. And when he had finally given up his Egyptological career altogether, and taken on the charity job, he had felt a sincere moral relief.
    His employers – the Abydos Project – were dedicated to saving Egyptian antiquities, such as the Abydos temple complex, from flooding and decay. This meant that Ryan spent his days giving something
back
to Egyptians, rather than always taking stuff away, as Westerners had done for centuries. That was a good feeling.
    And Ryan also enjoyed the sheer physical labour: he often spent entire days down there in the Oseirion with the Egyptian workers, rebuilding walls, shifting rubble, digging new drainage canals; toiling in the Egyptian sun, like a mindless slave building a pyramid. Then in the evening he quenched a mighty thirst with sweet hibiscus juice. And he slept soundly. And didn’t dream. And the days went by. And the years went by.
    Towelling his hands dry, Ryan descended the stairs, opened the door, and took a seat besides Hassan. His friend’s affable face was grave, yet also excited. ‘They found him, Ryan.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘A goatherd found the body yesterday. Your old tutor Sassoon. In the desert, north of Sohag.’
    Ryan blinked. Emotion surged.
    Hassan added, ‘And they say he was found with a bag. Of