Free The Visitors by Sally Beauman

for months afterwards: case after case of them, in a silent space a hundred yards long. There they lay, bandaged, shrouded, white, peaceable and threatening. At the very end of the gallery, in a special case of their own, were the smaller mummies: children, infants and tiny babies. Frances, whose face had set in an obstinate mask of indifference, reached for my hand, and I clasped it. When we reached the case containing the babies, Helen came to a halt. She had paled, and was fighting back tears.
    ‘Get me out of here, darling,’ she said quietly to her husband. ‘Please – surely you know a way out.’
    Winlock did. All the corridors in that labyrinth of a museum were familiar ground to him; within minutes we had left the stifling hush of the galleries and were outside in the shocking heat of the sun. Across the street, an altercation was taking place, of a kind we often glimpsed: two Arabs were being lazily beaten by Egyptian policemen; a British officer stood watching, aloof and indifferent, his revolver drawn. After a while, in a bored way, he raised the gun skywards and loosed off a shot. The shouts and cries instantly stopped, and everyone scattered. One of the policemen shouted an insult in Arabic as the offenders fled; the officer holstered his gun and strolled off. The museum-pitch beggars who had held back to watch this sideshow then spotted Miss Mack, by now a well-known mark throughout Cairo; without hesitation, they and the antika hawkers moved in.
    Miss Mack scattered baksheesh with her usual abandon, but recoiled when she saw the souvenirs on sale. A mummified hand? A collection of crumbling, evil-smelling mummified toes? No, she would not buy such horrors… I could see this refusal pained her, for the toe-hawker was a small boy of great beauty, perhaps five years old, barefoot, wearing clothes that were in rags. His eager face clouded – but disaster was avoided: he just happened to have two scarabs in his pocket and they also were for sale. Miss Mack bought both with alacrity.
    ‘Miss Mackenzie, those are both very bad fakes,’ Frances said, in her direct way. ‘And you paid twenty times too much for them.’
    ‘I know, dear,’ Miss Mack replied humbly. ‘Now I look at them, I can see – they’re even worse than the last lot I bought. They really are hideous. Still,’ her face brightened, ‘the money will buy that sweet child a meal or a pair of shoes, so it won’t be wasted.’
    She set off with a new spring in her step. The little boy was already being roughly robbed of his spoils by the man who controlled that particular band of infants – but this exchange took place behind her back, and she walked on, oblivious.
    When we’d returned to the hotel, I asked Miss Mack why Helen Winlock should have been so distressed by the museum’s mummified babies. The question had been puzzling me: surely she must have seen them many times before?
    Miss Mack knew the answer, I suspected: she and Helen had become very close by then. With a stern glance, she informed me that Mrs Winlock was a grown woman, who, like all grown women, had experienced sadnesses. ‘What a child you are for questions! Curiosity killed the cat, Lucy,’ she said tartly, turning away.

7
    We had then been in Cairo almost two weeks, and my entry test for Madame’s dancing class was coming closer by the day. Miss Mack had decreed that we’d need two further weeks to exhaust the delights of the city; for the final stage of our journey, we’d then travel up the Nile to the Valley of the Kings and the temples of Luxor – though Miss Mack, disdaining the modern name, would insist that our destination was Homer’s ‘hundred-gated Thebes’. Once there, our itinerary was formidable; when drawing up her lists, Miss Mack’s eyes would gleam at the wealth of mind-improving, life-changing spectacles that lay in wait for me. That smoke would begin to drift behind my eyes again as she quoted guidebooks and flourished photographs. I was