Free The Illusion of Murder by Carol McCleary Page B

long narrow craft loaded with bales of cotton; men aboard chant as they row with long oars, a rhythmic song of labor carried by the breeze to us.
    It takes little to imagine Cleopatra and her court attendants instead of cotton bales and a slave master cracking a whip over the heads of the rowers.
    “What are you smiling about?” Von Reich asks.
    I just shrug my shoulders because I can’t explain. The gentleman from the city of Mozart and Strauss, the Vienna waltz, and the glittering court of the Hapsburg emperors, would not understand how different this strange land is to a young woman who once thought she would spend her entire life underpaid and worked to the bone in an industrial town factory.

 
    11
    Ruins of the ancient city of Tanis are visible as our steam launch brings us to a dock in the late afternoon. I am more eager to see the antiquity site than to sit down to a meal with a sheikh. The thought of having come nearly six thousand miles and not getting a glimpse of the remnants of the golden civilization along the Nile would have been a thorn in my claw.
    A servant is waiting to escort us to the sheikh’s tent. “A short walk,” he says.
    My eyes light up as I step back in time to the ancient city.
    “Tanis was built a thousand years before the birth of Christ,” Von Reich says, “around the time God sent plagues to punish the pharaoh who wouldn’t let the Jews return to their homeland and parted a sea for Moses.”
    Always the showman, Von Reich adds, “We are walking in the footsteps of mighty pharaohs who were worshipped as living gods. The great civilizations of Greece and China had yet to arise when the monuments that you’re about to see were made—temples and tombs and statues that have excited and puzzled people for thousands of years.”
    He leans closer and speaks in a confidential tone so as not to be heard by the others. “Do you know what I like most about you, Nellie? How little things excite you so much and make you smile so brightly.”
    Little things?
    “You’ve missed your calling, Von Reich,” Lord Warton says. “You should have been a tour guide. Tell us about Tanis.”
    “Tanis was capital of Egypt several thousand years ago. The city had access to the sea and was an important port until it was finally abandoned because of the rising waters of the lake. Its most important complexes are the Temple of Amun, the king of gods, who is usually represented as a man with a ram’s head, and that of Horus, a god of the sky and war.
    “The city has been ravaged by time and by tomb robbers, and much of the area has gone back to desert, but be aware—the spirits of gods and kings still walk among the stone vestiges of its magnificent past.”
    Scattered about like the stone garden of a giant are granite statues and monuments, some colossal in size, many lying prone, all radiating the exotic and mysterious with their strange shapes and sacred writings.
    I’m already writing in my head the story that I will send with my cable back to New York.
    “Some very fine artifacts were found here by an English Egyptologist who spent several years working the site,” Von Reich says. “There are probably many more, but excavation is time-consuming and expensive, so it comes in spurts.” *
    “He must cry,” I say.
    Lady Warton asks, “Who’s crying?”
    “Him.” I gesture at a fallen statue of what appears to be a pharaoh. Standing upright it would be several times my height.
    “He has had to lie there and just watch over the ages as thieves carry away the treasures of his city.”
    She gives me a look that expresses at the same time both a question of sanity and contempt for my thinking process. I suppose in her world of tea parties and formal balls, stone kings don’t have feelings. But as I stand here, humbled in his presence, and look at his finely chiseled features—large eyes; a bold, almost Roman-like nose; a full mouth, all a bit worn by time—I still sense his power and majesty