Read Online The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt by Michael Pearce - Free Book Online Page B

don’t see how you came to fall.’
    ‘I think I may have tripped,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘put my hand out, as one does, found nothing there, overbalanced and fallen through.’
    Owen dropped on one knee and began to run his hands over the floor.
    ‘But what could you have tripped on?’
    ‘Is there nothing there? I thought I caught an edge. Of course, in the dark—’
    Owen straightened up and began to feel round the walls. ‘Perhaps it was my own flat feet,’ said Miss Skinner. She gave a little laugh. ‘I seem to be making rather a habit of it, don’t I?’
     
    ‘What didn’t you like about it?’ asked Owen.
    ‘It was what she said when we got her out,’ said Paul. ‘She said she’d been pushed.’
    ‘She said it as definitely as that?’
    ‘Yes. It was as we were helping her back along the passage. I said to her, you know, the way one does: “My God, Miss Skinner, what’s happened to you?” And she said: “I was pushed and fell into that dreadful place.” Something like that. But definitely pushed.’
    ‘She’s not saying that now.’
    ‘No, and a bit later, when we’d cleaned her up, and given her a drink, and she’d rested and I asked her again—I wanted to get the detail—she wasn’t saying it then, either. She just said she must have fallen. And when I probed, she shut up like a clam.’
    ‘Wouldn’t say any more?’
    ‘Stuck to a “Silly me—a foolish accident” kind of routine. But that’s not what she said when we got her out.’
    ‘Changed her mind when she’d had time to think about it.’
    ‘Yes. I must say,’ said Paul, ‘that I find the “Silly me” routine more than a little implausible in the case of Miss Skinner. A more self-possessed lady I have seldom encountered.’
    ‘Yes. Piling up the mummies—or even feeling them in the dark to find out what kind of mummies they were— does not seem to me the act of someone who’s lost her head.’
    ‘She was shaken, all right,’ said Paul. ‘She’d had a fall and she’d been down there all night. But confused? I wouldn’t have said she was at all confused.’
    ‘So you thought it was all a bit fishy?’
    ‘There were other things, too. I went back down the passage and had a look and I couldn’t see how she could have come to have fallen. And then,’ said Paul, ‘I remembered how she’d been pushed, and I decided that I was asking myself too many questions, and that they were not aide-de-camp sort of questions but Mamur Zapt sort of questions.’
     
    Last of all, Parker took them to a small chapel, only about ten feet long and five feet wide. The walls were covered with sculptures carved in relief and painted, and the roof was painted too, blue with yellow stars.
    ‘It is, of course, the sky,’ said Miss Skinner. ‘I like that, don’t you? The cow grazing in the field, with the blue sky above.’
    For this was the famous chapel in which Naville had discovered the Cow of Hathor.
    ‘What a piece of luck!’ said Parker enviously.
    ‘Not luck,’ corrected Miss Skinner. ‘Sound archaeological practice. He’d worked out the chapel was going to be there.’
    ‘He didn’t know there was going to be anything like the Cow of Hathor in it, though, did he?’
    Parker turned to Owen.
    ‘The trouble with these places,’ he said, ‘is that even when you get into a chamber, you don’t know there’s going to be anything there. And that’s for two reasons: first, because if there was anything there, it’s probably been stolen; second, because the people who put it there in the first place anticipated that it might be stolen and hid it somewhere else. You need luck as well as archaeology. And shall I tell you something else?’
    He faced Miss Skinner belligerently.
    ‘You also need to be a bit of a thief yourself, to figure out how their minds worked!’ He laughed loudly.
    ‘And are you?’ asked Miss Skinner.
    He broke off and looked at her, amused.
    ‘I’m just a simple archaeologist,’ he said.