Page 59

Be calm. There is not a scintilla of evidence to connect you to anything. Let indignation serve you as well as it always has.

"Why, that's from my uncle's collection. The Ramses collection. How did you get it? It ought to be under lock and key."

"The question is," said the one called Trent, "how did Mr. Sharples get it? And what was he doing with it on his person when he was killed?"

Henry ran his hands back through his hair. If only the pain would stop. If only he could excuse himself for a minute, get a good stiff drink and have some time to think.

"Reginald Ramsey!" he said, looking Trent in the eye. "That's the fellow's name, wasn't it? That Egyptologist! The one staying with my cousin. Good God, what's going on in that house!"

"Mr. Ramsey?"

"You have questioned him, haven't you? Where did he come from, that man?" His face coloured as the two men stared at him in silence. "Do I have to do your job for you? Where the devil did the bastard come from? And what's he doing with all that treasure in my cousin's house?"

For an hour Ramses walked. The morning was cold and dreary. The great imposing houses of Mayfair gave way to the dingy tenements of the poor. He roamed narrow unpaved streets, like the alleyways of an ancient city--Jericho, or Rome. Tracks of the horse carts here, and the reek of damp manure.

Now and then some poor passerby would stare at him. Surely he should not be dressed in this long satin robe. But that did not matter. He was Ramses the Wanderer again. Ramses the Damned only passing through this time. The elixir still had its potency. And the science of this time was no more ready for it than the science of any other.

Look at this suffering, these beggars sleeping in the alleyway. Smell the filth of that house, as if the door is a mouth that spews its foul breath while gasping for clean air.

A beggar man approached him. "Spare a sixpence, sir, I haven't eaten in two days. Please, sir."

Ramses walked on by, his slippers damp and dirty from the puddles in which he had stepped.

And now comes a young woman, look at her; listen to the cough rattling deep from her chest.

"Want to have a good time, sir? I have a nice warm room, sir."

Oh, yes, he did want her services, so very much that he could feel himself hardening immediately. And the fever made her all the more fetching; she thrust out her small bosom gracefully as she forced a smile despite her pain.

"Not now, my fair one," he whispered.

It seemed the street, if it was in fact a street, had carried him into a great wilderness of ruins. Burnt-out buildings reeking of the smoke, with windows empty of drapery or glass.

Even here the poor camped in alcoves and shallow doorways. A baby cried desperately. The song of the hungry.

He walked on. He could hear the city coming alive around him; not the human voices; those he'd heard all along. It was the machines which awoke now as the dirty grey sky grew brighter and became almost silver overhead. From somewhere very far away, he heard a deep-throated train whistle. He stopped. He could feel the dull vibration of the great iron monster even here through the damp earth. What a beguiling rhythm it had, those wheels rolling on and on over the iron tracks.

Suddenly a spasm of shrill noise threw him into a panic. He turned in time to see an open motor car hurtling towards him, a young man bouncing on the high seat. He fell back against the stone wall behind him as the thing rattled and bumped over the ruts in the mud.

He was shaken, angry. A rare moment in which he felt helpless, exposed.

Dazed, he realized he was looking at a grey dove lying dead in the street. One of those fat dull grey birds which he saw everywhere in London, nesting on the windowsills and on the rooftops; this one had been struck by the motor car, and part of its wing had been crushed under the wheels.

The wind stirred it now, giving it a false semblance of life.

Suddenly a memory, one of the oldest and most vivid, caught him off guard, ripping him from the present, cruelly, and planting him squarely in another time and place.

He stood in the cave of the Hittite priestess. In his battle garb, his hand on the hilt of his bronze sword, he stood looking up at the white doves circling in the sunlight under the high grate.

"They're immortal?" he asked her. He spoke in the crude, guttural Hittite tongue.

She had laughed madly. "They eat, but they do not need to eat. They drink, but they do not need to drink. It is the sun that keeps them strong. Take it away and they sleep, but they do not die, my King."

He had stared at her face, so old, shrunken with its deep wrinkles. The laughter had angered him.

"Where is the elixir!" he had demanded.

"You think it is a great thing?" How her eyes had gleamed as she approached him, taunting him. "And what if all the world were filled with those who could not die? And their children? And their children's children? This cave harbours a horrid secret, I tell you. The secret of the end of the world itself, I tell you!"