| 3 The young Egyptian found that he was by far happiest at work—although his duties hardly qualified as work, in his opinion. From his first night there, Sayeed felt an unexpected sense of belonging at the museum. The rooms were large and relatively cool and he breathed freely as he walked through them. The exhibits fascinated him. Sayeed el Kashef had never seen such wonderful things in his life, scarcely had imagined such masterpieces existed! The murky pictures in his books had not prepared him at all for their magnificence, their brilliant colors. He was awed by the great, hulking statues of the pharaohs and delighted at the delicately-wrought ornaments of their women. Sayeed tried to pronounce the names of these long-dead kings and queens, as written out in Arabic script. When he thought he succeeded, he repeated them over and over again as though reciting a charm. He gazed in enchantment at the ladies, at their slender, semi-nude shapes, and saw that their profiles were noble yet sweet in the same way that his mother’s face was. Everywhere Sayeed el Kashef shone his electric torch, gold glinted back at him. Until he had seen with his own eyes the treasures of King Tutankhamun in the books, he had not guessed that gold could be used for anything except women’s jewelry. And now here it was before him, the strange and fascinating property of one dead man, so lavish with gold that one might think this once had no particular value in Egypt but was as common as brass. Even the most insignificant items of the young pharaoh seemed to have a piece of gold stuck on them somewhere or a flourish of gold paint as if to say “There is no limit, why worry?” Sayeed was particularly fascinated by Tutankhamun, himself. He often studied the pharaoh’s effigies. They seemed so life-like, so young and vulnerable, someone no older than Sayeed, himself, surely. Sometimes, in the gloom of the darkened museum, the face on Tutankhamun’s funerary mask appeared so real to Sayeed that it seemed almost rude to pass it without stopping. Gold and death, a bewildering and eerie combination in the darkness, as if the one had some connection to the other. After a few nights, Sayeed el Kashef began to feel revolted by the gleaming ostentation, the golden objects of Tutankhamun, and he had the unsettling feeling that a force outside himself had caused this antipathy, someone else having influenced him to dislike the objects he had at first so much admired. As he passed them on his rounds, they weighed upon the Egyptian like a heavy burden that he could not throw off—all except the mask of the king. That still drew him like a magnet, or perhaps like a friend waiting for him on a street corner. There was another living being in the museum on certain evenings. This was the American, Dr. Rubin, whose work in the museum kept him there quite often when everyone else had gone. Even before he had ever spoken with the Egyptologist, Sayeed had liked the looks of Dr. Rubin. Rubin was a man neither young nor old, smaller than Sayeed but with hair and eyes as black as his own. Although the American’s skin was pale compared to that of an Egyptian, the cast of his features was so familiar to Sayeed that he felt he had known the man for a long time, even though they were strangers. Dr. Rubin, it seemed, was connected with Room 52. Sayeed had been told by a museum official not to bother with Room 52. Its door was locked and Sayeed did not have the key to it. Sayeed had asked a man who worked in the museum during the day, an aged character named Ahmed, why the room was always locked. “What is in there?” Sayeed had wanted to know. NEXT PAGE |