The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 10

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haven't heard from you for an absolute age. How are your They chatted

for a short while, but Royan was aware of the cost of the call. "Is the

Prof in?" she cut it short.

Professor Percival Dixon was over seventy and should have retired years

ago. "Royan, is it really you? My favourite student." She smiled. Even

at his age he was still the randy old goat. All the pretty ones were his

favourite students.

"This is an international call, Prof. I just want to know if the offer

is still open."

"My goodness, I thought you said that you couldn't fit us in, whatr

"Change of circumstances. I'll tell you about it when I see you, if I

see you."

"Of course, we' love to have you come and talk to us.

When can you manage to get awayr

"I'll be in England tomorrow."

'my goodness, that's a bit sudden. Don't know if we can arrange it that

quickly."

"I will be staying with my mother near York. Put me back to Miss Higgins

and I will give her the telephone number." He was one of the most

brilliant men she knew, but she didn't trust him to write down a

telephone number correctly. "I'll call you in a few days' time."

She hung up and lay back on the bed. She was exhausted and her arm was

still hurting, but she tried to lay her plans to cover all

eventualities.

Two months ago Prof Dixon had invited her to lecture on the discovery

and excavation of the tomb of Queen Lostris,. and the discovery of the

scrolls. It was that book, of course, and more especially the footnote

at the end of it, that had alerted him. Its publication had caused a

great deal of interest. They had received enquiries from Egyptologists,

both amateur and professional, all around the world, some from as far

afield as Tokyo and Nairobi, all of them questioning the authenticity of

the novel and the factual basis behind it.

At the time she had opposed letting a writer of fiction have access to

the transcriptions, especially as they had not been completed. She felt

that the whole thing had reduced what should have been an important and

serious academic subject to the level of popular entertainment, rather

like what Spielberg had done to palaeontology with his park full of

dinosaurs.

In the end her voice had been over-ruled. Even Duraid had sided against

her. It had been the money, of course. The department was always short

of funds to conduct its less spectacular work. When it came to some

grandiose scheme like moving the entire Temple of Abu Simbel to a new

site above the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam, then the nations of

the world had poured in tens of millions of dollars. However, the

day-to'day operational expenses of the department attracted no such

support.

Their half share of the royalties from River God, for that was the

book's title, had financed almost a year of research and exploration,

but that was not enough to allay Royan's personal misgivings. The author

had taken too many liberties with the facts contained in the scrolls,

and had embroidered historical characters with personalities and foibles

for which there was not the least evidence. In particular she felt he

had portrayed Taita, the ancient scribe, as a braggart and a

vainglorious poseur. She resented that.

in fairness she was forced to concede that the author's brief had been

to make the facts as palatable and readable as possible to a wide lay

public, and she reluctantly agreed that he had succeeded in doing so.

However, all her scientific training revolted against such a

popularization of something so unique and wonderful.

But she sighed and put these thoughts out of her head.

The damage was done, and thinking about it only served to irritate her.

She turned her thoughts to more pressing problems. If she was to do the

lecture that the Prof had invited her to deliver, then she would need

her slides and these were still at her office in the museum. While she

was still working out the best way to get hold of them without fetching

them in Person, exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep, still fully

clothed, on top of the bed.

 the end the solution to her problem was simplicity itself. She merely

phoned the administration office and arranged for them to collect the

box of slides from her office and send it out to the airport in a taxi

with one of the secretaries.

When the secretary handed them over to her at the British Airways

check'in desk, he told her, "The police were at the Museum when we

opened this morning. They wanted to speak to you, Doctor."

Obviously they had traced the registration of the wrecked Renault. She

was pleased that she had her British Passport. If she had tried to leave

the country with her Egyptian papers she might have run into delays: the

police would probably have placed a restriction order on all passport

control points. As it was, she passed through the checkpoint with no

difficulty and, once she was in.the final departure lounge, she went to

the news-stand and studied the array of newspapers.

All the local newspapers carried the story of the bombing of her car,

and most of them had resurrected the story of Duraid's murder and linked

the two events. One of them hinted at fundamentalist religious

involvement. El Arab had a front-page photograph of herself and Duraid,

which had been taken the previous month at a reception for a group of

visiting French tour operators.

It gave her a pang to see the photograph of her husband looking so

handsome and distinguished, with herself on his arm smiling up at him.

She purchased copies of all the papers and took them on board the

British Airways flight.

During the flight she passed the time by writing down in her notebook

everything she could remember from what Duraid had told her of the man

that she was going to find..

She headed the page: "Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper (Bart)." Duraid had

told her that Nicholas's great-grand, father had been awarded the title

of baronet for his work as a career officer in the British colonial

service. For three generations the family had maintained the strongest

of ties with Africa, and especially with the British colonies and

spheres of influence in North Africa: Egypt and the Sudan, Uganda and

Kenya.

According to Duraid, Sir Nicholas himself had served in Africa and the

Gulf States with the British army. He was a fluent Arabic and Swahili

speaker and a noted amateur archaeologist and zoologist. Like his

father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had made

numerous expeditions to North Africa to collect specimens and to explore

the more remote regions. He had written a number of articles for various

scientific journals and had even lectured at the Royal Geographical

Society.

When his elder brother died childless, Sir Nicholas had inherited the

title and the family estate at Quenton Park. He had resigned from the

army to run the estate, but more especially to supervise the family

museum that had been started in 1885 by his great-grandfather, the first

baronet. It housed one of the largest collections of African fauna in

private hands, and its ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern collection of

artefacts was equally famous.

However, from Duraid's accounts she concluded that there must be a wild,

and even lawless, streak in Sir Nicholas's nature. It was obvious that

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