Jon rushes to Cairo after an exchange of telegrams with Elizabeth.
Additional Sound:
Music: Swing Has Swung by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
If you like THWDY, tell people about us! It will help us grow!
Jon rushes to Cairo after an exchange of telegrams with Elizabeth.
Additional Sound:
Music: Swing Has Swung by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
If you like THWDY, tell people about us! It will help us grow!
THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU: THE HUNGRY TOMB Season Two
A Podcast concerning love, madness, mystery, murder and dead gods in 1920's Ireland, England and Egypt.
THWDY Episode 2.04
'The Midnight City '
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TELEGRAM London FEBRUARY 8 1926
RECEIPIENT ELIZABETH SANDERSON SHEPARD HOTEL CAIRO
PLEASE WAIT. CONCERNED ABOUT THIS EXPEDITION OF SIR M. NO CHANGE WITH GEORGE. WHAT IS HUNGRY TOMB? LOVE JON
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TELEGRAM CAIRO SHEPARD HOTEL FEBRUARY 8TH 1926
RECEIPIENT: JON ROSS LONDON
IF POOR GEORGE DETERIORATING, IMPERATIVE I SEEK AMULET IN CASE ESSENCE FAILS. CANNOT WAIT. ALL WILL BE WELL. MEET BACK IN CAIRO SOONEST. LOVE ELIZABETH.
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TELEGRAM London FEBRUARY 8 1926
RECEIPIENT ELIZABETH SANDERSON SHEPARD HOTEL CAIRO
DISAGREE. EXPEDITION HAZARDOUS. PEOPLE DYING. HUNGRY TOMB SOUNDS DANGEROUS. WHAT IS IT? PLEASE WAIT AND SEE IF ESSENCE WORKS FIRST. LOVE JON
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TELEGRAM CAIRO SHEPARD HOTEL FEBRUARY 9TH 1926
RECEIPIENT: JON ROSS LONDON
HUNGRY TOMB SILLY NAME FOR CAVE. NEED TO CURE GEORGE. MYSTERIOUS DEATHS ALL MEN. DEPARTING SHORTLY. MY SKILLS REQUIRED. LOVE ELIZABETH.
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TELEGRAM CROYDON AERODROME. FEBRUARY 9TH 1926
RECEIPIENT ELIZABETH SANDERSON SHEPARD HOTEL CAIRO
EN ROUTE VIA IMPERIAL AIRWAYS. ARRIVE SOON. PLEASE WAIT. HAVE LEFT LILY IN CHARGE OF ESSENCE. LOVE JON
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The Shepherd Hotel
Cairo
February 12th
1926
My dearest Elizabeth,
I am here and you are not! I had hoped you would wait for me but the lure of the ancient Nile was evidently too much for you! I will send this letter by train to Luxor that it may get ahead of you. I’m writing this in the middle of the night in my hotel room, sipping a glass of whiskey to ease my incipient hangover and a gun beside me on the table.
I flew into Heliopolis airport outside Cairo (though really it is little more than huts and hangers belonging to the RAF) and had a glorious view from the air of the great pyramids, the mysterious Sphinx, covered as it is in scaffolding as it emerges anew from the sands, and the long shadows they all cast in the morning light. I dallied at the aerodrome to watch a Vikkers Vernon take off for the Baghdad mail run and got talking to the RAF chaps hanging around.
Intrepid fellows, those pilots. They told me that once past Amman, which is over 300 miles in itself, there is nothing but featureless desert for the remaining 500 miles to Baghdad, too easy to go wrong even with a compass, and the airforce boys had to go and carve a deep line in the desert the whole length of it, with giant arrows pointing the way to Baghdad, for the pilots to follow. What a job that must be, to fly one of those ponderous beasts out into that great emptiness, no sound but the roar of the engines and only man’s scratches on the earth’s surface to guide you.
I got to the Shepard hotel hot and flustered by this heat and dust, only to find that you and Sir Malcolm’s party had all already checked out. Short of visiting every boat operator along the quayside I was at a bit of a loss how to find you but fortunately my old army friend that I mentioned came to my rescue. A few telephone calls by Clarke established that you had all left yesterday.
Once it was clear there was nothing further we could do today, we arranged to meet for a sundowner on the hotel terrace overlooking the busy street. I was tired from my travels of the last few of days but a couple of stiff G&T’s and some banter about old comrades helped perk me up. Cairo seems to be suiting Clarke. When we demobbed he had been as thin and hollow-eyed as the rest of us but here now he was tanned, wiry and relaxed in a loose linen suit. He had a confidence about him in this foreign place that I could only admire. We made quite a pair, the cool old colonial hand and the overheated, red cheeked Irishman in a too-thick suit.
The terrace filled up quickly with tourists and business men and if it had not been for the Egyptians strolling past and the spicy note of the rapidly cooling air, we could have been in an English tea room on a summer evening. There is though I have noticed, something about the quality of the light here that is different than in Ireland or England.
Clarke was evasive on the matter of Sir Malcolm and I got the impression that he was trying to get the measure of me before speaking frankly. It left me a bit cold, but I suppose I couldn’t blame him - I haven’t seen him in over five years and here I was on his patch looking for my errant fiancé and asking questions about mysterious deaths and an éminence grise like Sir Malcolm.
I suggested we might eat in the hotel restaurant. A West Indian jazz band was advertised to play on the terrace later, which intrigued me.
Well, Clarke was having none of that!
“These guys will be keeping it tame for all the tourists. Let me show you the real Cairo. The Devil’s Jazz Band might be on in the Kursaal or the Majestic. Now those fellows can play!”
With that he called for the bill over my protests and dragged me out through the hotel foyer, pushing past a group of well heeled Egyptians coming the other way. We had exited before one of those men, a tall slim fellow with a lavish moustache, came up behind me, tugging on my arm. Well it turned out in the rush I’d dropped my wallet and this kind fellow had returned it. Clarke looked at the man oddly as he retreated back inside and asked me to check everything was as it should be. Which it was, thankfully. That would have been a naive and embarrassing mistake to have made!
Before I knew it we were out on the busy street with darkness falling swiftly. We turned right and then right again down a side street before emerging on the great east-west street of Emad al Din. You mentioned it in your letters Elizabeth, but really one has to have been there to fully appreciate it. We snagged a street table at a joint called Bar Lyska and my odyssey through the district of Ezbekiyya started there with the first drink of many in that Egyptian Demi-monde.
Looking back, I think it was Clarke’s intent to get me off guard and inebriated, the better to find out my business. Even so, I do not think he had anything to do with what happened to me at the end of the night.
Emad al Din was thronged; Europeans yes, but mostly with Egyptians: sharply dressed young men in the main but also a sizeable cohort of young Egyptian women dressed in the latest European fashions, all of them chattering and laughing, the women if unaccompanied dodging the attentions of the men and everyone dodging the trams. Cigarette smoke mingled with hashish to chase away the smell of the city. The street was lined with the garish signs of Franco-Arab revues, of Egyptian theatres playing local melodramas and translated classics, of European cabarets and night clubs. Down the side streets Clarke said, would be hidden the brothels, hashish dens and gambling clubs.
It reminded me of Soho or Monmatre and has apparently become an oasis for the lost of this world, like your Irina. Some make it and some disappear. Black American jazz men rub shoulders with Japanese and Argentine musicians; dancers - Brits, Germans, Poles, Hungarians - strut their scantily clad stuff in the revues while the Egyptian audience gets drunk; palm readers and mystics from the Lebanon and Syria have set up stall on the street. Muslims, Coptics, Jews and foreigners mix and mingle in its bars and clubs to the consternation of those who care about such things.
Clarke waved at the sign above us and said the bar belonged to a Hungarian dancer who did well for herself. He seemed both excited by and disapproving of the licence women had within this small bohemian enclave. Here the Egyptian woman, he said, not just the man, can be an impresario, a nightclub owner, a person of influence as well as scandal. She can take the male roles in plays and she can sing the munulogs and taqtuqa -which he informed me with relish are always risqué and often filthy. And yet, only a mere street away, the conservative city began again with its place for everyone and everyone in their place. Much like home, actually, now that I write it.
Well, we strolled the length of that street and took in a cabaret act in the Casino de Paris (a bawdy burlesque affair accompanied by a full band and dancing girls) and taqtuqa singers in the Ramses (it was in Arabic so I didn’t understand a word but the singer, she had the crowd stitched up in riotous laughter) and Clarke kept the whiskies and cocktails coming at a steady pace. We washed up in some dive bar where the jazz band could barely be seen through the smoke haze. They were damn fine musicians, I remember that much. I was very much the worse for wear by this stage and so was Clarke. I’d recalled by then that he’d always had a fondness for the drink and if he had started out with the intent to quiz me, then he ended up telling me more than he planned.
After a waiter had delivered yet another round of drinks, I lit a cigarette and asked Clarke what the local situation was like. Generally we’d been pretty much ignored but I had seen some men giving us dirty looks.
Clarke thought for a moment and then pulled three of our empty glasses and a beer bottle towards him and then pushed one glass into middle of the table.
He said, “King Faud was put in place by Britain but is keen to assert his independence. He’s mainly afraid of the parliament” - here he pushed another glass out - “and dissolves it every time they look strong. Parliament is keen on democracy, as long as only the right sort of people can vote obviously, and none of this new communist nonsense thank god. Parliament is weak at the moment because” - here he pushed the beer bottle out - “ the Residency took a hard line after the assassination of the Sirdar, Sir Lee Stack, two years ago and browbeat the parliament into concessions. The Residency, that’s us Ross’ - I have to admit I held off from correcting him on that - “the British high commissioner runs the Residency and through it controls the Egyptian army, police and civil service. This of course unites the palace and the parliament against us Brits as they feel the country is not really independent while we still control those. This whole business with the antiquities service insisting that King Tut’s stuff remain in Egypt despite it being English money and expertise that found it, well that’s all part of the game.”
“So what’s the fourth one?” I asked, wondering with the sudden mention of antiquities, if Clarke had a point he was working towards. Clarke looked confused for a moment as if he had lost his train of thought, before picking up the remaining glass and examining it.
“On the surface,” he said, “the situation in Cairo is calmer than it has been in decades; the public hangings last August for Stack’s assassination and the assertion of British power saw to that. The nationalists are on the back foot, their innumerable secret societies with names like the Black Hand, The Flame, The Revenge Society, not quite what they were. “
He put the glass down with a heavy clink and pushed aside the Residency beer bottle with it.
“The nationalists if they align with the religious establishment, they’re the real threat to our stay here. So everyone, including the Residency, is looking for levers they can pull to tip the balance, take other players off the board. And your Sir Malcolm is a player all right. We’re just not sure what his game is. The world is stranger than you think Ross, and Sir Malcom is involved somehow. Some of his recent expedition have died in mysterious circumstances, supposed suicides. Well we think one of the secret societies, one called the Brotherhood of The Veil, killed them. The problem is, we know nothing about them. The Veil seems to be both very new and very old and nobody will talk about it.”
He downed the remainder of his whiskey in one go and looked intently at me, a calculating look on his face.
“We haven’t been able to reach an understanding with Sir Malcom. Our appeals to his patriotism have fallen on deaf ears. We think he found something in the desert, something old and well, strange. The Veil certainly seem to see him as a threat - and any one with him is in danger.”
Before he could continue with this most alarming thought, we were interrupted by a loud and drunk cohort of well dressed Egyptians. A slight young man in a tuxedo sat beside Clarke, draped his arm over his shoulders and started talking animatedly in Arabic. I heard my name mentioned and both glanced over the table at me. I realised then that this new person was actually a woman!
“Ross,” said Clarke, “Let me introduce you to Fatima al-Mahdiyya, leading lady of the Egyptian theatre and fabulous singer to boot.”
Fatima called loudly in English for champagne and soon bottles were being popped and fizz poured. I groaned but pretended I was still up for it. They were an interesting bunch, the men clearly admirers and hangers-on of this Fatima and as no one mentioned her extraordinary dress sense, neither did I. This is Ezbekiyya, I told myself. Anything goes.
Well, Fatima held court mostly. I understood her to be the owner of one of the more outre theatres in Ezbekiyya. Her dynamic with Clarke was odd. They seemed very familiar but also sparring against each other in some subtle way. I wondered if this was part of the game of power he had mentioned.
At one point I ended up beside Fatima. She was laughing and bantering with her friends but as soon as Clarke got up to go relieve himself, she immediately became serious and leaned back to talk directly to me. She smelt of booze and cigars and spices and her breath was hot on my ear.
“Monsieur Ross, French is okay yes?” she asked in that language.
I said it was.
“Monsieur Ross, your friend - you know who he is yes? He is mukhabarat, English secret police.”
I didn’t but it actually wasn’t a surprise if he was Special Section. With a cold shock, I realised that his whole spiel may have been a recruitment attempt.
“William Clarke is a dangerous man,” she said quickly in French, “He could have stopped your fiancé from going with Sir Malcolm but he chose not to. Instead he tried to get one of his own men on that boat. It is rumoured he has already sent a secret expedition into the western desert to find and raid whatever ancient tomb Sir Malcolm discovered at the end of last year.”
She leaned forward to look me in the eye.
“Yes, I know of your Elizabeth. All the wrong people know she is connected to Sir Malcom somehow. She turns up just as he arrives back from the desert and is seen scouring the bazaars with his factotum for, shall we say, unusual souvenirs. People are asking who is this lady? And from all the questions at the quayside today, well now everyone knows that Clarke also is interested in her and that you are here for her. Connections have been made. Clarke may even have wanted them made.
“You should run for home, Monsieur Ross. There is only death here for you. The Brotherhood of the Veil is hunting Sir Malcolm’s new expedition and there is nothing you or William Clarke can do to stop them. Nobody will return from the desert.”
“Madame,” I said angrily, “I will not ‘run for home’ and leave Elizabeth to the desert.”
She sighed theatrically, “I thought you might say that. You love her yes? Then hold on to that in your darkest hour.”
She glanced up and I saw that Clarke was weaving his way unsteadily through the dancing crowd.
She turned to me and said seriously and urgently, “Do not accept anything from a stranger tonight. It will be your death.”
Then she was the star holding court again, chiding me in English for monopolising her time and shouting for more champagne to her friends.
The two exchanges had quite taken off whatever little sheen was left on the evening. I didn’t mention Fatima’s comments to Clarke as it was clear she didn’t trust him and I wondered now if it was wise for me to do so, even if I knew nothing about her own allegiances. I didn’t want any part of these games. I was here for you Elizabeth, not to be recruited into some clandestine political wrangle.
As soon as I could, I pleaded exhaustion and made my way back to the hotel on my own. Emad al Din street was still crowded and it was a relief to turn up the empty side street to the hotel. I’m sure it was just suddenly being alone, but as I walked up towards the junction with Ibrahim Pacha street and the Shepard hotel, I had a growing sense of being watched. I increased my pace. As I turned on to Ibrahim Pacha, I glanced back. At the far end of the side street, back lit by the glow of the theatre signs stood a tall dark figure. There was something odd about its silhouette. I sped up, almost running now, for the safety of the hotel.
The sedateness and normalcy of the quiet foyer calmed me. I collected my room key and checked for any messages from you. None! Then I was quickly abed, absolutely shattered.
I awoke what must have been only an hour or so later, that time of night when your brain goes round and round in circles no matter how tired you are. There was something I had missed and I could not think what it was.
Clarke had said, the world is stranger than you think - did that mean he or indeed Special Section knew of the kinds of horrors we had faced in Waterford? That wasn’t it though.
And what did Sir Malcolm find in the western desert? I have read that since the start of this decade there have been persistent expeditions, first by camel and now by car, deep into the western desert, by both Egyptians and British. Indeed the papers are full of Prince Kemal el Din’s current motor trip where he intends to push further west than anyone before him. What are they all searching for, the Egyptians and the British? No, it was something else.
What had Fatima said, right at the end?
Do not accept anything from a stranger tonight. It will be your death.
And then I remembered that man handing me back my wallet.
My room was in darkness, the stout shutters that kept out the heat of the day, blocking any street or moonlight. The hotel was silent at this hour. The hotel room loomed with unfamiliar dark shapes, faintly seen. I’d hung my jacket on the back of the chair by the dressing table.
Apprehensive, a feeling of not being alone in this room, I got out of bed and padded over. I scrabbled for the switch on the desk lamb, remembering nights as a boy being afraid to pull the blankets down from over my head, the childish notion that if you can’t see the monsters, they can’t see you. Finally I found it and turned on the desk lamp; it threw out a small pool of light, leaving the rest of the room in dimness. I glanced around it quickly though. I was alone. I fished my wallet out and sat down. In the mirror, my reflection looked back, I was haggard and in need of a shave. My head throbbed badly with the oncoming hangover.
I spread the contents of my wallet on the dressing table. It was the expected stuff: Sterling notes as well as Egyptian pounds, receipts, business cards, a photograph of you that I paused over - how I miss you and pray that you are safe! And then my fingers closed on a tiny wad of paper that had been folded over several times and tucked deep into my wallet. I drew it out between two fingertips like it might explode. The paper was odd - I wondered if it was actually papyrus.
With much trepidation I slowly and carefully unfolded it. Written in delicate letters in a dark brown ink that I immediately somehow knew was dried blood, was the phrase:
Mr John Ross of England
And under it was drawn a large upside down ankh, with a single line of minute hieroglyphics underneath it again.
Leaving aside I wasn’t English and they had added an extra H to my first name, it was deeply unsettling. What mischief was this?
It was then I realised I could hear something breathing in the room with me. I say something, because it sounded animalistic rather than human; a coarse, low, steady, strong panting, and it was coming from behind me. Elizabeth, after the horrors of last winter, my imagination boiled up with what new terror this was and I froze for a moment unable to think or act.
In the end I did the only thing I could do. I was neither child nor coward. I looked in the mirror. The lamp beside me threw a dim light into the room but with its proximity, also blinded me somewhat. On the far side of the room, past the bed was a reading chair beside a small side table. The wall glowed faintly in the light, enough to show a dark shadow sitting in the chair. There was something human but malformed about its silhouette, something that screamed run, run now at me.
I still had the piece of paper in my hand. It will be your death, Fatima had said.
I could not stay like this, seated, my back to it. Pride forced me to stand slowly and turn to face this, this thing. The table lamp beside the intruder came on. No, it very slowly began to increase in brightness in a way alien to electricity.
Elizabeth, I can describe to you in one word what sat in that chair, observing me cooly but it will only bring forth a sterile archetype or image. It could never portray the sheer wrongness of the creature in front of me: The sleek muscled human body clad in a simple white tunic, the skin gleaming as if oiled; the glossy smooth black hair, the lolling tongue, the tall pointed ears, the long narrow snout, the yellow eyes that watched me with a baleful intelligence from a dog’s face. No, a Jackal’s.
Anubis. Anubis was here in the room with me. The dog headed man whose visitation has meant death.
Anubis the hieroglyph and Anubis the statue are stiff, strange things that the mind can accommodate, but Anubis, a living breathing god in the flesh - no, the mind just slid off him, impossible to reconcile such combined body and head as real. If he had been a ravening animal, I could have made sense of it but the way he looked at me, that he was observing and judging - a human-like intelligence in a jackal’s head. That was catastrophic to my own mind, threatening its sanity.
There was a cloth bundle on the side table that had not been there earlier. As my mind reeled under his gaze, Anubis reached out with his left hand and delicately unfolded it, all the time those yellow eyes locked onto mine. It was of all things, a gun, a revolver whose dark steel glistened evilly in the strange glow.
We stared across the room at each other, each in a pool of radiance separated by something more than the distance between us. Then the light by him went out.
Freed from his terrible gaze, I grabbed my table lamp and swung it wildly in front of me like it was a torch or a burning brand. Angular shadows grew and shrank from every item in the room, reaching across the walls and ceiling as I desperately tried to see where he had gone. I accidentally wrenched the lamp’s plug from the socket, but before the room disappeared into total darkness, I saw that the room was empty save for me.
I have written this all down, Elizabeth, because I am unable to get back to sleep. The alcohol I was plied with all night might excuse my more excitable descriptions but it does not alter what I saw. It was no dream Elizabeth. Beside me as I finish this letter, is the revolver. It is an impossible gun - my old service revolver, lost in the mud of the Somme, I would know it anywhere - and yet here it is, gleaming dully in the lamplight.
It has only one bullet in it.
I know what I must do.
I love you Elizabeth,
Jon