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| Getting carried away by the Sphinx |
Seems tourists are going a bit far at the site of the Great Sphinx.
Yet it reminds me of the opening scene in my latest novella...
CHAPTER 1
The
girl moved through a straggle of tourists to the edge of a great pit.
Dan
Loader felt his muscles tense.
She
was standing above the Great Sphinx enclosure at Giza in Egypt, where the stone
monster crouched inside a lion’s den of stone, its head and upper body emerging
into a metal hot sky.
He
stopped and willed her back from the edge. She fiddled with a camera. Could she
slip and fall?
She
looked around.
Freezing
on the spot gave him away and she noticed him standing there doing an
impression of a statue.
“Do
I have to do a selfie?” she said.
They
had crossed the invisible frontier between observer and the observed.
“Sorry?”
He
said it more as an apology for breaking into her world. When you shadowed
someone you did so from an objective distance, like viewing a movie or play,
with the understanding that you did not belong in that reality and must never
enter it.
Too
late to move away.
The familiar snake of anxiety coiled
inside him.
The creeping serpent of fear had
come into his life after an abduction and assault over three days by an antiquities
gang.
He saw it happening again as if in a
flash of sunlight glancing off the stone sphinx. His partner Carl shot in the
head execution style in an antiquities case gone wrong in London’s docklands.
The way Carl dropped slackly, without a sound or a look of surprise in his
eyes.
Two men then wrestling him into a
van and driving him to a hideaway. Then the pain of hard fists and even harder
steel gun barrels smashing into his head and face as they pistol-whipped him
for information about a haul he had hidden away for protection.
The snake had slid into his insides
and taken up residence there where his guts used to be and it moved at the
slightest fear, setting up weakening tremors. The authorities had rescued him,
but later, when there was no reason to be afraid any more, the snake was still
there.
“Will
you immortalise me?” she said.
Her
voice, hazy sounding, had an overlay of beguiling mystery like a veil.
“Okay,”
he said, shrugging.
Too
late to back away now. Just do the business in a perfunctory way and hope she
doesn't get too close a look at you.
His
wrap-around dark glasses might help to hide him.
She
held out the camera and he took it from her, a compact black digital model.
First
contact.
A
gentle brush with her skin, her hand cool and light – his, like a big stone paw
of the sphinx.
“You
know the shot I’m after, I suppose,” she said. “Sorry, it’s cheesy, but I can’t
resist it.”
He
nodded.
He
understood. It was the compulsory tourist shot that young women always wanted taken
of themselves in front of Egypt’s Great Sphinx.
“Maybe
move away from the edge. Good,” he said, letting the tension ease from his
shoulders. “Now lean your head forward.”
She
posed in profile in front of the calm face of the stone beast and bent her neck,
making her dark hair swing. He looked at the camera display screen.
“Head
a bit higher and move in. A little closer. That’s it.”
She
pouted her crimson lips and moved in so that she appeared to kiss the stone
lips of the most famous face in the world.
“That
was a monumental kiss,” he said.
He
had it, an image of a girl’s face, the same size as the sphinx’s, planting a
big smooch right on the lips of an ancient wonder of the world.
It
was a trick of perspective.
Or
so it usually appeared, but this was also a trick of time for the scene appeared
to be an image of Egypt itself kissing the ancient past. The girl, along with a
quality of classic loveliness, possessed an unmistakeable aura of ancient
Egypt, her eyes darkly edged and swept up in fantails at the side, shadowed
with malachite green, and her cascade of dark hair rippling to her shoulders.
He
had a fleeting moment of envying the sphinx.
