Tudor Parfitt - The Lost Ark of the Covenant - The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark

‘This is a drug den,’ sneered Daud, showing his blackened teeth. ‘They are building the widow a wall, and she pays them with tea, drugs and I don’t know what else. Egypt is a strange place. Our wonderful law bans the growing of tobacco - nobody knows why - so we have to import millions of tons of it every year; but every delinquent grows hashish in his back garden. This widow, this Maryam, grows it and sells it.’

One of the men picked up a drum and started playing an intricate, pulsating African rhythm. Daud had forgotten his tiredness and started performing a kind of lopsided disco dance. Ricky Gervais has serious competition. It was the strangest dance I had ever seen: he would leap in the air, eyes rolling, cross himself fervently and then bow deeply in the direction of the setting sun. No one paid much attention.

After a while Maryam went back into her tomb and came out wearing a colourful sequined shawl over her long shabby cotton dress. She walked over and stood squarely in front of me. Smiling, she too started to dance, her movements sinuous and sexy. Daud eyed her anxiously.

To the widow’s evident annoyance, the drummer stopped playing, put his drum on the ground beside him, and shot me a truculent look, a glimmer of interest in his eyes. I guessed he was wondering if there was any chance that I would pay him something to continue.

The widow faltered in her dance and tossed her head. The dust rose up around her fine ankles like a small cloud as she descended on the drummer. A victorious look on her face, she lifted the drum above her head and started playing it herself. Dancing and playing. Triumph in her eyes.

I was sitting in the shadow of the tomb watching this pantomime. I had wanted to imagine the days before the appearance of the Ark in the world, to understand what may have led to its construction. Bizarrely what was happening here had given me more enlightenment than all my walks around the pyramids and building sites of ancient Egypt. The scene before my eyes reminded me of something I had almost forgotten, something I had read without paying much attention years before when I was a student. I was reminded of the victory dance of Miriam, the prophetess and sister of Moses and Aaron.

Once the Israelite slaves had managed to evade Pharaoh’s army, which was dramatically engulfed by the waves of the Red Sea, Moses recited a poem of triumph known to be one of the most ancient passages in the Bible: ‘I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea…’ Then his elderly sister Miriam takes the stage. Like Maryam here in the City of the Dead, she had a drum ( tof ) in her hand - an instrument that the Israelites had encountered and adopted for their own purposes in Egypt - and started to dance, no doubt triumphantly.

As the woman strutted in front of the emancipated slaves, one can imagine the gestures she made in the direction of Egypt.

But the unfragrant widow was no longer dancing triumphantly; she was dancing sexily. To o sexily for my taste, and far too close. I imagined that she was a prostitute of some sort. She was rather handsome and had a lithe, curvaceous body. But this was not for me. Predictably she was holding her hand out for money.

‘She invites you to rest your weary body in her humble tomb. Or do I mean womb?’ whispered Daud, giggling.

‘Er no thanks,’ I said.

‘If the widow is not your style,’ said Daud huffily, ‘I can assure you that she is mine. Very much mine. Perhaps you could lend me a few pounds?’

He was swinging his cross with a circular movement of his hand, one of his eyebrows raised expectantly.

‘You loathsome little Copt,’ I muttered.

Dusk was turning to night and the fruit bats were starting to swoop and circle in the half-light, making their typical highpitched buzzing sound. I had a flight to London the following morning and I was looking forward to an early night. I had little desire to walk back through the City of the Dead alone, nor did I wish to wait around here while Daud had his way with the widow. Shaking my head I stood up to leave and gave the woman a few well-worn Egyptian notes.

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