Edward Whittemore - Nile Shadows

But Liffy?. Liffy?

Joe turned away, too wrenched with pain to dwell on that vast multitude of faces and voices once conjured up in Liffy's sorrowing magic, and laughter, lost now to the world. It was too much for Joe so they talked for awhile of other things, and then Joe rose.

***

Well I'll be leaving now, he said. There are things I must try to do, and whatever way it turns out, I'm afraid we won't be meeting again.

Little Alice looked at him tenderly, and Big Belle's sad eyes were as strong upon him as ever. They watched as he went to stand on the small veranda one last time, gazing out over the river. Then he came back into the room to face them.

And where will you go from here? asked Belle.

Joe tried to smile.

To meet a man at the Sphinx, he said. I have no answers for him, but I might know the questions to ask at least.

And this time he did smile. Thinly, but he managed it.

I have to tell you I've never been able to handle good-byes, he said. I've just never gotten used to leaving people, even though I've done little else in my life. People have a way of slipping into our hearts and staying there, and we treasure them and don't want to let them go, and more than that, we never can let them go.

Once long ago I tried to live differently, but it never really worked. I used to pretend something could be over and done with, a place or a person, and I could move on and nothing was the worse for it. But I learned soon enough that was only a turn of words on the surface of things, mere childish pretending, and it was pain that taught me that, I'm sorry to say. Of course we do move on all right, but we don't forget nor should we, and nothing important is ever left behind, and no one we've loved ever goes out of our lives. They live on in other ways, that's all, in our words and our gestures, changing us and changing with us and even speaking to us in the quiet moments. Sometimes recognized, mostly not, but always a part of us, woven into the stuff of our lives.

And as for what's out there where I'm going now, well, when you look at it one way it's surely not much of a world, is it? We lose and we lose and that's all we ever do from the time we're born. Lose those who brought us into the world and lose the place where that was, the only safe place we ever know, and then we go right on losing other places and other people and the hopes and dreams that go with them, losing those we love and finding others if we're lucky, only to know we'll lose them too with time. Lose is all.

And that's one way to look at it surely, and all of it true and undeniably the way it is. But then there's also that other side to life, those moments that have a kind of grandeur to them, that speak of love so beautiful it takes your breath away. Rare moments that shine in the darkness, rare precious gems in the night, jewels of the soul beautiful and ancient. .

Joe nodded, smiling. He leaned down and embraced Belle and then Alice, kissing each of them. At the door he paused.

I've known those moments here with the two of you. I've known them and I'll always know them, and I'll always remember this room one way. The way it was the other night when I came here, one timeless night like all others on the Nile, and I sat in the candlelight looking at the river and listening to your beautiful music. A night unlike any other for me, on the Nile in the shadows at the end of the darkness, listening to your beautiful music. Yours, and now mine. .

Then all at once he was gone and the two tiny women were alone in the moonlight of their airy sunroom, alone again with their memories. . Big Belle sitting stiffly erect, staring straight ahead at the river. Little Alice touching her hair and softly humming a tune against the night.

— 21-

Purple Seven Moonglow

Midnight past in the serenity of the still desert.

The pyramids stately before the stars.

And far away in the moonlight a wisp of sand swirling lightly over the crest of a dune, billowing softly in the wake of a distant horseman who had suddenly come racing into view from out of the pale stony reaches of the night, pounding swiftly down through the wastes in a headlong charge aimed at that huge crouching figure on guard among the pyramids, the calm and graceful Sphinx.

. . this mysterious solitary charge in the moonlight carefully observed all the while from an unsuspected lookout. From a black hole in the right eye of the Sphinx. .

The horse and rider dropped from sight and came flying over a final ridge to gallop wildly down the last hard stretch of desert, the hoofbeats of the animal drumming more loudly as the charge narrowed, the dashing figure on horseback now clearly visible.

The pale rider wore a pith helmet, a safari jacket and jodhpurs. His face was masked by a gleaming white silk scarf tied around his head and flowing on the wind. His eyes were masked by racing goggles that caught the drift of the moon and blankly reflected it back in opaque white discs. The horse reared in front of the Sphinx as the rider broke his gallop, then went charging off to one side and quickly circled the enormous stone figure so tranquilly in repose in the moonlight.

Nothing. The Major had found no one lurking along the sides of the great stone beast. No one crouching in the crevices of antiquity's hindquarters. The Major was quite sure he was alone.

He drew up again in front of the Sphinx and dismounted, removing his carbine from its case on the side of the saddle. He also checked his long-range sniper's rifle nestling on his back, the large automatic pistols strapped to each of his hips, the small automatic in one pocket of his jodhpurs and the even smaller automatic in the other pocket, and the minuscule ivory-handled derringer under his jacket to the side.

Lastly he felt for the hunting knife at his waist, the two smaller slashing knives taped to his back, and the four throwing daggers strapped to his shins. Jingling around on the Major's web belt was a mass of extra ammunition clips, a half-dozen for each of his automatic pistols and a full dozen for his carbine.

In addition to the large supply of shiny brass bullets bristling from bandoliers crisscrossing the Major's chest, deadly fifty-caliber tracers as long as a man's hand and of no use whatsoever without a large water-cooled machine gun to fire them. But although these utterly useless bullets were no more than a kind of brassy display of symbolic mail firepower in the moonlight, they were still undeniably impressive, awesome because of sheer size alone.

Equipped. Armed. Ready.

Rifles, pistols, knives, tracers, daggers.

Automatic bolt actions and slippery blowback loading and well-oiled breechblock plungers. Beady sights and solid safety switches and slithering barrel screws, and but the merest squeeze of a taut trigger needed to make a hammer slam home and balls explode.

Equipped.

And finally, for reserve firepower, the Major had also brought along a monstrous nine-shot Czech revolver, an enormous pistol once claimed by Balkan assassins to be the ultimate all-purpose secret weapon of the future. This crude Czech masterpiece hidden in a saddlebag on the Major's high-spirited Arabian mare, in case the Major suddenly found himself stripped of his other weapons. In case he suddenly had to leap from the Sphinx onto his mare, against all odds, and make a daring escape in the moonlight, blasting away at skulking shadows as he thundered over the dunes.

Armed.

Grimly the masked Major smiled beneath the flowing silk folds of his white scarf, behind the pale white discs of his racing goggles.

Ready.

As prepared as any masked man could ever be for a dangerous nighttime meeting with a Purple Seven fugitive in the shadows of the inscrutable Sphinx.