HORIZON

I can understand there being a commandment against coveting your neighbour's goods and chattels, not to mention his wife and his maidservant, of course, which goes without saying. All of us certainly coveted Bos' Enfield, and none of us could afford it, which is often the way of the world.

One Friday night we were in the pub, talking over what we might do for the weekend. 'Hey, come on, why don't we go for a run into North Wales, hey?' Bos said. 'You leave your girlfriends at home, we get a cottage for the weekend, stock it up with a few beers, and bring back a handful of the local totties. We could have a great time... what do you say, Jim, man, hey?'

'I say I'd get locked out of our bedroom for bloody weeks if my particular lady found out about it, that's what Bos,' I told him. 'Anyway, the Velo's clutch-race is on its way out, and my grant's nearly done so I don't want to take any chances. In any direction,' I added.

'I'll have to rebuild the Domi this weekend,' Rob told him. 'Count me out, Bos, I'll be too bloody busy cutting gaskets out of Corn Flakes packets with one of my scapels.'

'And I'm off climbing in the Lakes with Sue and a few mates,' Tim said. 'You ought to try it, Bos you don't get much exercise.. .'

'Not vertical exercise,' I grinned at him, and he laughed back, and gave me a couple of fingers in answer. 'But I suppose the horizontal press-ups keep you in trim.'

'Hey, everyone needs a hobby, you know,' he answered. 'So, none of you miserable bastards fancy exploiting the natives this weekend?'

'I guess you'd know all about that, Bos,' Rob said, and there was a sudden, uncomfortable silence. Bos had a lot of good points, though, and one of them, maybe, was his steadfast refusal to take offence at anything he didn't think was intended too seriously, so he just smiled, and went on: 'And talking of which, if I'm going to be going by myself on the bike, maybe I'll change the plan a bit. Yeah, sure, okay, men, you keep drinking, and I'll go and make a phone call, hey?'

'I don't know how he does it,' I commented morosely, as Bos charmed the girl behind the bar into letting him use the pub's phone to make a call to one ofhis numerous female acquaintances. 'I'd like to know what the secret is.'

'It's not being fat, ugly, and poor - like you, Tim assured me. 'I can tell you that for nothing.'

'Some people have got it, others haven't, Rob added. 'But I reckon that bastard's got our share as well as his own...'

Bos came back with a big grin on his face, and sat down to finish his pint of Heineken. 'Quite right about exploiting the natives,' he said, 'because I'm taking one back to Wales with me, man. Megan sends her regards, Jim... hey, she said love, really, but I thought that was a bit strong, you know...'

'Is that the red-haired girl with the ginger cat?' Rob asked. 'The one doing Egyptology?'

I assured him it was. 1.ICI STIIIT 111811

'You lucky bastard,' Tim said, and smiled. 'But watch out for her mummy, though.'

'All right, you bloody humorists,' Bos answered. 'I suppose maybe I ought to be grateful you've managed to avoid jokes about ginger pussies.'

I gave him the archaeologist's version of 'Blues In The Night', which starts off, 'Ma mummy done Ptolemy, When I was in Cairo' but, like 'Men Of Harlech, Don't eat Garlic' and a few other things drunken archaeologists sing in pubs after a day in the trenches, it's rarely amusing to people who don't realise that an archaeologist like Lawrence of Arabia, a bike-riding aesthete who dressed in long flowing robes, and enjoyed corrective training, backing into the limelight, and a fair degree of self-induced mystery, is about normal in the profession.

When I'd finished singing, and brushed the crisps that'd been thrown over me out of my hair and taken the beer-mats out of my beer, I said to him, fairly seriously: 'Even so, Bos, leaving aside feline jokes, watch out for that cat of Megan's, I reckon it owns her more than she owns it, and it's liable to give you a pawful of claws in a painful place if you're not careful.'

'Not this weekend,' he told me. 'I've talked Megan into leaving it with a mate of hers - piece of cake, man, believe me.'

I felt a small, insistent flicker of anger at that, one that I couldn't really explain, and still can't, for that matter - it's something to do with the way some people can charm everyone else, and without too much apparent effort. The rest of us poor sods go through life trying to be reasonable, and even occasionally unselfish, but all we get are hassles, set-backs and stonewalled by people we care a lot about, but the golden boys, and girls, of course, consider nobody else, pursue whatever they want, and everyone else falls in with their desires and wishes, and do their best to smooth their paths for them, too, and the darlings of fortune are usually blissfully unaware ofit. Maybe that's the biggest injustice of all - I know it's the one that angers me most, anyway.

After that weekend, I didn't see Bos much, and I saw even less of Megan and her cat, because she didn't go down into the Mummy Room any more to eat her sandwiches and drink beer. I'd guess that they were spending their lunchtimes together and, knowing Bos' tastes and wealth, probably working their way around the best restaurants in the city, and probably in north Cheshire as well.

I saw Bos once, very briefly, when I was walking into the city centre to get a choke-cable, and an inner-tube, for my Velo. A white car was waiting at the lights as I was crossing - I noticed it because it was a Triumph Stag, which were just out, and pretty expensive too, and the driver gave me a blast of 'La Cucuracha' on his horns. I jumped, turned to curse him, and saw it was Bos behind the wheel.

'Hey, man, how's it going, hey?' Bos shouted, grinning all over his suntanned face. 'You still got that ratty Velo, Jim?'

'Oh yes,' I shouted back. 'You still got that Enfield? I haven't seen it about much recently.'

'You'll be surprised when you do, man,' he replied. 'It's got a new paint job - it'll be ready soon. It's a real beaut, I'll show you and the other men it when it's finished.' The lights changed, and Bos drove off, the Stag snarling away from the lights. 'Tot siens, Jimmie,' he shouted. 'Be seeing you, Jim.'

A few days later I was asked to call in at Hardman Street Police Station, because the CID wanted to have a word with me. Some artefacts from the Egyptology Department'd gone missing, and someone had mentioned that I used to go into the place a lot, probably a porter, or someone else who'd seen me with Megan.

'They were doing stock-taking, like,' a CID Sergeant told me, and added with a lopsided smile, 'but someone had already been there taking it before them. Did you know about the storage rooms in the basement? Right next to the Mummy Room, where you and Miss Proberts used to go and have your butties at dinner-time?'

'I knew they were there,' I answered. 'But we never went into them - I suppose I always presumed that they were locked. I can't say that I'd be that interested, anyway - if their storage rooms were anything like the ones in the Archaeology Department, they'd look like a cross between a jumble sale and a Victorian curio shop. Was anything valuable taken?'

'It was all valuable,' the Sergeant told me. 'I don't know how you'd value it as historical objects, mind, but all the stuff taken was gold, or gold inlaid with precious stones, and you can always melt gold down and take it to a bullion dealer, and it's pretty anonymous then, of course.'

'What sort of things?' I asked. 'Do you have a list?'

'Of sorts,' he answered, 'although your comments about curio shops seem right enough - stuff had been piled down there from the 1920s, all jumbled together, and the records were like that, too. But, if it means anything to you, and I suppose it might, you being a history student, most of the stolen stuff was from the Robinson Collection, and we've got lists, but we've got a few old photographs of the stuff dug up too, which is helpful. Only black and white, mind,' he went on, and handed me a dusty large buff envelope across the table. 'See for yourself, son.'

I looked through the photos, and they rang a bell somewhere in the back of my memory. The Robinson Collection came about as a result of a series ofdigs in the Valley ofthe Kings - a favourite place for digging, because a high proportion of pharaohs, members of their families, and high court officials were buried there. From between 1922 and 1928 there were winter and spring digs, because no one likes standing in sand in summer in Eygpt. The digs had been valuable archaeologically, but I could only remember a couple of notably rich finds - a princess called Emennefer, who'd been a Hittite king's daughter given in marriage to a younger son of a pharaoh round about 1250BC, and a priest of Homs, the Egyptian falcon-god, who'd been called Anapu

Mose, from a century later. Their tombs had been richly decked out and, more importantly, hadn't been disturbed by grave-robbers, so their mummies and mummy-cases, gilded wood painted with bright colours and inlaid with ivory, silver, lapis lazuli and rare woods, had also survived, and had ended up, like much else, in the British Museum. The grave-goods though, furniture of ivory, carved guardian figures called ushabtis, personal jewellery and regalia, and everything needed for the afterlife, had been kept by the Department of Egyptology, because the University had funded the expeditions.

'I bet that looks nice,' the Sergeant said, as I looked at a faded photo of a pectoral, a collar of bright blue beads and gold wire, with a pendant in the middle. 'In colour, I mean...'

'The beads are a bright blue, sky-blue, and a mixture of lapis lazuli, turquoise, and a glaze called faience,' I told him, 'and they're shaded like that to represent the sky. The collar belonged to a priest of Homs, the Egyptian god of the sky, that's the god in the middle, on the pendant, the hawk with the red disc of the sun behind him.'

'Seems a pity that it'll be broken up, most likely,' the Sergeant said. 'For the gold wire and the figure of the hawk. What do you reckon to the Curse of the Pharaohs then?' he asked me unexpectedly. 'Maybe it's get the thieves you never know.'

'It's a lot of nonsense,' I told him, and went on to explain what I'd learned of Egyptian religion from talking to Megan.

'See much of her now?' he asked, and I told him I didn't, and mentioned her cat in passing.

He looked surprised. 'No cat when I was interviewing her at her house,' he told me. 'There was a South African lad there though - he was the one told me that you used to visit the Egyptology Department a lot, which is why I thought we'd better have a word with you.'

I was annoyed by that, so I decided to go round and see Megan and Bos, and ask what the hell they were playing at. When I got there another guy living in the same house told me that Megan was in hospital, and he presumed that Bos would be round there visiting her, so I rode over to the hospital.

'It's some sort ofvirus,' the ward sister told me. 'It produces a sort of intermittent fever, and then she rambles on a bit, but it's not contagious, so you can go and see her ifyou want. We're a bit worried by it, it doesn't seem to respond to anything, so really it's just a question of observation, and seeing how long it'll last, and making her as comfy as possible. No,' she went on, in answer to my question, 'no one else has been to see her recently - well, apart from one of her professors, I think.'

I was shocked when I saw Megan lying in the bed - a frail figure in a blue night-dress, small amongst the starched white hospital linen. I've mentioned before that her skin had a translucency, but now there seemed to be a fireiness behind it, as if the intermittent fever was burning her up from inside, and her hair, that red-gold hair that used to cascade over her shoulders and mingle with the fur of her marmalade cat, seemed faded and lifeless, and even a little dusty.

'Hi there, Jim,' she whispered to me. 'How's going, huh?'

We talked a while, and she seemed to be getting more tired by the moment, and then suddenly a feverish spasm caught hold of her, and her whole body started to tremble. My dad came back from the Second World War with malaria he'd caught in Egypt, or maybe it was sandfly fever, which is similar, I think, and Megan's condition seemed so similar that I decided to get a nurse.

The nurse bustled in, and set about making her more comfortable, and I said I'd be in to see her again soon, and bent down to kiss her forehead.

'Jim,' she whispered, 'please warn Bos, I love him very much.'

'Warn him about what?' I asked her.

'The Prayer ofWarning,' she answered. Tell him about the Prayer ofHorachti - please.'

Then her voice become incoherent, and rambled away into meaningless muttering, and the nurse told me it was high time that I left her patient alone. it

Every time I went round to see Bos, he was out, and no one knew where he was or how long he'd be. I got fed up with trying, but I began to think more and more about what she'd said, and so I determined to go and see one of her tutors in the Egyptology Department, to see if he could make any sense of it.

The frail and elderly man put some papyri in front of me, and I looked at the hieroglyphs, their colours and inks faded after 3500 years, protected by the glass that held them flat from the front and the back.

'The Prayer of Warning, it's also known as the Prayer of Horachti, Homs the Lord of the Horizon, it's quite interesting,' he told me. 'It's not a curse, of course, more of a moral treatise, although a fairly terrifying one - the Egyptians were a religious people, and they believed in punishment for wrongdoing, both in this life and the afterlife, and I think the Prayer is a sort of sermon. John Knox and the Scottish Calvinists would've been at home with it,' he said with a faint smile, and I just caught the faint Scots burr in his voice as he said it. 'Would you like to hear a little bit of it in translation?'

I nodded, and he started from the top lefthand side of one papyrus under its glass plate, working left, and then from the left to right on the second line, and back again the opposite way on the third, pointing to the characters with a rubber-tipped pencil.

"This then is how justice, the word is 'maat', but it's not easily translatable,' he told me, "shall be done under the Eye of Homs the Just, the Avenger, the Lord of the Horizon, the Hawk of the Upper and Lower Lands and of the whole firmament. And this is what the god says - for those who despoil men, their punishment shall be from men, but those evil-doers who despoil the gods, the gods themselves will judge.'' Do you want me to go on? This next bit's pretty fearsome, I'm afraid.'

I nodded again, and he continued. "For the despoilers will have no rest, these evil ones, and the lesser guilty, will not sleep, and will burn in their bodies, and know their wrong-doing. But for those great ones of evil, the corrupters of others, the marrow will flow from their spines in floods, and Homs the God will make dark places of their eye-sockets, and their fathers will bewail them, and their mothers, and they will have no prosperity: and they will know the justice of the gods, and so will the beholders of them, and the balance of Osiris will weigh their souls for justice, and the scales will be tipped, and for them there will be no resurrection in The Country Beyond And Across The River." He looked at me, and said: 'Well, that seems to cover everything, doesn't it? But, as I've said, it isn't really a curse: more of a warning, and a powerful one that I can't really see any of the ancient Egyptians not heeding, believe me. Mind you, they were more religious than we are, as well as more superstitious.'

'I suppose they were,' I answered slowly. 'Yes, thank you, Doctor Toleman, it's certainly food for thought.'

'Very civilised people, the Egyptians,' he answered. 'Humane, urbane, civilised, a great culture, but we've all got a darker side to our natures, as peoples or individuals, as I'm sure you'll know from your study of the Dark Ages, Mr. Fogg.'

I nodded, convinced that I should find Bos as soon as possible. To do what though? Give him Megan's warning? Tell him about the Prayer of Horachti? Ask him if, as I was finally convinced, he'd been responsible for the thefts from the Egyptology Department? Maybe he'd just laugh but, hopefully, maybe he wouldn't. 'Hey, man, come in,' Bos said, when I'd been round for the fifth time that week. 'Long time no see, hey? Sling your helmet down over there, Barbie won't mind. Jim, this is Barbie, my new lady - Barbie, this is a mate of mine, Jim Fogg. We've just got back from London, man, been down there at an antiques fair, you know, and wait 20201UI

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