The Words of the Mouth

  ******

  I inspected the hotels to see which would be the best one to stay in. The Medinet Habu was the last hotel before the desert, standing next to a temple. One of the guests I recognised was the self-possessed Egyptian from the train journey, a presence which instantly recommended the place to me, and I checked in. Before long, we met.

  "My name is Samir," he told me. "I am a professor of Egyptology at the University of Cairo. And where is your home?"

  "Scotland."

  "Ah, the Celts; are you psychic?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What was your impression when you entered a pyramid?"

  "It was like a disgusting urinal, actually," I replied cynically, always suspicious of mystics.

  "But what do you feel like when you first enter a tomb?"

  "Blankness, nothing at all. But I have a definite game. I say to myself as I enter a tomb, 'I've died', and when I leave, 'I'm reborn'. Yesterday I died and was reborn six times."

  The first night after I moved into the hotel, I noticed a pack of dogs sniffing around the buildings huddled next to the hotel. Wild dogs in Luxor are like muggers in New York's Central Park: nobody walks at night because of them.

  I woke before sunrise and walked out into the desert for a mile, to watch the sunrise; its light revealed a pack of dogs between me and the town. I watched the biggest dog as he trotted, nose down, following a scent which meandered across the road.

  With a shiver of fear, I realised it was my own scent.Picking up a few stones, I climbed a nearby hillock. With the big dog in the lead, the entire pack came scampering up the slope. I took a deep breath to puff myself out, and look, as I hoped, intimidating; the stones would be saved until the last moment.

  Then the big dog, wagging his tail, came up to me and licked my hand.