“I was staring out of the window. At the weather.”
The valley was so narrow, Chitty’s wingtips were almost touching each side. They were flying through an ancient, colossal tunnel. Then they were out, soaring over a dry sandy plain, as though they’d been spit out of a massive stone pea-shooter.
“How are we flying if we’ve got no petrol?” said Mum.
“We’re not flying; we’re gliding,” said Jem. “Listen.”
There was nothing — no sound from the engine at all. Or from the wind. They drifted silently over hills and sand dunes, noiselessly passing over a road and then a walled city. From the air, it looked like the best toy fort ever. Beyond the city walls, something that looked like a gigantic colourful quilt spread out in the sand.
“A market!” said Mum. “Look, those cloths are the roofs of the stalls. And those splashes of red are . . . gosh.”
They could see now that some of the colours they had seen from the air were piles of fresh spices, chilies, oranges, grapes, figs, olives. They were gliding just above the stalls and the shoppers. No one saw them. No one looked up. Everyone was much too busy choosing and weighing and haggling and gossiping. No one had time to notice a low-gliding camper van as it brushed the tops of the palm trees.
Then they were in the desert. Sand dunes rolled beneath them like slow, golden waves, and Chitty followed the contours — rising high over the peaks, sweeping low into the valleys, riding the thermals of hot air as though the Sahara was one vast, gentle fairground ride. For hours and hours, the view didn’t vary. Once they saw some kind of fox scurrying down a dune. Just a little fox with unusually big ears, but after so long without seeing any living creature at all, it seemed as magical and impossible as a unicorn. Later they saw a Jeep with a pair of bored-looking camels tethered to the back of it, their shadows waving on the hot sand like strange trees. There was no sign of a driver.
Then it went dark.
Just like that.
It was light.
Then it was dark.
“Headlights,” yelled Dad. “Put the headlights on, darling.”
“What happened?”
“There are no sunsets in the desert,” explained Lucy, “due to the low horizon. The sun appears to drop very rapidly, giving the appearance of instant night. Also there are no petrol fumes and so on to create that afterglow we see when the sun sets back home.”
“So it’s nothing strange or worrying, then?”
“It’s perfectly normal, but it is worrying. If you remember, we have no petrol. For the last few hours, we haven’t been flying — we’ve been gliding, using thermals of hot air rising from the sand. Now that the sun has gone down, everything will cool down and so we can expect to . . . oh.”
“Oh!”
“Ow!”
There was a terrible jolt. Chitty had run into a bank of sand.
“Is everyone all right?”
Everyone was all right.
“For the moment,” said Lucy. “But we are in a camper van in the middle of the desert with no fuel, limited water, and no emergency food rations.”
“That is true,” said Mum. “Does anyone have a plan?”
“What about . . . ?” Dad thought for a moment. “What about coffee and pancakes?”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t use too much water,” said Mum, “not if we’re stranded in the middle of the desert.”
“Shhh,” said Jem. “Listen.”
“What?”
“Can’t you hear? Voices.”
There were voices — slightly distant, but definitely voices — laughing, talking, arguing, singing, old and young voices.
“If we’re all alone in the middle of the desert, how can there be voices?” asked Mum.
“Clearly,” said Lucy, “we’ve all gone mad from fear. Now we’re hallucinating.”
“Scared!” yelled Little Harry.
“Now, now, don’t be scared, Little Harry,” said Mum. “Ghosts can’t hurt you.”
“Scared! Scared!” yelled Little Harry, pointing at the windscreen.
Mum followed his gaze and gave a yelp of fear. Then Dad, then Lucy, and then Jem all looked where Little Harry had been pointing, and all gasped in fear and horror. A face was staring in through the windscreen. A cold, unblinking, unseeing face. A huge face. A face the size of a cliff.
Dad covered his eyes with his hands. “Has it gone?” he said. He seemed to think that if he could stop himself from seeing it, then it would stop being there.
“No,” said Lucy, “it hasn’t gone. And it’s not going. It hasn’t gone anywhere for thousands of years. Look.”
Dad peeked. Then Mum. They looked more closely.
“It’s . . .” said Dad.
“Yes, it is,” said Lucy. “This van has parked itself right in front of the Sphinx. In Egypt. We couldn’t see it when we first landed because it was all in darkness. Then the moon rose.”
“And the voices . . .”
“Are people who’ve come to see the Sphinx by moonlight.”
“According to YouFinder,” said Lucy, checking her phone, “the Sphinx is fifteen kilometres from Cairo by road, so we’re not in the middle of the desert at all. In fact, we are conveniently situated for water, petrol, food, and all amenities.”
“So,” said Dad, “coffee, anyone? And what about those pancakes?”
Jem lay on his bed listening to the homey sounds of eggs being cracked and the kettle being boiled, smelling the rich perfume of Dad’s coffee. If he closed his eyes, he felt like he was back on Zborowski Terrace, but if he opened them, he was looking at the moonlit Sphinx and the candles and campfires of its visitors.
“Errm . . . is anyone expecting a visitor?”
Lucy had been too excited about seeing the Sphinx to wait for coffee and pancakes. So she’d put on her shoes and her coat and slid open the door of the van and found a surprise. Someone was waiting to come in. A dozen people, in fact. All waiting in an orderly line, chatting. The moment they saw Lucy, they pushed closer to the van and started yelling things at her.
“What’s going on? What do they want?” said Mum. “Have you parked illegally again, Tom?”
“I don’t know,” said Dad. “I don’t speak Sphinxese.”
“Arabic,” Lucy corrected him. “They think we are a snack van. This man in the stripes wants two coffees and two pancakes. The one with the beard is asking if you do tea. . . .”
Dad was carrying Lucy’s pancakes. Before Lucy had even looked at them, the man at the front of the queue had taken them and was eating them and giving Dad a big thumbs-up and a small banknote with a picture of the pyramids on it. The rest of the queue squeezed closer while the man with the pancakes seemed to be describing their finer points, explaining how flat they were and crispy round the edges but squashy in the middle, with maybe just a slight sweetness that really made them the best he’d ever eaten. There was more shouting. Lucy said, “Some of them are asking if we have ice cream to go with the pancakes.”
Dad stared at Lucy. “Lucy,” he said, “do you speak Arabic?”
“Shwaya.”
“Where did you learn to speak Arabic?”
“In my bedroom.”
“French. Meteorology. Egyptology. Arabic . . . And all this time we thought you were just on Facebook.”
“I was. A lot of my Facebook friends are bilingual Egyptian meteorologists.”
“Well, can you use your Arabic to tell these people that we are not a snack van? We are a family home.”
“Egyptians,” said Lucy, “attach very great importance to hospitality. If you tell them this is your home, they will think you are inviting them to free pancakes. At least as long as they think we are a snack van, they will give us money.”
“Which we need,” said Jem, “for petrol.” He handed his pancakes to the next person in the queue in exchange for a fistful of tiny coins.
So the Tooting family spent the night cracking eggs, whisking batter, flipping, and, most of all, selling
pancakes. Mum and Lucy put out the deck chairs so that customers could sit and talk and ask for second helpings. The moonlit Sphinx looked down on them all as they passed the pancakes out. Much later, Dad and Jem walked across the cool sands in search of a petrol station. They found a single pump with a boy sitting next to it and some goats. The boy was eating one of the Tooting family pancakes. He showed it to Dad and gave him a thumbs-up before filling two big cans of petrol for them. As they walked back, with the white stars reeling overhead and campfires glowing to the left and right, they could hear people singing strange and lovely songs. Dad said, “You know, I could live like this. We could stay here and run this place as a proper business. We could call it Café Café Bang Bang. We could offer people pleasure flights across the pyramids. We could be the hottest spot in Cairo.”
And just then Jem thought he might be right.
The first ray of sunlight was slicing the horizon when the Tooting family shut up shop and followed Lucy to the feet of the Sphinx. The Sphinx looked even bigger close up. The last few visitors — sitting around their campfire — hardly reached her toenails. Dad asked one of them to take a photograph of the whole family with the Sphinx, but the man had to walk so far away to fit the monument in that they looked like a speck of dirt at the bottom of the picture. There was nothing to do but stand and stare and let that magical sight sink into their memories. Lucy told them the legend of a Sphinx who guarded a road and would not let travellers pass unless they could correctly answer her riddle. If you got it wrong, she would eat you. How the statue had been built four and a half thousand years ago. Or three thousand years ago, depending which theory you believed. How legend had it that Napoleon’s soldiers had accidentally broken its nose while they were practising nearby with their cannons. She described what it looked like when it was new, before the wind and sand had chewed it up — how it had the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle.
But Mum wasn’t listening. “Little Harry!” she gasped. “Where is he? Where is Little Harry?”
The visitors had gone now and so had everyone else. Little Harry was nowhere to be seen.
“Look!” yelled Jem. He had spotted a set of small footprints toddling off into the desert.
They followed Little Harry’s footprints as fast and far as they could. But then a morning breeze started up, blowing sand into their faces and smoothing away every print and smudge from the surface of the desert, making it flat and blank. All around there was nothing to see but sand and the blue air wobbling in the heat. It was as though a terrible invisible hand had come along and rubbed Little Harry out.
They looked behind them. They could no longer see the Sphinx, the pyramids, the sightseers or their cars, or even the van. It wasn’t just Little Harry that had been erased. It was the whole world.
“Little Harry! Little Harry!” they called, but their voices were snatched away in front of their faces.
“We should split up,” said Mum. “You and Jem go that way. I’ll go this way with Lucy. He can’t be far.”
“If we separate, we might all vanish,” said Dad. “We might never find one another again.”
“We have to do something!” said Mum. “We can’t just stand here!” She was feeling headachy and hot. She wanted to run, but she didn’t know which way to go.
“Excuse me.” It was a gentle, soothing voice, and it came from just behind them. A woman, dressed all in red, with red hair and red sunglasses, was smiling at them with red lips from under the wide shade of a huge red umbrella.
The woman said calmly, “Could this be the dear Little Harry you’re looking for?”
Holding one of the woman’s fingers (her nails were painted red), smiling up at them from the shade, was Little Harry. “Babies!” yelled Little Harry.
“My baby,” said Mum, sweeping him up in her arms and kissing him. “Don’t ever wander off again. Especially in a desert.”
“Babies!” yelled Little Harry.
“Oh, don’t be cross with Little Harry,” said the lady in red. “It was really all the Nanny’s fault.”
“Who’s the Nanny?” said Dad.
“I’m the Nanny. Silly Nanny was walking through the desert with a hole in her packet of jelly babies, see?” She passed Dad a paper bag with a few jelly babies in it. “Do take one,” she said, “Mr. . . . ?”
“Tooting. Don’t mind if I do. This is my wife, Julie. You’ve met Little Harry. This is Lucy, and this is Jeremy.”
“Jeremy.” Nanny smiled. “What a deliciously old-fashioned name.”
Jem winced.
“I seem to have been dropping jelly babies every few yards. Little Harry spotted one, ate it, spotted another, went after it, ate that, and followed the jelly-baby trail all the way out here. Didn’t you, Little Harry? Still, no harm done, though he’s a bit sticky.”
Mum wiped Little Harry’s face and said, “I can’t believe I didn’t see him wandering off. I’m always so careful with him.”
“It’s entirely understandable,” said Nanny in a soothing tone. “After all, you were seeing the Sphinx for the first time. That’s quite a distraction. Sometimes all it takes is a moment. Do come under Nanny’s umbrella.”
They all shuffled under the umbrella. It’s amazing what a difference a bit of cloth on a stick can make. Suddenly they could breathe again. And see. Without the sun blazing in their eyes, it was easy for them to spot the Sphinx, just a few hundred yards away. And the pyramids. And Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They hadn’t gone far at all. They had been tricked by the heat.
“You all look so hot and bothered,” said Nanny. “Please, have a drink.”
She took a bottle of water from her big red handbag and passed it round. The water was icy cold, which is a bit strange when you think about it. Nobody thought about it just then, though. They were all too happy drinking it.
“Say sorry to the lady for eating her jelly babies,” said Dad to Little Harry.
“Oh, they weren’t for me.” Nanny smiled. “I was taking them home to my little charge. It’s my morning off. I always do a bit of archaeology on my days off, and I always take a present back to my little one.”
“Archaeology?” said Lucy. “That’s interesting. So which is your favourite Sphinx theory? Three thousand years old or four and a half?”
“Oh, I’m not interested in the Sphinx at all. Or the pyramids. It’s automotive archaeology that interests me. Come and see. . . .”
She led them to a spot just over the next dune, where some men were digging what looked like a set of old tyres out of the sand and loading them onto the backs of a couple of camels.
“These,” she said, “are the wheels from an old racing car. My theory is that they fell off during the Timbuktu–Cairo rally of 1922 — one of the greatest motor races of all time. I’m so happy that we’ve found all four wheels.”
One of the men shouted something excitedly. “He says,” translated Lucy, “that he’s found a fifth wheel. Maybe it’s the spare?” The man was brushing the sand from a big wooden wheel, inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli. Carved crocodiles chased each other through ivory papyrus all around the rim.
“Dinosaurs,” said Little Harry.
“Beautiful,” said Mum.
“That’s not the spare tyre, silly,” said Nanny. “That’s just the wheel of some old pharaoh’s ceremonial chariot. Leave it in the sand. My racing wheels are much more interesting.”
It turned out that there was something very interesting about the racing wheels. Jem was the first to spot it. “Dad! Come and look at this.” Dozens of shiny steel spokes radiated from a thick silver hubcap and engraved in curly letters across the middle of the cap was the word Zborowski.
“What a coincidence!” said Dad. “Your wheels have got the same name as our engine.”
“You have a Zborowski engine?” gasped Nanny. “Can I see?”
So, while the men with the camels took the Zborowski wheels away, Nanny followed the Tooting family back to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “Isn’t t
hat a twenty-three-window camper van — the kind beloved by adventurous families?” said Nanny.
“Exactly right,” said Dad. “You certainly know your stuff.”
“The little boy I look after is crazy about cars. Aren’t all little boys? I bet you are, too, aren’t you, Jeremy? But surely the Zborowski engine wouldn’t fit in a camper van. Doesn’t the Zborowski engine start with a hand crank? Whoever heard of a hand-cranked camper van?”
“Jem . . .” said Dad.
Jem held up the crank handle for her to see.
“Well, how utterly charming,” she said. “A crank-started camper van. Does she have a name?”
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” yelled Little Harry.
“Of course,” said Nanny. “Well, good morning, Chitty Chitty . . . Oh! Excuse me!” A car horn seemed to be honking very nearby. “My phone,” she explained, “has an automobile theme of course.” She glanced at the screen. “It’s a text from my little boy. He’s wondering where I am. I’m a bit late. . . .”
Dad was slightly startled to see that her mobile phone was shaped just like a larger-than-average jelly baby. Before he had time to think about this, Mum had offered Nanny a lift. “It’s the least we can do. You saved Little Harry’s life.”
“I’m sure you’d have saved it yourselves eventually,” said Nanny. “But if you insist. I would love to hear the roar of that Zborowski engine.” She climbed into the front passenger seat, fastened her seat belt, and said, “Straight on until we get to the main road.”
“Your mobile phone,” said Dad. “I think I’ve seen one like that before.”
“Oh, what a fabulous sound that engine makes. Twelve pistons. Twenty-three litres. A symphony of horsepower.”
Dad was impressed. “You really do know about cars.”
“I pick up tidbits here and there, you know . . .” And Nanny told them the story of Count Zborowski, the man whose name appeared on her wheels and their engine. She told them how he had built a massive car in the 1920s in order to try to break the World Land Speed Record.