Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas

up outside the dark-pink block of the museum. Iris sat up in the front next to the driver and Mamdooh, who had insisted on coming with them, was squeezed in the back next to Ruby.

      In the mornings the front of the building was choked with tourists and their guides and buses, but at the end of the day there was only a handful of stragglers and postcard sellers loitering in the dusk. As they swept through the gates they made an unusual threesome, but it was Iris with her stiff back and profile like a face on a coin who drew the attention. Ruby slouched with her hands in her trouser pockets. She didn’t care for the wholesome, family-day-out aspect of most of the museums she had been dragged to at home, but at least this outing was a diversion. As they reached the doors she was even experiencing a flutter of mild interest.

      Mamdooh negotiated for tickets, then they walked inside.

      Ruby tilted her head to look upwards. Dim galleries rose round a central well crowned with a span of murky glass. Radiating away from where she stood were tall wooden cases filled, heaped, overflowing with a wild profusion of exhibits. She drifted down the wood-and-glass avenues, gazing at the displays. There were tiny carved wooden figures from tombs and huge imperious pharaonic statues. There were primitive boats and earthenware pots, broken shards and scratched hieroglyphs and curled papyrus, massive jewellery in gold and cornelian and glass, amulets and bracelets, and humble leather sandals that looked as if they had been discarded only a day ago. The artefacts were all dusty and most of the labels were written in scratchy, faded Arabic, but for Ruby this only added to the appeal. This was a museum, not a museum experience. It was rich and darkly disordered and abundant, and tantalising because she didn’t know enough to begin to comprehend it. It was a vast collection of innumerable collections, a multi-magnification of her own one-time passion that made her hungry and awestruck at the same time.

      Her breath fogged the glass as she stared at a swarm of bizarre brooches in the shape of golden flies.

      Mamdooh shuffled and huffed at her shoulder.

      ‘Miss, to come this way please.’

      Go away, she wanted to shout. But Iris was beckoning to her too. At the far end of a long vista of columns and crammed niches a phalanx of cleaning women with buckets and mops were swilling the stone floors.

      ‘Where are we going?’ Ruby asked.

      ‘Upstairs.’

      Reluctantly she followed them up shallow stone steps to the first-floor gallery, all the time wishing that she could have this treasury to herself without the distraction of Mamdooh and Iris.

      There was a crowd of visitors in one room, and past the craning heads she caught one brief glimpse of the serene funerary mask of the boy king.

      ‘Here?’ she pointed.

      Iris shook her head. They came to a side gallery, with rows of polished wooden benches in the ante-room.

      ‘I will wait here,’ Mamdooh announced.

      The room beyond was hushed and dimly lit. The mummified remains of the royal pharaohs lay in sealed glass boxes.

      Ruby crept along the line, lingering beside each enclosed mummy. Here were a queen’s dark ringlets and hooked nose, here was a skull showing through skin like dried leather, long yellow teeth bedded in the jawbone, a withered arm circled with a coil of gold. Iris moved in step with her, murmuring the names: Seti I, Ramses II, Tuthmosis IV. Some of them looked as if they were merely asleep, others were withered and collapsed, a bundle of remains more touching than macabre. What struck Ruby most was that these were just people, with wrists and nostrils and fingernails. Outside in the halls were the decorated sarcophagi and tomb ornaments, but here were men and women. They had lived and known glory, and then they were dead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them.

      She murmured to herself, the skull beneath the skin. She didn’t know where the line came from, but she had heard or read it somewhere.

      She understood why Iris had brought her here. The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obliterated forever, but there was no real difference between this hushed room and the tomb house where Ash’s family lived.