Mr. Ibis shook his head. “He didn’t say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect.”
“So,” asked Shadow, “what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something?”
“No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its names from us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days.”
“Frontier times?”
“You might call it that,” said Mr. Ibis. “Evening, Mizz Simmons! And a merry Christmas to you too! The folk who brought me here came up the Mississippi a long time back.”
Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. “Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago?”
Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, “Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take.”
“Okay,” said Shadow. “I’ll buy it, I guess. What were they trading?”
“Not much,” said Mr. Ibis. “Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in the upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them.” He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. “This country has been Grand Central Station for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus?”
“Sure,” said Shadow, obligingly. “What about him?”
“Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. There’s nothing special about coming to America. I’ve been writing stories about it, from time to time.” They began to walk again.
“True stories?”
“Up to a point, yes. I’ll let you read one or two, if you like. It’s all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally—and this is speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, here—I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait.
“Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.”
Shadow hadn’t said anything, and hadn’t planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so he said, “Well, weren’t they?” The last dead leaves of the autumn crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.
“The misconception is that men didn’t travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the East, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasn’t a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away.”
They had reached a large house, built in the style people