"What was it?" Freddy said. "Can't we get another? If you bought it, it was probably a fake."
"A new one would never be the same—Mike gave me the one I've lost"—she purposely used Michael's intimate name—"while we were staying at Luxor. It has been my 'heaven-sent gift'"—(the ancients' name for the amulet, which represented the right eye of Horus).
They all looked to see if the amulet had been dropped in the room, if it was under the table. But it was nowhere to be found; the eye of Horus was concealing itself.
"It was probably only a fake," Freddy said, "if you bought it in Luxor. I'll try and get a genuine one for you—for ages and ages they were the commonest of all amulets, judging by the number we find. Almost every ancient Egyptian must have worn one. It was the all-seeing eye, the protecting light."
"The moon was the left eye of Horus and the sun was the right—isn't that so?" Millicent asked.
"Roughly speaking, but the eye of Horus is a complicated subject. It's not just the evil or good eye of Italy, by any means. The eye of Horus is the eye of Heaven, Shakespeare's 'Heaven's eye,' but it's when it gets identified with Ra that the complication comes in. The sacred eye is the eye of Heaven, or Ra. Poets, ancient and modern, have sung of it, from the time of Job to the days of Shakespeare. But there was also the evil eye, the one we hear so much about in Southern Italy."
"Tell me about that. I always like the naughty stories. I've never grown up in that respect. The evil eye is more interesting to me than the eye of Heaven. I knew a woman in Italy who was selling lace; she let a friend of mine buy all she wanted from her at the most absurdly cheap prices you can imagine. When the lady of the house we were staying in, who had allowed the woman to call and bring her lace, asked her why she had sold the lace to a stranger at a price for which she had refused to part with it to her, she simply threw up her eyes and said, 'Ma, Signora, what could I do? She had the evil eye—if I had not given it to her, what terrible misfortunes she could have brought to me!'"
"I remember seeing a crowded tramcar in Rome empty itself in a moment when a well-known Prince, who was supposed to have the evil eye, got into it," Michael said.
"A common expression for a woman in ancient Egypt was stav-ar-ban, which meant 'she who turns away the evil eye,'" Freddy said.
"Then the Egyptians believed in the evil eye, as apart from the sacred eye of Ra?" Millicent said. "What a universal belief it seems to have been! One meets with it all over the world."