by Jack Dann
‘The things I have seen!’ he croaked. ‘You must hear everything, everything.’
He went off into a fit of coughing, as dry as sandpaper. In the short time I knew him, Gordon Sturman could never utter more than a few sentences without that cough rising up in his throat. Yet he was desperate to tell his experiences to an English-speaking listener. I think he expected me to envy his tourist marvels.
It was in the Mayfair Hotel, a budget hotel in the Zamalek area of Cairo. I was staying nearby at the New Star Hotel, one of the few American guests among flocks of Germans, French and Italians. What brought me to Sturman’s bedside was a misunderstanding over the ‘Dr’ in front of my name; in fact, I’m a PhD, not a medico. As it turned out, Sturman’s case was beyond medical assistance anyway.
His room in the Mayfair was small, dark and sparsely furnished. For the sake of his cough, wet towels had been hung over the window to generate a little humidity in the air. It amazed me that a middle-aged Australian could be so short of funds: Sturman was no young backpacker, and his expensive cameras were at odds with the poverty of his surroundings.
‘It’s him.’ Sturman indicated the thin-faced Egyptian who had brought me to the room. ‘Naguib the Inscrutable, I call him. My guide. He’s got all my money.’
He had a strange relationship with his guide, half wary and half resentful. Waiting respectfully outside the open door, Naguib must have heard every word.
‘He tempted me,’ Sturman went on. ‘He told me about the Kingdom of the Dead.’
‘The what?’
‘Hah!’ Now his eyes glittered with a kind of triumph. ‘Never heard of it, have you? You’ve come to Egypt to do the usual sights. I did them too, every last temple and statue and pyramid. I’ve been five weeks in Egypt. I hired Naguib as my personal guide and we started in the north, then south to Abu Simbel, then down the Nile to Luxor. Twelve hundred photos I’ve taken. Not in the Kingdom of the Dead, though. Not allowed … not possible …’
His cough overwhelmed him and he buried his mouth in the pillow. Naguib came forward and gestured me away. For the first time, I studied the Egyptian’s face: the thin, fine lines of nose and eyebrows. When he turned to me on the landing outside, his voice was as calm as Sturman’s was laboured.
‘He excites himself too much, sir.’
‘I’m not the kind of doctor he needs, you understand that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Dr Webber. But I think he needs you too.’
‘I’ll come back with a proper doctor.’ Perhaps I misinterpreted the motion Naguib made with his left hand. ‘I’ll pay the bill. You don’t have to worry.’
I wondered how much money Naguib had managed to extract from Sturman. Did he feel somehow responsible for Sturman’s sickness? Why else would he still be looking after him? He was no ordinary guide, that was certain.
It took a great deal of searching to find a suitable Egyptian doctor, and a fair sum to persuade him to a bedside visit. I was beginning to regret my commitment, though I was still curious to hear more about the Kingdom of the Dead.
The doctor’s visit proved a complete waste of time. He could find no cause for the pain in Sturman’s throat or his feverish symptoms.
‘The fever is the body’s reaction to the throat,’ he said.
‘And the throat?’
He shrugged and exchanged glances with Naguib. He prescribed some drugs, but it was obvious he didn’t expect them to work.
Sturman himself was less interested in a cure than in talking to me. He started up as soon as Naguib left to fill the prescription.
‘The Valley of the Queens, Webber,’ he said. ‘Near Luxor. Have you been there?’
‘Only the Valley of the Kings.’
‘The Valley of the Queens is where the most amazing recent discoveries have been made. You’ve heard of the Tomb of Nefertari?’
‘No.’
He swallowed and rolled his tongue around his mouth, trying to work up a little moisture. ‘You should have. Best preserved tomb-paintings in Egypt, better than anything in the Valley of the Kings. Naguib took me there, then on to another tomb that almost no one has heard of. The royal daughter of Nefertari, Meret Hathor.’
‘And the tomb-paintings were better again?’ By now, I could follow the way his mind worked.
‘No, no paintings. Nothing much at all. Just very deep underground. I knew Naguib must’ve brought me there for a reason. Then I noticed the door.’
The effort to fight down a cough brought tears to his eyes. But he was determined to go on, regardless of the pain it cost him.
‘See, he’d been dropping hints for weeks. About the ancient Egyptians as navigators on the other side of death. About sights a hundred times more spectacular than any ruined temples or pyramids. Everything I’d been seeing was just a shadow of something greater.
‘But he was tricky. He didn’t want to talk about the door — pretended he didn’t, of course. Said I might not be the right kind of person, said it was dangerous even for him. Leading me on. I had to just about knock the truth out of him.’
Even wasted with sickness, Sturman was a big man, with a rough and raw-boned sort of face. I didn’t doubt he could be physically intimidating.
‘It was the Kingdom of the Dead on the other side of that door. I couldn’t open it myself, though. It was a part of the wall, painted on. Only he could let me through. At a price. Eight hundred thousand bucks, he wanted.’
I whistled.
‘Yeah. Too much. Crazy. But he knew he had me hooked. I could raise it — just. It was like he’d calculated the precise amount I was worth. I couldn’t beat him down, not one buck.’
‘But wait up. You said the door was only painted on?’
‘Painted, but not ordinary painting. What do you think, you could pass through a real door to the Kingdom of the Dead?’ His laugh was a dry bark. ‘We went back two days later, after my bank had cleared the cash through to Luxor. Burning hot day, kept the tourist numbers down. We were the only ones in the Tomb of Meret Hathor when he did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘He opened a hole in the door. Muttered some words and pulled out a chunk of stone. Then he took hold of my hand. His own hand was slender as a woman’s, but sinewy too. He slid our arms into the hole, up to the elbow, until we couldn’t go any further.
‘I tell you, Webber, there was a different feeling on the other side. The air was colder and tingling on my skin. Emptied out like a vacuum. Then Naguib’s arm twisted over mine. You know the bonecracking thing a chiropractor does? Except that this spread out across my whole body. I was dislocated, unhinged, turned back to front. Can you imagine? No, of course, you can’t.
‘Suddenly we were through. Although it was more as if we stayed in the same place while the two sides of the door switched round. I looked up and there were great unearthly stars in the sky. The sky was blacker than any night you’ve ever seen, and higher too, far, far away. Yet the stars blazed a hundred times more sharp and clear. And the air was absolutely still, no hint of a breeze. I don’t think there ever could be a breeze in that place. Somehow it was exactly the way I’d expected from that feeling on my arm.
‘Next thing, I looked at Naguib and got an almighty shock. His eyes shone out like huge silvery lanterns.
‘Yes, your eyes too, he said. Because we are alive in the Kingdom of the Dead. Do not be afraid. It is dangerous to have too much feeling in this place.’
Sturman fell silent. Footsteps were coming up the stairs and along the landing. A moment later, Naguib stood in the doorway with a crumpled paper bag tucked under his arm.
‘I have brought the prescription,’ he told Sturman. ‘Permit me …’
He placed the bag on a cabinet by the bed, then retreated to the door. ‘I apologise for the interruption.’
But Sturman was coughing again, an almost silent cough that made his shoulders shake. He waved me away without another word.
‘Your visits are good for him, Dr Webber,’ said Naguib,
as he escorted me to the top of the stairs.
‘Not if I make him cough.’
‘That is not your doing, sir. I hope you will return tomorrow.’
I was caught, you see. I didn’t know how to help Sturman, yet I couldn’t simply turn my back on him. I told myself that his health would improve with rest and recuperation — that his health was improving, in spite of the evidence before my eyes. I could hardly afford to move him to a better hotel, and in any case he didn’t wish to move. I neither saved him nor abandoned him, I suppose. I just kept coming to visit him every day.
And my visits were good for him. He was desperate to have a witness. ‘You’re my only record,’ he said on one occasion. ‘You have to see with my eyes. I’m the camera and you’re the film.’
He took it for granted I believed whatever he told me. And in a way, I did — or I suspended disbelief, at least. The Kingdom of the Dead was absolutely real for him, and he made it real for me.
He told me how Naguib had led him across cool soft sand towards the Great River. ‘Strange sort of walking we did. Sort of loose in the joints, you know? Like some chiropractor really had been working on me.’
On the way, they passed the Assyrian Necropolis. ‘Webber, you’ve never seen anything like it. A city built down instead of up. The tops of the roofs were level with the ground, the streets were channels five meters deep. We stood on a mound to survey the grid. The houses were just the stone left standing between the channels. Windows, doorposts, ornamental features, all carved into solid rock.’
‘Nobody lived there?’
‘Lived!’ Sturman found that amusing. ‘They were the dead. The Clamourous Dead. Naguib explained it to me. Twenty-four types of death, he said, and twenty-four species of the dead. The Unready Dead, the Shrunken Dead, the Turbulent Dead, the Nomadic Dead, the Willful Dead, the Shivering Dead … I can’t remember all the names. The Assyrian Necropolis is a city of the Clamourous Dead. Naguib had to point them out before I could see them. Two-dimensional shadows gliding flat to the ground or flat against the walls. You couldn’t see any faces, only the shape of arms and legs. I think they were blind and feeling their way by touch.
‘They became aware of us, though. Soon they started to approach along the streets. A whole sliding, slithering tide of them. They had no voices, but they reached out their arms in our direction. They gathered in the channel below our mound and fluttered and clutched at empty air, like they were trying to attract our attention. Like we were the tourists and they were trying to sell us something. I guess that was their clamouring.’
He shuddered when he described them, yet he was ecstatic too. I could hear the unspoken boast behind his words: I’ve seen such sights as you’ll never see. Terrible or beautiful, pleasing or ghastly — so long as it was spectacular, that was all he craved.
Spectacular was what he got in the Kingdom of the Dead. Another time, he told me about the valley of the Great River: a stupendous gap in the landscape, many kilometres wide. Naguib followed a winding route along the valley’s edge. On the other side of the river were stone constructions of unimaginable size.
‘Mausoleums, they were. I swear, the finished ones were bigger than any building in the world today. And the unfinished ones a hundred times bigger again. They had bases as wide as mountains. Huge stone buttresses, surrounded by ramps and scaffolding. The biggest of all was only just rising from its foundations. When I asked Naguib how long it would take to build, he said, Five thousand years already. Time has no significance in the Kingdom of the Dead.’
His eyes flicked towards the doorway, where Naguib stood listening. Sturman had overcome his earlier reluctance about speaking in the presence of his guide.
‘And the sound, Webber, the sound! This endless murmur, low but deafening. The sound of a million hammers tapping, a million chisels chipping, a million blocks of stone being dragged up the slopes.’
‘Who? Who was doing it?’
‘The Bonded Dead.’
‘Another species?’
‘Yes. I never got a good look at them, though. In a mass, they glistened under the starlight like blueblack ants. Same colour as the stone they were working on. They were fastened together in teams, tied up with ropes. But as soon as you tried to pick them out one by one, they winked in and out of existence like they were only half there.’
I didn’t understand, but he was already rushing ahead to the next marvel. He always talked faster when his voice was giving out.
‘Great pillars too. Think of the tallest skyscrapers, and these pillars were even taller. Like sentries, in pairs on either side of the river. Faces carved on them … terrible, cruel faces … human eyes and eyebrows, but the beaks of hawks, the jaws of dogs. They were the Lords of Death.’
‘What? Rulers of the Kingdom?’
Sturman fought for breath. ‘Yes. The mausoleums were theirs too. Naguib wouldn’t tell me their names.’ He turned to Naguib with an odd expression of defiance. ‘Would you?’
‘We do not speak their names,’ said the Egyptian quietly.
‘See?’ Sturman turned back to me. ‘Naguib the Inscrutable.’
Naguib the Inscrutable … but maybe not so inscrutable in the end. In the end, he spoke out against Sturman, and I finally understood the nature of their relationship. It was the last time I saw Sturman alive, my last visit before he died.
‘We went to cross the Great River.’ Sturman was his usual monomaniac self, overflowing with his own experiences. ‘We followed a staircase of giant steps to the floor of the valley. Steps carved into the rock, hard as iron, each one half a metre high. We had to climb down over them.
‘At the bottom was a field of tall pale flowers. Pretty from a distance, but unwholesome close up. You only had to brush against the stems and they broke off, oozing milky liquid. The petals gave off a sickly sweet smell, half like perfume and half like rotting meat.
‘Naguib went on ahead and dug out a coracle that was hidden in the flowers. You know what a coracle is? Circular boat woven from reeds. We carried it together to the water’s edge.
‘That was the first time I got a close look at the river. So broad and fast-flowing — but not proper water at all. It was the most amazing thing. What flowed in the Great River were the shades of the dead.’
‘The newly dead, added Naguib. He had been out on the landing, but now came forward into the room.
‘Right. The new arrivals. All the different species, sliding and twining over one another. Like a rushing current of black fire, with flickers of yellow and white. Sometimes an arm or a leg shot up from the surface like a jet of flame.
‘It looked too wild and choppy for any boat to cross. But the coracle was unbelievably buoyant, just bobbing on the tips of the waves. There was a rope stretched from bank to bank, and Naguib hauled us across hand over hand. He made me keep my own hands inside the boat.
‘It was incredible, Webber. The shades of the dead went past in a blur. They were making a mournful sound as they went, a chorus of lamentation. There was an oily smell too, and a smell of something burning.’
He looked at me with his what-do-you-think-of-that expression. His eyes had a feverish intensity.
‘Incredible,’ I said. ‘But take it easy. Don’t exhaust yourself.’
‘I don’t care about that. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen.’ For a middle-aged man, Sturman could sound childishly petulant. ‘Listen. We reached the other side and the bank was dry cracked mud. A vast flat plain of it. We left the coracle on the mud and Naguib started off towards the side of the valley. There was a V-shaped gorge running back into the rock. The way out, he said.’
Naguib advanced to within a couple of paces of the bed, but held his peace.
‘The way out! I’d paid eight hundred thousand bucks for the trip of a lifetime and he wanted to end it already!’ Sturman coughed and hacked and spluttered. ‘Eight hundred thousand bucks!’
Naguib pursed his thin lips and waited for Sturman’s indignation to subside.
‘I made no promises. Already you had seen sights beyond your expectations. You have been saying so to Dr Webber.’
‘But eight hundred thousand bucks for a couple of hours! It was a cheat! No way was I going to leave!’
‘You let anger into your mind,’ said Naguib. ‘First greed and an uncontrollable hunger for sights. Then anger. I warned you against too much feeling in the Kingdom of the Dead.’
‘There was more to see.’ Sturman’s tone changed to a kind of querulous appeal. ‘I know there was. We only saw a few kilometres of the whole valley. Admit it.’
Naguib refused to give a direct answer. ‘My ancestors made maps,’ he said. ‘Precious maps handed down from generation to generation. There are routes and there are limits. You stepped beyond the limits.’
‘I only walked a different way.’ Sturman switched his appeal to me. ‘I headed back upstream to the pillars and mausoleums.’
‘Backwards, backwards.’ Naguib shook his head. ‘No one goes backwards in the Kingdom of the Dead. I called out to you, didn’t I?’
‘I never heard you.’
‘You did, because you shouted a reply. A loud angry voice. Very foolish.’
A long silence followed. The only sound was the painful rasp of Sturman’s breathing.
‘What happened?’ I asked at last.
‘Footsteps,’ said Sturman.
‘One of the Lords of Death,’ said Naguib.
‘Boom-boom-boom! Like thunder. Stamping towards us. I saw him.’
‘There was nothing to see, Mr Sturman. You heard but didn’t see.’
‘I saw him, I tell you. It was one of those pillars come to life. Bird-beak and dog-jaws. Way up in the sky.’
‘How did he move? Where did he step?’
‘I don’t know. Coming towards me. Coming to crush us.’
‘No. You had your arms over your head as you ran. It was only your imagination. Only your terror.’
‘Yeah, I was afraid, who wouldn’t be? Except you, because you have iced water in your veins. But not terror. Don’t say that.’