The Tower

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ‘You are,’ agreed the old man. ‘That’s why I’m telling you that you are still far from the truth. Have you ever heard of the Tower of Solitude?’

  Jobert shook his head.

  ‘That’s where you’ll find the answer, if you ever get there. The tower is beyond the Sand of Ghosts, at the very end of the sea of sand, but if you want my advice, forget everything, even Kalaat Hallaki. This war is too tough for even the most inveterate soldier.’

  Jobert did not reply, overcome by emotions too diverse and too strong.

  ‘Sleep now,’ said the old man. ‘Rest. Tomorrow I’ll give you abundant food and water so that you can cross the wall of dust and the arid lands that separate you from your territory. Forget what you have seen. Tell your commanders that your men died of hunger and thirst. Fight your battles against men who look like you do and have the same weapons. Forget Kalaat Hallaki and the Sand of Ghosts for ever.’

  DESMOND GARRETT WAS SLEEPING soundly under a starry sky in the middle of the wide valley. The dying embers of his campfire cast a faint glow on his face and on the sparse bushes around the clearing. His horse was grazing nearby, abruptly raising his head and cocking his ears now and then when there was a rustling in the undergrowth or the hoot of some nocturnal bird.

  He suddenly snorted and kicked at a rock, letting out a low whinny of alarm.

  Desmond threw back his blanket and jerked into a sitting position, looking all around. Silence and tranquillity reigned. Even the birds were sleeping in the niches they’d found between the rocks or inside the tombs dotting the mountainside. His attention was attracted to one tomb in particular, a monumental mausoleum with an impressive decorated pediment resting on a row of Corinthian columns in ochre-streaked brown stone. With every passing moment, a reddish glimmer became more apparent in the inner chamber, as if someone had lit a fire there.

  Perhaps a shepherd had entered the valley to find shelter for the night, thought Desmond, but the hour was late and he could not understand why he would have waited so long to start a fire. The light was becoming stronger now, setting the inside of the tomb aglow, flames flickering outward as if licking at the columns. The tomb opening looked like the mouth of a furnace. Or the gate to hell.

  Desmond had already got to his feet and drawn closer, to try to understand what was causing that strange phenomenon, when he saw a black figure wrapped in a cloak standing out against the red glare. The cloak fell to the ground and a sabre flashed in the hand of the mysterious man.

  Desmond bent to unsheathe his own scimitar and continued to advance slowly towards the tomb entrance. The other man turned his head to face him and Desmond recognized him: it was Selznick!

  ‘It’s you, you dog!’ he shouted, and lunged forward with a downward slash of his weapon.

  The other side-stepped the blade and responded with a sudden thrust; Desmond just barely managed to avoid a direct blow to his chest by twisting to the side. The sabre grazed his flesh under the armpit and blood began to pour down his side. He could feel its heat on his skin and smell its cloying odour in his nostrils. The wound intensified his energy because he had no idea how badly he was hurt and did not know how much longer he had to live. He had to strike back and kill his detested enemy.

  Desmond launched an all-out attack, lashing out again and again until his adversary began to draw back. But as Desmond was seeking a way to stab him in the exact spot where his blade had already penetrated once, he felt his strength leaving him. He focused all of his hate into a single thrust and drove the blade into his enemy’s side. Selznick’s face twisted into a mask of pain as Desmond struck out again and again.

  The clanging of the blades as they collided with such violence echoed between the walls of the valley and roared inside the tomb itself. But every swing, every jab, was slower, more sluggish. The two bodies clutching at each other in the ultimate struggle seemed to be floating in the air now, weightless, even as their movements became more and more arduous.

  Selznick’s voice seemed louder than ever, nonetheless, as he shouted, ‘We’ll see each other in hell, Desmond! We’ll finish this fight in hell!’

  Desmond felt Selznick slipping away from him; his foe was losing a great deal of blood from the reopened wound and was retreating towards the mausoleum’s back wall. Desmond couldn’t follow, couldn’t finish him off with the one last blow that was needed. His limbs were stiff, wooden, no longer responding to his will. Not even the hate he felt was sufficient to instil strength into them. With a last, impossible spurt of energy he forced himself to get up and make his way down the long corridor at the end of the funeral chamber.

  He found himself inside a vault carved into the solid rock. Drops of water seeped from the many cracks in the walls. It felt refreshing at first, but then he understood with horror that the drops were blood, not water. The entire mountain was bleeding on him.

  The insistent neighing of his horse woke him and Desmond scrambled up from his bed, somewhere between waking and sleeping, and brought his hands to his face. It was wet, from the rain! Clouds had gathered over the valley, driven by a strong western wind, and the sheer walls of the immense basin were lit up now by flashes of lightning. He ducked into one of the tombs to seek cover from the storm. The same one he had seen in his dream.

  It was dark and silent, now.

  Desmond lit his lantern, took a look around and was gripped by a strong, precise sensation. The Fateh’s words came back to him: ‘The beast in you will sniff him out.’

  He said, out loud, ‘This is where he is, then. This is where he slept in his sixth tomb.’

  He took the lantern and went in, past the great stone façade. At the back, in what had once been the funeral chamber, there were signs that the room had been reused as a chapel in the Christian era. The same circumstance as he’d found in Aleppo. Perhaps these ancient believers had sensed the traces of an enemy presence and felt they had to neutralize it?

  On the back wall, amid a number of pagan motifs, he saw a painted crucifix. The wound on Christ’s side was in relief, looking like living flesh.

  ‘The beast in you will sniff him out,’ he repeated to himself. His hand mechanically reached for his belt and he took out a long dagger. What he was about to do revolted him and his forehead beaded up with sweat in that airless atmosphere. He drew close to the painting. Although his posture had been stiffened by death, this Christ had the serene expression of one who has found peace after a long martyrdom. Desmond could hear the sound of thunder in the distance. It was raining upon Petra, a winter rain, a useless rain that would not help anything to grow.

  His features hardened at the moment in which he drove the blade into the wound in Christ’s side, and he felt something snap inside of him. He knew that he had cast off another of the moorings that had once kept him anchored to the rest of humanity.

  A sharp click shook him from that painful tension. He thought with relief that his intuition had been correct, but nothing happened. He tapped the wall to check for hollows, using the round pommel at the end of his dagger, but his raps sounded as dry as if he were hitting solid rock. Perhaps he’d been fooled; he’d let a dream get the better of him and now he had no idea of the direction in which to go.

  Desmond turned back towards the monumental gate of the tomb and leaned against its gigantic columns to contemplate the rain falling on the valley. He listened to it pelting against the rocks and the ruins of the vanished city.

  In that atmosphere outside of time and place, he imagined that he could see his wife rising up at the centre of the valley under the silvery rain. He imagined her walking towards him without even touching the ground, a light gown clinging to her body as if she were a deity sculpted by Phidias.

  For years now, ever since he had chosen to leave civilization, he had grown accustomed to seeing her in his dreams, to calling up her ghost and seeing her appear like a desert flower after a rainstorm, but his absorbed contemplation was abruptly broken by a noise like that of two boulders grinding one
upon the other. It was coming from behind him.

  Desmond turned around and saw, to his great amazement, a crack snaking through the plaster on which the crucifix was painted. It split open above the cross and at its sides, and then the entire portion of the wall began to tilt inwards like a drawbridge, revealing a dark opening that descended into the centre of the mountain.

  He held out his lantern to light up the tunnel that branched off from the wall. He looked down and saw that beneath his feet a deep trench had opened. The painted plaster slab stretched over the void like a bridge. To cross it he would have to tread on the crucifix. ‘This certainly won’t stop me,’ he thought, reasoning that the mechanism must have been devised in ancient times for those who lived their religion as superstition. Yet he couldn’t help but recall how he had become imprisoned in the crypt under the mosque in Aleppo and so, before he proceeded, he stuck two large wedges of stone between the base of the painted slab and the sides of the opening so that no one could close it behind him. He tied a rope around his waist and got out his pickaxe. Then he went forward, holding his lantern high to illuminate the passage in front of him.

  Desmond considered trying to balance his weight on either side of the slab, but he saw that he would only risk falling into the abyss yawning at his feet. He had no choice but to walk over the body and the face of the sacred image. The tunnel continued with a slightly downward slope, and he began to make his way along the passage at a slow pace, taking care to light up every centimetre of the ceiling, walls and floor. At a certain point he saw several asymmetrical niches off to his left containing images of Romanized Nabataean divinities carved into the limestone.

  The smell of burning petroleum that came from his lantern stagnated in the heavy, still air, creating a suffocating atmosphere. Rounding a bend in the tunnel, he found himself in front of a massive structure unlike anything he had ever seen in his life.

  In the middle of a vast chamber was a cubical structure, completely carved in stone, as tall as the ceiling. A round opening in its front wall was closed by a millstone. There were no other chambers or niches, nor were there any other passages leading out of the main room. The walls were bare and rough, cut from solid rock. He examined the system of closure attentively; the millstone had simply been rolled along and inserted into the wall opening. The words of the Gospel came to his mind: ‘They rolled a stone in front of the entrance and left.’ This is how he imagined the tomb of Jesus.

  He approached and saw that the track that had been used to slide the stone forward was nearly flat and that the stone itself was not very large. He slowly nudged it sideways using the lever on his crowbar, and once the entrance was free he placed a quantity of debris from the floor into the track to block the stone in place, making sure that there was no way its weight could make it slip forwards.

  He entered and found himself inside a chamber measuring four metres by four, at the centre of which there was a Nabataean sarcophagus of painted wood in the Egyptian style. The paintings depicted peasants working in the fields, sowing or pushing ploughs. Others held sickles and were harvesting wheat or tying it into bundles. There were pastoral scenes on the other side: flocks at pasture, sheep being shorn, women weaving cloth and carpets on their looms.

  He forced the lid with the tip of his dagger and lifted his lantern to look inside. The coffin was empty, but the bottom was crawling with scorpions.

  They were mostly females, with clusters of young, their bodies still transparent, clinging to their backs. They’d found an undisturbed, well-sheltered place for reproducing. But how had they got in?

  Desmond spilled a little of the petroleum from his lamp onto the bottom of the sarcophagus, then lit a match and dropped it in. The decaying wood caught fire all at once, in a huge blaze that lit up the funeral chamber as bright as day. Amid the hiss of the flames, he could hear the crackling of the scorpions’ bodies as they burst, and he recalled being told that a scorpion hemmed in by a ring of fire will kill itself by injecting its body with its own poison.

  He watched the fire as if hypnotized by that explosion of light. He had destroyed the sixth tomb! Only the seventh was left: the last, the most remote, the most hidden, the most difficult. An impregnable fortress, watched over and defended by formidable forces.

  The Fortress of Solitude!

  Desmond turned to retrace his steps and what he saw changed his elation into the deepest despair.

  Sand.

  The access tunnel was full of sand, which was pouring slowly into the underground chamber, spreading out in the shape of a fan across the floor. He rushed forward to search for a way to get out, but he sank in all the way up to his waist. He floundered through the river of sand, trying desperately to make his way back up the ramp, but the sand was sucking him down, making every movement incredibly difficult. This time he really was in a trap.

  He looked at the rope, the pickaxe, the steel crowbar – objects that his experience in the Aleppo tomb had suggested. All completely useless. What an idiot! He’d been tricked into thinking that what had got him out of trouble the first time would work a second. The components of this new trap were totally incongruous: solid rock and sand. Two elements which were the exact opposite of each other, yet equally unyielding. Whoever had designed the sixth tomb had factored in the presumptions of the hunter who would succeed in destroying the fifth. But . . . where had the sand come from, if the ceiling and the walls of the tunnel were carved into solid rock?

  The slab with the crucifix! Moving the slab must have activated some sort of delayed mechanism that poured sand into the tunnel from a reservoir up above. And he, Desmond Garrett, the last hunter, was a prisoner in the bottom of an hourglass. When the lower compartment was filled with sand, the monstrous machine would mark the hour of his death.

  He looked at the tunnel. The top of it was still open and a fair amount of air was flowing through it, but there was nothing along the passage that he could grasp on to, nothing that would help him get out. He tried tapping the walls again with his pickaxe, to see if he could find some hidden compartment or crumbling stone, but all his efforts were in vain.

  He would stop every now and then, sitting in the corner furthest from the opening to regain his strength and catch his breath, hoping for some last-minute solution: a stone, a chunk of clay, anything that he might use to block the passage and stop the flow of sand. Might it even stop on its own? How could any rock basin designed to hold and feed in the sand still be as smooth and clean as a glass jar after all these centuries? Might there not have been some landslide, or an infiltration of some sort? After all, Petra was built of carboniferous rock, which dissolved in water. And plenty of water had fallen over twenty centuries in a land so vulnerable to erosion. It was raining at that very moment . . .

  He thought of Philip.

  HE SAW A FLICKERING LIGHT for a moment in that total darkness, like a fire blazing at the end of the valley. But how could a fire be burning there after an hour of rain? He urged his horse in that direction at a trot, careful not to let him stumble on the jutting rocks, and watched as the light flared up again, coming from some kind of hollow in the ground, and then died out.

  The storm had subsided a little but was not over, and Philip took shelter under a rocky outcrop near to where he had seen the flashing light. He began to dry off his horse with the sponge that he always kept in the saddlebag.

  He suddenly heard a muffled but distinct sound, a kind of dull pounding that seemed to be coming from the hollow. He lit his lantern to inspect the bottom. There was a hole there all right and that’s where the pounding was coming from. He took a rope from his saddle, tied one end to a dry acacia trunk standing at the edge of the hollow and cautiously lowered himself down towards the hole. The sound was even louder now, but Philip could still not tell what it was. It would sometimes stop for a few minutes and then start up again.

  He felt that he needed to know who or what was making that noise. He leaned over the edge of the hole and shouted in Ar
abic, ‘Who’s down there?’ He waited, then shouted again even louder, ‘Is someone down there?’

  Desmond stopped the pickaxe in mid-stroke and strained to hear. The voice repeated, ‘Is anyone down there?’

  ‘Philip!’ he said, thinking he’d gone mad. Then, as loudly as he could, he shouted back, ‘Philip! Philip!’

  ‘Father!’ replied his son’s voice. It was muffled and distorted, but he was sure it was Philip’s voice.

  Desmond started shouting again, pronouncing one word at a time so he was sure he’d be understood. ‘Philip, it’s your father! I’m trapped in an underground room that’s filling up with sand. From where you are, can you see what s beneath you?

  ‘Wait!’ replied Philip.

  He dropped slowly down into the hole. When his foothold felt secure, he let go with his hands and lit the lantern. Below him was a big funnel-shaped bowl, a seemingly natural structure that had been artificially modified in order to create a smooth surface down which a large quantity of sand was pouring. The hole at its bottom was partially clear, for a space of about fifty centimetres. So that was where the reflection of the fire that had caught his attention had been coming from, and from where he could hear his father’s voice.

  He shouted, ‘The sand is coming from here! There’s a big reservoir but I can’t tell how deep it is. The sand is pouring down towards an opening. I could try to descend with a rope.’

  ‘How long is the rope?’ asked his father.

  ‘About fifteen metres.’

  ‘That’s not enough. You wouldn’t even get within sight of me. The corridor leading to the room I’m in is at least eight metres long on its own.’

  ‘I’m going to try to get down to you anyway,’ said Philip.

  ‘No! Don’t do it, for the love of God! You would only sink into the sand.’

  ‘How did you get down there?’

  ‘From the valley of Petra. From the big stone tomb with the Corinthian portico.’