“Faith.”
“Of a sort.”
She sighed. “I never guessed it would end in Egypt.”
“Don’t let Ali hear you say that. This is Nubia.”
“Yes, but it’s an Egyptian chamber.”
“Then what better place to die? Egypt is death’s spiritual home.”
“I’m not afraid of it, you know.”
“It’s not going to happen, Gemma.”
“You haven’t thanked me yet for saving you,” he said in darkness.
“You haven’t.”
“I’m talking about earlier, our romantic walk under the crescent moons. You could be salami now.”
“And you could be damaged for life.”
“Ouch, yes. Don’t remind me.”
“What motivates you to do what you do, Anson? Curiosity?” she said.
Curiosity was not the right word. Hunger might be a better word. A drive to find some greater radiance and mystery than life itself could offer, and, like Khaemwaset, because of his love of the ancient days and the noble ones who dwelt in antiquity and the perfection of everything they made.
Instead, he said: “I’ve always had a compulsion to open up things and find out what’s inside. Envelopes. Post boxes. Emails. Parcels in brown paper tied up with string. Boxes of iron, bronze, keté-wood, silver and gold and the more forbidden the better. I even went into my mother’s handbag as a child.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You take things from your mother’s bag?”
“I took. Not take. I don’t keep doing it obsessively. Besides, she dead. No I went there because it’s the most forbidden place a child can go. Especially a male. I still shudder at my own audacity.”
“So you should.”
“After that, violating the sanctity of ancient tombs was a doddle. Any crimes you want to confess?”
“Nothing nearly as shocking as that.”
“How shall we pass the time?” he said. “Want to do something?”
“You’re suggesting-?”
“Here we are, a renegade archaeologist and a lovely intelligence agent, trapped together in the dark.”
“You dream.”
“Romance has been known to happen in such circumstances. The end of the world reflex. People let down their hair, snatch a moment of joy before it’s too late.”
“You said we weren’t going to die.”
“I did, didn’t I? Stupid of me.”
“You’re a cool one.”
But he wasn’t and he just hoped that he was right about them both getting out of here.
“Is it too soon?”
“I like you, Anson, but I’m not here to play around. I take my work seriously and I’m not a person who jumps into things.”
“That’s okay. I can be patient. The right time will come along one day when we can finally be alone together, somewhere dark and intimate, a thousand miles from anywhere... like upper Nubia, for example.”
“It’s not going to happen.”
“You obsess,” she said.
“I’ll get over it.”
“I mean about your theories. But what do you want, Anson? Why are you really chasing this relic?”
Not that question again, the one he was still asking himself. He deflected it.
“Maybe it’s time I threw that question back at you. I’m a controversial alternative Egyptologist with outlandish ideas. A wild theorist some might say. I believe in the sacred, in metaphysical powers and unseen forces. That’s my excuse. But what’s yours? You’re supposed to be a member of the Intelligence community. Not the crazy crowd. Has Intelligence paranoia finally caught up with my own? Why are you people at all interested in my latest obsession? What, in concrete, real world terms, do you fear?”
“Ramifications.”
“What ramifications? Are you referring to plagues, fiery disaster, pestilence…?”
“I can’t say.”
“You and that blonde glamazon who invited you on a cruise – Germaine Ryan. You are well suited.”
“Lady Neith’s real name is Germaine? Don’t go and spoil everything. Lady Neith is a pagan and a neo-religionist who’d like to bring back the mystery religions of Egypt. She says she likes my alternative thinking, but feels I’m not quite alternative enough. We’re on the same journey, she believes, but I just don’t know it yet.”
“And are you?”
“We will be- on a dahabiyyah cruiseboat. But if she’s hoping for my conversion she’s headed for disappointment.
“She sounds made for you. You revel in the alternative. Esoteric powers, sacred, magical Egypt.”
“Accepting the existence of unseen forces and alternative realities isn’t the same as bowing down to them. People like Lady Neith make an alternative theorist like me feel quite orthodox.”
“No man can have two masters and yet you like to straddle two worlds, belief and paganism. The sensational clearly has a powerful hold on you.”
“Is that the Intelligence community’s analysis of me?”
“No, it’s mine.”
“I’m a believer in the theory that intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. I call it opposable thinking. What if the only way to grasp truth is between the opposing fingers of contradiction and of opposites? The Egyptians understood this with the duality of their beliefs and their unique ability to live with contradictory ideas about their gods and their world. The living and the dead. The desert, the Nile. Osiris and Seth. Light and shadow.”
“You love your theories.”
“I’m just getting started. Think about it. In the early prehistory of humankind’s development, the opposable thumb and fingers allowed us to grip tools, helping the human species develop more accurate fine motor skills to take the next step in evolution. Could opposable thinking provide us with mental skills to take a further step in evolution? What if the solution to a Unified Theory of Everything is not to be found in physics or mathematics, but in semantics? Is the answer to the big issues of life simply that we have to embrace opposing ideas, contradictions and inconsistencies in order to pick up the truth? Is truth literally within our grasp?”
“You tell me.”
“Okay, try this. What can opposable thinking reveal about God? God exists. God does not exist. Opposite, opposing ideas, yet in their collision, a new ideas is released. Existence is something limited by time and space. Existence has a beginning, a middle and an end. God, therefore, is non-existent. He does not exist. He simply is, for all eternity - he’s outside of existence. Egyptians grasped this truth. Their religious texts spoke about the birth of the universe beginning with a state of non-existence. They said that the beginning was a time when ‘there were not yet two things’. There was only one thing, just endless, oneness. Non-existence. Creation came out of this. Creation was division and splitting of this one thing into millions of things. So god is oneness and nonexistence. Opposability thinking could help answer the big questions of life: The problem of existence: who we are. Where do we come from? The problem of the universe; what are we doing here? Did God create us? The problem of death: what happens to us after we die? The problem of the mysterious - is there a supernatural world? The problem of pain - why do so many people in the world suffer?”
“Okay. Good and evil. Let’s say God is good. And God is bad, leaving us stuck down here. Where does that get us?”
“Your question captures the answer. God is good, God is bad. Maybe he’s both. It raises the fascinating and dangerous theological question – does God have a shadow side?”
“You like abstractions of ideas and philosophy, Anson. To some it may seem visionary.”
“The tools we use to measure or experience determines what we find. If we use our mind to find god, god is thought, use our feelings, god is feeling, use our experiential nerve endings and god is sensation, use our bodies and existence and god is creation, if we try super-sensory means like
prayer, we find a super-sensory being. What tool can you use that doesn’t predetermine the finding? Maybe opposable thinking gets us closest.”
She sighed, “Maybe. But right now I’m thinking about our survival and that’s more helpful than its opposing idea.”
Chapter 17
HOURS, or what seemed like days later, they heard tinkling and ringing sounds on the rock above their heads.
Then the rock slowly edged away and light, first a chink, then a half moon, stabbed their eyes.
They crawled out, blinking in the glare of day.
Gemma gasped.
A sea of cheering Manoosir tribesmen in robes surrounded the rock.
“There must be a thousand of them!” she said.
It looked like a Hajj festival scene at the Black Stone of Mecca, swarming with pilgrims.
The tribesmen dropped their ropes, like a vast spider’s web, and surged to the stone.
Ali appeared.
“I hope you didn’t spend all of my hard-earned gold,” Anson said.
“That’s what it took - and the promise of more to salvage.”
“I told you a power greater than Nectanebo’s magic would save us,” he told Scrumptious Girl. “Greed. Well, maybe greed’s a bit harsh. These people are poor they’ve been given a bad deal. Let’s say the power of self-gain and the lure of Pharaoh’s gold.”
“Then they’d better be quick,” Ali said. “Look at that lake. Very close now. It’s almost reached the rock. It won’t be long before this site will be swallowed, along with all the others.”
“We heard an explosion. What happened up here?” Anson said.
“No doubt about it. Someone sneaked up and set a charge. We thought it was an earthquake. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but the rock shifted.”
“Did you see anyone?” Gemma said. “Not a sign.” “Thanks, Ali,” Anson said. “Yes, thank you,” she said, and now she gave Anson a reproachful look. “Anson obviously knew all along that he could count on you.” Ali drove them back to Gebel Barkal. As the Land Cruiser bounded and jolted over the desert moonscape, disappointment and sleep fell on Anson like the stone khepesh blades of Nectanebo, crushing out the dazzling heat.
Chapter 18
HE WAS STILL FEELING crushed on the flight to Cairo, both physically and emotionally.
The physical reason was sitting next to him in the aisle seat, a corpulent Egyptian guide who had come on board with a group of Spanish tourists at Aswan. He wore a flak jacket with bulging pockets like saddlebags that swelled his girth even more and he sat shoehorned into the aisle seat, splaying the armrests. He reminded Anson of the gigantic ovoid rock that plugged the cache of Nectanebo.
His size made it impossible for the man to move his seat into the upright position for take off and a flight attendant brought him an extension for his seat belt.
“These seats - too small,” he said to Anson.
“That’s the problem.”
Anson sat jammed against Gemma who occupied the window seat.
“You don’t look happy,” she said.
“I’m crushed.”
He had said goodbye to Nubia, to his friend Ali at Khartoum airport, and also to his hopes of tracing the disc in the south.
His search had reached a dead end, a very damp dead end. And yet he had walked in the footsteps of the exiled king. Where to from here? Give up?
Or had the disc found its way back to Egypt, just like a legend that told how the lioness goddess had once exiled herself in the desert, only to be led back?
When the aircraft landed and the corpulent guide unplugged himself from his seat, Anson felt a weight lift from his spirits too.
“It’s still in Egypt,” he murmured to Gemma. “I’m certain of it.”
“You’re going to go on looking,” she said. “Fine, but its best if we keep apart in Egypt so we’ll say goodbye for now. I’ll make contact discreetly on your journey. Oh and thanks, Anson, for letting me come along.”
“Glad you enjoyed your fact-finding tour.”
“You keep surprising.”
Chapter 19
TINTED CAR WINDOWS were illegal in Egypt.
So when a stretched black limousine with darkened windows purred to a stop in front of him at hectic Cairo Airport, he guessed it had to be the car of some important government official.
A window hummed down at the back to reveal the grey-templed head of Saleh Haroun, Egypt’s Minister of Culture, and the man with ultimate responsibility for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
“Mr Hunter, welcome back to Egypt. Please join me inside.”
“Thanks, but this is not the car I ordered. I’m waiting for my driver, you see.”
“Your driver is going to have to wait for you. Come.”
The door opened from the inside and the flamboyant official made his invitation even more pointed by waving him inside.
“Very well,” Anson said, “but it’s always rash jumping into a car in Egypt before negotiating the journey first.”
He slid into the hush luxury of the limousine and sank into an atmosphere of leather and crisp air-conditioning.
“Far better we do our talking in here,” Saleh Haroun said.
He was not alone. In the seat opposite sat a bearded, youngish man in a Muslim cleric’s garb.
He could have been a brother of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even shared the same mild, assassin’s smile.
“Meet Hassan,” Haroun said.
“Iranian?” Anson said.
His stab at humour was closer to the mark than he could have guessed.
The man’s smile gave way to a wince of surprise.
The cleric exchanged looks with Haroun who shrugged.
“I will not ask how you knew, but you are well informed. You will remember that Iran is the original home of Sufism, although Sufism finds itself in more complicated times,” Haroun said.
Anson recalled that the government man in the midnight blue suit was a Sufi himself. Sufis were generally a moderating influence, but this Egyptian official had been radicalised by the loss of a relative in Palestine. Sufis were also mystical and it was whispered that their beliefs were deeply rooted in the magic of the old religion, which they hid under the veil of Islam.
“Think of Hassan as an advisor,” Haroun added.
“Not for me, I hope. I don’t think it’s advisable for a Westerner to take advice from an Iranian cleric.” By the suddenly intent look in the cleric’s eyes he obviously had some advice to give in return. “Nothing personal,” Anson added. “I don’t seek advice from Anglican ministers, either.”
Anson closed the door and the driver pulled off.
Somehow I always seem to pay when I meet Saleh Haroun, Anson thought. He wondered what he would end up paying for this journey.
“Now, my friend Anson,” Haroun continued in a more engaging tone. “I thought we might have a little talk.”
“You’re here to thank me for past services to Egypt,” Anson said. “How is the reclamation archaeology going after our last encounter? I suppose it will take decades, if the clearance of the small tomb of Tutankhamun took Howard Carter years to complete.”
“Let’s forget ancient history,” Haroun said. “I do not wish to talk about it.”
“There goes the one thing we had in common.”
“May we ask what brings you back to our fair land?”
“I told them at the airport.”
“Yes, we know the official story. You are here to act as guest lecturer to a group of mystery seekers. It is not what you have declared that interests me. It’s your private agenda, and you always seem to have one. We hope you are not planning any illegal guerrilla archaeology. Must I assign somebody to hold your hand?”
“No need. With my mystical tour group we’ll all be holding each other’s hands.”
“You have been to Nubia, I understand. Why?”
“Just following a dead end.”
“We know your curre
nt subject of obsession has to do with ancient Egyptian beliefs about solar apocalypse, plague and chaos.” He threw in a loaded expression with the word ‘chaos.’ “And chaos always seems to attend your visits to Egypt, and that’s what worries me. Where is this obsession with a solar catastrophe taking us?”
“I hope you, and the rest of the world, never find out. But I’m sure you know all about my theories from my blog and book.”
“Let us give credence to your speculation for a moment. If such a ‘Sekhmet cache’ ever existed, do you think it has already been found or that it still lies hidden under the sands of Egypt?”
He could see why this senior government headed up Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
He liked to dig.
“I really can’t say.”
What did the Egyptian already know?
If they really were afraid of the repercussions of finding a Sekhmet sanctuary, they could simply have refused him entry to Egypt and turned him back at the airport. Clearly they were giving him some rein. Why? Because they did not believe in the threat? Then why this interest? Could it be that they were on the trail of the site too? For what reason? To bring chaos to the Middle East? Why invite that? Or was it a plan to export disaster somewhere else as Anson believed Haroun, with his hatred of the West, had once attempted to do in the past?
If they were on the trail of the sanctuary, they would be watching him.
And the Sufi cleric? Why bring him along for this interview?
Merely as an advisor? Or to give him a good look at Anson.
“You think nothing about exposing the Islamic world, and the rest of the world, to the dangers you theorise about. Why do you go prodding around where you shouldn’t?”
“Most people simply laugh me off. Evidently you don’t.”
“Stick to your itinerary, Anson, and if you so much as turn over a stone in Egypt illegally, I will know about it. “The consequences could be severe. For a man like you, in love with our fair land, a penalty of up to fifteen years with hard labour would be the least of it however. You know the ancient tale of Sinuhe? Naturally you do. Sinuhe stumbled upon a dangerous state secret and was forced to flee and to live in exile in foreign lands for many years, while all the while his heart pined for Egypt. As the old saying goes, ‘He who drinks the water of the Nile, will always return.’ Or wish to return.”
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 11