by Will Adams
Elena huffed noisily and shook her head, but she signaled and swung through double gates, then bumped along a rutted track. Three Egyptian men were conferring animatedly at the far end. “That’s Ibrahim,” muttered Elena, with such obvious chagrin that Gaille had to fight back a smile. If Elena thought she was gloating… They parked. Gaille quickly opened her door and jumped down, suffering a momentary, debilitating flutter of shyness. Normally she was confident in professional situations, but she had no faith in her skills as a photographer and consequently felt like a fraud. She went around to the back of the flatbed, ostensibly to check her belongings and equipment, but in truth to hide.
Elena yelled out for her. She took a deep breath to compose herself, fixed a smile to her lips, then walked around to meet them. “Ibrahim,” said Elena, indicating the elegant man in the center of the group, “I’d like you to meet Gaille.”
“Our esteemed photographer! We are truly grateful.”
“I’m not really a—”
“Gaille’s an excellent photographer,” said Elena, with a sharp glance. “What’s more, she’s an ancient-languages expert, too.”
“Splendid! Splendid!” He gestured to his two companions, who were spreading out a site map on the ground. “Mansoor and Mohammed,” he said. “Mansoor is my right hand. He runs all our excavations in Alexandria. I couldn’t survive without him. And Mohammed is the construction manager for this hotel.”
“Pleased to meet you both,” said Gaille.
They glanced up from their map and nodded politely. Ibrahim smiled distractedly, glanced at his watch. “Just one more to come. You know Augustin Pascal?”
Elena snorted. “Only by reputation.”
“Yes,” nodded Ibrahim seriously. “He’s a fine underwater archaeologist.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” said Elena.
“Oh.”
An awkward silence followed, broken only when an engine roared at the mouth of the site. “Ah!” said Ibrahim. “Here he is.”
A thirty-something man cruised up the approach on a gleaming black-and-chrome chopper, wending around potholes, bare-headed, allowing his long dark hair to flow free. He was wearing mirror shades, two days’ worth of stubble, a leather jacket, jeans, calf-high black biker boots. He rode the chopper up onto its kickstand, stepped off, and fished a cigarette and a brass Zippo from his shirt pocket.
“You’re late,” said Ibrahim.
“Desolé,” he grunted, shielding the flame. “Something came up.”
Mansoor asked wryly, “Sophia, I suppose?”
Augustin grinned wolfishly. “You know I’d never take advantage of my students like that.” Elena clucked her tongue and muttered a Greek obscenity beneath her breath. Augustin grinned and turned to her, spreading his hands. “Yes?” he asked. “You see something you like, perhaps?”
“How could I?” retorted Elena. “You’re standing in the way.”
Mansoor laughed and slapped Augustin on the shoulder, but Augustin looked unruffled. He looked Elena up and down, then gave her a grin of frank approval, perhaps even of intent, for she was a striking woman, and anger added a certain something to her coloring. Gaille winced and took half a step back, waiting for the inevitable eruption, but Ibrahim stepped between them just in time.
“Well,” he said, with nervous jauntiness. “Let’s start, shall we?”
The ancient spiral steps looked precarious, and Gaille descended warily, but they reached the bottom without alarm and gathered in the rotunda. The corner of a black-and-white pebble mosaic showed beneath the rubble. Gaille pointed it out in a murmur to Elena. “Ptolemaic,” declared Elena loudly, going down on her haunches to brush away the dust. “Two-fifty BC, give or take.”
Augustin pointed to the sculpted walls. “Those are Roman,” he said.
“Are you suggesting I can’t tell a Macedonian mosaic when I see one?”
“I’m suggesting that the carvings are Roman.”
Ibrahim held up his palms. “How about this?” he suggested. “Perhaps this site started out as a private tomb for some wealthy Macedonian, which would explain the mosaic. Then, when the Romans came three hundred years later, they decided to turn it into a necropolis.”
“That would explain the staircase,” admitted Elena grudgingly. “Macedonians didn’t usually build in spirals. Only straight lines or squares.”
“And they’d have needed to widen the shaft when they expanded it into a necropolis,” agreed Augustin. “For light and ventilation, and to lower corpses, and to take out quarried stone. They used to sell it to builders, you know.”
“Yes,” said Elena scathingly. “I did know, thank you.”
Gaille was barely listening. She was staring dizzily up at the circle of sky high above her head. Christ, but she was out of her depth. An emergency excavation offered no second chances, so within the next two weeks, the mosaic and all these exquisite carvings and everything else in this place would need to be photographed. After that, the place would probably be sealed forever. Artifacts like these deserved a professional photographer, someone with an eye for the work, experience, sophisticated equipment, lighting. She plucked anxiously at Elena’s sleeve, but Elena brushed her off, following Mohammed down the steps into the forecourt of the Macedonian tomb. They paused to admire the shining white marble blocks of the facade and entablature, then pressed on through the half-open bronze door into the tomb’s antechamber.
“Look!” said Mansoor, pointing his flashlight at the side walls. They went closer to inspect them. There was paint on the plaster, though terribly faded. It had been common practice in antiquity for important scenes from the dead person’s life to be painted in or around the tomb. “You can photograph these?” asked Mansoor.
“I’m not sure how well they’ll come out,” said Gaille wretchedly.
“You must wash them first,” said Augustin. “Lots and lots of water. The pigment may look dead now, but give them some water and they will spring back to life like beautiful flowers. Trust me.”
“Not too much water,” warned Mansoor. “And don’t set up your lights too close. The heat will crack the plaster.”
Gaille looked around desperately at Elena, who studiously refused to meet her eye. Instead, she shone her flashlight at the inscription above the portal into the main chamber. “Akylos of the thirty-three,” said Augustin, translating from the Ancient Greek. Elena fumbled and dropped her flashlight at that moment, cursing violently, so Ibrahim turned his light on the inscription instead, allowing Augustin to complete his translation. “Akylos of the thirty-three. To be the best and to be honored above the rest.”
“It’s Homer,” murmured Gaille. Everyone turned to look at her in surprise. She felt her cheeks burn. “It’s from the Iliad,” she said.
“That’s right,” nodded Augustin. “About a man called Glaucus, I believe.”
“Actually, it comes up twice,” said Gaille timidly. “Once about Glaucus and once about Achilles.”
“Achilles, Aklyos,” nodded Ibrahim. “He evidently thought a great deal of himself.” He was still staring up at the inscription when he followed Mohammed into the main chamber, so that he tripped over the low step and went sprawling onto his hands and knees. Everybody laughed as he picked himself up and brushed himself down with the self-deprecating smile and shrug of the accident prone.
Augustin went to the shield pinned to the wall. “The shield of a hypastist,” he said. “A shield bearer,” he explained when Ibrahim frowned. “Alexander’s special forces. The greatest unit of fighting men in the most successful army in the history of the world. Maybe he wasn’t being so boastful after all.”
MORNING SUNLIGHT fell on Knox’s cheek as he lay on Augustin’s couch and tried to catch up on sleep. He groaned and turned his back, but it was no good. The day was already too sticky. He rose reluctantly, took a shower, ransacked Augustin’s room for clothes, then ground some beans and set the coffeemaker brewing. He slathered a croissant with butter and confiture d
e framboises, then wolfed it down as he wandered the apartment looking for ways to divert himself. Egyptian TV was gruesome at the best of times, but Augustin’s flickering black-and-white portable made it completely unwatchable. And there was nothing to read except tattered newspapers and some comic books. This was not an apartment for killing time in. It was an apartment for sleeping in, and preferably not alone.
He walked out onto the balcony. Identical high-rises on every side, all in the same disheartened beige, washing hung out to dry on the balconies, ubiquitous gray dishes all turning to their satellites like the faithful to Mecca. Yet still he felt glad to be here. Few Egyptologists would say it openly, but they looked down their noses at Alexandria. They barely considered the Greco-Roman era to be Egyptian at all. But Knox didn’t think that way. To him, this was Egypt’s golden age, and Alexandria its golden city. Two thousand years ago, it had been the greatest metropolis on earth, nurturing the finest minds of antiquity. Archimedes had studied here; so had Galen and Origen. The Septuagint had been translated here. Euclid had published his famous works here. Chemistry took its very name from here; al-Khemia was the black land of Egypt, and alchemy the Egyptian art. Aristarchus had proposed the heliocentric theory here, well over a millennium before it was rediscovered by Copernicus. Eratosthenes had calculated almost exactly the circumference of the earth by extrapolating from discrepancies in the lengths of shadows cast at the sun’s zenith both here and in Aswan, some 850 kilometers to the south, on the summer solstice. What imagination! What intellectual curiosity and endeavor! An unprecedented collision of cultures, an effervescence of thought the equal of Athens and unmatched again until the Renaissance. It was beyond him how anyone could dismiss such achievements as second best or think that—
His meditations were interrupted suddenly by a noise from inside, as though someone was trying surreptitiously to clear his throat. Had his sanctuary been discovered already? He stepped to the edge of the balcony, so that he couldn’t be seen through the glass doors, and pressed himself flat against the wall.
IBRAHIM FOLLOWED CLOSE BEHIND MOHAMMED as he led them down the corridor into the main body of the necropolis. For all that he’d been dampening his hopes before visiting this place, he still felt a sense of anticlimax that the tomb had proved to be for a common soldier, not a king. But he was a professional, and he concentrated hard, the better to understand what he was dealing with.
They came to a chamber, its walls cut with columns of loculi, like the drawers of a massive morgue. It seemed to confirm his theory that this whole complex had started off as a private Macedonian tomb for Akylos before being expanded into a public necropolis. He took a closer look. The niches were crowded with bones, half buried in dark sandy dirt, others scooped out onto the floor by grave robbers looking for treasure. Amid the debris they found a broken faience figure, some green and blackened coins dating from the first to fourth centuries AD, numerous fragments of terra-cotta from funerary lamps, jars, and statuettes. There were chunks of stone and plaster, too. Loculi had typically been sealed after burials, but the looters had smashed these seals to get at the contents.
“Will you find mummies, do you think?” asked Mohammed. “I took my daughter to your museum once; she became fascinated by the mummies.”
“It’s very unlikely,” answered Ibrahim. “The climate here isn’t kind; it eats away everything but bone. And even if they had survived the humidity, they’d never have survived the tomb robbers.”
“Robbers stole mummies?” frowned Mohammed. “What for?”
“People often hid jewelry and other valuables in their body cavities, so the robbers would take them up into the sunlight to tear them apart and search them. But the mummies themselves had real value, too. Particularly in Europe.”
“You mean museums?”
“Not at first, no,” said Ibrahim. “You see, about six hundred years ago, Europeans came to believe that bitumen was very good for the health. It was the wonder cure of its time. Every apothecary had to stock it. Demand was so great that supplies ran short and traders started looking for new sources. You know how black mummified remains can get? People became convinced they’d been soaked in bitumen. That was where the word ‘mummy’ came from, you know; ‘mumia’ was Persian for ‘bitumen,’ and most of the original supplies of bitumen came from Persia, because it forms naturally there, in great congealed pools.”
Mohammed grimaced. “People used mummies as medicine?”
“Europeans did, yes,” said Ibrahim, giving the big builder a grin. “But, anyway, Alexandria was right at the center of this trade, which is one reason we’ve never found even fragments of mummy here, though we know for sure that mummification was practiced.”
They moved on to another chamber. Mansoor lit up a plaster seal with his flashlight. It had faint traces of paint on it, a scene of a seated woman and a standing man clasping right hands.
“The wife has died,” Ibrahim explained to Mohammed. “This painting is known as a dexiosis, a kind of farewell, with them saying good-bye for the last time.”
“Maybe he’s in there with her, too,” muttered Mohammed. “They seem pretty crowded, these tombs.”
“That’s because there were so many people in Alexandria, and not enough space. Some estimates say that a million people lived here in ancient times. Have you seen the necropolis at Gabbari?”
“No.”
“It’s huge. A true city of the dead. And there’s Shatby and Sidi Gabr, too. But still they weren’t enough. Particularly after Christianity became popular.”
Mohammed frowned. “Why so?”
“Before the Christians, many Alexandrians opted for cremation,” he explained. “See these niches in the walls? They’re designed for urns and caskets. But Christians believed in resurrection, you know. They needed their bodies.”
“This is a Christian necropolis, then?”
“It’s an Alexandrian necropolis,” answered Ibrahim. “You’ll find believers in the Egyptian gods, the Greek gods, the Roman gods, Jews, Christians, Buddhists—every religion on earth.”
“And what happens to them now?”
Ibrahim nodded. “We’ll study them. We can learn a great deal about diet, health, mortality rates, ethnic mix, cultural practices. Many other things.”
“You’ll treat them with respect?”
“Of course, my friend. Of course.”
They went back out, into another chamber. “What’s this?” asked Augustin, pointing his flashlight through a hole in the wall to a short flight of steps disappearing down into the dark.
“I don’t know,” shrugged Mohammed. “I didn’t see it before.”
Ibrahim had to duck low to get beneath, and Mohammed had to go on his hands and knees. Inside was what appeared to be the tomb of a wealthy family, separated by a line of carved pillars and pilasters into two adjoining spaces. Five stone sarcophagi of different sizes stood against the walls, all decorated with a rich confusion of styles and faiths. A portrait of Dionysus was carved into the limestone above depictions of Apis, Anubis, and a solar disk. Stone recesses above each of the sarcophagi held Canopic jars, perhaps still containing their original contents: the stomach, liver, intestines, and lungs of the deceased. Other objects glittered on the floor: fragments of funerary lamps and amphorae, scarabs, small items of silver and bronze jewelry studded with dulled stones. “Marvelous,” murmured Augustin. “How can the robbers have missed these?”
“Perhaps the door was concealed,” suggested Ibrahim, kicking at the rubble. “An earthquake, or just the passage of time.”
“How old?” asked Mohammed.
Ibrahim glanced at Augustin. “First century AD?” he suggested. “Maybe second.”
They came at last to the level of the water table. Steps disappeared tantalizingly down into it, hinting at more chambers beneath. The water had risen and fallen dramatically over the centuries; if they were lucky, it might have prevented the robbers from looting whatever lay beneath. Augustin stooped and ma
de ripples with his hand. “Do we have the budget for a pump?” he asked.
Ibrahim shrugged. Pumping was expensive, noisy, dirty, and all too often completely ineffective. It would also mean running a fat pipe along the passage and up the stairwell, which would get in the way of the main excavation. “If we must.”
“If you want me to explore first, I’ll need a buddy. These places are death traps.”
Ibrahim nodded. “Whatever you wish. I leave it up to you.”
NESSIM WAS DRIVING through Suez when his cell phone rang. “Yes?” he asked.
A man’s voice. “It’s me.”
Nessim didn’t recognize his caller, but he knew better than to ask. He’d contacted a great many people last night, and few of them were keen on having their connection with Hassan known. Cell phones were notoriously vulnerable; you had to assume you were being monitored at all times. “What have you got?”
“Your man has a file.”
Ah! So the Egyptian Security Service had a file on Knox. Intriguing. “And?”
“Not over the phone.”
“I’m on my way to Cairo now. Same arrangement as last time?”
“Six o’clock,” the man agreed. And the phone went dead.
KNOX WAS STILL STANDING out on Augustin’s balcony, expecting at any moment that the glass doors would be pushed open and the intruder would step out. Only now did he realize what a death trap this apartment was. The fire escape, elevator, and main stairs were all outside the front door. Other than that… There weren’t any other balconies to leap onto, or any ledge to inch along. He gripped the rail tight and leaned out to look six stories down to the unyielding concrete of the parking lot. He could conceivably drop down to the balcony directly beneath his own, but if he mistimed his release… His toes went numb just thinking about it.
Inside Augustin’s apartment, the coughing was growing worse. A strange intruder to break into an apartment only to stand there hacking away. He risked a quick glance through the glass doors but saw nothing to alarm him. Another cough, then some hissing, and finally he understood. He went back in, shaking his head at his paranoia, to find Augustin’s percolator spluttering out the last few drops of coffee. He poured himself a cup and toasted himself mockingly in the mirror. He wasn’t good at this kind of thing, not least because he found confinement hard to bear. Already he could feel a kind of cabin fever building, a slight cramping in his upper arms and the backs of his calves. He longed to take a brisk walk, burn off some nervous energy, but he dare not show his face outside. Hassan’s men would surely already be showing his photograph at train stations, hotels, and taxi companies, scouring parking lots for his Jeep. Knox knew he needed to lie low. But still . . .