by Tom Holland
‘You are one of them, I presume?’
Newberry nodded abruptly; and I could see how, despite the shadow of the cliff, his eyes were glinting brightly. ‘My God, Carter,’ he exclaimed suddenly, as though his words were a torrent barely dammed until that moment, ‘have you ever thought, ever considered, how little we understand of the Ancients? Yes, Petrie digs his mounds, and temples, and pots, but what do they truly tell us? No more than a skull can tell us of what a dead man once dreamed. And what dreams - what wondrous dreams! -- the people who dwelt in this land must have had. Those are what I hunt!’ In his passion he had reached across from his saddle, and now he pulled upon my arm. ‘The long-forgotten mysteries of those ancient times!’
‘Mysteries?’ I frowned at him. ‘I don’t understand. What can you mean?’
Newberry checked himself as though suddenly embarrassed. ‘The Greeks spoke of them.’ His tone was more reserved and sober once again. ‘Even the Egyptians themselves, in dark, uncertain hints, in terms of nervous awe. Of the wisdom possessed by the priests -- something ancient, very ancient, and impossibly strange.’ He swallowed, then looked away. ‘Nor, I believe . . .’ he swallowed again -- ‘the rumours that I spoke of. . . they are not altogether dead.’
‘What do you mean?’ I exclaimed a second time.
‘The peasants hereabouts - the fellahin . . .’ - he turned back to me -- ‘they too have strange stories.’
‘Of what?’
Newberry shook his head.
‘I am intrigued,’ I continued, ‘but I can scarcely believe . . .’
‘What? That the past might run so deep?’
I did not answer him, astonished by the sudden violence of his tone. Newberry must have observed my look of surprise, for he reached out again and gently squeezed my arm. ‘History around here is like the Nile itself he said, more calmly now. ‘An eternal, ceaseless flow. Statues and pots lie preserved beneath the sands. Why should not traditions linger on as well?’
I trusted that my expression did not betray my feelings of doubt. ‘And what is the particular tradition you have heard?’
‘That there is a tomb hereabouts, still hidden, the object of a curse.’ Newberry paused. ‘A tomb which had once belonged to a King.’
‘Akh-en-Aten?’
Newberry shrugged very faintly. ‘This is what the folk tales report of the King. He had not been a worshipper of idols like the other Pharaohs, but rather a true Muslim; for he had believed in Allah, the one and only God. In the name of this God, the King had driven all the demons from the land, and their priests from the temples which they had stained with living blood. But the ambitions of the King betrayed him in the end, for he was afraid of death and wished to live for ever; and so he sought to discover the hidden name of God. He fell like Lucifer, whom the peasants hereabouts know as Iblis, Prince of the Jinn. A curse was laid upon his tomb that he, who had sought eternal life, should now for ever be restless in death. And so he remains even to this day, a demon whose breath is the winds of the desert -- and the womenfolk scare their children with his tale.’
He paused, then smiled. ‘I apologise,’ he murmured, suddenly diffident, ‘for the perhaps melodramatic nature of my tone. Yet it is an intriguing story, I think you will agree.’
‘But. . .’ I frowned, and shook my head. ‘A myth, surely?’
‘And what are myths, if not the expression of some hidden or forgotten truth?’
Yet . . . the vast length of time we are talking about -- what exactly were Akh-en-Aten’s dates?’
‘He reigned, it is thought, around 1350 BC
‘Then how could the tradition possibly have been preserved from such a time?’
‘Oh, with the greatest ease,’ answered Newberry airily. ‘Arab folk tales are directly descended from the traditions of Ancient Egypt. If you do not believe me, then you need only compare the Westcar Papyrus with the cycle of “The Arabian Nights”.’
Never then having heard of the Westcar Papyrus, I did not know how to reply to this assertion; but I must still have looked doubtful, for Newberry began impatiently to list the parallels between Akh-en-Aten and the peasants’ folk tale king -- how they had both sought to overthrow an ancient priestcraft, how they had both been the worshippers of a single god . . .
‘And his end?’ I interrupted him. ‘What did happen to Akh-en-Aten in the end?’
‘We cannot be certain,’ Newberry answered promptly. ‘But his revolution’ -- he shifted in his saddle, to gaze back at the dusty, abandoned plain -- ‘it clearly did not last.’
‘And his children?’
Newberry frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘In the fragment Petrie showed us - the King appeared surrounded by his children. He must have had heirs.’
‘Two sons, Petrie thinks.’
‘Then what happened to them? Why did they not carry on their father’s work?’
‘Again’ -- Newberry shrugged -- ‘we cannot be certain. The first son, it would appear from the evidence of Petrie’s excavations, reigned here no more than two or three years. And then in the second son’s reign - we can be confident of this much at least - El-Amarna was abandoned, and the court restored to Thebes.’
‘Why can we be so confident?’
‘Because, just as his father had changed his name, so did this King as well. He had first been known as Tut-ankh-Aten -- or in English, “the Living Image of the Sun”. But when he returned to Thebes, and to the influence of the priests of Karnak, such a title was clearly impossible to keep. So you can imagine what new name he chose to adopt.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Think, Carter, think.’
I shook my head.
‘Why what else could it have been’ - Newberry paused to smile - ‘but Tut-ankh-Amen? “The Living Image of Amen” -- you see?’ His smile grew wistful. ‘Tut-ankh-Amen.’
And so I heard, for the first time, the name of that King who was one day to shadow all my ambitions and hopes, and become in due course the very object of my life. And indeed, almost as though in witness of the moment, even as Newberry pronounced the fateful name so we rounded an outcrop of jagged rock and I saw ahead of us, guarding the entrance to a narrow ravine, a carving hewn out from the wall of the cliff. Newberry gestured to it. ‘You can see here,’ he proclaimed, ‘what on Petrie’s fragment had been incomplete.’ I gazed up at the carving. Although still seated in my saddle, the figures it portrayed rose high beyond my eye-level. I recognised the Pharaoh, Akh-en-Aten, at once: his appearance was, if anything, more grotesque than it had seemed upon the earlier frieze. He was standing with arms outstretched to greet the welcoming rays of the sun. Two girls were behind him, very small, their appearance likewise even more bizarre than before. But there was also a second adult figure, a woman, who wore upon her head the crown of a queen; and she, although just as distorted in her features as the others, did not seem, for all that, grotesque in the least. Far from it - for the strangeness of her appearance lent her a loveliness which was both unsettling and profound, a beauty which seemed almost to be not of this world. I strained to inspect her more closely, puzzled by this mystery; and even as I urged my camel closer to the carving, so the angle of the sunlight changed and all the figures were stained a dark red, and then the beam itself was gone and the carving cast into darkness.
‘We must hurry,’ said Newberry. ‘We do not want to be out in the desert late at night.’ Yet even as he said this, he continued to stare up at the weird carving of the Pharaoh, as though he could not bear to look away. ‘It would be a grand thing,’ he whispered, ‘to discover the tomb. A grand thing indeed.’
‘And if we were successful’ -- I paused -- ‘what then? What do you hope to discover inside?’
It took Newberry a moment to reply. ‘A darkness rendered light,’ he answered at last, ‘a mystery solved. For that the fate of Akh-en-Aten is a mystery, both science and legend can agree.’
I laughed. ‘Legend claims that he never even rested in the tomb.�
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Newberry glanced round at me irritably. ‘In the end,’ he muttered, ‘who knows what we may find?’ He stared up at the carving one final time, then urged his camel onwards. ‘For that is the mystery -- the great mystery, and the prize.’
We began our search early the next morning. I had been sworn once again to the profoundest secrecy, and we left the camp as quietly as we could, for Newberry could not endure the thought that others should learn of our ambitions. I doubted, though, that our departures would long remain concealed, for the camel is not the most discreet of beasts, and I knew that my colleagues, Blackden and Fraser, were both observant men. When I mentioned this to Newberry, however, and suggested we bring them into the search, a look of near panic passed across his face. ‘No, no,’ he insisted, ‘we must keep this to ourselves’; and he began to speak to me again of his hopes of the tomb, of the many mysteries it might prove to contain. ‘We must keep this as quiet as we can.’ And in truth, I was content to do as he said, for the passion of his enthusiasm was infecting me strongly and I was experiencing for the first time what I had long desired to feel - the thrill of a quest.
We concentrated our efforts on the rocks above the plain. Whenever we passed into the desert, I was filled, leaving the Nile behind and gazing at the red sands piled against the sky, with the strangest sense that the world had been ended, that all was silent, and empty, and vast. As we laboured in our search, poking about amidst gullies and clefts, Newberry would tell me of the legend of Seth, the ancient god of darkness and evil, who had once sought to seize the throne of the world from Osiris, his brother. The resulting conflict had been terrible and long; but Seth, in the end, had been overthrown and banished to the deserts which stretched beyond the Nile. There he had reigned as the spirit of confusion, eternally restless, and hungry for revenge. When the fiery winds began to blow across the river, and the fields be lost to the encroachments of the sands, then the Ancient Egyptian would pray with fear in his heart that Seth was not seeking to return from the desert, that the realm of darkness might not be restored. At night, when the gales swept in from the endless deserts, he would pray all the more; for he would know that he was hearing the devil-god’s screams.
‘Remarkable,’ I commented. ‘Just as the peasants today, in the story you have told me, hear the screams of the spirit of the restless King.’
‘Remarkable indeed.’ Newberry smiled at me. ‘The persistence of these myths never ceases to amaze.’
Nor, so far as Newberry himself was concerned, to inspire. His excitement may well be imagined when, on the third day of our search, we were approached by three bedawin who spoke to us of tombs buried deep within the desert. The bedawin had clearly learned of Newberry’s obsession, for when he mentioned to them the folk tale of the restless King, they smiled and nodded: ‘Yes, yes, that King!’ We mounted our camels in a flurry of excitement, and the bedawin led us for several hours across the sands, until at length we discovered an ancient road. Following this for a couple more hours, we arrived at a deep and extensive gorge where veins of salmon pink ran through gleaming white calcite; and we could see, piled against these cliffs, heaps of rubble and limestone chippings. Newberry dismounted from his camel and hurried across to them. He picked up a handful, inspected them for a moment, then flung them down again. ‘But this is a quarry!’ he exclaimed. The disappointment on his face was almost painful to behold. ‘Nothing but a quarry!’
He strode across to the bedawin, and spoke angrily with them. I saw the bedawin point, and then Newberry reach into his pocket for more coins. He handed them across impatiently, as one of the bedawin dismounted and began to pass further into the ravine.
I hurried after Newberry. ‘What did he say?’
‘He claims -- so far as I could make him out -- that the King made sacrifices here, when he succumbed to temptation and became a servant of Iblis.’ Newberry paused, his doubt and disappointment still evident on his face. ‘He claims there are inscriptions marking the site.’ ‘What about the tombs?’
Newberry’s lips tightened, and he pointed to mine shafts dug into the cliffs. ‘Those are the so-called tombs.’ He shrugged in despair. ‘So God knows what the inscriptions will turn out to be.’
I looked ahead at the bedawin. He had stopped by a fork in the ravine, and when we joined him he pointed into the shadows of one of the clefts. Newberry ordered him to lead on; but the bedawin shuddered and shook his head. He muttered a garbled prayer, then suddenly began to scamper back the way he had come. Newberry watched him go with undisguised contempt. ‘These people!’ he muttered, passing into the cleft.
I followed him; and the moment I did so felt suddenly cold. We had been walking in shadow before, but the darkness now seemed icy and black, and I found myself shuddering just as the bedawin had done. I called out to Newberry to ask him if he felt it. He turned round impatiently. ‘Feel what?’ he barked. But I could not reply. My throat felt hoarse - parched with a baffling, unaccountable fear.
As I joined Newberry at the end of the cleft, I asked him again if he could not sense something strange about the place. But he was too distracted even to have heard me, and pointed instead to the innermost wall of the cleft. ‘Well,’ he muttered despondently, ‘there it is.’ I gazed at where he was pointing. There was an inscription, clearly visible, chiselled out from the rock, and above it the disk of a sun with its rays curling downwards. Two figures could just be made out squatting underneath it; both were very worn, but seemed to represent a man and a woman.
For a moment my heart had leapt, but then, as I studied the inscription itself, I frowned in disappointment and puzzlement. ‘Is it Arabic?’ I asked, for my knowledge of that language was as yet rudimentary. I reached up to trace the inscription with my finger, then glanced back at Newberry. ‘Can you read what it says?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid my knowledge of the lingo’s only good enough to know when the beggars want more backseesh out of me.’
‘Should we note it down, then?’
Newberry frowned. ‘Why should we do that?’
‘Well’ - I pointed to the figure of the sun -- ‘it seems so similar to the portraits of the Aten.’
‘I suppose there is a superficial resemblance. But it is clearly of a piece with the Arabic inscription. That is hardly going to lead us to Akh-en-Aten’s tomb.’
‘But you said yourself. . .’
‘Yes?’
‘How history in Egypt runs very deep.’
‘Not that deep, old man.’ Newberry gazed reproachfully up at the sun once again. ‘Why at the very earliest, it must date from almost two thousand years after Akh-en-Aten’s death. No use at all. No, no - this whole damn place is a busted flush.’ He kicked at a stone with sudden violence. ‘Come on, Carter. Let’s get out of here.’ He turned and walked briskly back down the ravine. I pulled out a piece of paper and quickly scribbled the inscription down, then hurried after him, almost at a run. It will sound queer, I know, and it is hard to explain, but I had no wish to be left on my own in that place, for even as we rode back across the desert I imagined that the chill of its shadows lingered upon my skin. As a wind began to blow, the sand rising in whirls upon its shriek, I remembered the ancient superstitions and could almost believe that I was listening to Seth, stirred from his rocky sleep, and risen once again to claim back the world.
We arrived back at last, feeling weary and depressed. Not surprisingly in view of our state, Blackden and Fraser asked us where we had been. I told them about our discovery of the quarry, but nothing more. I noticed, however, that they both exchanged glances, and I knew that our purpose would not remain a secret for long. Newberry himself was growing steadily more frantic as the days slipped by and nothing more was found; and the more frantic he grew, so the more haphazard our search came to seem.
At length, the period of our holiday came to an end and I prepared to return to my work in the tombs. Newberry, however, had other plans, for he told me he had arranged with my sponsors that
I should move to El-Amarna, where Petrie had offered to train me up as an excavator. Of course, I knew full well what Newberry’s motive was in all this: he wanted his own man in residence on the site, so that he would learn at once of any significant finds. But what did I care? Petrie was the greatest archaeologist of the age -- and now he had offered to teach me all he knew. Me! - a mere draughtsman -- in Egyptological terms, the lowest of the low! What would I not have done to be granted such a chance? I had been in Egypt a bare few months, but already it had confirmed me in all my boyhood fascination, and I knew that it had become my great love and perhaps, I thought, my fate. The lure of its mysteries had me in their grip - and it had grown my profoundest hope that I too, one day, would be an archaeologist myself.
I trusted that Petrie, who was self-taught himself, would understand this ambition -- and yet it was just as well that I possessed it, for he was not to prove an easy taskmaster. I had learned before of his eccentricities; now I was to suffer their full effect. My first day he put me to building a hut; for I found that - like furniture and linen - servants were sternly tabooed. The result of my efforts could hardly rank as luxury -- nor could the conditions under which I was then set to work. There was to be no galloping about in the pursuit of lost tombs now; rather, a painstaking sifting of rubble and dust; no searching for hidden mysteries or treasure; rather for shattered statues, the fragments of pots, and all the scattered pieces of an impossible jigsaw. How I loathed my teacher, for he was a pedant of the most ruthless and bloody-minded kind. And yet how I reverenced him as well, for he was certainly a genius as Newberry had claimed, with the most extraordinary aptitude for interpreting history out of chaos. I began to understand, as I sweated and toiled beneath the midday sun, how archaeology is dependent upon meticulous research - not the giddy pursuit of some dramatic find, but rather the labour of months, perhaps even years, and the mapping of an infinite number of clues. Petrie taught me, in short, the ABC of my profession -- how an excavator must be a man of patience and of science.