by Tom Holland
How long I remained unconscious I am still uncertain. I was revived by Ahmed splashing water on my face, but I knew even before he told me that he too had been attacked, for I could see how his hair was still matted with blood. Of the man who had struck me there was not a sign, save only a jumble of footprints; nor was he the only thing to have disappeared. For as I staggered to my feet, Ahmed pointed grim-facedly in the direction of the trench. I hurried across to it, but alas! -- my worst forebodings were to prove all too correct. The mummy had gone; so too the ornament which I had wrapped and laid aside so carefully. Of all my hopes and finds of that night, not a single trace remained.
My disappointment cut me especially deep, since I knew now that I would have no choice but to leave the next day for Cairo. I had briefly hoped that Ahmed might have recognised our assailants; but he, like me, had been caught by surprise, and when I attempted to describe the man that I had glimpsed he could only shrug and give a shake of his head. He promised, though, that he would launch a full investigation, to track down not only our mysterious assailants but also the mummy and the portrait of Tyi. Even as he vowed this, of course, I knew that he had little prospect of success; but I slipped him money all the same, and made him promise to keep me informed of any news.
Then I thanked him for all his many years’ service, and would have bade him farewell save that I could sense he had something he still wanted to say. He appeared strangely reluctant, however, to spit it out, and indeed, I was almost losing patience when he finally cleared his throat. ‘The tomb, sir,’ he asked me. ‘What about the tomb?’ ‘Tomb?’ I frowned.
‘The tomb, sir, in the story, with the demon inside. I told you of the lion with the woman’s head - how that was supposed to have been found beside the unopened door. But in the story, sir -- there was . . . yes -- there was something else as well. A withered body, with its throat torn apart.’
I narrowed my eyes and, with great deliberation, began to stroke the ends of my moustache. ‘Indeed?’ I said at length.
Ahmed cleared his throat again. ‘You cannot, sir, stay a few more weeks?’
I considered this option, then shook my head slowly. ‘No. Not with the present lack of definite proof
‘And . . . Mr Davis, sir?’
I glanced at him sharply.
‘Will you tell Mr Davis of what happened here tonight?’
As I gazed around me at the level sands, I thought of all the secrets, the treasures they might contain. I glanced at Ahmed again; I did not reply.
‘You will be back, sir,’ he whispered. ‘Inshallah, the chance will come, and you will dig in the Valley of the Kings once again.’
I shrugged very faintly. ‘Let us hope so,’ I said.
It goes without saying, of course, that I profoundly regretted my transfer from Thebes; and yet for all my disappointment, I could not suppress a certain mood of excitement at taking up my new post. After the solitude and quiet of my former Inspectorate, how vast Cairo seemed, how impossibly full of colour and noise! In the desert, I might well have heard nothing for hours save the crying of a jackal or a hawk, but in Cairo the sounds of the streets formed an endless backdrop to my day. Even at night, the tramping of feet would never cease, nor the hubbub of conversation, nor the shouting of traders and the howling of dogs. And sometimes too there would come the summonings to prayer, a chorus as ancient as the city itself, so that standing upon my roof, scanning the minarets as they speared into the haze, I would imagine Cairo’s centuries melted by the cry. But then I would turn and stare towards the southern horizon, and see a skyline more vastly ancient by far. The pyramids of Ghiza, viewed from the roof of my house, appeared strangely insubstantial, as though afloat upon a mist; yet they would outlive, I suspected, all of Cairo itself. Nor did it cease to stir me, nor to fill me with pride, that it was I who had been charged with their continued protection - for the pyramids had been ancient even in Akh-en-Aten’s time.
Not that my interest in that King, nor in the mysteries of his reign, had been in any way diminished by my transfer to Cairo. I knew, of course, that the trails I had been following in Thebes would now be difficult to pursue. There were no sites near Cairo to excavate, nor any source of those folk tales which I had relied upon before. Indeed, only one faint line of inquiry still seemed open to me, for it would be my duty in Cairo, as it had previously been in Thebes, to keep a track of any smuggling of antiquities. With so many dealers in the capital, I feared that this would prove a near impossible task; but I also knew that the finest of Egypt’s many plundered treasures, all the richest loot of the Valley of the Kings, would infallibly end up in Cairo’s bazaars, where European collectors might then have their pick. When my other duties spared me the time, I began to visit these shops, making myself known to the antiquity dealers and closely inspecting their assembled wares. I particularly hoped to trace the portrait of Tyi, but that was not the only object I sought, for indeed I was interested in anything dating from Akh-en-Aten’s reign. Above all I hunted images of the sun, images with two worshippers praying underneath.
As I had suspected would be the case, however, I had little luck at first. Yet my calls upon the dealers were not wholly without point, for they served to establish my name amongst them and to establish theirs with me. I had soon come to identify where the true heart of the antiquities industry lay, in a souk just south of the Khan el-Khalili, the great covered market of the medieval city. It was there, accordingly, that I centred my search. And indeed, I thought, it was a fitting enough place in which to hunt for treasure; for the narrow, winding streets, with their spices and bright silks, their porters and donkeys, their cross-legged merchants and slowly-moving crowds, seemed a vision conjured from some oriental fantasy, some children’s book version of ‘The Arabian Nights’.
Several months after my arrival in Cairo, however, I was starting to grow discouraged. But then, just as I was on the point of abandoning my search altogether, I had a piece of luck -- one which was to lead me, as though I might truly have been Aladdin or Ali Baba, into a world full of dark and fabulous mystery. It happened one evening, as I was passing through the trinket-laden byways of the souk, that I observed a shop-front I must have overlooked before, for it was very narrow and stood in the shadow of a high, crumbling wall. I crossed to it and, brushing aside the curtain which had veiled the contents from my view, passed inside. There were two men sitting there. One was stooped and very old; his companion, however, seemed little more than a boy, and it was he who rose and came forward to greet me. I asked him if he had any antiquities for sale. He nodded, and beckoned me to follow him. Although he was only carrying a single lamp, I had already caught the gleam of metal ahead and, as I passed further into the shop, I began to make out goblets, jewellery and swords piled randomly amidst blocks of decorated stone. I soon realised, however, that the artefacts were all of an Islamic date. My disappointment must have been evident on my face, for the old man now came forward to see if he could help.
I described to him what I was looking for. As is ever the way of the Orient, the old man could not bring himself to admit that he did not have what a customer might want, and so he allowed me to continue with my questions, nodding and smiling and shrugging all the while. Then I asked him if he had any portrayals of the sun, and at last his smile seemed one of relief. He took me by the arm, still smiling broadly, and led me across to the blocks of stone. He pointed at one of them, but I shook my head, for I had seen at once that the decorations on its side were like all the others, of an early Islamic origin. But the old man insisted I look closer and so, for the sake of form, I bent down to inspect it.
At once, I felt my heart leap into my mouth. I stared up at the old man, wide-eyed, then back at the artwork on the side of the stone. For there could be no doubting that it was a portrait, not just of the sun but quite specifically of the Aten -- and beneath the disk were the figures of two crouching worshippers. It was identical, in almost every way, to the image I had found in the quarry with Ne
wberry, and although the one before me now bore no inscriptions, it clearly dated from a similar period. Seeing my excitement, the old man began naming his price, but although I was perfectly willing to pay, it was information I wanted, not the piece of stone itself. I asked where it had come from. The old man shrugged and smiled, but then, when I pressed him, his smile suddenly dissolved into a look of fear. I pulled more money from my wallet.
All I want to know,’ I repeated, ‘is the source of this stone.’
But the old man, for some reason now terrified of my intentions, had declined with great suddenness into the most remarkable funk, and would say nothing at all. Instead he began to flap at me, as though to shoo me away I tried once again to calm his nerves by pulling out more money, but the old man appeared barely to see it, so abject was his terror, and still he flapped at me, moaning all the while. At length, accepting that I would get no sense from him, I turned and left, as infuriated by his terror as I was also intrigued.
I began to stride in a tense fury through the crowded souk. To be so close to such a remarkable breakthrough . . . and then to be denied! But it so happened, just as I was resolving to turn and go back, that I felt a tugging upon my jacket and, swinging round, found the lad from the shop. He grinned up at me. ‘The piece of stone, sir,’ he whispered, ‘it came from a mosque.’
‘What mosque? One here in Cairo?’
The boy’s grin broadened.
I reached inside my pocket for a roll of bank-notes and handed a couple over.
The boy inspected them disdainfully. ‘You must know, sir, the information that you want, it is very dangerous.’
‘Why?’
‘A very bad mosque -- a very bad reputation.’
I counted out more bank-notes, and handed them across.
The lad slipped them into the pocket of his robe, then took my arm and led me in a conspiratorial manner towards the darkness of a side alley. ‘The mosque, sir, you want is that of al-Hakim. He was a Caliph, a great King, who ruled over all the Arab lands long, long ago. But he was evil, sir, and mad, and it is said he worshipped not Allah but Iblis, for he was a servant of darkness.’
‘How did the old man come by the stone?’
‘The mosque, sir, is abandoned -- so it was an easy matter for my uncle to remove the stonework where it crumbles.’
‘But why was he so terrified that he could not tell me that himself?’
The lad glanced sideways into the night shadows. As he turned back to me, he fingered a charm which hung around his neck. ‘To carve a sun, sir,’ he hissed, ‘and upon the walls of a mosque, it is a terrible crime. If anyone should know that my uncle had found it . . .’
‘But who would know? I thought you said that the mosque was abandoned?’
The lad shrugged. He appeared almost as nervous now, I thought, as his uncle had been. ‘I must go, sir,’ he said.
‘Wait,’ I called out, ‘wait! Where can I find this mosque of al-Hakim?’
The lad glanced back at me over his shoulder. ‘By the Bab al-Futuh,’ he cried, ‘the Northern Gate. And may Allah guard you, sir!’ Then he turned and was gone.
I stared after him a moment before glancing up at the sky. The stars were already prickling brightly and, remembering the fear which the mosque had inspired in both the old man and the young lad, I was almost tempted to postpone my visit there. But I had business the next day away from Cairo, and when I asked, I found it was not a great distance to the Bab al-Futuh. Accordingly, I left the souk and began to walk northwards, forcing my way through the still-crowded bazaars, and smiling ruefully to myself as I did so at the thought of how superstition could infect even my own, rational mind. But as I left the covered markets behind, so the crowds began to thin, and the darkness gradually to seem more close and intense. Certainly, the piles of refuse in the street were growing higher, but so also were the crumbling buildings on either side, so that when I looked up I could see only a narrow strip of stars, barely glimpsable through the balconies which projected from the walls. No lights shone from behind either windows or doors, nor - a strange thing in Cairo indeed! - could I hear any noise at all; yet I had the most powerful sense of being watched, as though there were hidden eyes behind every latticed front. Even as I thought that, I began to observe eyes painted on the walls, staring out from within the palms of open hands - the traditional Egyptian charm against an imagined curse.
As the street widened again, so the number of eyes upon the walls began steadily to increase. Peering ahead of me now, I could just make out the silhouette of a massive gateway -- the Bab al-Futuh, I assumed, where the mosque was said to stand. I stopped and looked about me. I could see nothing, however, save for a dilapidated wall with an archway to my right, so decayed and littered with rubble that I was astonished the authorities had not already pulled it down. Even in comparison with the rest of the street, it seemed a wasteland of particular desertion and shadow; yet although I sought to tear my gaze from it, I found myself strangely drawn by its aspect of ruin. Almost despite myself, I crossed to the archway and gazed through it to see what lay beyond. I could just make out a courtyard, its crumbling marble lit silver by the moon; but as I approached it, so the gleam began to fade and grow mottled by the withered tangles of weeds, as though the desolation were stifling the light. I continued to walk forward. Ahead of me now, I could see more debris: collapsed walls, abandoned boxes, piles of toppled stone. I could also see, to the left and right of me, two minarets stabbing upwards, perfectly silhouetted against the star-emblazoned sky. At the same moment, I felt a strange blackness settle on my heart; and I knew that I had surely found the mosque of al-Hakim.
Conquering my quite irrational sense of oppression, I began to walk towards a doorway beneath the nearest minaret. The stonework there appeared better preserved, and I was hopeful that I might discover something worthy of my study. Above the doorway, when I inspected it, I found a line of Arabic text, but so weathered had it become that I could barely make sense of it. ‘Al-Vakhel’, I read - that seemed to be a name -- and then faded stonework, and then ‘this place’, and then, on the other side of the archway, only the one word ‘darkness’. I frowned. It was impossible to read any more but certainly, whatever the text may originally have said, it did not seem to allude to a long-dead Pharaoh, and I shook my head to think I had ever hoped that it might have done. How, in God’s name, when Akh-en-Aten’s reign had been buried utterly in oblivion, would his name have been known to a Muslim Caliph? And how, even if by some extraordinary coincidence it had been known, would the evidence of such a heresy - carved upon the stonework of a mosque, no less -- ever have been preserved these many long centuries? And yet... I frowned. I remembered the carving of the Aten in the old man’s shop. I had seen it with my own eyes. And I had seen his terror as well, his abject fear; and that had certainly been real enough . . .
When I pushed at the door, it swung open easily. I peered into the darkness beyond it, and could just make out steps. Feeling my way carefully, I began to walk up them. I soon realised that they had been built in a spiral, and that I was climbing the centre of the minaret. My journey, though, was very slow, for the darkness remained pitch until suddenly I saw a thin beam of silver ahead of me, slanting across the stairway, and when I looked out through the slit of the window I realised that I had climbed higher than I had thought. I inspected the shell of the mosque laid out below me for a while, then continued with my ascent. Soon there came another window, and then another, and then, just beyond the fourth, there came a heavy door. Unlike the first one I had passed through, it appeared newly fitted and I could see, in the pale moonlight, how the stonework around it had been reinforced. I tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. I sought to force it, but without much hop e. At length I stepped back, frowning. What could possibly lie beyond it which had led it to being secured with so much evident care? I inspected the door again, and then the stonework more closely. As I did so, the angle of the moonlight must have changed, for I suddenly caugh
t something I had not observed before; and at once my heart seemed to stop.
Above the highest part of the arch there was a carving of the Aten. But I could still barely make it out, and so I reached up to trace the lines with my finger. I could feel that the disk was full and that two worshippers knelt beneath it, reaching up to greet its rays.
I breathed in deeply and at the same moment -- very faint and far below -- I imagined I heard a noise like that of a door creaking open. I froze and stood motionless a while, straining my ears. But I could hear nothing more, and so I assumed it had been a trick played upon me by my nerves. I breathed in again, this time with relief, and turned back to inspect the carvings on the arch above the door.
I could see now that there were two lines of script on either side of the sun. ‘ “Have you thought upon Lilat”,’ I quoted aloud, as I copied down the first inscription, ‘ “the great one, the other? She is much to be feared. Truly, Lilat is great amongst gods”.’ So it had been written in the tomb of Akh-en-Aten, by the portrait of his Queen; and so again it had been written down here.
I turned to the second inscription. This too I had seen before, in the quarry I had explored with Newberry. I shuddered as, again, I began to copy it down, for this verse suddenly struck me as a warning aimed forcibly at myself. And even as I thought this I heard it spoken, rising from the steps behind me, spoken by a voice as silver as the moonlight and as cold as when it shines upon the sand dunes of the desert. ‘ “Leave for ever”,’ the voice whispered. ‘ “You are damned. You are accursed”. Leave for ever.’