The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘How?’

  ‘His plane crashed in the bush. No one knows what happened. Took off from a place called Imphal and didn’t come back. Next day they sent out a foot patrol and found it nose-down in the ulu. The bodies were unrecognisable, but they discovered Wingate’s Wolseley helmet, and assumed he was among the dead. Ironically enough, all his life he’d been terrified of flying.’

  Doc paused and lit a cigarette with her silver lighter. ‘So of the three men Julian mentioned it seems only one of them, Tutankhamen, could have been murdered. Lord Carnarvon died of a mosquito-bite, 1923, and Orde Wingate died in a plane crash, 1944. All died in different ways, and the only link between them is that they’d all been in Tut’s tomb. It’s very shaky ground for anything - I mean, millions have been there. But what is interesting is that there’s a connection between Orde Wingate and Julian Cranwell: the Lost Oasis of Zerzura.’

  ‘You’re great, Doc,’ I said. ‘My favourite doctor.’

  ‘And you will stay tonight, Jamie.’

  ‘All right. I don’t think I could move now anyway. I’ll collect my things from the hotel tomorrow.’

  I woke up to find beams of sunlight trickling through the open window. The herbal infusion had done the trick, and there remained only a muzziness in my head where the pain had been. I opened the small wardrobe in the room to find that Doc had actually kept some of my things from ancient times. There was a white cotton suit, some jeans, pants, socks, sandals, baggy sinval, and a couple of spare shirts. There was even a washing and shaving bag and an old pair of glasses. Doc really was a wonder; there’s nothing so pleasant as rediscovering a hoard of possessions you’ve completely forgotten about. It’s almost like finding buried treasure. Doc was already humped over her computer-desk in a towelling dressing-gown when I emerged, her long fingers working over the keys deftly with blinding speed. She looked as though she had been at it already for hours. I tiptoed past her and entered the bathroom and removed the clothes I’d slept in. Doc had laid out some fresh pine soap, shaving gear and a new toothbrush with a squiggle of striped toothpaste on it, all ready for me, just like in the old days. Little considerations like that had always endeared Doc to me. I stepped into a hot shower. The steam rinsed away the heaviness, and when I emerged, dressed in two clean towels, she was waiting for me on the balcony with fresh croissants, coffee and orange juice. This morning her face looked pale and drawn: ‘I’ve been up since sparrowfart,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I don’t sleep well these days.’

  I drank the juice in two gulps and described my encounter with Kolpos while eating the croissants and drinking the coffee. ‘Sounds like something out of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’ Doc said finally.

  ‘Yeah, but the weirdest thing was when Kolpos tried to dice me with the cleaver. I mean, it was as if I knew what was going to happen just a split second before. It saved my life.’

  ‘Maybe you just divined it unconsciously from his expression; that happens.’

  ‘No. I actually saw the blade flash in my head a moment before it appeared.’

  ‘That is weird, Jamie, but memory plays tricks. Perhaps it didn’t really come in that sequence at all.’

  ‘You’re probably right, Doc.’

  ‘Did it ever happen to you before?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. I was starting to feel uncomfortable. If I went on like this Doc would soon be thinking I was cuckoo. ‘What about the parallel between Julian and Wingate, though?’ I said, deliberately changing the subject.

  ‘Very interesting. In 1933 Wingate trogs off to find Zerzura with fifteen men, none of whom return. He himself is never the same again and his headman is so crazy he has to be put away. In 1995, sixty years later, Julian Cranwell sets out to find Zerzura and winds up dead.’

  ‘I didn’t swallow Kolpos’s story. I sensed he was hiding some-thing and he seemed a real money-grubber. His plea that he wouldn’t break the law here in Egypt didn’t ring true at all.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust that man as far as I could throw him. What about Elena?’

  ‘Different. Nice. Beautiful, just like you said. She didn’t say much, just threatened to put a bullet in me.’

  ‘Really. Sounds as if she liked you.’

  ‘Hardly my type. You know I’ve always been madly in love with you.’

  ‘Pull the other one, Jamie. Oh, by the way, I remembered something that might help. Some time ago, here in Cairo, I came across Professor Aurel Karlman...’

  ‘What, the Aurel Karlman? The hieroglyphics expert — used to be professor of Egyptology at Harvard?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘I thought he’d kicked the bucket aeons ago.’

  ‘Not a bit of it. He’s no spring chicken, of course — must be ninety — but he lives in Cairo. Address in Imbaba. Now, Karlman actually knew Howard Carter in the 1930s. If anyone can throw light on what went on between Carter and Carnarvon and how Carnarvon really died, it’s him.’

  ‘I just hope Karlman doesn’t keep a meat cleaver behind his desk, or a sexy girl with a revolver in his closet.’

  ‘I doubt it, darling. From what I hear, the Professor has no truck with sexy girls. There was some kind of scandal years back — before your time maybe — concerning Karlman and boys from his digs. Something to do with pornography. But it was all hushed up. Anyway, the last time I saw him he was being minded by the ugliest-looking customer you ever saw. But I’ve got his phone number, and I’ll let him know you’re coming, so this time there won’t be any nasty shocks.’

  But nasty shocks were still in store for me that day. The first was when we called in at Shepheard’s Hotel for me to settle up and check out. Doc pulled up on a side-street opposite the entrance, and together we walked through the metal-detector, nodded to the smartly dressed doormen, and approached the reception. A tall, slick young man in an impeccable black suit enquired in English if he could help. ‘I’d like to check out,’ I said, replying in English — it invariably commanded more respect than Arabic in an Egyptian hotel.

  ‘What room is it, Sir?’

  ‘Three—one—six.’

  The clerk tensed suddenly, and sent me a troubled glance. ‘Er…Mr Ross?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He paused. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  ‘Excuse me, Sir. I’d better get the front desk manager.’

  A few moments later the manager emerged from the office, a swarthy, blue-chinned man, comfortingly plump, with a polished public-relations smile. ‘Ah, Mr Ross,’ he said, shaking hands with us both, ‘it’s nothing to worry about — it’s just that there was a fire in your room last night.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘About 3 a.m., Sir. The room-service waiter saw smoke and sounded the alarm, but it was already burning like mad. They managed to stop it spreading, but we had to evacuate all the higher floors. Then I noticed your key wasn’t at reception. No one remembered you going out, so we thought you’d been trapped in the room. It was only when the fire’d burnt out and they found no er...remains, that we realised you must have been somewhere else.’

  ‘I stayed at a friend’s last night.’

  ‘Very lucky, praise God.’

  ‘Any idea how the fire started?’ Doc enquired.

  ‘Might have been an electrical fault, they can’t say just yet.’

  ‘What about my things?’ I asked. ‘All my traveller’s cheques were in my case.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say most of your things went up. I’m afraid you’ll have to reapply to the issuing agency to replace your cheques, but the hotel will be happy to pay you the cost of your luggage.’

  I settled up and filled in an Insurance Claim. As we tramped back to the car, Doc said:

  ‘Now there’s an interesting coincidence, Jamie.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You think it was deliberate?’

  She smiled a little wistfully. ‘Either that, darling,’ she said, ‘or else an electric
al fault.’

  13

  At Imbaba the traffic was slowed by a herd of camels, six hundred strong, that had just been offloaded from the fleet of trucks that had shifted them from Daraw in Upper Egypt for sale here at Imbaba, the largest camel-market in the world. Before Daraw, they had been brought a thousand miles across the desert from the Sudan, along the ancient caravan-route called ‘The Forty-Days Road’.

  I watched them flowing past with liquid strides, their great necks stretched out swan-like, and wedge-shaped heads raised high. Some of their brands were familiar, and I felt a surge of nostalgia for the desert life. To my Hawazim cousins camels are everything, even in this age of motor travel. The very word ‘camel’ in Arabic is connected with the word for ‘beauty’, and I’ve only ever been able to see them through the eyes of the Arabs, not the joke animals of the British — ‘a horse designed by a committee’ — but as the epitome of power, endurance and grace. The Hawazim is one of the last Bedouin groups in Egypt still to travel by camel. They could have bought motor-cars —many modern Bedouin groups have done — but for them the motor vehicle is an intrusion. The camel is the real thing. I remember my mother saying, ‘You can milk a camel, ride it, eat it, use it to carry your tent, yoke it to a plough, use its hair, use its skin; you can even drink its vomit if you’re dying of thirst. It multiplies naturally, its food is free, and it will keep on going until it dies. Cars might be good, Omar, but only the camel is great.’

  I watched the herd until it disappeared into a cloud of dust, driven by muscular, big-bellied market stewards in dirty galla-biyyas and headscarves carrying hippo-hide whips bought from Sudanese pedlars. The taxi nosed through a warren of half-deserted alleys, and stopped in an unmetalled street behind the camel-market. The strong sunlight of midday had faded, screened by dark cloud through which fugitive sunbeams strobed like starfish tentacles. The taxi bounced on the mud surface, a hard-caked track between craters made by the winter rains, their edges still black with stagnant sludge. I was surprised that the distinguished Aurel Karlman should have chosen a slum like this in which to spend his old age, but I remembered what Doc had said about a scandal attached to Karlman’s name. Perhaps the street was the outward reflection of Karlman’s inner nature. There were the rusting hulks of wrecked trucks dumped tyreless and motorless in the gutter, or shored up on bricks. Waves of empty milk cartons and supermarket bags blew along the pavements. Someone had been burning rubbish, and the street was full of acrid smoke, whose stench mingled with the rich odours of camels from the nearby stalls. The street was dark, full of shadows, the tenements standing close together, teetering against one another, seeming to leer down on the car like giants. These were old houses, part of an older Cairo, much of which had been knocked down to make way for the art nouveau wintering resort which had grown up with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Their facades were hidden behind baroque systems of balconies, walkways and grilled mashrubat windows, with arched doorways and double doors of solid cedar, studded with iron rivets and monstrous gargoyle doorknockers. As I stepped out of the taxi I glimpsed eyes peering at me from balconies and from behind the mashrubat screens. I walked through an open doorway, up stone flags to a deeply shadowed landing where an unnameable iron device of weights, chains and pulleys stood like a massive spider on thin iron legs. There were doors here, warped out of shape and shedding dry paint, some of them festooned with cobwebs. The walls were mouldering under trickles of green slime. I found the number I was looking for and knocked. The door opened at once and a tall Nubian in a bullet-grey gallabiyya stood there, regarding me malevolently with red-shot eyes. The man was huge, I realised — taller even than Hammoudi — barrel-chested, shaven-headed and hook-nosed, black as ebony, with swollen jowls for cheeks and great dewlaps of fat around the neck. He filled the whole aperture of the door, and had to bow his head slightly to fit beneath the frame.

  ‘What?’ he snapped.

  ‘Professor Karlman?’ I said. ‘Does he live here?’

  Suddenly a high-pitched, effete, cultured, English voice piped up from inside the dark apartment: ‘Is it Ross? Let him in at once, Mas’ud.’

  I stepped inside. Aurel Karlman was sitting hunched in a wheelchair in the shadows, a small, thin, spiky man with close-cropped silver hair, his face a smudge of lines that obscured any regular shape. He wore a dark suit with a bow-tie, but like his features, his clothes had departed from their original shape under the pressure of successive generations of tatters and restitching. Karlman extended a fragile hand covered in liver spots: ‘Forgive my not rising to greet a guest,’ he said. ‘It’s the prerogative of age, not frailty. I am not confined to this wheelchair, but it saves effort when I’m in the flat.’ The voice was curiously eldritch — New England, cold, precise as a scalpel.

  The interior of the flat was large and opulent in a fusty, antique sort of way, but almost as dark as the outside, and it smelt of dust and old books — a library smell. Streaks of light from the mashrubiyya fell across heavy bookcases which lined the walls. I saw at once that they were full of classic volumes on Egyptology and hieroglyphics, many of them bound in vellum. ‘Aren’t you afraid to keep these valuable books in a place like this?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I have Mas’ud, after all, and if you look around you’ll see that the flat is pretty well fortified. The floor has been reinforced to take the weight of the books; there are two sets of bars on the windows; the front door is inch-and-a-half thick cedar. I have internal locks on all the doors, radio alarms which bring a busload of armed thugs within three minutes, and I have my own four-wheel drive vehicle, well locked up at the back in a garage approached by a private staircase. I am connected by cell-phone, fax and e-mail. Evelyn Barrington let me know you were coming. I expected you.’

  He snapped his fingers: ‘Mas’ud. Tea,’ he said testily.

  ‘Mas’ud is such a dear,’ he went on, lowering his voice confidentially. ‘Unfortunately for him he has rather a problem — heroin, you know. I give him just enough money to buy it every week: I draw the exact amount out of the bank on “pay day”: he knows that if anything happens to me his supply dries up at once.’

  ‘What about the books? Aren’t you afraid of him stealing them?’

  ‘They are all listed and the list has been placed with the bank. The moment anyone tries to sell one of them, Mas’ud will be arrested automatically. He is Sudanese, and he’s here without a permit: the Egyptian authorities don’t take kindly to that. I’ve shown him the list and he understands the implications. As long as he’s a good boy he will get fed and housed and his needs catered for.’

  Mas’ud brought two glasses of red tea on a tray and placed them with surprising delicacy on the carved Arab table in front of Karlman. The professor motioned me to sit in an ancient leather armchair next to him. ‘I serve tea Arab style,’ he said. ‘Does that suit you Mr Omar Ross?’

  ‘Have we met?’

  ‘No, but I know all about you, Mr Ross. You were expelled from the Antiquities Service two years ago. Abbas Rifad was the hatchet-man — a damned pen-pusher if ever there was one. Not a day’s field experience in his career. The Antiquities Service ceased to be an effective force the day it was taken over by the Gyppos.’

  ‘I’m half Gyppo.’

  ‘I am perfectly aware of that, Mr Ross. You might be surprised to know I have Egyptian blood in my ancestry too. I’m certain you’ll excuse the sentiment, though.’

  ‘Let’s say I understand what you mean.’

  ‘Precisely. I know your work, Mr Ross, just as you certainly know mine. You have an unconventional er...theory...about the origins of ancient Egyptian civilisation, do you not? You believe that such sophistication as the first Dynastic Egyptians possessed could not have sprung into being overnight, so to speak. If the ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley knew mathematics, astronomy, medicine, geometry, music, advanced engineering, as we know they did, where did this knowledge come from? Knowledge cannot come out of a vacuum: it must have a point of
origin. Your answer is that this advanced knowledge was brought to Egyptian shores by refugees from an earlier, more advanced civilisation — let us call it “Atlantis” for the sake of argument. You say that the god Thoth, one of the earliest gods in the pantheon, is cited in ancient Egyptian legend as a stranger from a distant land who arrived in Egypt during the zodiacal age of Cancer, bringing with him the arts and sciences. You believe that legend to hold a kernel of truth: Thoth paved the way for more refugees from “Atlantis” — the Osiris family, who came later, strongly influenced the course of the country’s history. According to you, Osiris, Isis and the others were as real as Jesus Christ or the Prophet Mohammad and only passed into myth after their deaths. You hold that the great monuments, such as the pyramids, were not merely tombs but repositories of esoteric knowledge subsequently lost, knowledge which had accrued from this earlier “Atlantean” civilisation. Is that a fair summary of your “theory”, Mr Ross?’

  ‘More or less, yes.’

  Karlman put his teaglass down and tipped his head to one side, regarding me with a mischievous grin. A slow grating began deep down in his throat, as if a bellows were pumping out the last gasping breaths of air, which magnified by degrees into a full, humourless cackle of derision. ‘You’re more of a fool than I thought you were, Ross,’ he spluttered. ‘Your so-called theory is absolute balls. How could there possibly have been a pre-Dynastic culture more sophisticated than the Egyptians, a culture with telescopes and flying machines and lasers? If they had that kind of technology, where is the archaeological evidence? We have the ruins of ancient Egypt: the temples, the pyramids. We have paleo-lithic implements and fireplaces of Homo habilis dating back a million years, and dinosaur bones dating back hundreds of mil-lions. But we have not a single whiff of this “Atlantean” culture with all its lasers and flying machines. Why? Where did it go?’ Karlman cackled more loudly, more desperately: ‘No, your idea is nonsense. No wonder Rifad kicked you out. Never fool about with what you don’t understand, my boy; the scenario is too big for the likes of you.’