The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I said.

  Mansur’s blank eye bobbed at her. ‘It’s the custom,’ he said, ‘when two young men want the same girl, they hold a contest to see how many lashes of the whip they can take before calling a halt. The one who takes the most is the victor. Win or lose they carry the scars for the rest of their lives as a sign of manhood.’

  ‘Horrible!’ Elena said in English.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Primitive, I suppose, but their lives are incredibly hard, and the quality they admire most is endurance, the ability to deal with pain in one form or another, heat, cold, thirst, hunger, exhaustion. This looks brutal but you can see it as a sort of microcosm of their whole existence.’

  As the sun sank, Aysha spread a carpet for us on the dunes, and we sat quietly, enjoying the evening cool, watching tight knots of camels and goats being brought in from the rough fringe pastures of the oasis by young boys chanting ancient herding songs as they went. Occasionally riders passed us and shouted a greeting, sloping into the village on tall camels fully decked out with woven saddlebags and tassels that swung majestically as the animals walked. The sun was a gold sovereign hovering on the western skyline, its power burned out, and within minutes it was gone. As the darkness seeped in to take its place and the stars came up, Mukhtar lit a coffee-fire outside and a few dark shadows moved in to join us.

  Mukhtar set the coffee-pot on the fire, brushed the sand off his hands and said, ‘Omar, the Divine Spirit has sent you and you are welcome. Now it is time to tell us why you have come.’

  It was a direct approach and it deserved a direct answer. ‘It’s about dealing in antikas, Uncle,’ I said.

  I regretted the shot as soon as I’d said it. Mukhtar was my uncle and my host, and had just welcomed us into his home with unqualified warmth. He took a deep breath and turned his hawk-like eyes on me. There was disappointment in them. ‘The Hawazim don’t deal in antikas,’ he said quietly. ‘You come to your own family as a representative of the government?’

  ‘This is not about the government. I ceased to work for the government two years ago. You had a visitor last winter, someone who wanted to buy antikas.’

  ‘A visitor? We have few visitors here.’

  ‘His name was Julian Cranwell, one of my father’s people, an Englishman.’

  Mukhtar was looking at Mansur with a mystified expression. ‘Did we have any visitor, Mansur?’ he asked. My cousin turned his blind eye on me and blinked.

  ‘I don’t think so, Father.’

  ‘He came here to buy something from you, Uncle,’ I said.

  Mukhtar put his pipe down and frowned. ‘And what is he supposed to have bought?’

  ‘Akhnaton ushabtis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Small statues, figurines of the Pharaoh Akhnaton, “The Fallen One”.’

  Mukhtar’s face dropped. ‘The Fallen One,’ he said, flicking up two fingers — the Bedouin gesture of defence against the Evil Eye — ‘God protect us from the Stoned Devil.’

  Mansur’s blank eye blinked again, and he made a half-hearted effort to copy his father’s gesture.

  ‘Cranwell said he bought two statuettes from you, Uncle.’

  ‘He told you that himself?’

  ‘No. It was written.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Mukhtar looked at me gravely. ‘What is your connection with this Englishman?’ he enquired.

  ‘He was my good friend, a blood friend. I know you understand that, Uncle. Actually, I’m not sure if he’s really dead. But either way, he’s been destroyed, and whatever destroyed him is in some way connected with the ushabtis he bought from you.’

  The whole company had gone silent now. The air of celebration that had attended our arrival had evaporated. Mukhtar hadn’t insisted in his denial, I noticed. It was obvious that he was holding something back.

  I stood up and Elena followed. ‘Uncle,’ I said, ‘at least two people have died for the sake of those ushabtis. If we don’t sort this out, I’ve got a feeling that others will die too.’

  I thanked Mukhtar for his hospitality, and Elena and I made our way to a sleeping space the women had prepared for us nearby.

  32

  I awoke with a start to find Mukhtar jogging my arm roughly, the second time in two days I’d been woken up suddenly. ‘Quiet, Omar,’ he told me gruffly, putting a finger to his lips. ‘Just wake the girl.’ I woke Elena as gently as I could. She gasped when she saw the dark figure standing over us. ‘What’s this about?’ she demanded.

  ‘Shsh!’ Mukhtar growled, ‘no questions. I have something to show you. Here, put these on.’

  He handed me two clean sets of jibbas and sirwal — the knee-length Hawazim shirt and baggy trousers, dyed a russet colour to blend in with the desert — and two pairs of hand-crafted Hawazim sandals, a large and a small pair. We put the clothes on quickly, and I was glad to get into Bedouin dress again; it’s more comfortable and more suitable to a life in public view than anything Westerners have designed. When we’d dressed, I buckled my khanjar under my sleeve, just in case. We pulled on our sandals, grabbed our shamaghs, and followed my uncle outside. There was a chill in the air, and on the eastern skyline a fissure of blood-red light split the darkness. Venus shone vividly, hanging low over the edge of the night. Near the tent three camels were couched, all of them fully saddled and caparisoned with cushions, woven saddle-bags and waterskins. They were small, fit beasts of the Hawazim’s own breed, specially raised and trained to cover long distances on the minimum food and water, each one marked on its shoulder with my family’s lizard brand. Mukhtar slung his rifle from the saddle-horns, picked up a hooked camel-stick, and gestured to us to mount up. Elena looked at me nervously and I remembered that she’d never ridden a camel before. I chose the most patient-looking of the three, removed its knee-hobble, and stood on its foreleg to prevent it from rising suddenly. Elena giggled softly as I helped her into the saddle. ‘Hang on tight!’ I whispered. I stepped off the camel’s leg and poked it in the shoulder with my toes. It groaned once and began to stand, tilting forwards, backwards, then forwards again as its multi-hinged joints unlimbered. I was about to tie its headrope to the horn of my own camel, when Elena hissed, ‘No! Give it to me! I’m not going to be a passenger. I’ll drive it myself.’

  ‘It’s not a car!’ I said, admiringly, handing her the headrope and the camel-stick I’d found on the ground. ‘Tug left for left, right for right, and pull back for stop,’ I told her, ‘Kick gently on the shoulders and shout “Hut! Hut!” to make him go.’

  She nodded. I unhobbled my own camel, picked up the stick leaning against its flank, and mounted, crooking my knee around the forward saddle-horn. As the animal rose, snorting, Mukhtar leapt into the saddle of his own beast as nimbly as a youth. He beckoned to us silently, and we moved off through a tunnel of smells — slumbering woodfires, damp camels’ wool, cured leather — then through the palm-groves and out into the fresh, chalky scent of the desert.

  The streak of blood across the sky widened almost imperceptibly, like a torrent gathering strength until it burst its banks, shattering the greyness into ragged fragments which gradually fell away like sloughed skin to reveal an inferno of orange fire beneath. The camels padded on placidly and the morning was still and soundless but for the solid crunch of their feet on the sand, and the occasional clink as one of them struck a stone. I was dying to ask where we were going, but Mukhtar had said ‘No questions,’ and I guessed he would tell us in his own time. We crossed the dune-belt, where water-seams had favoured the growth of tiny ecosystems, tufts of coarse esparto grass whose roots provided moisture for beetles and solifugid spiders. The sand was criss-crossed with the stitch-marks of their tracks. We left the dunes and rode out into the plains, on and on until almost every vestige of vegetation was left far behind us. The dune-belt already lay an hour at our backs when Mukhtar reined in slightly to let us come abreast. We rode in silence for a few more minute
s, then suddenly he said, ‘Did your mother ever mention your grandfather, Salim wald Salman, Omar?’

  ‘He was lost in al-Ghul wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, long before you were born. I was only a boy at the time myself. Not long after he went, I took responsibility for the clan. I had to decide everything; it isn’t an easy job deciding for others.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Did Maryam say what happened to our father?’

  ‘Only that he was lost.’

  ‘It was the Year of the Englishman.’

  ‘You mean my father?’

  ‘No, another Englishman. He came looking for fifteen men to take him out into al-Ghul. Your grandfather was one of them. The Englishman said he was looking for Zerzura — the Lost Oasis. His name was Orde Wingate.’

  ‘Wingate!’ I gasped. For a moment I looked at him, half stupefied, wondering if I’d heard right. ‘No God but God! My grandfather was with Wingate?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him. When was this?’

  ‘You know we don’t understand foreign reckoning. We call it “The Year of the Englishman”, that’s all.’

  My head reeled. I’d guessed that Wingate had used Hawazim guides and camel men, but I’d never dreamed my own family history was involved. Questions crowded into my mind in a whirl of confusion. I removed my glasses, wiped them on my cuff and took three deep breaths. Then I replaced them with as much calm as I could muster.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, this Wingate hired fifteen Hawazim from various clans and off they went. They’d been away, oh, perhaps twenty days when, one morning, the Englishman and the headman of the expedition, Hilmi wald Falih, came staggering out of the dune-belt dragging half-dead camels, and ranting to themselves. We knew at once they were possessed by Jinns. I was only young but I remember it as if it was yesterday. Their faces were shocking. Hilmi looked as if he’d come face to face with the Devil himself, eyes bulging out of his head, quaking, teeth chattering. The Englishman was calmer, but he kept repeating that he couldn’t remember what’d happened, and just sat staring into space. Hilmi never said another sane word in his life. Later, other English came in a motor-car and took them both away. Neither my father nor any of the others ever came back. We heard later the English had put Hilmi in some kind of place for those possessed. They had no right. His family were furious. What happened to Wingate in the end I don’t know.’

  We rode quietly. Elena and I stared at each other. The crunch-crunch of the camels’ feet seemed as loud as a snare-drum.

  ‘Everyone warned Salim not to go with Wingate,’ Mukhtar went on. ‘We all knew about Zerzura. Not one of us had ever been there, but we heard about it from our fathers and our fathers’ fathers. It was a place of evil — a haunt of Jinns and demons. They say that there were palm-groves there with the best dates you ever tasted, and grapevines with fat grapes, pools of sweet water and buried store-rooms packed with treasure. But you could never find the Lost Oasis twice, no matter how hard you looked, and if you took fruit and water it would turn to dust by the time you got home. It was magic — black magic. It only “opened” at certain times, but there were shamans who knew how to open it by sacrificing human beings. Some said Wingate was an evil shaman who’d sacrificed the Hawazim to open the oasis.’

  ‘Do you really believe that, Uncle?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? I don’t know. Only God knows. But I’d like to find out what happened to my father.’

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ Elena said softly.

  He pointed with his camel-stick. It was fully light now, and in the distance I made out a long wall of crescent dunes, a ripple of amber sand on the plain, like a sea-serpent.

  ‘Uruq al-Anaq,’ my uncle said. ‘Remember it, Omar? It’s a sand-sea of crescent dunes rising in a horseshoe from a gravel beach. Within the horseshoe there’s a ruin from Zep-Tepi, the First Time; we call it Khan al-Anaq, “The Inn of the Ancient Ones”. You’ve been there before, Omar.’

  There was a sudden flash of memory, of playing among ancient ruins with my father, and the name, Khan al-Anaq — Anaq, the name the Hawazim gave to their legendary ancestors.

  The camels strode on, and within half an hour we’d come face to face with the dunes. We worked around their base along the gravel beach, and as we passed the arm of the horseshoe I saw a cluster of ruins, half buried in the sand. Closer up I saw great toppled pillars, blocks of masonry, broken obelisks, even two ram-headed sphinxes peering out of a drift of sand. It was the sphinxes that clinched it for me. Now I remembered. This was the first ancient Egyptian temple I’d ever visited as a small child. I recalled being awed by it even then; the sphinxes with their inscrutable expressions, the hieroglyphs, the strange stelae showing falcon-headed men and lion-headed women had fascinated me right from the beginning. Mukhtar couched his camel by a massive stone wall and went to help Elena. ‘No!’ she protested. ‘Let me do it! I’ve got to learn!’

  ‘Just let the headrope go limp,’ I told her, ‘tap him on the head with your stick and make this noise: khkhkhyyaa! khkhkhyyaa!’

  She tapped and rasped and after a few moans of protest the camel knelt gracefully in the sand. We hobbled the animals, while Mukhtar took a thick coil of rope from his saddle-bag and looped it round his shoulder. ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  His eyes twinkled at me. ‘Wait and see,’ he said. He slung his rifle over his spare shoulder. ‘There’s an electric torch in the saddle-bag,’ he said. ‘We’ll need it. Better bring a couple of canteens of water, too.’

  There was a sudden powerful squall of wind across the open sands, and Mukhtar’s expression changed abruptly. ‘There’s a ghibli coming,’ he said. ‘It’ll hit us before the day’s out if I’m not mistaken. Come on — we’d better get moving!’

  We followed his small, quick figure — astonishingly quick for an old man — into the shadows of the ruin, passing through broken archways and clambering over shattered columns. I stopped to look at a relief of the god Set, with his half-rat, half-aardvark head. It must have been one of the first reliefs I’d ever seen, yet it was still as alien as anything I’d encountered in ancient Egyptian culture.

  ‘You remember?’ Mukhtar repeated.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Come and look at this, then.’

  He halted in the middle of a portion of wall which was engraved with numerous stelae. They were Old Kingdom, I noticed, and were thick with references to the old gods of the ancient Egyptian pantheon: Thoth, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Nepthys and Set.

  ‘Now,’ Mukhtar said, ‘you’re an expert on antikas, Omar. How old is this place? I mean, does it go as far back as Zep-Tepi?’

  ‘What’s Zep-Tepi?’ Elena asked.

  ‘It means the First Time — the Time of Creation, when the gods lived on earth. I’d say this place is at least five thousand years old, maybe as much as twelve thousand. That certainly makes it as old as Zep-Tepi, yes.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, pointing at a nearby stela with a calloused finger. ‘Now, look at this.’ I examined the stela carefully. It showed a sky full of what appeared to be winged disks, trailing fire and smoke, with, beneath it, an ibis-headed figure — obviously Thoth — handing what looked like a basket of fruit to a human figure. ‘Look closely,’ Mukhtar said. I peered at the human figure. It had to be the same age as the other figures in the tableau, and yet it was strikingly familiar. It was a man with a mop of wild, curly hair, and unlike the usual images of ancient Egyptian men, wore a beard. He carried a spear and a shield and had a slim, stiletto-like blade attached, handle downwards, to his forearm. On the right lobe of his upper ear, he wore a carefully drawn earring. ‘A Hazmi!’ I said.

  ‘An Anaqi,’ Mukhtar corrected me, ‘one of our forefathers. You see, Omar, we were here at Zep-Tepi, when the Ancient Ones walked the earth.’

  I felt an unmistakable pulse of excitement swelling through me. Was this the elusive image I’d been searching for all
these years — the point at which I could say: ‘That’s where I began?’

  ‘I’ve never seen this anywhere else!’ I said. But now I wondered: had I actually seen this image before, right here in Khan al-Anaq? I strained my memory, concentrating hard for a moment, trying to remember, but it was impossible to crank up images over so many years — I couldn’t have been more than four or five the last time I’d been here. But, was it possible, I wondered, that the image of Thoth handing a gift to one of my remote ancestors could have lain dormant in my subconscious for all that time? Could it have been this that subliminally sparked off my interest in the ancient Egyptians, and the origin of their civilisation?

  Mukhtar pointed to the basket of fruit Thoth was handing to the Anaqi. ‘See these bulbs,’ he said, ‘they are tuffah al jinn —Demon’s Apples.’

  I examined them carefully and caught my breath. These I had seen before.

  ‘What are Demon’s Apples?’ Elena enquired.

  ‘Mandrake,’ I said, ‘Mandragora officinarum. Dried specimens of it were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. It’s believed that the ancient Egyptians used it for some religious ritual. In the right quantities it has psychedelic properties. It’s still in use today.’

  ‘By whom?’

  I glanced at my uncle, embarrassed. ‘By the Hawazim,’ I said. ‘It’s used as a hallucinogenic to induce trance state, what they call The Shining.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mukhtar said, not thrown in the slightest, his eyes sparkling now. ‘You see, Omar, the Demon’s Apple was brought to our people by the Ancient Ones at Zep-Tepi. Now, look at this...’