by Paul Sussman
They stood motionless, neither of them daring to breathe, knowing that if the guard came up onto the platform itself they were sure to be found. To their relief he remained below, pacing up and down before eventually, satisfied there was nothing amiss, moving off, the clump of his boots slowly receding. Flin waited until he had disappeared altogether, then peered cautiously round the side of the pillar. The coast was clear. He handed Freya his crowbar and, clutching the bolt-cutters, stepped up to the iron gate that secured the temple entrance and sliced through its padlock, the cutters severing the metal link as though it were made of cheese. He eased the gate open, stepped through and, taking another glance across the courtyard, waved Freya in, pushing the gate closed after her and pulling her to the left, out of the pool of illumination thrown by the floodlights outside.
For a moment they stood there, catching their breath, eyes adjusting to the gloom, listening. Then, propping the bolt-cutters against the wall, Flin took a crowbar and a torch from Freya and, clicking the torch on, led her forwards.
They were in a cavernous, stone-floored hall. Twin rows of columns marched off to left and right, each column eight metres tall and thick as a tree trunk, every available surface – walls, columns, ceiling – carved with tangled thickets of hieroglyphs. Freya clicked on her own torch and circled it around, gazing in wonder. A couple of years back she had gone night diving on a coral reef off the coast of Thailand, and this had the same mysterious, sub-aquatic feel to it. Her beam cut through the murk, picking out curious shapes and images: figures with human bodies and the heads of animals – hawks and lions and jackals – a man kneeling with hands raised in supplication, three statue heads lined up in a recess in the wall, their empty eyes staring blankly into the shadows. There were colours as well: reds and greens and blues loomed momentarily before fading back into monochrome as she swung her torch elsewhere, as though it were the beam itself that was creating the different hues.
They reached the far side of the hall – the only sound the soft pad of their feet on stone – and passed through a wall into a second huge space, this one also crowded with a forest of decorated columns. Even to Freya’s untutored eye it was clear the carving here was of a far higher quality, the hieroglyphs rendered in bas- rather than sunken relief, the images more detailed and subtle. A ladder of moonbeams dropped through a skylight in the ceiling high above. Otherwise everything was utterly black, the darkness so intense Freya could almost taste it.
They made their way across this room too and up a ramp onto a low platform at its far end. Flin played his torch beam across the hall’s rear wall, illuminating a row of seven rectangular doorways, deeper voids within the wider one all around. He made for the third door from the left, Freya following, passing beneath a badly damaged lintel and into a long rectangular chamber. Its vaulted ceiling was stained black with mould, its relief-covered walls patched here and there with eczema-like smears of concrete render where the stonework had disintegrated and been repaired.
‘The chapel of Re-Horakhty,’ Flin announced, still keeping his voice low even though they were now deep within the temple and the chances of anyone outside hearing them were minimal.
He flashed his torch around, then turned to the right and lifted the beam, directing it into the very top right-hand corner of the chamber, to the point where the wall merged into the curve of the ceiling vault. There, just as Fadawi had described, was a small square block, no more than forty centimetres by forty centimetres, faded remnants of hieroglyphic text just visible beneath the mould which covered its face.
‘Now all we’ve got to do is reach it,’ he said.
They went back out into the hypostyle hall and split up. Wandering off in opposite directions, they slashed at the blackness with their torch beams, searching for something – anything – they could use to get up to the stone, neither of them wanting to vocalize the fear that having come all this way they might not actually be able to access the relevant block. Within less than a minute Freya heard a soft whistle. Retracing her steps, she found Flin standing in the doorway of the chapel next to the one they were interested in, a relieved grin on his face. Inside, against the false door in the chapel’s back wall and surrounded by sacks of cement, stood a portable aluminium scaffold tower, its legs fitted with castors for ease of movement.
‘Appropriate we should find it here,’ he said, going over to the scaffold and giving it a rattle. ‘This is the sanctuary of Ptah, god of – among other things – masons and stonecutters. Let’s hope it’s a good omen.’
The tower was too tall to push through the chapel door as it was, obliging them to remove its upper tier and transport it into the Re-Horakhty chapel in two separate pieces before reassembling it, losing them precious minutes. Once it was erected Flin clicked on the wheel locks and, clutching the crowbars and torches, the two of them climbed up, Freya swiftly, Flin with rather less confidence.
‘Jesus, it’s wobbly,’ he muttered, easing himself onto the platform at the top. ‘Feels like it’s made of jelly.’
‘Stop fussing,’ she chided. ‘We’re only three metres up.’
He threw her a look as if to say, ‘That’s three metres too many’ and, shuffling forward, aimed his torch into the corner of the wall.
From ground level the stone block had appeared as tightly fitted as all the others of which the wall was constructed. Now they were up close, and their torch beams just centimetres away, they were able to see exactly what Fadawi had seen: a narrow gap running along the top of the stone with even narrower ones beneath and to either side of it, each no wider than a pencil stroke. Leaning forward, Flin held his cheek close to the wall.
‘Hassan was right,’ he said after a pause, eyes gleaming with excitement. ‘There’s definitely air moving around back there. Come on.’
He glanced at his watch – 4.24 a.m. – and positioned his torch on the platform so that its beam shone directly up at the block, then spat on the palms of his hands and grasped his crowbar.
‘OK, let’s get to work.’
DAKHLA OASIS
Zahir al-Sabri stood over his son’s bed, smiling as he gazed down at the sleeping figure curled beneath him, one arm bent underneath his head, the other thrown out to the side, palm open as though the boy was reaching for something. He remembered the day Mohsen had been born – how could he forget? – the wonder he had felt, the choking surge of euphoria. As a Bedouin it was not considered seemly to show emotion in public and so he had contented himself with giving the wrinkled bundle a kiss and embracing his wife before driving out into the desert where, crazed with joy, he had danced and yelped like a madman, watched over only by the dunes and the sky.
He would have liked more children, a dozen more, for what greater satisfaction can there be than to forge new links in the chain of life, extending it forward into the future? It was not to be, though. The birth had been difficult, there had been complications, bleeding – he hadn’t understood the details, only that to go through the same again would have put his wife’s life in danger, and that was not something he would allow to happen. Allah gives, and Allah takes. It was how things were. He had Mohsen, and that was enough.
He continued to look down, the moonlight wrapping a silver halo around the boy’s head. Leaning forward, he kissed his cheek, murmured ‘Ana bahebak, ya nooreanay’a’ – I love you, light of my eyes – and slipped back into bed beside his wife. He stared up at the ceiling. For a while he just lay there, biting his lip, no nearer sleep than he had been four hours ago. Then, rolling to the side, he reached beneath the bed and touched the muzzle of the rifle he kept there, running a finger along the cold steel of its barrel.
He was ready. Whatever happened, whatever was asked of him, he was ready. In that, at least, he would live up to the memory of his ancestors.
‘Ana bahebak, ya Mohsen,’ he whispered. ‘Ana bahebak, ya noor eanay’a.’
ABYDOS
‘You really think Fadawi hasn’t told anyone else about this?’ asked Freya
as they worked their crowbars into the gaps around the stone block, Flin at the top, Freya the side. ‘Or that other guy, Abu whatever-his-name-was.’
Flin shook his head, pushing with his crowbar, trying to get the block moving.
‘I’d have heard about it if they had. Like Fadawi said in the tape, if there’s a dismantled Pepi II temple back there it would be one of the biggest finds of the last fifty years. Word would have got out. Come on, you bastard.’
He applied more pressure to the bar. Freya did the same with hers, the two of them falling silent as they focused all their energy on the job in hand, aware that time was ticking away and anxious to get the block moving. Sweat dampened their faces; the room echoed with the laboured grunt of their breathing and the clink of metal on stone. After a couple of minutes Flin changed his angle of attack, yanking the bar from the gap at the top of the block and working it into the one down the side instead, opposite Freya’s. They rocked their jemmies back and forth, pushing and pulling. Still the stone resisted and Freya was beginning to wonder if they would ever get it loose when, finally, there was a faint twitch of movement, just the merest shiver, barely noticeable. They adjusted their position, wriggling the bars in another couple of millimetres and heaving. The movement became more pronounced. Flin freed his jemmy and forced it underneath the block, pushing down on it. The block lifted slightly.
‘Almost there,’ he puffed, eyes wide both with the effort of shifting the stone and excitement at what might lie behind it.
They continued to work their way around the edges, sometimes coming at the block from the sides, sometimes from above and below until eventually it started to creep forward out of the wall – fractionally at first, millimetre by millimetre as though reluctant to show itself; then, as they were able to get a better purchase on it, more swiftly, the clink of their crowbars now accompanied by the grating rasp of stone scraping across stone. When they had prised it some fifteen centimetres out of its socket they laid aside the jemmies and clasped it with their hands, carefully easing it forward, adjusting their holds as more and more of the block emerged. At last, with a final heave, they were able to drag it free of the wall and take its full weight on their arms and shoulders. It was heavy, unbelievably heavy, far more so than either of them had expected, and it was extremely hard to manoeuvre, with the scaffolding wobbling beneath them and the limited space available on the platform. They shuffled a couple of half-steps away from the wall and started to lower it, sweat stinging their eyes, their breathing growing increasingly fast and frantic. They got it about halfway down before both of them simultaneously felt the stone starting to slip through their fingers.
‘I can’t hold it,’ gasped Freya. ‘It’s …’
She stumbled to her right, trying to keep hold before realizing it was hopeless and letting the block go, leaping out of the way to avoid her feet being crushed. Flin lurched forward and also released his grip, a fraction of a second later than Freya, his momentum propelling the stone to the very edge of the platform and then off into space. The chamber – the entire temple – seemed to reverberate to a dull, hammer-like thud as the stone crashed to the floor below, the force of the impact breaking off a large chunk of its corner.
‘Oh God,’ Flin groaned, snatching up a torch and shining it down. Heavy wafts of dust undulated through the torch’s beam. ‘Two and a half thousand years that’s been there …’
‘Screw the block,’ said Freya. ‘What if someone heard?’
They stood still, listening, the echo of the crashing stone seeming to linger around the chamber’s vaulted ceiling, Flin looking as mortified as if he had unwittingly run over a close friend. There were no shouts or footfalls, however, no sign that the accident had attracted the attention of the temple guards, and with a last, pained look down at the shattered block, Flin turned his attention to the newly opened hole in the wall. Stepping up to it, he shone his torch through into the space beyond.
‘What can you see?’ asked Freya, picking up her own torch and moving in behind him.
He didn’t respond, just moved his beam to and fro, surveying the cavity, his back and shoulders blocking Freya’s view.
‘What can you see?’ she repeated, trying to look round him.
Still he didn’t say anything and she felt a momentary jolt of fear that maybe there was nothing there, that Fadawi had been fooling with them after all. Then Flin turned to face her, his horrified expression of a moment earlier now replaced with one of startled awe.
‘Wonderful things,’ he said, giving her a thumbs-up. ‘I see wonderful things.’
He shuffled to the left, allowing her to slip in beside him and shine her own torch through the hole. Freya found herself looking into a narrow, shaft-like cavity, no more than two metres across and perhaps twelve metres long, a secret passageway hemmed in between the walls of the chapels. Its ceiling – made up of huge stone slabs – seemed to be on the same level as that of the chapel ceiling, and its floor, she assumed, must likewise be a continuation of the chapel floor. It was impossible to be certain, for along its entire length and up to a point less than a metre below the opening the cavity was packed with a confused jumble of stone blocks, the smallest at least twice the size of the one they had just removed. Some of the blocks were square, others rectangular, some blank, others decorated with images and hieroglyphic inscriptions. The carvings – like those in the hypostyle halls outside – still bore traces of their original coloration: greens and reds and yellows and blues. There were segments of column as well, random pieces of statuary – part of a granite torso; the front end of a sphinx – all of it thrown into the cavity seemingly willy-nilly, everything lying across and on top of everything else. The impression was of peering into a giant box crammed full of children’s play bricks.
‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ said Flin, leaning his head in so that his cheek was almost touching Freya’s.
He shone his own torch into the shaft, moving the light around until it had settled on the face of one block in particular, illuminating a pair of what looked like elongated ovals, one beside the other, each encircling a row of hieroglyphic signs.
‘Nefer-Ka-Re Pepi,’ he read, his torch beam juddering slightly as if he was so overwhelmed by what he was seeing he couldn’t hold his hand still. ‘The throne name of the pharaoh Pepi II. Like Hassan said, there must have been an Old Kingdom temple on this site that was dismantled and recycled as wall-filling when Seti built his temple a thousand years later.’
He shook his head.
‘Christ, Freya, I can’t even begin to … I mean this is a period of history from which we have almost no material remains. Something like this could completely rewrite … Mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing!’
They gazed into the cavity for a while longer. Then, aware that time was short, Flin squeezed his head and shoulders into the gap in the wall and started to drag himself through into the space beyond, his legs and feet disappearing as he squirmed down onto the tangle of stone below. Freya followed, rather more dextrously, Flin helping her through from the other side and lowering her gently onto the uneven surface.
‘Careful where you put your hands,’ he warned. ‘The place is probably crawling with scorpions.’
She winced and whipped her palm away from the statue head on which she’d laid it.
Now they were inside, the cavity felt even more cramped and claustrophobic. The ceiling was too low for them to stand fully upright, and masonry pushed at them from all directions, although there was the faintest hint of draught, a barely discernible movement of air – where it was coming from Freya couldn’t tell. They gave it a moment, squatting beside the opening in the wall, wheeling their torches about, getting the measure of the space. Then, with another glance at his watch – 4.51 a.m. – Flin started to clamber around, examining the inscriptions, looking for anything that might offer a clue to the oasis’s whereabouts. Freya angled her torch beam in his direction to give him extra light, but otherwise let him get on with it. S
he could no more read hieroglyphs than she could Japanese so there was little other contribution she could make.
Twenty minutes went by, neither of them speaking, the only sounds the scrape of Flin’s boots on stone and his occasional murmurs of ‘Wonderful. My God, it’s just wonderful!’ Then, suddenly, he clicked his fingers and waved her over.
‘Come and look at this.’
Freya stumbled across to him, head knocking against the ceiling, and crouched down at his side. Flin drew his torch back and played its beam along a length of greenish-black stone. After a moment she realized it was a small obelisk, lying horizontally and partially buried beneath a clutter of other blocks.
‘It seems to be some sort of hymn or prayer to the Benben,’ he said, indicating the hieroglyphic text with which the stone was inscribed.
‘That’s the Indiana Jones rock, right?’ she asked. ‘The one with the supernatural powers?’
He nodded, smiling at her description. Touching a dusty finger to the top right-hand corner of the inscription, he started to recite, his voice – as it had when reading the Imti-Khentika papyrus – seeming to grow deeper and more plangent as though it was echoing from far back in time.
‘Iner-wer iner-en Ra iner-n sedjet iner sweser-en kheru-en sekhmet,’ he intoned. ‘Oh great stone, oh stone of fire, oh stone that made us mighty, oh voice of Sekhmet that we carry into battle before us and that brings us victories beyond number …’
‘Anything about the oasis?’
‘No, but this one mentions the Benben too …’
Flin moved his torch to the side, aiming the beam at a hieroglyph-covered limestone block, its text picked out in vibrant shades of red, blue, yellow and green.
‘… and this one …’
Now his torch swung over to what looked like a fragment of shattered column.