by James Becker
34
JJ Donovan had watched the excitement of the house fire – an event which made no sense to him – and the arrival of the fire engines, and then started his car and eased out after Bronson as they drove away from the scene.
Now he watched with irritation as Bronson pulled off the road. He daren’t stop there as well, because it was too small a place, and Bronson was a police officer, which meant he’d been trained in observation skills. Donovan knew that if he stopped at the bar Bronson would notice and remember him, and he definitely didn’t want that to happen.
So he carried on another quarter of a mile or so and then eased his car off the road and on to the verge. He stopped the engine and waited for a few seconds, watching the scene in his rear-view mirror carefully. When it was obvious that Bronson and his companion were going to have a drink at the roadside café, he realized that he would have to wait, too. And the obvious way to do that was to stage a breakdown.
Donovan dropped all the windows on the Mercedes – it was going to get very hot inside the car without the engine and the climate control running – but the heavily tinted glass was a possible identification feature. With the windows lowered, it was just another light-coloured midsized Mercedes saloon, one of thousands on the roads around Cairo.
Then he stepped out of the car and lifted the bonnet. There was very little to see inside the engine compartment, apart from a massive sculpted aluminium plate that covered the top of the motor, but that didn’t matter. With the bonnet lifted, any passing driver would simply assume the car had stopped because of some fault – mechanical or electrical.
Then he got back inside the car and sat down, all his attention focused on the café-bar about five hundred yards behind him. The other thing he needed to do was make sure Bronson didn’t get a look at the car’s number plates as he drove past, and that meant lifting the boot lid. But he couldn’t do that until the Peugeot started moving, because his best view of the café was using the interior mirror and, when he lifted the boot, that view would vanish.
So all he could do was wait. Wait and watch.
Bronson switched off the engine and he and Angela got out of the car, the heat hitting them like the blast from a furnace. About half a dozen men, all wearing either traditional Arab dress or white shirts and trousers, were already sitting at the tables, drinks in front of them. They eyed the two Westerners with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion as Bronson steered Angela through them towards a couple of vacant seats at a table close to the side of the bar, where the noise from the generator was loudest.
‘What would you like to drink?’ he shouted.
‘What I’d really like is a long, cold gin and tonic with bags of ice, but I guess that’s not an option here,’ she said. ‘Get me anything non-alcoholic, a Coke, Fanta, something like that. No glass and no ice, obviously.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said. A couple of minutes later he returned to the table with two cans of Coke, moisture beading the outside of the metal. He sat down beside her and they both drank thirstily. ‘So this el-Hiba place,’ Bronson said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you know about it?’
‘It used to be called Tayu-djayet, which simply meant “their walls”, because of the massive stone walls out there. Hang on a second . . .’ She rummaged in her bag, brought out a notebook and flicked through the pages that were covered in her neat and precise script until she found what she was looking for. She took a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, and drew a series of shapes on it.
‘Time for your first lesson in hieroglyphics,’ she said, turning the paper round so Bronson could see it.
She’d sketched a half-moon shape, a vulture, two leaves, what looked like a young chicken, an obelisk, two more leaves and a half-moon surmounting a cross in a circle.
‘And this is what?’ Bronson asked.
Angela smiled at him. ‘That’s the hieroglyphic equivalent of Tayu-djayet. The first symbol, this half-moon,’ she said, indicating the shape with the end of her pencil, ‘is a “T”, the vulture is “A” or “AH”, one leaf is “I”, but two together like that mean “Y”.’
‘Hang on, let me work this out,’ Bronson said. ‘That makes “TAY”. What about this chicken here?’
‘That is not a chicken. It’s a quail chick, and it stands for “W”. All those symbols are consonants, part of the Egyptian alphabet, which is almost all consonants, but the next one is a fire stick or drill, and that’s a determinative. Because the hieroglyphic language is pictorial, there can be two or more different meanings of a series of symbols.’
‘Like a rebus, you mean?’
Angela blinked. ‘I’m impressed,’ she said. ‘Though I have to confess that I don’t know exactly what a “rebus” is – apart from being the name of Ian Rankin’s detective, of course.’
‘It’s a modern type of pictorial statement,’ Bronson said. ‘Kids’ stuff really. Like a drawing of an eye, followed by a heart, followed by the letter “U”. That means “I love you”,’ he said, firmly holding Angela’s gaze as he said the words.
She blushed, and looked away. ‘OK – back to the hieroglyphics. The determinatives simply eliminated any confusion over the way the other letters – the consonants – were to be sounded and what they meant.’ She gestured towards the paper again. ‘Next is another two leaves – a “Y” – and finally a “T” with another determinative – the cross in the circle, which means a city.’
‘You said you read hieratic and demotic script from right to left, but hieroglyphics are from left to right, just like English?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not necessarily. In fact, they were usually written from right to left, but they could also be read from left to right, or downwards.’
‘Wonderful. So how did anyone know where to start?’
‘That was really easy,’ Angela said, and pointed at the drawing she’d done. ‘See the vulture and the quail chick?’ Bronson nodded. ‘There were a lot of animal symbols used in hieroglyphics – birds and snakes, and so on – and they were always drawn in profile. The two birds in this hieroglyphic word are facing to the left, so that’s the end you start reading from. If they’d been facing to the right, you’d have to read the word from right to left.’ She drained the last of her Coke and stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you as we drive. We’ve still got a long way to go.’
Donovan had got steadily hotter and more irritated as the minutes passed, but kept his eyes fixed on his rear-view mirrors. Two figures were now moving slowly across the café’s dusty parking lot towards their car.
He pressed the button to open the boot, checked the mirror to ensure that it had lifted – that would make the number plate on the boot lid itself effectively unreadable – and walked around to the front of his Mercedes. He stood right beside the front number plate to shield that as well. As Bronson’s car accelerated past him, heading south, he lifted his arm to the front of the bonnet to make sure his face was invisible to the occupants of the passing car. In his white shirt and light-coloured trousers he would, he hoped, look like just any other motorist with a broken-down vehicle, wondering what the hell to do next.
When they were safely past him, he closed the bonnet and boot of his car and walked back to the driver’s side door, sitting down gratefully in the seat and switching on the engine, relishing the blast of ice-cold air that almost immediately poured out of the dashboard vents.
He waited until three other cars had passed him, then pulled back out on to the road. Bronson’s Peugeot was now at least five hundred yards in front of him, but still clearly visible.
All he had to do now was to find out where they were going.
35
The road stretched long and straight ahead of them, shimmering in the noon-day heat.
Angela adjusted one of the dashboard vents to direct cold air straight at her face. ‘El-Hiba is one of those places that not many people have heard of, under any of its names. As well as Tayu-djayet and el-Hiba, in Coptic it was called Teud
jo and much later, in the Graeco–Roman Period it was called Ankyronpolis.’
Bronson settled back in his driving seat. ‘I can see that the Coptic and Egyptian words are pretty similar, but how did they come up with Ankyronpolis?’
‘It was a Greek name. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in three hundred and thirty-two BC, and founded the city of Alexandria. When he died, his generals divided up his vast empire and one of them – a man named Ptolemy I Soter – eventually seized power in Egypt and created a dynasty that would rule the country for almost three hundred years. It was called the Ptolemaic Period – a mind-numbingly obvious name to choose because every king or pharaoh took the name Ptolemy, one after the other. The only breaks were the handful of women who ruled for short periods. They usually adopted the name Arsinoe, Berenice or Cleopatra. The last one was Cleopatra VII – the lover of Antony. When she died in thirty BC, that ended the Ptolemaic Dynasty.
‘Anyway, el-Hiba didn’t rank with places like Thebes or Luxor or Giza, but from about twelve hundred BC to around seven hundred BC – that was the period spanning the Twentieth to the Twenty-Second Dynasties – it was an important frontier town. It marked the division of Egypt between the High Priests of Amun, who were based upriver at Thebes, modern Luxor, and the kings of Egypt who ruled from Tanis.
‘As a frontier town, el-Hiba was vulnerable to attack, and so a massive wall was built there, encircling the settlement, which of course gave the place its Egyptian name. Now, our interest in the town is because the first of the Twenty-Second Dynasty kings, Shoshenq I, built a temple to Amun there.’
‘I thought you said the pharaoh’s name was Shishaq?’
Angela sighed. ‘Actually, there never was a pharaoh called Shishaq, as he’s named in the Bible, which is one of the problems, but most experts now agree that the best fit for Shishaq is probably Shoshenq I, and one reason for that, apart from the similarity in their names, is what Shoshenq did at el-Hiba. Towards the end of his reign, probably about nine hundred and thirty to nine hundred and twenty BC, he had the temple walls decorated with a list of the cities that his forces captured during his campaign in Palestine. And that accords quite well with the biblical account of the invasion of Judea by the pharaoh who was called Shishaq in the Bible.’
‘Yes, that makes sense,’ Bronson agreed.
The road was following the east bank of the Nile upstream, heading south-west. There were occasional roads heading off to the east, presumably leading to nearby settlements, and they had driven through some small villages that lay on the main road as well. The road was still reasonably quiet, but there were several cars and a few vans and trucks heading in each direction, with the heaviest volume of traffic going north, towards Cairo.
‘Where are we now?’ Angela asked.
The road ahead swung slightly to the left, and as Bronson steered the car around the bend he spotted a sign on the right hand side of the road. ‘Kuddaya,’ he said.
‘Got it.’ Angela looked down at the map, tracing their route with her finger. ‘Believe it or not, it looks as if there’s a fairly sharp bend coming up in about ten miles. That’ll wake you up.’
Bronson laughed. ‘And when we get there, you want to look at the hieroglyphic inscriptions?’
‘Exactly,’ Angela said. ‘I already know that the inscriptions include a list of the towns that Shoshenq captured in Judea – that’s been well established – but what I haven’t been able to find out is if there’s a list of the spoils of war there as well.’
‘Did they usually show that kind of thing?’ Bronson asked.
‘Normally, yes, because that would show the pharaoh as a supremely powerful and all-conquering leader of his people, a living god, in fact. Quite often the temple inscriptions would show him in a war chariot, personally leading a charge against his enemies, or executing captives with a sword or mace after a battle, that kind of thing. If the Egyptian forces managed to capture a treasure as important as the Ark of the Covenant, the pharaoh would want that fact to be recorded in stone as well.’
Bronson sighed and stretched his shoulders. ‘Bring it on,’ he said.
36
‘We’re here,’ Angela said, folding up the map and putting it back in the glovebox. ‘That’s el-Hiba up there on the hill.’
In front of them, a vast area of ruined mud-brick walls and other structures extended from the River Nile on their right all the way up the hillside, the bright afternoon sunlight turning it golden. The road climbed steadily up to the village, and had clearly been driven straight through one section of the ruined buildings.
‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Bronson said, disappointed.
‘It isn’t much, now,’ Angela replied, ‘but in its heyday it was a busy, populous place. Several thousand people lived here, but now it’s probably only a handful. Let’s find somewhere to park the car, and then we’ll have a look round.’
The village wasn’t quite as deserted as it appeared. There were a few locals wandering about, their white clothes grubby from the dust that swirled everywhere each time a vehicle passed through the settlement. Some were sitting beside the road outside a small café, smoking hookah pipes or drinking thick black coffee from tiny glasses. Finding somewhere to park their car wasn’t difficult. Bronson pulled over on some waste ground.
‘I expected it to be a lot bigger, and a whole lot busier, than this,’ he muttered, as he locked the car.
‘It’s not on the most popular tourist itineraries,’ Angela said. ‘In fact, I don’t think it’s on any tourist itineraries, so apart from the locals the only people likely to be here are wandering archaeologists, and I don’t even see any of them. I read somewhere that an American team came over here five or six years ago to excavate this site, but I’ve heard nothing about it since. This is one of the few major – by that I mean historically important – places in Egypt that hasn’t already been picked clean by the archaeologists.’
‘They were excavating Shoshenq’s temple, I suppose?’
‘Probably not just the temple. This place was a fortress, and also a necropolis. There are thousands of tombs here somewhere that date back almost four millennia. I assume the team would have looked at the whole site, rather than just a bit of it.’
‘So nobody’s ever really studied the place before them?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not really, though there have been one or two spectacular finds reported here. The earliest known example of demotic script was found here, on a piece of papyrus. That dates from about six hundred and sixty BC. But because el-Hiba is so old, and has had so many influences – Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and so on – any dig here would have to be a long and wide-ranging excavation.’
They walked on, heading for an open area at the very top of the settlement that they guessed would give them a decent view of the whole site.
‘Spectacular,’ Bronson said, as they stopped and looked around.
Below them, the ruins of the reddish-brown mud-brick walls descended in tumbled waves and terraces towards the surrounding plain and the eastern bank of the slowly flowing River Nile.
‘Quite a place,’ Angela agreed. ‘The high ground would have given the defenders a significant advantage in any conflict, and being so close to the river meant that they were protected from attack on that side. Right, now let’s find the temple.’
At the far end of el-Hiba, JJ Donovan stood beside a part of the old city walls and watched his targets through a small pair of binoculars.
About a hundred yards away, Bronson and Angela had their backs to him and appeared to be looking at something. Then they suddenly turned directly towards him, and for a brief, unsettling instant, it seemed to him as if they were staring right at him, their magnified faces clearly visible through the lenses of the binoculars.
Then he saw Angela gesture, and they turned back and started walking slowly down the hill away from him.
The walls were massive. Not just feet thick, but yards thick, the old mud-bricks still largely intact. �
��These must be the old city defences,’ Angela said. ‘They’re not in a bad state of repair, bearing in mind how old they are. They date from the Twenty-First Dynasty – that’s about one thousand BC – so they’ve been standing here for three millennia.’
Bronson glanced around. The village nestled in palm trees – this close to the Nile, the soil was obviously reasonably fertile – and more palms studded the settlement itself. But the main road was busy, cars and trucks roaring past them at regular intervals, and they had to be careful to keep well clear of the road itself.
‘We’ve no guidebook or anything,’ Angela said, ‘so we’ll just have to walk around until we find what’s left of the Temple that Shoshenq built. All I know is that it’s somewhere inside the old walls, which is why I thought we’d start looking from here.’
Slowly they started to retrace their steps, looking closely at all the structures as they passed them. A couple of times Angela thought she’d spotted it, but each time she was mistaken. Then she looked ahead and muttered something under her breath.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What?’ Bronson looked where she was pointing.
‘I think these Egyptian idiots have driven the bloody road straight through the temple. Look, you can see the same kind of stone walls on both sides of it over there.’
It wasn’t anything like as clear as that to Bronson. ‘You might be right,’ he said, ‘but perhaps the engineers had no option. There might have been nowhere else here they could have built the road.’
‘So they demolished half of an irreplaceable temple just to lay down a strip of tarmac? There’s always an alternative in this kind of situation, Chris. This is just archaeological vandalism, caused by nothing more than sheer laziness. They could have routed the road around the hill, down in the valley. It would only have added a few tens of yards to the length, and it might even have been easier to do.’
