The crescent moon shone low over the lake and ripples on the surface made grooves in a silvery path. Light from the moon also fell on her face and it seemed to hold her in a mesmeric clasp.
“The new lake’s rising fast,” Ali said
Heavy rocks clattered against each other as the men dragged them clear of an entrance.
Was this the true hiding place of the disc of Ra? Had Nectanebo, the clever magician brought it to Nubia and found a way to hide it for millennia?
Anson shivered in the early morning desert air.
The tribesmen had cleared the entrance and the opening invited him with a breath of warm air.
The sword and the shrine. The statue of Nectanebo in New York held an image of each object in his hands.
Have an eye for the treasure, yes, but keep an eye on the sword, he told himself as he bent to go through the opening.
He went in first with a Manoosir tribesman, a leader wearing a red head cloth, perhaps the man who had found this place. The others followed.
The hole quickly opened into a sloping corridor cut cleanly into the stone. Nectanebo had evidently brought his best masons and tomb builders with him to Nubia, Anson decided, looking around.
Red Cloth pointed and Anson followed his line of direction, training his flashlight on a wall. In the halo of illumination arose a carved image of a kilted pharaoh. The king stood in the canonical side-on position, presenting in his hand an image of Maat - goddess of order, balance and truth - to Amun-Ra wearing a sun disc on his head. Incised Egyptian hieroglyphs also leapt into the beam. This was evidently the place where the tribesmen had found the cartouche.
He went closer.
“It’s our man. Nakht-horeb.”
“You said he was Nectanebo” Gemma’s voice echoed in the corridor.
“His Greek name,” he explained. “His predecessor was Nectanebo and so I guess it just made things easier and gave things a tidy dynastic ring.”
“What does it say?”
“I hoped you wouldn’t ask. I’m not much good at reading hieroglyphs on the fly. I decided long ago to leave translations to the philologists. Cartouches are easier, however.”
“I’m not much better,” Ali confessed.
“Let’s see.” Anson spent a while, mulling over it, murmuring under his breath. “Sorry folks, I don’t normally sub-vocalise when I’m reading.”
“Well, what does it say?” Juliia said, prodding him along.
As to whomsoever shall venture beyond, Egyptian, Kushite or Persian, may the god Amun-Ra the Invisible One smite him.
“I wonder what that means.”
“I don’t know. I much prefer it when the threats are more specific. Things like: ‘No sons shall succeed you and a donkey shall violate your wife.’ Do you suppose that extends to ex-wives?” Anson said as an afterthought.
Ali gave a rumbling laugh that filled the cavern.
“I thought you’d have got over her by now.”
“I don’t like the sound of it,” the British girl said.
“Neither do we,” Anson said. “It’s frighteningly vague. So the question is, what is it about Amun-ra that should scare us?”
“He’s a god of invisibility, air and wind,” Ali said.
“Yes, but not a particularly violent member of the pantheon. Significantly, this message does warn us against going beyond, so presumably there must be a beyond.”
“All I can see ahead is a wall ahead,” Ali said, swinging his flashlight.
He had a bad feeling about Nectanebo.
A snake hiding under a rock.
Anson tried to put himself into the mind of the long-dead magician king.
Chapter 14
“THE GOD Amun-Ra will smite us,” Anson repeated the warning.
It was difficult to imagine how, when all he could see at the end of the chamber was a wall of dressed stone. Masons had carved reliefs of Nectanebo wielding a crescent khepesh sword above his head, while a clutch of foreigners cowered in his grasp.
Persian enemies and Nubians among them.
A warning to both camps.
Then a thought struck him and his hopes sagged. What if this is all there is? Could this have been the cache chamber? Had this sloping corridor once been stashed ceiling high with treasure only to have been plundered in antiquity?
He went to the image of Nectanebo smiting his enemies.
Brushing the surface, he saw that the image lay on a single block of stone. A line had cracked in a coating of stone plaster that had tried to disguise it.
Did the stone turn on a hinge?
Should he get the men to push? But wait, Amun was the Invisible One. Pushing against the stone could trigger some unseen menace.
He looked up at the ceiling. The rock on either side curved around the door like arches. Curves? That bothered him.
Were they arches?
Or could they be invisible khepesh swords carved out of stone and ready to fall and smite intruders?
The answer might be not to push, the expected approach, but to pull and now he saw holes where the tribesmen could screw in hooks and haul the block clear.
What magical trick would the wily magician king Nectanebo have prepared to keep intruders away from his treasure stash?
Images of the god of magic Thoth now flanked them in a hall carved out of the living granite. A crescent moon on his head, Thoth took the form of an ibis seated on a shrine.
First the sword, now the shrine, Anson thought.
“Stay here,” he said to the others. “I’ll scout ahead.”
“You fear traps,” Gemma said.
“I fear Nectanebo and his bag of magical tricks. He may have some hidden surprise waiting for us.”
“Then you need me,” the Intelligence girl said.
He shrugged and moved on slowly into the hall, Gemma at his shoulder.
Thoth was also god of the moon, he thought, eyeing a crescent moon on the head of the carved bird that slid by. No harm in that.
Or was there?
Too late he remembered that in the hands of this lunar deity, the crescent moon was also a knife.
Something flashed metallically in their torchlights. He grabbed her arm and propelled her forward, diving after her, hitting the stone floor hard. A blade in the form of a monstrous crescent moon whooshed out of the darkness of the ceiling like a slicing guillotine, almost shaving the sole of a shoe.
It vanished to one side and now came back for another attack.
There was no turning back.
He still had hold of his torch but Gemma had lost hers. He saw her climb to her feet and start to run. He jumped up and ran after her. The torch. It had rolled ahead on the stone. Her foot landed on it it, spinning it around like a barrel. Her legs went under her.
She dropped.
And now there was another sound slicing the air, not behind them this time, but ahead.
A second pendulum moon.
This place was a hall of Thoth-knives.
Like flutter-cut images on film, dread threw a nightmarish scenes from the Book of the Dead on the walls of his mind. Animal-headed demons brandished knives at their gates. He saw knife-wielding goddesses of slaughter. Butchering blocks. Images of souls tortured at stakes. Places of annihilation.
He flashed his beam at the ceiling. Which way was it coming from? Not the same direction.
That side.
She saw it too, tried to rise.
He remembered the moon on the lake outside.
The crescent moon shone low over the lake and ripples on the surface made grooves in a silvery path. Light from the moon also fell on her face and it seemed to hold her in a mesmeric clasp.
The sight of the pendulum held her frozen again.
“Gemma!”
Anson was still on the floor. No time to get up. He rolled at the girl, his torchlight spinning light up at the razor-sharp crescent swinging down.
He hit Gemma, rolled over her and grabbed her by the shoulder, rollin
g her after him.
Whoomf!
The moon-knife of Thoth split the darkness so close that they felt it suck at them like the gravitational pull of the moon on a tide.
“Stop here!”
They slithered to a wall, and caught their breath.
Anson flashed his beam ahead and then behind, where a guillotine gauntlet of two curving moons still swung.
It was impossible to go back. They must look ahead. But how many more attacks by crescent moons would they trigger?
Anson inspected the way ahead more closely.
There had been a rockfall up ahead, perhaps a result of an earthquake. One large chunk, the size of a suitcase, caught his eye.
Were these moons connected to some kind of mechanism in a sequence?
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “See that block.” He pointed it out with his torch beam. “Help me get behind it and shove. Maybe we can stop the next one and jam the whole system. But if you see or hear anything, pull back. Fast.”
They got behind the block and pushed with all of their strength.
It defied them.
He noticed a gap between the block and the wall.
“I’ll try getting down on the floor and pushing with my legs.”
Instead of pushing the block straight ahead, they could edge it forward diagonally.
Anson got down and put his back to the wall and set his feet to the side of the block and she braced herself against the back.
“Push!”
Together, they strained.
A stir, a grating squeal. It was budging.
“Harder!”
Anson pushed, straining muscle and sinew and Gemma gasped with her effort. Yes, it was creeping forward into the chamber, stone complaining on stone. They pushed more. It trundled forward, rumbling.
He was almost flat on his back when the moon came slashing down.
Gemma gave a warning scream and fell back.
The crescent moon of Thoth swished through the darkness and hit the rock with a reverberating clang and a shower of sparks. Grit blasted his face. Pieces of rock flew.
There was a screech and the chamber shuddered.
Now it was silent, except for the whistle of the blades behind.
Anson shone his torch at the frozen blade.
It had bitten deep in the rock and stopped inches away form his splayed legs.
“You’re lucky,” she said.
The blade-moons slowly lost momentum and they were able to edge around them.
The Manoosir men shook their heads as they passed. Ali paused to finger the edge of a blade.
“Still sharp. Nectanebo clearly meant to protect something. It’s amazing you’re still in one piece.”
“This place would make a great delicatessen,” Anson said.
No menace waited to threaten them in the next, narrower passage, just a cut that went as deeply as any slicing moon.
The passage sloped down to meet a well of dark water.
“We’re too late,” Ali said in a dead voice. “I thought the lake was close. Obviously it has raised the water table dramatically.”
Lake Merowe had beaten them to it, drowning the rest of this man-made cavern.
“I suppose we’ll never know if the disc was down there,” Gemma said, giving voice to their fears.
It can’t end like this, in murk. It was time to go deeper.
“What are you doing?” she said.
He was pulling off his shirt.
“All this exertion has made me feel like a dip.”
“You’re mad. You can’t see a thing down there.”
“Do we have a water-proof torch, Ali?” He kicked off his shoes next and dropped his trousers, stripping to his underpants.
“My torch is waterproof. Has to be. I’m forever dropping it in the Nile,” Ali said.
“Fine, let’s swap. Get the others to turn their beams on the water, too, and spread light around.”
Ali gave instruction to the men and they trained their torches onto the pool. Their lights did nothing to penetrate its surface, merely turning it a milky grey.
“I’ve got to try.”
He went gingerly to the edge and dipped a toe in the water like a reluctant bather.
Cold, yes. Bone chillingly cold.
Oh well, think of English beaches.
He immersed himself in the inky water, cursing Chinese dam engineers and German and French subcontractors, and when it reached his waist, he took a breath and a firm hold of the waterproof flashlight and made an angled dive.
When the shock of the cold hit his face and the dark water blinded his eyes, he thought, maybe I’m going in over my head this time.
The water had been like black ink above, now it turned a tone of murky sepia. He went deeper.
Dark water always held a terror, no less so, in a site of the ancient past. The Egyptians believed that harmful spirits dwelt near or within lonely stretches of water and they wrote spells and wore amulets to protect themselves against drowning and attacks by crocodiles, hippos and against a demon of the river, a demon of a canal, a demon of a well, any demons from a lake. Murk and lurk went together in water. Phantasms of the imagination swam up to meet him, wavy arms outstretched.
With the torch held out ahead of him he could just make out the floor of the passage. He frog-kicked his way lower and followed it.
It opened into a chamber.
He saw a fleck, then a flash.
At first he thought the shiny things dancing in his light were fish.
Then he saw hoops, rings, amulets and more.
Gold was suddenly in his eyes, but it wasn’t in his thoughts. He was here for something else. Against all hope, he sprayed the dim beam of torchlight from side to side.
He wanted a drowned sun of gold.
His air began to give out before his optimism, a tickling in his lungs, the first tingle of panic.
Don’t go back empty handed.
Go for gold.
Handfuls of it. Underpants full of it.
He plunged his hand into the glinting pieces of old. It was like one of those grabs for cash on TV, he thought. All the pharaoh’s gold you can grasp in ten seconds.
He jammed in chunks of the metal. Enough.
Chapter 15
HE TURNED in the water and swam back. He thought he heard a tinkle as a gold bangle worked its way free and hit the stone floor.
Swim towards the light, the far-off milky haze ahead.
Was it the weight of his booty, or a compound of the heaviness of his limbs and the lack of air in his lungs that seemed to drag him down? He let the torch go and used both arms to swim.
He crept up towards the milky haloes of their lights. He was going to make it, but his hopes were drowned.
There was no chance of finding the disc back there.
A few more hard kicks.
He broke the surface, gasping.
A ring of anxious faces waited at the edge, Gemma’s in front.
Rasping air into his lungs, he waded out towards them.
“What’s that?” she said looking down.
“The water’s freezing,” he complained. “You think I’m coming out without stuffing my underpants first?” He waded all the way out. “At the risk of sounding like a flasher, look, I’ve got something interesting to show you.” He dug down.
The Manoosir tribesman had been taciturn up till this moment, but now they erupted in enthusiasm.
The gold of the pharaohs could do that.
Ali took the cargo from him, piece by piece. He gathered the haul in a handkerchief and dried off the pieces, objects of yellow metal afire in the flashlight, rings, bangles, small golden statues of gods and goddesses, including Sekhmet. “Treasures of a pharaoh… probably made with Nubian gold,” Ali said, trying to keep his voice calm.
“There’s more down there. Hard to know how much.”
“Let’s go up above ground and take a look at this in daylight,” Ali said.
; Was it morning already?
“Are you coming, Anson?”
“No. I’m not going anywhere till I can feel my fingers and toes again.”
“Are you all right?” Gemma said. “You’re very adventurous.”
“Come on up when you’ve dressed,” Ali said.
The Manoosir team followed the Nubian and his handkerchief filled with gold, like bees on the trail of a honeypot.
Gemma provided Anson with light, while he pulled on his clothing. The rest of him would soon dry out in the desert air.
Chapter 16
ALI AND HIS TEAM would barely have been out of the passage, blinking in the bright light of morning, when an almighty detonation, followed by a seismic shock, sent waves below.
“That was a detonation. Explosives.”
She’d know about such things.
“I think something has just shifted Nectanebo’s plug.”
They ran back, weaving between the crescent knives of the moon, and clambered to the entrance, except there was no entrance any more, just the underside of a massive rock.
Nectanebo’s plug had rolled back to seal the entrance.
It ended all hope like a giant full stop at the end of a sentence.
They tried shouting.
Anson used a chunk of stone to bang on the underside of the rock.
They were entombed in silence.
They sat with their backs against the wall, their light doused to save the batteries.
“Who could have done this?” she said.
“Someone who wants to stop me from tracking down the disc.”
“And someone who evidently believes that the disc is here. They must, or why go to these lengths to stop you in your tracks?”
“Perhaps my excursion to Nubia has armed them since they have some proof that the sun disc was actually once down here. They worry I might find a clue or pointer to its location today. And who knows, there may be a clue down here, drowned by the rising water table.”
“You rationalize anything.”
“It’s what we theorists do. Cheer up. I’ll dive down again and pick you out some nice pieces of jewellery if you want.”
“I hardly think I’ll be needing them.” “Are you going to let a hundred ton boulder weigh you down?” “I think you have an aversion to reality.”
“I do, but we’ll get out of this.” “How, exactly? A handful of tribesmen can’t save us.” “No, but a power even greater than Nectanebo’s magic can.”
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 10
