Napoleon's Pyramids

by William Dietrich

  Ashraf and I rode in that direction because no sane man would. We passed first through Cairo’s City of the Dead, the Muslim beehive tombs as white as ghosts in the night. Then we trotted quickly through a ribbon of green farmland that followed the Nile, dogs barking as we passed. Long before sunrise we were dots on an arid plain. The sun rose, blinding as we angled east, and arced so slowly that it became a pitiless clock. The saddles of our captured mounts had canteens that we made last until noon, and then thirst became the central fact of existence. It was so hot that it hurt to breathe, and my eyes squinted against desert whiteness bright as snow. Powdery dust caked lips, ears, clothes, and horses, and the sky was a weight we carried on our shoulders and the crowns of our heads. The chain of the medallion burnt into my neck. A mirage of a lake, the cruel illusion all too familiar by now, wavered just out of reach.

  So this is Hades, I thought. So this is what happens to men without proper direction, who drink, fornicate, and gamble for their daily bread. I longed to find a scrap of shade to crawl into and sleep forever.

  ‘We must go faster,’ Ashraf said. ‘The French are pursuing.’

  I looked back. A long plume of white dust had been caught by the wind and spun into a lazy funnel. Somewhere under it was a platoon of hussars, following our hoof prints.

  ‘How can we? Our horses have no water.’

  ‘Then we must find them some.’ He gestured ahead at undulating humps of hills that looked like cracked loaves.

  ‘In a bed of coals?’

  ‘Even in a bed of coals a diamond can hide. We’ll lose the French in the canyons and wadis. Then we’ll find a place to drink.’

  Kicking our tired horses and tightening our cloaks against the dust, we pressed on. We entered the uplands, following a maze of sandy wadis like a snarl of string. The only vegetation was dry camel thorn. Ashraf was looking for something, however, and soon found it: a shelf of bare, sun-blasted rock to our left that led to a choice of three canyons. ‘Here we can break our tracks.’ We turned off, hooves clacking, and picked our way across the stone table. We took the middle limestone canyon because it looked narrowest and least hospitable: perhaps the French would think we went another way. It was so hot that it was like riding into an oven. Soon we could hear the frustrated shouts of our pursuers in the dry desert air, arguing about which way we’d gone.

  I lost all sense of direction and docilely followed the Mameluke. Higher and higher the crests reached, and I could begin to see the jagged lines of real mountains, the rock black and red against the sky. Here was the range that separated the valley of the Nile from the Red Sea. Nowhere was there a spot of green or glisten of water. The silence was unnerving, broken only by our own clop and creak of leather. Was this desert – the fact that ancient Egyptians could walk from the fertile Nile to absolute nothingness – the reason they seemed so preoccupied with death? Was the contrast between their fields and the ever-encroaching sand the origin of the idea of an expulsion from Eden? Was the waste a reminder of the brevity of life and a spur to dreams of immortality? Certainly the dry heat would mummify corpses naturally, long before the Egyptians did it as religious practice. I imagined someone finding my husk centuries from now, my frozen expression one of vast regret.

  Finally the shadows seemed to be growing longer, the sounds of pursuit fainter. The French must be as thirsty as we were. I was dizzy, my body sore, my tongue thick.

  We stopped at what looked like a rock trap. High cliffs rose all around us, the only exit being the narrow canyon we’d just ridden through. The towering walls were finally so high, and the sun so advanced, that they cast welcome shadow.

  ‘Now what?’

  Ashraf stiffly got down. ‘Now you must help me dig.’ He knelt on the sand at the base of a cliff, at a cleft where a waterfall might have pooled if such an absurdity could exist here. But perhaps it did: the rock above was stained dark as if water occasionally flowed down. He began burrowing into the sand with his hands.

  ‘Dig?’ Had the sun driven him mad?

  ‘Come, if you don’t want to die! It rains a torrent once a year, or perhaps once a decade. Like that diamond in coals, some water remains.’

  I joined in. At first the exercise seemed pointless, the hot grit burning my hands. Yet gradually the sand grew gratefully cool and then, astonishingly, damp. Smelling water, I began throwing sand away like a terrier. At last we reached true moisture. Water oozed, so thick with sediment it was like coagulating blood.

  ‘I can’t drink mud!’ I reached to dig again.

  Ashraf grabbed my arm and rocked us back on our heels. ‘The desert asks patience. This water may have come from a century ago. We can wait moments more.’

  As I watched impatiently, sweet liquid began to pool in the depression we’d dug. The horses snorted and whinnied.

  ‘Not yet, my companions, not yet,’ Ash soothed.

  It was the shallowest bowl I’d ever seen, and as welcome as a river. After an eternity we bent to kiss our puddle, like Muslims bowing to Mecca. As I lapped and swallowed the dirty leakage it gave me a shiver and a glow. What bags of water we are, so helpless if not constantly replenished! We slurped until we’d drained it back to mud, sat back, regarded each other, and laughed. Our drinking had made a circle of clean wetness around our lips, while the rest of our face was painted with dust. We looked like clowns. There was an impatient wait for our meagre well to refill and then we cupped some for the horses, guarding that they didn’t drink too much too soon. As dusk settled this became our job, carrying water in a saddlebag to the thirsty mounts, sipping ourselves, and slowly mopping the rest of the grit from our heads and hands. I began to feel faintly human again. The first stars popped out, and I realised I hadn’t heard any sounds of French pursuit for some time. Then the full panoply of the heavens blossomed, and the rocks glowed silver.

  ‘Welcome to the desert,’ Ashraf said.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  He grinned. ‘That means you’re alive.’

  It grew cold but even if we’d had wood, we dared not light a fire. Instead we huddled and talked, giving each other small comfort by sharing our grief about Talma and Enoch, and small hope as we talked about vague futures: with Astiza for me, and with Egypt as a whole for Ash.

  ‘The Mamelukes are exploitive, it is true,’ he admitted. ‘We could learn things from your French savants, just as they learn from us. But Egypt must be ruled by the people who live here, Ethan, not pink-skinned Franks.’

  ‘Can’t there be a collaboration of both?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Would Paris want an Arab on its town council, even if the imam had the wisdom of Thoth? No. This is not human nature. Suppose a god came down from the sky with answers to all questions. Would we listen, or nail him to a cross?’

  ‘We all know the answer to that one. So each man to his place, Ash?’

  ‘And wisdom to its place. I think this is what Enoch was trying to do, to keep Egypt’s wisdom locked away where it belongs, as the ancients decided.’

  ‘Even if they could levitate rocks or make people live forever?’

  ‘Things lose value if they’re done too easily. If any nation or man could make a pyramid with magic, then it becomes no more remarkable than a hill. And live forever? Anyone with eyes can see that this goes against all nature. Imagine a world full of the old, a world with few children, a world in which there was no hope of advancement because every office was filled with patriarchs who had got there centuries ahead of you. This would not be a paradise, it would be a hell of caution and conservatism, of stale ideas and shopworn sayings, of old grudges and remembered slights. Do we fear death? Of course. But it is death that makes room for birth, and the cycle of life is as natural as the rise and fall of the Nile. Death is our last and greatest duty.’

  We waited a day to make sure the French weren’t waiting for us. Then, assuming a lack of water had driven them back to Cairo, we started south, travelling at night to avoid the worst of the heat. We paralleled the Ni
le but stayed many miles to the east to avoid detection, even though it was a struggle to negotiate the serpentine hills. Our plan was to catch up with Desaix’s main column of troops, where Silano and Astiza rode. I would pursue the count as the French pursued the Mameluke insurgents up the river. Eventually I would rescue Astiza, and Ashraf would have revenge on whoever had killed poor Enoch. We would find the staff of Min, unscramble the way into the Great Pyramid, and find the long-lost Book of Thoth, protecting it from the occult Egyptian Rite. And then … would we secrete it, destroy it, or keep it for ourselves? I would cross that bridge when I came to it, as old Ben would say.

  Along our way, we found nests of life in the desert after all. A Coptic monastery of brown domed buildings sprouted like mushrooms in a forest of rock, a garden of palms promising the presence of a well. The Mameluke habit of carrying their wealth into battle now displayed a practical purpose: Ashraf had retrieved the purse he’d thrown at me and had enough coins to purchase food. We drank our fill, bought larger water bags, and found more wells as we continued south, spaced like inns on an invisible highway. The dried fruit and unleavened bread was simple but sustaining, and my companion showed how to coat my cracked lips with mutton fat to keep them from blistering. I was beginning to become more comfortable in the desert. The sand became a bed, and my loose robes – washed of donkey stink – caught every cooling breeze. Where before I had seen desolation, now I began to see beauty: there were a thousand subtle colours in the sinuous rocks, a play of light and shadow against crumbled white limestone, and a magnificent emptiness that seemed to fill the soul. The simplicity and serenity reminded me of the pyramids.

  Occasionally we would zigzag closer to the Nile, and Ashraf would descend to a village at night to barter as a Mameluke for food and water. I’d stay up in the barren hills, overlooking the serene green belt of farmland and blue river. Sometimes the wind would bring the sound of camel or donkey bray, the laughter of children, or the call to prayer. I would sit on the edge, an alien peeking in. Toward dawn he would rejoin me, we’d make a few miles, and then as the sun rose over the cliffs we’d shovel away sand at places he knew and creep into old caves cut into the bluffs.

  ‘These are tombs of the ancients,’ Ash would explain, as we risked a small fire to cook whatever he had bartered for, using purchased charcoal and washing our meal down with tea. ‘These caves were hollowed out thousands of years ago.’ They were half-filled with drifting sand, but still magnificent. Columns carved like bundles of papyrus held up the stone roof. Bright murals decorated the walls. Unlike the barren granite of the Great Pyramid, here was a representation of life in a place of death, painted in a hundred colours. Boys wrestled. Girls danced and played. Nets drew in swarms of fish. Old kings were enveloped in trees of life, each leaf representing a year. Animals roamed in imagined forests. Boats floated on painted rivers where hippos reared and crocodiles swam. Birds filled the air. There were no skulls or morbid ravens as in Europe or America, but instead paintings that evoked a lush, wild, happier Egypt than the one I was traversing now.

  ‘It looks like a paradise in those days,’ I said. ‘Green, uncrowded, rich, and predictable. You don’t sense a fear of invasion, or a dread of tyrants. It’s as Astiza said, better then than at any time afterward.’

  ‘In the best times the whole land was united upriver as far as the third or fourth cataract,’ Ashraf agreed. ‘Egyptian ships sailed from the Mediterranean to Aswan, and caravans brought riches from Nubia and lands like Punt and Sheba. Mountains yielded gold and gems. Black monarchs brought ivory and spices. Kings hunted lion in the desert fringe. And each year the Nile would rise to water and renew the valley with silt, just as it is doing now. It will peak about the time you said your calendar indicated, on October 21st. Each year the priests watched the stars and zodiac to keep track of the optimal times for sowing and reaping and measured the level of the Nile.’ He pointed to some of the pictures. ‘Here the people, even the noblest, bring offerings to the temple to ensure the cycle continues. There were beautiful temples up and down the Nile.’

  ‘And the priests took those offerings.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For a flooding that occurred every year anyway.’

  He smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s the profession for me. Predict that the seasons will turn, the sun will come up, and rake in the common people’s gratitude.’

  ‘Except it was not predictable. Some years there was no flood, and famine followed. You probably didn’t want to be a priest then.’

  ‘I’m betting they had some good excuse for the drought and asked people to double the tribute.’ I have an eye for easy work and could just imagine their tidy system. I looked around. ‘And what’s this writing?’ I asked of graffiti atop some pictures. ‘I don’t recognise the language. Is it Greek?’

  ‘Coptic,’ Ashraf said. ‘Legend has it that early Christians hid in these caves from the persecution of the Romans. We are the latest in a long chain of fugitives.’

  Another wall took my eye. It seemed to be a tally of something, a series of hash marks in the old language none of us could read. Some seemed plain enough: one mark to designate 1, three for 3, and so on. There was something familiar about those marks and I mused about it as we lay on sand that had sifted through the entrance, half filling the cave. Then it came to me. I took out the medallion.

  ‘Ash, look at this. This little triangle of notches on my medallion – they look like the marks on that wall!’

  He glanced from one to the other. ‘Indeed. What of it?’

  What of it? This might change everything. If I was right, the bottom of the medallion was not meant to represent a pyramid, it represented numbers! I was carrying something that bore some kind of sum! The savants might be lunatics for mathematics, but my weeks enduring them was paying off – I’d seen a pattern I otherwise might have missed. True, I couldn’t make much sense of the numbers – they seemed a random grouping of 1s, 2s, and 3s.

  But I was getting closer to the mystery.

  After many days and miles, we came to the crest of a steep limestone bluff near Nag Hammadi, the Nile curling around its edge and green fields on the far shore. There, across the river, we saw our quarry. Desaix’s division of French soldiers, three thousand men and two guns, formed a column more than a mile long, marching slowly beside the Nile. From our vantage point they were insects on a timeless canvas, crawling blind on a sheen of oils. It was at this moment that I realised the impossibility of the task the French had set for themselves. I grasped finally the vast sprawl not just of Egypt, but of Africa beyond, an endless rolling vista that made the French division seem as insignificant as a flea on an elephant. How could this little puddle of men truly subdue this empire of desert, studded with ruins and swarming with horse-mounted tribesmen? It was as audacious as Cortez in Mexico, but Cortez had the heart of an empire to aim for, while poor Desaix had already captured the heart, and now was pursuing the thrashing but defiant arms, in a wilderness of sand. His difficulty was not conquering the enemy, but finding him.

  My problem was not finding my enemy, who must be somewhere in that column of soldiers, but coming to grips with him now that I was a French outlaw. Astiza was down there too, I hoped, but how could I get a message to her? My only ally was a Mameluke; my only clothes my Arab robes. I didn’t even know where to start, now that we had the division in view. Should I swim the river and gallop in, demanding justice? Or try to assassinate Silano from behind a rock? And what proof did I have that he was really my enemy at all? If I succeeded, I’d be hanged.

  ‘Ash, it occurs to me that I’m like a dog after an ox cart, not at all certain how to handle my prize should I catch it.’

  ‘So don’t be a dog,’ the Mameluke said. ‘What is it you’re really after?’

  ‘The solution to my puzzle, a woman, revenge. Yet I have no proof yet that Silano is responsible for anything. Nor do I know exactly what to do with him. I’m not afraid to face the count. I’m jus
t uncertain what he deserves. It’s been simpler riding through the desert. It’s empty. Uncomplicated.’

  ‘And yet in the end a man can no more be one with the desert than a boat can be of the sea – both pass on its surface. The desert is a passage, not a destination, friend.’

  ‘And now we near the end of the voyage. Will Silano have the army’s protection? Will I be regarded as a fugitive? And where will Achmed bin Sadr be lurking?’

  ‘Yes, Bin Sadr. I do not see his band down there with the soldiers.’

  As if in answer, there was a ping off a nearby rock and the delayed echo of a gun’s report. A chip of rock flew up in the air and then plopped into the dirt.

  ‘See how the gods answer all?’ Ashraf pointed.

  I twisted in my saddle. To the north behind us, from the hills where we’d come, were a dozen men. They were in Arab dress, riding camels, rocking as they trotted fast, their image wavering in the heat. Their leader was carrying something too long to be a musket – a wooden staff, I surmised.

  ‘Bin Sadr, the devil himself,’ I muttered. ‘He keeps raiders off the back of the French. Now he’s spotted us.’

  Ashraf grinned. ‘He comes to me so easily, having killed my brother?’

  ‘The cavalry must have asked him to track us.’

  ‘His misfortune, then.’ The Mameluke looked ready to charge.

  ‘Ash, stop! Think! We can’t attack a dozen at once!’

  He looked at me with scorn. ‘Are you afraid of a few bullets?’

  More smoke puffed from the oncoming Arabs, and more spouts of dust twanged up around us. ‘Yes!’

  My companion slowly raised a sleeve of his robe, displaying fabric neatly holed in a near-miss. He grinned. ‘I felt the wind of that one. Then I suggest we flee.’