The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘OK, bring on the pathologist,’ Hammoudi drawled, and I suddenly identified his accent. He was a Sa’idi. a southerner, and the reference to Jesus and Mary made it certain that he was a Copt, despite his name. Probably from Asyut, where the majority of Copts are concentrated. No one seems to know exactly how many Copts there are in Egypt — the official estimate is ten per cent of the population, while the Copts themselves put it at twenty per cent. The Muslims look down on them as unbelievers. The Copts despise the Muslims as Johnny-come-latelys and consider themselves the direct lineal descendants of the ancient pharaohs. At first sight Hammoudi seemed beef-witted, but one thing I was sure of: a Copt from the south didn’t get to be an investigator in Cairo without showing powers of cunning and ruthlessness way above normal.

  The pathologist scurried forward carrying a leather bag and a stethoscope. ‘Ah, Dr Amin,’ Hammoudi said, ‘I hope you’re not afraid of Jinns.’

  It doesn’t pay in my profession, Captain,’ the doctor replied, ‘but Jinns exist. It says so in the Quran. There are three kinds of beings mentioned there: angels, Jinns and human beings.’

  Hammoudi grasped his own throat as if he was about to vomit, then fixed his eyes on me. ‘All right, Mr Friend-of-the-Dead,’ he said, ‘can you confirm that this is Dr Julian Cranwell, the British Egyptologist?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘What do you mean, suppose so?’

  ‘The features are distorted, but yes, I’d say it’s him.’

  I watched the pathologist as he pulled on rubber gloves and went about his work, examining the body nervously. ‘There are no external wounds,’ he commented, ‘and no sign of a struggle. The lips and face are purple. It looks to me very much like a simple cardiac arrest. Was he a healthy man?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t seen him for two years.’

  ‘Two years is a long time. Drinking man, was he?’

  ‘He enjoyed the odd tot, yes.’

  ‘Did he ever complain of angina? We’ll have to check the medical record, I suppose. See the face — bright purple — that means dilation of the capillaries consistent with cardiac arrest. He was probably just strolling around the pyramids late yesterday afternoon, overtaxed himself and dropped dead. We’re nearly into the summer season, I mean it was about thirty-six degrees in the shade yesterday. The late afternoon heat is worse than midday — you don’t notice how hot it is until it’s too late. I’d say cause of death was a heart attack. I don’t see any sign of suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Really,’ I said, an angry tightness creeping into my stomach. ‘I see plenty. Like how come nobody saw him collapse? The place is full of tourists in the late afternoon, it’s the ideal time to see the pyramids because of the light. Then you’ve got hordes of camel and horsemen, guides, the Tourist Police, yet you’re saying no one notices a man collapse and die? He must have been screaming in agony — look at the face, you’d think he’d seen a ghost.’

  The troopers within earshot eyed each other uneasily, shifting the slings of their automatics. I even saw one or two making the sign for protection against evil spirits.

  Hammoudi noticed the gestures and turned sand-bagged eyes like blasting-lasers on the men who’d made them. ‘What do you think this is?’ he growled accusingly. ‘The Mummy’s Curse?’

  ‘There’s nothing abnormal here,’ Amin cut in soberly. ‘The bulging eyes and the distorted expression are caused by the severe chest pain that comes with cardiac arrest.’

  I removed my glasses, wiped them on my shirt, replaced them again, and took two slow, well-spaced breaths. I stared at Hammoudi, wondering if he knew that Julian had been missing for three days. Three days. And now here he was suddenly, lying in a heap beneath the Great Pyramid, apparently dead from a heart attack, having collapsed on a walk round the plateau? I didn’t swallow it. Julian had been in Egypt for twenty years. He’d even excavated at Giza. He was eccentric, certainly, but he wasn’t the type to have visited the pyramids for an afternoon stroll.

  A sudden thought struck me. ‘Did he have a ticket?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, listen to Mr Sherlock Holmes!’ Hammoudi chuckled, holding up a plastic bag with a blue and white card inside. ‘With the official stamp too. That means he must have come through the gate at before four yesterday afternoon.’

  I shook my head, prepared to speak, then thought better of it. Hammoudi brought out a disposable lighter and a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes. He flicked the corner of the pack so that a single stick emerged, then placed it in his mouth and lit it slowly. He didn’t offer them round.

  ‘I can’t go any further until the autopsy,’ Amin said, ‘but I don’t think there’s any need to go round pulling in suspects at this stage, Captain Hammoudi.’

  ‘That wraps it up for now, then,’ Hammoudi said with obvious relief. ‘No need for the press to print crap about Islamic terrorists this time. This death is an act of God and nothing else. No knives in the back. No machine-guns. Nothing. If any of you men is caught breathing a word to the newspapers, I shall personally castrate him. This is death by misadventure. No suspects. No ulterior motives. Terrorism is definitely not involved.’

  He pulled out his notebook and turned to me. ‘Name and address?’ he demanded.

  ‘My name is Omar James Ross.’

  ‘Omar? So you are an Arab?’

  ‘Actually I am half-Egyptian. My mother was Egyptian, my father British and I have dual nationality. I’m staying at the Shepheard’s Hotel.’

  ‘Don’t leave the city without letting me know. I might want to ask you some questions.’

  4

  By the time the ambulance had left, scouring up mustard-powder dust across the plateau of Giza, the pyramid’s shadow had melted away, and the three great points of stone stood gleaming in sunlight like burnished brass. Already the tourists had thinned out, driven off by the heat, and the camel-men had couched their animals in cracks and clefts of shade awaiting the afternoon shift. A sudden buffet of wind, squalling off the desert, brought a moment of relief from the stagnant air. As I walked back towards the pyramid, I realised that I was more shocked by Julian’s death than I’d first thought. In front of Hammoudi it’d seemed easy enough to put on a show of nonchalance. Away from public scrutiny, though, the delayed reaction set in, and my eyes filled with tears which I swept away angrily. My mother had disappeared when I was a child. My father had been distant. Julian Cranwell had filled the gap, had been the mentor I lacked, had supported me in public even when he disagreed privately. He was generous, kind and wise — a man who laughed at convention and got things done in his own way. I admired him. When I’d first arrived in Egypt twelve years earlier, awkward, aggressive, uncertain but opinionated, with a chip on my shoulder, I’d queered the pitch with almost everyone who might have taught me something. Only Julian had put up with me, because Julian himself was an erratic loner who didn’t give a damn what the establishment thought, and who saw me as a younger version of himself. Colleagues in the Antiquities Service sucked in their breath with theatrical derision when they heard I’d been appointed as Julian’s assistant: ‘He’s a nut!’ one told me. ‘Drinks like a bloody grouper! Three sheets to the wind five nights a week and has “insights” while he’s pissed. Hates women. Hates children. Hates Gyppos. Hates Brits. Hates Yanks. Hates everybody. His last assistant left after three weeks with a broken nose. They had a fist-fight apparently. You won’t find him easy company.’

  The tales proved to be exaggerated, the prediction entirely false. I’d found Julian perfect company. Under his tutelage I’d done some of my best work — blossomed from an amateur into a decent field Egyptologist in five years. Even when we’d parted two years before, when they booted me out of the Antiquities Service, I’d comforted myself with the thought that we’d work together again some day. Now there were no ‘some days’ left, only a terrible vacuum which I knew I’d never be able to fill.

  There was a touch on my arm and I looked up to see the old Hazm
i tracker, his face puckered as a prune from a lifetime in the high sun. ‘I’ll kill that policeman,’ he said earnestly, massaging my wrist.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘God give me the strength!’

  He released my arm and searched my face. ‘I’m Sulayman wald Haamid of the Hawazim,’ he said. ‘Are you one of us?’

  ‘My mother was Hawazim, yes. I’m Omar, the son of Maryam bint Salim.’

  ‘I knew it!’ he said, touching my earring lightly. ‘I knew from this. I knew your face, your speech — the blood shows through even if you’re wearing foreign clothes. I know who you are now, your father was Abu Sibaahi — the Englishman who lived with our tribe. I’ve heard of you. Your mother was the sister of the amnir of al-Maqs.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She was lost, they say, taken by the ghibli wind, in the Year of the Great Red Dust. Your grandfather, Salim, was lost in the desert, too. Runs in your family. Take care you aren’t lost, Omar. Don’t have anything to do with the police or that dead man.’

  ‘I know a Jinn’s work when I see it. There were only eight sets of tracks around that body: two Fellahs, two Bedouin, four policemen — eight.’

  ‘That’s right. I saw them myself.’

  ‘Yes, but there should have been nine. Where were the dead man’s tracks? And his face! Did you ever see a face like that on a corpse? Keep away from it, Omar. Don’t get involved.’

  ‘I’m already involved,’ I said. ‘The dead man was my friend.’

  ‘What kind of friend?’

  ‘The kind that’s like a brother.’

  ‘Then I pity you.’

  We shook hands. Then I worked my way thoughtfully along the side of the Great Pyramid. Sulayman was right, of course. I hadn’t even thought of a ninth set of prints. There I was, taking secret pleasure in my ability to read tracks, and I wasn’t even in the same league as the Hawazim tribesmen who’d taught me as a boy. All night it had been deathly still. The wind had not stirred since the previous morning. If Julian had been walking around and simply dropped dead, as Amin had suggested, where were his own footprints? Sand reveals everything. The Hawazim read it like a book. Everyone else’s prints were clearly visible on the surface — but the dead man had left no tracks.

  5

  As I walked along the pyramid’s base, I ran my hand along the polished stone blocks, relearning their texture, wondering again as I’d wondered for many years, at their precision. Ever since I lost my mother in childhood, I’ve had the ability to switch off painful emotions and lose myself in facts and figures, and especially in architectural forms. This pyramid has remained unchanged for at least forty-five centuries, and if I’m correct, much longer. It has retained its form while millions of human lives have flicked on and off like candles. Its concept is immense. Some of these limestone blocks are thirty feet long and weigh fifteen tons. More than two million of them are incorporated in the structure, making up a staggering total of eighty-five million cubic feet of stone. The pyramid is a masterpiece of mathematical exactitude. Its four faces are aligned almost perfectly to the cardinal points of the compass, with an average error of only three minutes of arc, a deviation from true of only 0.015%. That’s an almost unbelievable feat of accuracy for the engineers of any age, but especially for those of the dawn of civilisation. And there is more. The four sides of the pyramid are almost exactly the same length at the base, showing an error of less than 1 per cent, a flaw smaller than a modern architect would be allowed in the construction of a large building, and the corners are almost perfect right-angles, a perfection denied many of the most modern structures. In sum, the Great Pyramid, one of the oldest and largest buildings on earth, represents a mathematical precision only equalled and not surpassed in the modern age. Was this mathematical precision simply to satisfy the vanity of a single man, the pharaoh Khufu, who wanted to triumph over death and live a million million years? I’d come back full circle, I realised suddenly — back, inevitably to death, the great mystery, the great obsession of the ancient Egyptians, the great taboo of the twentieth century. Was the pyramid intended simply as a huge and vulgar tombstone, or was it something else, a vast cosmic clock, a machine for measuring time? Death and time are, anyway, just aspects of the same thing, examples of entropy, that quality of the universe which is always degrading and running down. Life flows against them, defying the laws of thermodynamics, expanding eternally in the opposite direction. To the ancient Egyptians death was a journey into an alternative dimension, a shadow realm of endless possibilities. But if the pyramids were intended just as monuments, why were they built with such precision? And how did the ancient Egyptians develop such accurate engineering techniques — apparently very suddenly — when the rest of the world was still living in the stone age?

  I screwed up my eyes at the incredible brightness of the sun. Not a single pad of cloud remained in the unforgiving sky. I remember my childhood like that. The long holidays spent with my cousins in an oasis in the Western Desert: the unbearable infinity of the desert sky. Out there in the wastes the sun stands so high in midsummer that you have almost no shadow at all. In the Western Desert it might rain once in forty years and the meteorologists have discovered that there is cloud-cover there for only four per cent of daylight hours. That means that for ninety-six per cent of the day, summer and winter, you’re getting pure, unadulterated, high octane ultraviolet. No wonder the ancient Egyptians worshipped Ra, the sun-god, above all others. No wonder they chose the west bank of the Nile to bury their dead. On the fringes of the Western Desert it’s so hot and dry that a body left in the sand will mummify naturally within hours. They’re still pulling pre-dynastic corpses out of the earth, buried two thousand years before the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, complete with hair and skin. When I was eight or nine, I rode with my older cousins on camels into the Western Desert, far beyond the outlying villages of the oases. Nobody lived out there, and after two days we were into frightening sand-sheets which trembled with heat-haze around the edges and which seemed to have no beginning and no end. The sand-sheets were featureless: not a single stone, not a tree, not a blade of grass. The emptiness played havoc with your sense of scale, and the dark hump on the sand-sheet in front of us seemed a mountain at first, until we came right up to it and realised it was a dead person. I was scared: I’d never seen anyone mummified before. The corpse was curled up in a foetal position, its flesh melted but its skin and bones intact. Strips of a jibba fluttered like faded pennants from the cadaver. My cousin searched the corpse’s pockets and found inside a pouch full of silver coins. We discovered later that the coins were of Turkish origin and hadn’t been in use for a hundred years. That was how long the corpse had lain there, undiscovered, perfectly mummified by the dry heat. A little farther on, we found a severed camel’s leg, and further on still, the carcass of a three-legged camel, completely preserved. We concluded that the man had been riding towards the oases when his camel had died of thirst. He’d cut off its leg for food and tried to walk on. Soon the leg had proved too cumbersome and he’d dropped it, and not far away he’d given up, laid down on the sand and died. No one had disturbed the body until we’d come by a century later.

  I stood outside the gates of the Mena House Oberoi. Gharry drivers, working their lunch-hour, pestered me to take a ride. Ordinarily, I enjoyed the tranquillity of a gharry, but today I wanted to get out of the noise and heat of the city quickly. I stopped a black-and-white taxi and got in. The plastic seat burned my legs. The driver smelt of perspiration and bad breath. I gave him Doc Barrington’s address on the Gezira, and asked if the meter was working, knowing that in Cairo the meter is never working.

  ‘Don’t dare charge me tourist fare,’ I said.

  ‘Are you Egyptian or foreign?’ the driver asked.

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘The distance to Gezira is still the same.’

  The traffic riffled on, jerking, slowing, halting, the sunlight flipped back blindingly from windsc
reens and mirrors and chromium bumpers. It was like floating in a stream of hot sauce, smelling of sweat, petrol fumes, burned rubber and stale tobacco, with horns dementedly honking and drivers shaking their pressed thumbs and forefingers, and swearing savagely. The traffic thinned as we turned left before the Giza Bridge and drove along Shari’ an-Nil with the choppy waters of the river beside us, catching the highlights of the noon sun. Across the Nile at Gala’a Bridge: past the concrete pagoda of Cairo Tower, past the worn-out buildings of the once fashionable Gezira Sporting Club, its oblong of unkempt turf now hemmed in narrowly by new cement blocks, and into the relative tranquillity of Zamalek.

  I paid off the driver outside Doc’s block. The ghaffir, a sullen old man with a drooping neck, was new: at least I didn’t remember his face from the years when I had been a lodger with Doc. I wished him ‘as salaam ‘alaykum’, but the man only scowled miserably and mumbled at me: ‘al-assensir baayiz: the lift is out of order.’ I groaned and hurried up the winding stairs, gasping in the oven-like heat. I hoped Doc would be in. I’d phoned her the previous night to say I’d be over, but now I was hours late for our appointment. I passed down a corridor straddled with bars of light and shade and halted before a carved wood door on which Doc had painted a large coloured version of the Wedjet Eye, the Eye of Ra. It was a fine example of Doc’s Gothic humour. The Eye of Ra symbolised the eye of consciousness peering into the void. I pressed the bell and waited, feeling a prickle of uneasiness: the Eye of Ra seemed to be studying me, blinking at me balefully. I peered at it and realised with a mild start that in the very centre of the eye a peep-hole had been opened. I could now see a real eye beyond, a fish eye eerily distorted by the magnification of the lens. Then Doc opened the door and a cool breeze from her open balcony hit me in the face. She flung both arms around me. ‘I told you you’d be back!’ she said.