The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  Amin’s steps were nearby now, and suddenly his voice snapped: ‘Just a minute, you!’

  The handle went down and the door opened. I glanced over my shoulder to see Amin accosting the receptionist, who’d just returned through another door. I pushed myself into the narrow closet amid mops, buckets, and tins of cleaner, and closed the door to a crack. Moments later Amin sauntered past and went through the cracked glass doors leading into the street. I opened the cupboard to find the receptionist standing with his hands on his hips and eyeing me curiously.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought it was the toilet.’

  He showed me to a filthy, smelly toilet along a corridor, and when I returned to my seat he was wafting away flies with a folder and pretending to read.

  Another ten minutes passed. Then twenty. I yawned and shuffled my feet. At that moment a bald man in an off-white lab-coat hurried out of the shadows, carrying my note gingerly, looking round-shouldered and apologetic. I rose to greet him: the man’s handshake was limp and his palm damp. He avoided my gaze, his eyes shifting sideways beneath the thick lenses of his spectacles.

  ‘Dr Ross,’ he said, ‘I’m Dr Rafiq. We always like to welcome our colleagues from the universities, and of course, we know Dr Margoulis well.’

  ‘Hello Dr Rafiq,’ I said.

  ‘You wanted see the body of Julian Cranwell, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, he died of a heart attack and was sent here yesterday.’ Rafiq began to tap his feet nervously. He looked away and a spillikin of sweat ran down his brow. ‘I’m afraid there’s a problem,’ he said.

  I tensed. I’d waited forty minutes — ample time for Rafiq to check up on me. Or perhaps Amin had spotted me after all. ‘I can’t see him?’ I enquired.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t, Dr Ross.’

  ‘Why?’

  Rafiq took a deep breath. ‘Because according to our records, there were no heart-attack victims from Giza admitted to the morgue yesterday. I’ve checked thoroughly. I’m afraid the body in question is simply not here!’

  10

  The coffee house on the Corniche was packed and from the rear came the clack of dominoes being slapped down on tables. From another direction came a heavy, intoxicating rhythm and the wail of Umm Kalthum. I took a table on the pavement and watched the procession of lights that poured like burning oil through the darkness on the bridge of Qasr an-Nil. The waiter brought red tea and the shisha-man set up a heavy brass-bound water pipe. I sipped the tea and took a long cool draught of honey-flavoured smoke from the bubbling pipe. I let the smoke dribble out of my nostrils with satisfaction: shisha smoking is the most relaxing, most civilised Egyptian custom I know. Cars rumbled by incessantly in a slurry of vapour-trails, but through the pall of city smog I could make out some of the constellations that litter the night sky. It’s not as easy to see them in the city as it is in the desert, where the whole dome of the heavens often seems weighted with bright bodies. In the city the stars are cloaked by the glare of a billion sodium lamps and clouds of effluent and motor fumes. There are four hundred million stars in our galaxy alone, but even on a good day only about two thousand are visible to the naked eye. In the city it’s far fewer. As my eyes adjusted, though, I managed to make out some old friends: Taurus, Cassiopeia, Orion’s belt with Sirius hanging below. Sirius looked lack-lustre in the fumes but actually it’s one of the brightest stars in the heavens. Only eight-and-a-half light years from earth, it’s among our closest neighbours. In fact, Sirius is a binary star: there are two stars in the system, Sirius A and Sirius B, or Digitaria as it’s sometimes called. Sirius A can be seen clearly with the naked eye, but Digitaria is invisible. Lost in the glare of its bright companion, its presence wasn’t guessed until the 1830s and not proved until 1862. In 1915 it was identified as a white dwarf, a super-dense star, that orbits Sirius A every fifty years.

  Sirius had a special significance for me. Two years earlier, I’d uncovered a narrow shaft on the west bank of the Nile at Madinat Habu near Luxor that descended at an angle forty feet into the cliff. I was only just able to crawl through it on hands and knees, but it opened out into a spacious cave where there was a door sealed with the symbols of the Winged Disc and the Eye of Ra. At first I could hardly believe it. This had some of the features of an 18th Dynasty burial — it might even have been the grave of Akhnaton himself — the proverbial ‘Big One’ every Egyptologist dreams of. I went back next day with guftis and a photographer and unsealed the door. To my disappointment though, there was no tomb behind it, only a stone shelf containing a hoard of artefacts. One of them was a stone stela, which looked as if it had once formed part of a wall-decoration, bearing the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for Sirius, carved into a circle surrounded by a perfectly elliptical cartouche. The stela was identifiable from its style as 18th Dynasty, about 3400 years ago, and I examined it from every possible point of view. It was obviously making a statement about Sirius — the hieroglyph made that clear. But there was something extraordinary here. The ellipse was formed from circular dots — exactly fifty of them — and I knew it took fifty years for Sirius B to make an elliptical orbit of its brighter companion. If the ellipse really showed the orbit of Sirius B, a star invisible to the naked eye, it would mean that the ancient Egyptians had access to advanced optical techniques — telescopes, possibly even a knowledge of spectrum physics. Surely, that was impossible. At least Dr Abbas Rifad, Director General of the E A S , thought so. He entered the cave and examined the ‘Siriun Stela’ personally. ‘I think your theory is far-fetched, Mr Ross,’ he told me. ‘Sirius B was detected by spectrum analysis in 1915. I doubt if they had that technique in the 14th century B C! Ill-conceived ideas like that bring the Service into disrepute. After all, it’s only a circle, an ellipse and the Sirius symbol. To me the find has no significance at all.’ I wanted to remove the stela. Rifad said no. He ordered it kept in situ until the whole context could be thoroughly studied by a team of 18th-Dynasty experts — extravagant measures, I thought, for a find of ‘no significance’. It wasn’t long after that Rifad posted me to another dig at Heliopolis, and shortly they threw me out on my ear altogether.

  ‘You’re miles away!’ a voice said, and I glanced up to see Doc Barrington standing in front of the table, smiling. Tonight she was wearing a knee-length black dress with a wheel design on the chest, and she’d taken the trouble to put on some make-up and gold ear-studs. She took the pipe from me. ‘I love a shisha,’ she said. ‘What were you ruminating on?’

  ‘The stars,’ I said.

  ‘Did you see Julian?’

  ‘Julian’s not in the morgue.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘Not a sniff of him.’

  ‘It’s just a bureaucratic cock-up, must be. Wouldn’t be the first time they got the labels muddled.’

  ‘No, I thought of that. I even went over the admissions lists with Dr Rafiq, and no corpse of Julian’s age or description was admitted to the mortuary the day before yesterday, at least no one sent from the pyramids. He’s just not there, Doc!’

  ‘Well if he’s not in the morgue, where the hell is he?’

  ‘Buried already?’

  ‘That would be illegal without Consular permission. Anyway, you said there was going to be an autopsy.’

  ‘That’s what they told me. You can’t trust anyone in this place!’

  Doc sent a nervous glance in my direction, put the shisha down, and lit a Rothmans with fingers that were surprisingly shaky. She leaned over towards me. ‘Darling,’ she said, almost in a whisper, ‘the walls have ears. When Ronnie died I told them the same thing — that there’s something going on here. Something big. That there were people following us and watching us. You know what they said? They said I was nuts — paranoid delusions caused by the trauma of Ronnie’s death. Sent me to a loony-bin and sort of ironed my head out. Now I just keep my mouth shut and try to think rationally. You really do go round the bend if you start thinking about all that. You can read anything into an
ything, but it’s all bunk in the end. Julian’s dead. He’s not coming back. You saw him at the pyramids. His body might have been misplaced but it will turn up.’

  I looked at Doc in surprise. Sometimes she’d come out with this sort of stuff before, and I had the impression of a quick and intelligent mind constrained by fears of wandering into the fearful terra incognita of the irrational. I sympathised with her more profoundly than she would ever know.

  ‘OK, Doc,’ I said, ‘I know you’ll say it’s crazy, but I can’t help thinking about what that hunchback said. That he saw Julian after he was supposed to be dead.’

  ‘Darling, no one rises from the dead except Jesus Christ, and whatever else Julian may have been he was not Jesus Christ. You saw his corpse at the pyramids. Look, I’ll get on to the Consulate tomorrow, they might know something about it. Don’t worry, Jamie. I’m certain there’s no big mystery. A body can’t just vanish. It’s some kind of mistake and everything will be explained.’

  ‘Right.’

  Doc sat in silence for a few moments, composing herself. The waiter came and she ordered coffee. I turned back to the stars. ‘You know Sirius?’ I asked after a while.

  Doc glanced up. ‘Certainly. It’s in Canis Major,’ she said. ‘The brightest star in the sky.’

  ‘Did you know it’s a binary star?’

  ‘Of course, darling. It’s encircled by Sirius B, a white dwarf so dense that it gives out hardly any light. Its helium and light hydrogen has burned up and the remaining material is so tightly packed that a spoonful of the stuff would weigh tons.’

  ‘Did you know that the ancient Egyptians based their calendar on the heliacal rising of Sirius? They believed it was the home of departed souls. It was immensely important to them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one knows for certain, but there are strong traditions about Sirius in many ancient civilisations. The Dogon of Mali believe that the starting point of civilisation is the star that revolves around Sirius — the smallest and heaviest of all stars.’

  ‘Who told them?’

  ‘No one — at least not recently. The tradition was discovered by two anthropologists, Griaule and Dieterlen, in the 1930s, and the Dogon shamans claimed it dated back to the remotest antiquity. Apparently they also knew that the star revolved around Sirius with an elliptical orbit, once every fifty years.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Jamie. How could they possibly have known that in the remotest antiquity?’

  ‘Right. It wasn’t known in the West until a century ago, and wasn’t even photographed until the 1970s. Some say the Dogon are descendants of Egyptians who fled from their country during the Arab invasion of AD 640. Their ancestors might have brought advanced knowledge with them. In 1993, I found a stela at Madinat Habu dated to the 18th Dynasty, that bore an inscription of the hieroglyph for Sirius, on an engraving of a circle enclosed by an ellipse. The ellipse was portrayed by dots, and there were exactly fifty of them. Was it a coincidence? Or did the ancient Egyptians actually know about the white dwarf Sirius B?’

  ‘But how could they? Telescopes weren’t invented till Galileo tottered along in the 1500s.’

  ‘Yes, but perhaps their civilisation was descended from a previous one that did have telescopes.’

  Doc shrugged. She knew my hobby-horse only too well. ‘Well, I hope they were right about one thing,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That Sirius is the home of departed souls. If so, then Julian and Ronnie are up there laughing at us right now.’ Doc smiled at the thought and swallowed her coffee.

  ‘Come to the flat, Jamie,’ she said. ‘I can’t see why you want to stay in that awful Shepheard’s anyway.’

  ‘I will, Doc, I promise. But not tonight.’

  11

  In the morning I took a taxi back to Khan al-Khalili to hunt for Nikolai Kolpos. By the time I arrived in the bazaars it was ten o’clock and the warren of alleys was a surge of movement. I forced my way through the crowds jammed around bakers’ stalls and fruit stalls, stalls piled with shoes and second-hand clothes. The address Julian had written on the back of the photocopy — The Osiris Arcade — was tucked into a side-street, entered through a moresco arch and paved with stone flags. The store was draped with a gay-coloured awning and festooned with gaudy goods — gold-lame pouffes, stuffed camels, onyx scarabs, jade Nefertiti busts, bronze palm-trees, brass coffee-pots with Islamic inscriptions, miniature pyramids. I pushed open the glass door and a bell rang shrilly. At once a woven drapery behind the counter was thrust aside and a fat man in a generously cut grey suit walked out. I recognised him easily from Doc’s description — a loop of shaved hair circled his tanned pate and his cheeks were as plump as a cherub’s. Thick glasses sat on the end of his nose, and the small black eyes behind them shifted constantly.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he asked, with an oily show of helpfulness which was palpably false.

  ‘Aren’t you Nikolai Kolpos?’ I enquired.

  His face clouded over for an instant, but the change of expression was so rapid that I doubted that I’d actually seen it. ‘I am, yes,’ he said. He opened his mouth in what was evidently meant to be an engaging smile, showing dazzlingly white teeth. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I’m Omar Ross, a friend of Dr Cranwell’s.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Julian Cranwell?’

  ‘Sorry, never heard of him.’

  ‘My friend Evelyn Barrington assures me you have.’

  ‘I don’t know her either. You’ve got the wrong person. I’ve no idea what you want, but if you’ll excuse me I’ve got work to do.’

  Kolpos had dropped the pretence of friendliness now. He was sidling very cautiously away from me, with fear showing unmistakably in his shifty eyes, fumbling for something hidden by the counter. It’s hard to be sure now, looking back, but I’m almost certain that a split second before it happened, I felt cold fingers probing under my skull and clutching the grey matter itself. There was a lash of pain and I had a clear image of a steel blade slicing down towards me. I leapt aside frantically only an instant before Kolpos brought the real meat cleaver out and down, slicing into the wood, splintering it in several places. The movement was so fast I had the impression he’d practised it. I put a choking armlock on the thick neck, caught the hand and twisted it down across the counter, smashing the knuckles against the edge until Kolpos screeched and dropped the blade. ‘Elena, Elena,’ he choked.

  Almost at once the tapestry at the back of the shop was flung open and a slim girl stepped into the room. She moved uncertainly, stretching out with her feet, feeling for the solidness of the floor to maintain her balance, never taking her eyes off me. Her arms were fully extended towards me and in her hands, police-fashion, she held a small black .38 calibre pistol whose muzzle wavered slightly as she pointed it at my chest. Her eyes blazed: ‘Leave him alone,’ she shouted, ‘or I’ll kill you.’

  I released Kolpos. The man rubbed his neck, then his wrist. ‘You hurt me’, he said indignantly, panting with exertion. ‘You son-of-a-bitch, I’ll have your prick flayed off over a slow fire.’

  ‘Nice welcome,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want?’ the girl demanded, still holding up the pistol.

  ‘Look, there’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said, turning to face her fully.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said.

  ‘Julian Cranwell was my friend. He was found dead two days ago at the pyramids. He left your name and address for me on a paper at his flat.’

  ‘Who are you?’ the girl demanded again, still pointing the pistol at me.

  ‘I’m Omar James Ross.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  I opened the flap pocket of my bush-shirt carefully and held up my passport. Kolpos took it and flipped through the pages doubtfully. ‘Distinguishing marks,’ he read out, ‘pierced upper lobe of right ear.’ He looked at my earring with a flash of recognition.

  ‘Ah, the fidwa,’ he said, ‘Yes, I remember
Julian saying you were half Hawazim.’ He nodded at the girl. ‘He’s clean.’

  Hesitantly, still watching me like a hawk, she lowered the pistol.

  ‘Pity you didn’t think of that before you almost scalped me,’ I said, wondering if Kolpos had ever heard of the word ‘apology’.

  He grinned suddenly, showing his teeth. ‘We’ve been a bit on edge since Julian died.’

  ‘A bit on edge! What would you have done if I hadn’t dodged in time?’

  Kolpos shrugged. ‘There are casualties in every war.’

  ‘That’s wonderful! What the hell are you so frightened of?’

  He lost his false smile. ‘Look, Ross. Julian Cranwell was murdered two days ago. I don’t want myself or Elena to be next on the list, OK?’

  ‘The police said Julian’s death was caused by a heart attack.’ Kolpos scoffed. ‘A heart attack! If you believe that, Ross, you’re a bigger fool than you look.’

  ‘Maybe. But I saw his body. There were no marks on him.’

  ‘Hah! There are more ways than one to skin a cat.’

  ‘Right. But I came from London to find Julian, and now I want to know what’s going on.’

  Kolpos glanced at Elena. ‘Shut up shop,’ he told her, ‘I think perhaps we owe Mr Ross a cup of coffee and an explanation.’

  The apartment behind the shop was extensive, but most of the space was taken up with junk. There were crates and cans and cartons piled everywhere, piles of old books and bric-a-brac, imitation Bedouin coffee-pots, beads, Nubian swords, Beja daggers, brass models of the pyramids, brass lamp-stands, tea trays, kettles, desert fossils, bits of ancient saddlery. Kolpos led me into a parlour with a sash-window looking on to the street, beside which an ornate pendulum clock tocked away noisily on the wall. Behind the parlour was a door opening into a kitchenette and another into a small study with a writing desk and a telephone. He removed a pile of newspapers from an armchair and slapped off the dust, inviting me to sit down. Elena knelt and rubbed ointment into his bruised hand where I’d bashed it against the counter, making small sucking noises. I glimpsed the nape of a long neck, a delicate ear with a golden stud, and caught a faint whiff of sandalwood. Then she busied herself in the kitchen with coffee. I sat and studied a photo on the mantelpiece of a middle-aged woman wearing a colourful Arab dress and a floral headcloth. ‘My wife,’ Kolpos said, catching my glance. ‘I am Greek - Alexandria Greek, that is — but my wife was Egyptian — a Catholic. She died in the. influenza epidemic five years ago. There was nothing they could do. I said, how is it possible in these days of space flight and computers that people are still dying of influenza? They said it was a new type, Chinese ‘flu, that they’d never seen before. Magda came back one day with a high fever, I put her to bed and within forty-eight hours she was dead. My sons are both in America, big businessmen. Elena’s been good to me, though - like a daughter. Better than a daughter. I don’t think I could have got over Magda’s death without her.’