The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘That was great!’ Doc said, clapping.

  The waiter brought two more beers and laid them on the table. I paid and we drank as the applause died down.

  ‘Say what you like,’ Doc said, ‘you don’t see dancers as good as that every day. They’re trained to it from being little kids.’

  ‘It was great,’ I admitted, sipping my beer, watching her expression as she smoked. That small, wistful smile still hovered around her lips — a kind of smugness, I thought, as if she was waiting for me to pump her.

  ‘Out with it, Doc,’ I said at last. ‘What else did you find?’

  ‘There’s stuff on an Eye of Ra Society,’ she said.

  I turned my attention on her like a headlight beam. ‘As in “Look out for the Eye of Ra”, Professor Spooky Karlman’s famous parting words?’

  ‘Bang on. Of course, it might be nothing. At first glance it looks like a bunch of loony-toons who believe they’re descended from the ancient pharaohs. Address in central Cairo. Run by a lady called “Montuhotep XV” who styles herself “High Priestess of the Horus Throne of the Great House”. She claims to rule in direct line of descent from the goddess Isis — or Austet — who sat on the same throne something like ten thousand years ago.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘At least it coincides with my theory that Isis was a real person.’

  ‘You’re as cranky as she is, darling.’

  ‘Doc, I’m not the first to come up with the idea. You ever heard of W. B. Emery? Or Flinders Petrie, the Father of Modern Egyptology?’

  ‘Jamie, am I a complete cretin?’

  ‘Well, both of them reckoned that the Osiris myths were much older than was generally thought, and based on real events. Their theory was that in very early times Egypt was invaded by a warrior race, the Patu, who used the falcon as their totem, and who set themselves up as an aristocracy ruled by Divine Kings — the Dynastic Pharaohs. They thought the myths describing the conflict between the Osiris—Isis—Horus family, and their enemy Set, were garbled accounts of the real struggle between the Patu and the indigenes, for whom Set was the totem.’

  ‘Set: the god of evil.’

  ‘Yes, he was depicted with the head of some unidentifiable beast, and was said to stalk the Western Desert, brewing up sand-storms and typhoons. That’s one of the reasons the ancient Egyptians were shit-scared of the desert. But Emery and Petrie thought Set’s evil persona was a later development. After the invaders had established the supremacy of the Osiris cult, Set was demonised and pushed out into no-man’s land. Did Julian’s notes explain the Society’s beliefs?’

  ‘No, only that it claims to be dedicated to all the Egyptians who fled from their country during the Muslim invasions in A D640 and who preserved the ancient traditions in various parts of Africa.’

  ‘Like the Dogon in Mali.’

  ‘Like the Dogon, yes, but also the Bambara of Central Africa, the Beja of the Sudan, the Tutsi of Burundi, the Wolof in Senegal, and a whole stack of others. No mention of where the society gets its funding from, but not from the government or any Islamic Fundamentalist powers, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Why would Julian be interested in such a bunch of screwballs, anyway?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Actually there’s masses of fascinating stuff in those files. The only problem is that I can’t see any underlying theme. It’s as if Julian was just squirrelling material on any topic that happened to take his fancy at the time.’

  ‘What was the second thing?’

  ‘The Zerzura Club. Didn’t Karlman say something about that too?’

  ‘Yes, he said Wingate was “one of those damned Zerzura Club people”.’

  ‘The odd thing is that Wingate’s name isn’t on the membership list in Julian’s file. The Zerzura Club was founded in 1930 by a Major Bagnold who wrote a deadly tedious book on sand-dunes that nobody ever read. Members were mostly well-to-do peacetime army officers — all stiff upper lip and state-of-the-art technology. There’s people with names like Battenberg and Carruthers, a Hungarian adventurer-playboy called Count Ladislaus de Almasy, but no Orde Wingate. From the start the club was shrouded in secrecy, almost as if it had some sort of religious purpose. They trolled about the desert for most of the thirties looking for Zerzura.’

  ‘Any members still alive?’

  ‘There is one ex-member still holed up in Cairo, name of Dansey-Smith — Colonel Dansey-Smith. Lives on Roda island. Now, it might be worth having a talk with him about Orde Wingate. Ought to talk to Mrs Montuhotep, too.’

  ‘Rather you than me, Doc. I had a bellyful with Karlman and Kolpos.’

  We finished our drinks. ‘Want another?’ I asked Doc.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘That’s enough, Jamie. Let’s go home.’

  We walked along the alleys behind 26th July Street to where Doc had parked the car, past the windows of cube-shaped shops offering glimpses into a score of tiny worlds — an ancient barber in spectacles leering over his lathered customer with a cut-throat razor, two boys sitting cross-legged at sewing-machines, running up trousers, a butcher slicing cuts from a hank of hanging meat, a fat baker in an apron drawing brown loaves from an oven on a long spatula. I put my arm round Doc. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, smirking. ‘Ought to do it more often.’

  ‘Doc,’ I said, ‘you’re hiding something. What is it?’

  ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ she said.

  We found the 504 parked in a side-street, and Doc unlocked the doors. We got in, and Doc started the engine, nursing the car into the maelstrom of traffic on 26th July Street.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s the present?’

  She beamed. ‘That photocopy you wanted enlarging,’ she said, ‘the one of Carter and Carnarvon in the Valley of the Kings in 1923. I got it scanned. There’s a brown envelope on the seat behind you. Have a look. I think you’ll find it interesting.’

  I bent over the seat gingerly, with a hand on my aching ribs, picked up the envelope, and extracted a digitalised 18x12 computer-printout.

  The scanner had certainly done a brilliant job. Carter and Carnarvon had been enlarged out of the picture and the newspaper Carnarvon was pointing to now filled the frame. It was the United American Press, dated February 16th, 1923 — the day Tutankhamen’s burial-chamber had been opened. The headline was blurred but readable. It ran: ‘Treasures of Tut: Important papyrus and map also discovered.’ And in smaller type beneath, ‘An account of Akhnaton, the mystery pharaoh — secrets of his tomb revealed’.

  ‘Doc, you’re a pleasure to work with,’ I said.

  ‘I think one champagne dinner at the Marriott is in order!’ she replied, grinning with satisfaction. ‘The next question is, where did that newspaper get its information? According to the official records, no such papyrus or map was ever found.’

  19

  It was almost sunset. From Doc’s balcony, I could just make out the dark angles of the police station where Hammoudi had interrogated me, on the waterfront at Bulaq. It gave me a sudden pang of uneasiness to think that I was still in sight of the Mukhabaraat. I smoked my pipe and watched fly-boats being made fast to their moorings upriver amid flocks of seagulls spiralling along the wharfs. Suddenly, from nowhere it seemed, the dark shape of a falcon plunged among them like a black stone, banking and circling with magnificent grace. The seagulls flickered and flapped away frantically, the falcon pursuing now one, now another, weaving across the red and purple city sky until the whole wheeling circus was out of sight. It reminded me that to the ancient Egyptians the falcon was an embodiment of the sun-god Ra, whom they depicted as a falcon or a man with a falcon’s head, wearing the sacred sun-disc. Wherever you looked in ancient Egyptian mysteries, Ra was always there lurking in the shadows. I thought of the magnificent facade of the Ramses II temple at Abu Simbel, the one that UNESCO had lifted out of the bed of Lake Nasser and rebuilt higher up the bank. Four seated colossi of Ramses II, carved out of red sandstone, grace the eastern face, two on each s
ide of the entrance. But behind them in a niche, directly over the door, stands the image of Ra, half man, half hawk, carrying the sacred sun-disc on his head. The sinister eminence of Ra behind the pharaoh was captured perfectly by David Roberts in his painting of 1886. Ra worship was the most powerful of ancient Egyptian cults, and in Old Kingdom times pharaohs were known as ‘The Sons of Ra’. The Ra priesthood was traditionally the dominant element in the Egyptian state, and there is more than a hint that it was the priesthood which influenced the king rather than vice-versa. Since Ra had created himself out of the primeval dark-ness, his Eye was considered all-seeing, omniscient, and thus the symbol of both knowledge and fertility. In his guise as the sun, Ra crossed the heavens in his majestic sky-barque each day, passing into the underworld at sunset, where he spent the shadow hours of the night in battle with dark forces — Doc’s Ahriman — emerging victorious each day at sunrise. In one version of the myths, Ra’s Eye was the sun itself — a burning, fiery Eye, capable of wreaking terrible revenge.

  Doc came out of the shower shaking a towel, and plonked herself down on a chair opposite. She nodded in approval as I poured her a Scotch. ‘Ah, my reward,’ she said, holding it up to the last of the light.

  ‘And well you deserve it,’ I said. ‘But let’s face it, Doc. That newspaper report could be hokey. We know Carnarvon gave the story to The Times — maybe the others just made it up. There was a lot of hoax journalism in those days. Still is.’

  ‘You’re right. But say it wasn’t. Say the story was leaked and then someone sat on it.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like Howard Carter.’ She picked up both the enlargement and Julian’s photocopy from the table and waved it in front of me. ‘Look at the faces. Carnarvon seems happy about the headline, Carter truly pissed off. Perhaps Carnarvon leaked the story against Carter’s wishes, and Carter later denied it, just like he denied finding the curse tablet. Two months later Carnarvon snuffs it, and there’s no one to contradict Carter any more.’

  ‘That’s right, he always made a point of denying there were any papyri in the tomb, and a lot of Egyptologists found it surprising. People make a big hoo-hah over epigraphy, but the Egyptians actually wrote ninety per cent of their stuff on papyrus with pen and ink. It seems astonishing they left no historical records in a pharaoh’s grave.’

  Doc put the photocopy down under the outside lamp, and as my eyes fell on it I suddenly made out the features of the third figure, who I now realised was actually holding the newspaper Carter and Carnarvon had been looking at. ‘Who’s that?’ I said, pointing.

  Doc put her glass down and bent over the picture. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I’d forgotten our Third Man.’

  She slipped her magnifying glass out of her pocket and examined the figure closely. ‘Interesting,’ she said, ‘want to have a look?’

  The body of the ‘Third Man’ was obscured by the newspaper he was holding, and the face was slightly out of focus, but visible. It was hard to say with such poor definition, but it looked like the face of an old man between sixty-five and seventy-five, a rather bland, expressionless face — clean-shaven, which was unusual in that era — with close-cropped hair and rather penetrating eyes. At least that’s what I read into it — perhaps half of it was merely suggested by the shadows. ‘Well, who is it?’ I asked Doc again.

  She made an exaggerated Latin shrug. ‘Maybe a minion, Mace or Carver? Weren’t those the names of Carter’s assistants?’

  I thought about it for a minute. ‘I’m sure Mace and Carver were youngish men,’ I said. ‘Carnarvon was in his late fifties when he died, a few weeks after this photo was taken, and Carter must have been...what? About fifty? But to me this guy looks older than both of them. Of course it might be just the light...’

  Suddenly the telephone trilled.

  ‘Let it ring,’ Doc said.

  I shifted uneasily. ‘Might be important,’ I said.

  ‘Might be Hammoudi.’

  ‘Surely he couldn’t have traced me that fast!’

  The phone trilled insistently again. ‘Oh, my giddy aunts!’ Doc said. She straightened her dressing-gown with crisp movements, and stalked into the sitting-room. In a second she was back. ‘For you,’ she said, ‘Nikolai Kolpos.’

  Kolpos’s voice sounded strained: ‘Is that you, Ross?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Look, you remember our little conversation the other day?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, I’ve thought it over. Perhaps I wasn’t quite straight with you. Come over tonight — alone, you understand — at ten, and I’ll...I’ll show you what you wanted to see. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I think so, but isn’t it a bit late for a meeting? Won’t tomorrow do?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ross,’ his voice sounded gravelly now. ‘It’s tonight or nothing. Ten o’clock on the dot. Will you be there?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

  ‘Alone, Ross. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

  Abruptly, Kolpos rang off.

  20

  I had a bad feeling about it from the beginning. I hadn’t liked the strain in Kolpos’s voice or the late hour of the meeting. I think that’s why I wouldn’t let Doc persuade me to take her with me that night, why nothing she said would shift my determination to do it by myself. After all, Kolpos had stressed that I should come alone, and I didn’t want to betray that fragile trust. Second, though, I thought Doc had pushed the boat out enough on my behalf and I didn’t want her getting any further into it than she already was.

  We’d ordered a taxi to come to the house and when I climbed in next to the driver, for some reason I was thinking about ancient Egyptian tombs. For the ancient Egyptians, the tomb was a sort of gateway into another universe, a physical and symbolic portrayal of the spiritual journey made by the dead soul. No two tombs are identical, but all are built on a similar model. During the 18th Dynasty, the period of Tutankhamen and Akhnaton, each tomb consisted of an entrance staircase carved into the rock, and a long tunnel cut through to an entrance antechamber. From here a second stairwell led into a hall of pillars in which the sarcophagus was contained. Around the sarcophagus were store-rooms containing artefacts and priceless treasures. The tombs had a twofold purpose — first to defeat the tomb-robbers who preyed on them, and second to symbolise the voyage of the soul towards the bright illumination of Ra with which it must merge. The walls of the burial chamber were painted with brilliant scenes taken from the Book of the Dead which portrayed Ra’s nightly journey through the Underworld and his battles with the evil demons which lurked there. The dead soul would be guided on his journey by angels and spiritual guides such as the jackal-headed Anubis, Lord of Embalming, who was also referred to as ‘Guardian of the Secret’ and ‘Opener of the Ways’. It would congregate with other freshly liberated souls in the West, at the gateway of the sunset, to hitch a ride on Ra’s barque through the corridors of the night, where it would battle demons and evil spirits until it finally arrived at the door of the Judgement Hall, domain of the god Osiris. Here, a list of forty-two mortal sins would be read out, and the dead soul was required to answer guilty or not guilty to each sin. If it answered not guilty to all, Anubis weighed its heart against a feather — the Feather of Truth. If it were found wanting, a terrifying beast, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, would emerge from the shadows and tear the soul limb from limb, thus ending for ever its chances of immortal life. If equilibrium were attained, the god Osiris would gravely motion the soul on to the next stage of transformation into a being of light. The Book of the Dead —actually a kind of navigation-chart for the soul’s voyage through the Afterworld — is more correctly called The Book of Coming Forth By Day.

  This train of thought dogged me all the way across the 26th July Bridge, past the squares and oblongs of light from shops and hotels along 26th July Street, through Opera Square and the ragged remains of Ezbekiyya Gardens, where my f
ather’s old Shepheard’s used to stand before it was burned down in riots in the 1950s. As we halted at the traffic lights, I turned back for a glimpse of the tottering wreck of the Continental, once the grandest hotel in Cairo, where Lord Carnarvon had died of an infected mosquito bite on 5th April 1923. The first inkling that something was amiss came to me when the taxi stopped suddenly in a street near Al-Ahzar. The lighting was poor, the street a play of shadows, the buildings massive eyeless blocks whose dimensions were lost in the darkness. There seemed to be no one about. ‘Why have you stopped?’ I asked the driver, a long-chinned, silent man in a grey gallabiyya, whose front teeth protruded prominently like a rat’s. He looked at me gravely. ‘I have stopped for the Dead,’ he said. It was only then that I saw the procession of hooded figures emerging out of the thick shadows: men in dirty white robes, pacing noiselessly in ragged file as if to the beat of a silent drum. After them came a wheeled carriage, a baroque contraption painted with black flowers and scrolls, whose canopy stood on four ornate wooden pillars and whose wheels creaked painfully. The carriage was being pulled by several of the men, I saw, and was lit dimly by flickering oil lamps in gimbals. As it passed by I realised that the dark object lying beneath the canopy was a coffin, and only then did it dawn on me that I was watching a funeral. ‘Allah yarhamu: God have mercy on him,’ my driver muttered, as we watched the carriage creaking back into the darkness. ‘How do you know it’s a him?’ I asked. The driver glanced at me sneeringly: ‘The coffin was too big for a woman,’ he said.

  We drove on towards Khan al-Khalili, yet the eerie procession had sparked off an uneasiness I couldn’t get rid of. There it was again, the feeling I’d had at the pyramids the night Hammoudi had jumped me, a sense of something glimpsed once long ago, lurking just beyond my consciousness. As we turned into the Khan, the feeling seemed to grow more and more intense, and I looked around instinctively for a way of escape. The alleys were an impenetrable warren around me, trapping me, and the glow from the street-lamps illuminated my driver’s eyes with a square of light. I saw deep, leering, malevolent eyes, like the eyes of Akhnaton on the museum statue. The car halted at a crossroad, and I looked out to see the door of a shop, dimly lit by a lamp. On the door was painted a full-sized effigy of the jackal-headed god Anubis, Lord of the Dead, and the words, ‘Welcome To The Underworld — The Anubis Bazaar’.