The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘Simple fantasies, perhaps?’

  ‘Perhaps. But this text was written in the seventh century, an era in which people still fought with swords and spears and believed the earth was flat. Fantasies are based on current know-ledge and suffer its limitations. A man who knows a horse might fantasise about a flying horse, and one who knows a boat might imagine a celestial boat, but a man who believes the stars are tiny lights in the sky is not likely to fantasise about space-travel. How could men of the early Christian era even imagine about lasers, plastics, radio and TV — technology inconceivable before the development of modern physics?’

  ‘But the artefacts were never found, of course.’

  ‘They’ve never come to light, no. Whether or not they were found is a different question. In the ninth century al-Mamun, the Governor of Egypt, succeeded in breaking into the pyramid. He appears to have kept very quiet about what he discovered there, if anything. Of course it’s possible he found nothing — either that there wasn’t and never had been anything to find, or that somebody had got there before him. But when you think that Carter and Carnarvon may have kept quiet about something they found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, it seems at least possible that the same thing happened when al-Mamun unsealed the Great Pyramid, a thousand years earlier.’

  ‘Perhaps. But in both cases, I’d say the evidence was inconclusive. Is your theory of ancient Egyptian origins based simply on these unsubstantiated facts?’

  I paused again. Rabjohn’s manner was subtly penetrating, almost hypnotic. It made you want to tell the precise truth. Not really,’ I said. ‘I suppose I already had this feeling before I started — that there was something about the conventional theories that just wasn’t right.’

  ‘Aha! Intuition! I thought so!’

  ‘I’ve always rejected the idea of intuition, if you mean any more than an ability to add up facts and see where they lead.’

  ‘Really? Are you certain, Jamie? Why was it, then, that you were attracted to someone like Julian, a naturally intuitive man? Isn’t it possible that you have spent your life trying to conceal something from yourself?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I see,’ Rabjohn said. ‘Yet years ago your father told me a most interesting story. He said that he’d been carrying you across the desert on his camel, when in a certain place you began to yell and screech, hysterical with fear. “Don’t go, Daddy! Bad! Bad! Jinns! firms!” you shouted. Calvin said that you’d been so terrified that he’d turned back and made a long detour just to calm you down. A week later, when a stray camel passed the same spot, its leg was blown off by an unexploded World War II mine!’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I said, but I knew it was a lie. This and other childhood memories were things I’d deliberately shut out of my life as a civilised Englishman, things I’d bottled up and imprisoned in the dark side of my psyche. A cold shiver suddenly ran down my spine. Rabjohn was watching me intently, and I had the sudden frightening hallucination that he knew more about me than I knew myself. ‘I was just a child,’ I added lamely.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he went on, unrelenting, ‘Elena tells me you had a “feeling” about Nikolai’s death, only two days ago.’

  How had he known that, I wondered? Then I remembered mentioning it to Elena on the way here. Earlier, she and Rabjohn had talked alone for half an hour or so when he’d escorted her to her room. I took off my glasses and rubbed them on my cuff, looking at him in silence, unable and unwilling to make myself foolish by denying any more. I drew a deep breath and replaced my glasses. ‘What exactly are you driving at, Robert?’ I asked.

  He put his Cognac glass down and looked back at me mildly. His eyes had lost their piercing quality. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be impertinent. It’s just that I think you may be hiding your light under a bushel.’

  With that, he wished me good night, went out, and closed the door.

  25

  After he’d gone, I showered, lathering and scrubbing myself, trying to scour away the sudden bitter-sweet memories of my childhood he’d induced so vividly. What the hell had he meant with that parting shot, ‘hiding my light under a bushel?’ Deep down, though, I suppose I knew, and didn’t want to admit it. I had had a feeling about Nikolai all right, and I’d sensed what was going to happen a couple of seconds before it had occurred. I couldn’t kid myself; those two seconds had saved my life. And this wasn’t the first time. The same thing had happened when Kolpos had tried to carve me up: I’d had a clear image of the blade a split second before he’d whipped it out. I had lied to Rabjohn, of course. I knew the story he had told about me and my father was true — it was still talked of in hushed voices by the Hawazim today. If I was absolutely honest with myself, I’d admit that things like this had been happening to me since I was a kid, only I’d always tried to pretend to myself there was a logical explanation.

  I forced myself to stop thinking about it. Like Doc had said, you could go wacko playing these mind-games. I towelled myself as energetically as I dared, carefully dabbing at the bruises on my body and the lacerations on my cheeks, which were still painful but beginning to heal. Then I went to examine some bookshelves I’d spotted in the corner of the room. Almost all of the books were on Bedouin life, I noticed. Some were classics: Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, the first folio edition, and Burckhardt’s two-volume Notes on Bedouins & Wahhabys, dated 1830. There was Tregenza’s Red Sea Hills, Murray’s Sons of Ishmael, and even my father’s book, Ghosts of the Desert — The Hawazim of Egypt. I flipped open the title page, and read in Dad’s crabbed handwriting ‘To Robert, The Eternal Amateur, ICharja 1968’. It brought an unexpected lump to my throat, this reminiscence of my father, on top of Rabjohn’s stories. As a boy I remember him as vibrant, full of life, with his big black beard and sparkling blue eyes. His nickname, Abu Sibaahi — the ‘Father of the Desert Rat’ — was a great tribute. The Hawazim revered the Desert Rat — Jaculus orientalis — which never drank water for its entire life, and whose ability to survive in the most hostile of conditions was proverbial. My father was a survivor, but I suppose there’d always been a black hole at the centre of his being, a black hole that Maryam filled. Anyway, his will to survive had certainly faded away after she went. It was as if the colours had all been washed out of him — turned him almost literally grey. He became nearly a stranger to me in England. He simply eked out the rest of his existence waiting — waiting for her to return, I think, because he would never use the word ‘dead’ in relation to Maryam, only ‘disappeared’.

  I climbed in bed and switched out the light. I couldn’t sleep. My ribs and my head were still aching, and I thought about taking a painkiller, then rejected the idea. The blinds were drawn back, and bars of yellow light penetrated the darkness from the security-lamps outside. I lay there for an hour before the ache began to subside. I was just drifting downhill into slumber, when there was a soft knock at the door. I leapt out of bed and opened it cautiously. It was Elena. She was wearing plain but loosely cut pyjamas, and her hair, caught in a jet of light from the outside lamps, made a sheeny cascade down her back. Her eyes and mouth were little thickets of shadow against the soft lamplit ochre of her face. For a moment I was stunned by the vision, unable to summon the will to move.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, almost in a whisper, ‘were you asleep?’

  The words broke the spell and I opened the door wide. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Neither could I.’

  I had a sudden impulse to take her head in both hands, run my fingers through that beautiful hair, and kiss her passionately. ‘Come in,’ I said. As she entered her hair brushed my shoulder. I caught the faint scent of sandalwood. ‘Would you like to sit on the balcony?’ I asked.

  ‘No, let’s sit inside,’ she said.

  We sat down side by side on the bed and when I switched on the side-light, I noticed she was holding a book in her lap, a dog-eared notebook with a black all-weather cover. ‘I’m sorry for intruding,
Jamie,’ she said, ‘but I had to give you this.’ She handed me the book.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Julian’s journal for the last three months. He gave it to Nikolai for safekeeping when he thought he was in danger. Nikolai couldn’t read it because it’s written in cipher.’

  I took the notebook and flicked through it. The title page read ‘Dr Julian Cranwell, Diary Beginning 1st January’.

  ‘So Nikolai did try to read it then?’ I asked, more harshly than I’d meant to.

  ‘Look, Jamie, you’ve got Nikolai wrong. He wasn’t such a bad guy really. It wasn’t the origin of the ushabtis that concerned him so much as what had happened to Julian. He thought the diary might shed some light on that.’

  ‘OK, I’ll take your word for it. Why have you brought it to me — why didn’t you give it to Rabjohn?’

  ‘Nikolai’s instructions were very clear. If anything happened to him, the ushabti was for Robert and the diary was for you. I wasn’t even to tell Robert about it until you’d seen it.’

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’ I asked.

  ‘Nikolai trusted him. Julian did too. Nikolai didn’t say that I wasn’t to reveal the existence of the diary, only that you must have it first. Robert’s the only real friend we’ve got, Jamie. He’s been very good to me since I’ve been here. Of course, he’s very intense — absorbed — but I think that comes from being alone for so many years. He’s very cerebral, always got something ticking away in his mind, always got his head in the clouds. But I feel he’s a good guy, don’t you?’

  I shrugged, and held Julian’s diary under the pale light from the bedside lamp. ‘When did Julian first appear with the ushabtis?’ I asked.

  ‘It was, let’s see...around the beginning of February.’

  ‘OK, so let’s start about 20th January.’

  ‘Can you read Julian’s cipher?’

  ‘Yes, he taught me years ago, so I could read the nasty things he wrote about me when he was in a bad mood, he said. Said it was a very salutary lesson to be able to see ourselves as others see us. It’s a long time ago, of course, but I think I can do it —if I remember rightly, it wasn’t exactly the Rosetta Stone.’

  I turned to the page for 20th January and examined the rows of figures in Julian’s erratic copperplate. The cipher would have presented no problem to a specialist. Julian’s zeros represented ‘e’s and the sequence continued from there, with 1 for ‘f’, 2 for ‘g’ and so on. It seemed an incredibly painstaking way of writing, and hardly worth the bother for the few things Julian had to hide. Or so I’d thought before.

  I took my own notebook and a pencil from the bedside table, and began to work through the ciphers while Elena watched, sitting on the pillow at the bed-head, her long legs drawn up to her chin, her small feet protruding from under the cuffs of her pyjamas. It took twenty minutes to decipher the entry for 20th January:

  20th January

  Kharja villages. Main centre geographically for Zerzura legends.

  Suwayri wald ‘Ali, headman Dimashq village tells me legend that 5 miles due west of Buwayr necropolis is limestone saddle with small chapel buried in sand. Under floor of chapel is buried a box containing book and looking-glass. Book describes route to Zerzura, and glass shows what place looks like. Asked Suwayri if he’d ever dug for it. Said yes, but nothing found. Night on Suwayri’s floor — fleas terrible.

  ‘Nothing much there,’ I told Elena, holding out the deciphered page for her to read, ‘except that he’d identified the Kharja area as a possible starting point for the Zerzura quest. Shall I go on?’

  ‘It looks hard work.’

  ‘No, but it’s tedious and long. If you have the patience to wait, I’ll continue.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’d rather be here than on my own, anyway.’

  Now I’d got in the swing of it, the second page went more smoothly. I finished it in fifteen minutes:

  21st January

  AM mention W to Suwayr. Goes silent. Then says Ws headman in ‘33, Hilmi wald Falih is still alive — old man, loony. Was shut away for a time but let out some years ago. Living in Kwayt village. I drove there arrived PM. Found Hilmi after some trouble. Crazy all right. Hardly articulate. Nothing about W but told me to ask at al-Maqs village, Mukhtar wald Salim.

  I read the entry through with mounting excitement. ‘W’ was Orde Wingate, I was certain. Against all odds, Julian had run to ground Wingate’s headman on the 1933 expedition, and now we had a name for him: Hilmi wald Falih, almost certainly a Hazmi, I thought. All Wingate’s men would have been Hawazim; no other Bedouin knew the desert like them. And then Mukhtar wald Salim. An unbelievable coincidence that I certainly hadn’t anticipated. Julian had really been on the trail of something here, and he knew it. I felt a sudden resurgence of admiration for him. I handed the paper to Elena. ‘Who’s W?’ she asked.

  ‘Orde Wingate,’ I said.

  She looked at me inquisitively.

  ‘Wingate led an expedition into the Western Desert in 1933 in search of Zerzura,’ I explained, ‘and of the fifteen Bedouin with him, only this Hilmi ever came back, and he’d gone completely off his chump. No one ever discovered what happened out there.’

  ‘Zerzura seems to be poison,’ she said, but I’d already started on the next entry. This time I worked through it in less than five minutes, my pencil flashing across the page with excitement. The entry was extremely short:

  22nd January

  Al-Maqs village AM. Headman Mukhtar wald Salim. Bought 2 x ushabtis. Authenticity uncertain. Missing Journal. Account of anachronae.

  ‘Eureka!’ I said. ‘That’s it! That’s where Julian found the ushabtis. Al-Maqs village in Kharja oasis!’

  Elena read the deciphered entry quickly. ‘But what’s this?’ she asked, ‘ “Missing journal” and “anachronae”. What on earth does that mean?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ I said, ‘but Mukhtar wald Salim might.’

  26

  I awoke on the floor to find Elena sleeping peacefully in my bed. She lay curled up protectively with her head in the crook of her elbow, and her raven hair thrown wildly across the pillow. We’d talked till it was almost light and I’d finally agreed to tell Rabjohn about Julian’s diary. She’d simply fallen asleep, exhausted, leaving me to doss down on Rabjohn’s priceless Qashgai carpet. I left her sleeping and went downstairs to the kitchen where I found Rabjohn already up, drinking coffee and feeding a golden canary in an antique-looking cage. ‘Morning,’ he said.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know you had a canary.’

  ‘Yes. I call him “Carter” after Howard.’

  ‘You never knew him?’

  ‘No. Before my time. You know the story of his canary don’t you? He brought it back with him from England on his last season. You know they were actually going to give up looking for Tutankhamen; this was to be the final effort. Anyway, he found Tut’s tomb that season and the men said the canary had brought him luck. That’s why they named it the Tomb of the Bird. Then, the day they opened the tomb, a cobra sneaked into the bird’s cage and killed it. Then they said it was revenge for having disturbed the peace of the king.’

  ‘I’ve heard the story.’

  ‘The significance, of course, is that the cobra was an emblem of kingship in pharaonic Egypt, representing both the fecundity of the sun as well as its destructive aspect. Actually, the cobra was a manifestation of the Eye of Ra.’

  ‘Lux in tenebris,’ I said suddenly, ‘light in the darkness. Wasn’t that what the Eye of Ra was supposed to represent?’

  ‘In one of its aspects, yes.’

  Rabjohn sat down at the pine table and I joined him. He poured coffee — this morning ground coffee in large cups — and served boiled eggs, cheese, butter, jam and fresh bread. A real Egyptian breakfast, I thought.

  As I rolled and peeled an egg, I noticed that my computer-enlarged photocopy of Carter and Carnarvon at the Valley of the Kings in 1923 was spread out on the brea
kfast table next to the original photocopy Julian had left me. Rabjohn had been looking at them. ‘Interesting, eh?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘comparing their expressions.’

  ‘You know, when I first saw you I thought for a minute you were the third guy visible in the enlargement, the one holding the newspaper.’

  Rabjohn squinted at the picture and laughed. ‘I might be ancient, Jamie,’ he said, ‘but I’m not Methuselah.’

  ‘Of course — it was just a passing impression. I must have retained a subliminal memory of you from the time I saw you in the oases.’

  ‘I tell you who this picture does look like.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A slightly younger Aurel Karlman.’

  Now it was my turn to scrutinise the picture. He was right, there was something of Karlman in the austere features. ‘It does look a bit like him,’ I said, ‘but it couldn’t be, could it? This is clearly an old man, and in 1923 Karlman would have been a teenager.’

  He was about to answer when the door opened and Elena entered looking misty-eyed, dishevelled and beautiful. She sat down and Rabjohn poured her coffee.

  ‘Sorry if I disturbed you last night, Jamie,’ she said.

  Rabjohn looked up in surprise but refrained politely from asking what she meant. We ate and drank in silence for a while, then he said, ‘I think we have to decide on the next step. We must assume the police suspect Nikolai was murdered. They’ll also find out you visited him the same night, Jamie. They’re certainly going to want to talk to Elena too.’

  ‘Isn’t it better just to talk to them?’ Elena said. ‘I mean, we haven’t actually done anything. Running away will make it look worse.’

  ‘You know how the Mukhabaraat are,’ Rabjohn said. ‘They maim and torture first and ask questions later.’