The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  He pointed to a second stela beneath, which showed the same Anaqi figure, this time without his weapons and in a relaxed sitting position. The same winged sun-discs filled the sky, but the curious thing here was that rays of sunlight seemed to be emanating not from them, but from the man’s head, upwards.’

  ‘See!’ Mukhtar said, ‘the Shining. The power of the Shining was given to us by the Ancient Ones, but over the generations it has almost disappeared. You may be the last one with the power, Omar!’

  I sighed. ‘Is this what you brought us to see, Uncle?’ I asked.

  ‘No — that’s only part of it. Come on.’

  We came to the centre of the sprawling ruin, a labyrinth of broken masonry and crumbling walls, where six enormous columns, as thick as old oak-trees, sprouted from an expanse of deep sand. Mukhtar leant his rifle against one of them, put down the rope, and began to brush away the sand. ‘Here’s something you won’t remember, Omar,’ he said, ‘only a few of us know about it. Come on, help me clear the sand. Uggh! Should have brought a shovel, too.’

  Elena watched him incredulously, as if convinced she was in the presence of a lunatic. ‘What on earth is he doing?’ she said in English. ‘Has he brought us all the way out here to make sand-castles?’

  ‘Just trust him,’ I said.

  We began to scrape away the sand with our hands; by now the sun was hot, and clearing the sand was unexpectedly hard work. Soon we came to a hard surface, and within half an hour we had uncovered a thick, flat stone, perfectly disc-shaped, about four feet in diameter, capping what looked like a round plinth. In the very centre of the disk an Eye of Ra was sculpted in relief. There were some hieroglyphs carved into the stone beside it, and I leaned over them, brushing the last grains of sand aside. What I read sent a shiver down my spine, and for an instant it came back: Kolpos’s face, distorted with death-agony. The sound of the Mills grenade rolling across the floor.

  ‘What does it say?’ Elena asked.

  ‘It’s from the Hymn to Ra,’ I said. ‘It reads:

  Let the Eye of Ra descend

  That it may slay the evil conspirators.’

  Elena blanched. ‘Isn’t that what was written on Nikolai’s mirror

  the day he was killed?’

  ‘It’s a common enough hymn in ancient Egypt,’ I said off-handedly, turning to Mukhtar and changing the subject. ‘This stone must weigh a ton,’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t intend to lift it with that rope, Uncle.’

  Mukhtar smiled mysteriously. ‘Here’s the real secret,’ he said. He crouched over the capstone and touched the pupil in the Eye of Ra relief with the palm of his hand. Instantly there was a clunk and four cracks appeared in the disc, dividing it into quarter segments. There was another clunk and the segments opened inwards, revealing a deep, dark, humid-smelling aperture. Elena stared into it with wide eyes.

  ‘Good God!’ I said, dropping down to examine the segments, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it! How does it work?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Mukhtar said, ‘they were clever people, the Ancient Ones.’

  ‘Must be some kind of weight and balance system,’ I said, ‘but to stay in working order for so long!’

  ‘What is it?’ Elena asked.

  Mukhtar picked up a pebble and dropped it into the hole. ‘Listen!’ he said. A few seconds later there was the distinctive ‘plink’ of the pebble hitting water.

  ‘A well!’ Elena said.

  ‘Yes, a secret well. But more than that, a kind of hiding-place too.’ He picked up the rope and began to feed it through a stone bracket which had lain hidden under the sand on the rim of the well.

  ‘What now?’ I enquired.

  ‘Now we go down the well,’ he said. ‘I hope you can both use a rope. First you, Omar, then the girl, then me.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Elena said. ‘Are you serious? What’s this about?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Mukhtar said, ‘you’ll find out.’

  Elena looked at me appealingly. ‘We might be walking into a trap,’ she said in English. ‘Once we’re in there, who knows what will happen.’

  I gulped. ‘I trust him,’ I said, ‘he’s my uncle.’

  She drew in a deep breath, ‘OK,’ she said, ‘then I go first.’

  ‘You’d make a good Hazmiyya!’ Mukhtar said, with obvious admiration. ‘But no, let Omar go. You need only descend a man’s height, on the rope, then you’ll find a shelf and a ladder. The ladder takes you down to the height of six men, where there’s another stone shelf.’

  ‘What does he mean, six men?’ Elena enquired.

  ‘It’s the way the Hawazim measure depth,’ I explained. ‘They don’t have metres or yards, so they use the height of a man with his arm fully extended over his head. You can say one man is about three metres, so six men is eighteen metres — roughly fifty feet.’

  ‘Come on!’ Mukhtar urged me, Yallah!’

  I took the rope, tied the end around my waist and poised myself backwards on the lip of the well. Mukhtar handed me the torch and a canteen of water. He took up the strain on the rope, and I paused for a moment, looking at him straight in the eyes. Then I flung myself into the darkness. For a few moments I experienced a pang of sheer terror which ended when my feet came into contact with hard stone — the first ledge, about six feet down. I untied the rope and shouted to my uncle to pull it up. The well smelt fetid, and as I groped around the ledge for the ladder I hoped it was not inhabited by snakes. I soon found the ladder — like everything here, it was stone, not steel, and perfectly made. ‘OK!’ I shouted up, ‘I’ve found the ladder!’

  ‘Coming down!’ Elena said, and her slim body swung suddenly above me. I caught her and helped to steady her as she shed the rope. A few minutes later, Mukhtar was standing beside us. ‘That’s the first bit done,’ he said. ‘Now the ladder. You first, Omar.’

  I felt for the steps uncertainly and began to climb down. ‘Steady does it,’ my uncle said, ‘take your time.’ I squinted down through my feet to see the palest of reflection of light on water far below. Or perhaps I imagined it. Once or twice I stopped to get the torch out of my pocket and examine the wall. This was certainly no Arab well. It was constructed of huge masonry slabs which had been shaped and fitted with perfect precision. The ladder too, cut out of solid stone, was a magnificent piece of engineering. It took me only ten minutes to arrive at the next ledge, some thirty feet down, and I shone the torch upwards to see that Elena and Mukhtar were both on their way. I flashed it around the walls again, and saw at once that there was a small archway opening off the shelf into a dark tunnel beyond. A few minutes later, Elena and Mukhtar had landed next to me on the shelf. ‘I hope someone doesn’t come along while we’re down here and shut us in!’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t like to be stuck here for the rest of my life.’

  ‘God is generous!’ Mukhtar said, feeling his way towards the tunnel. ‘Watch out here, there are sometimes scorpions.’ He took the torch from me and led the way into the tunnel, which appeared to have been bored through solid rock. Within twenty feet, though, it opened into a much larger chamber. Almost as soon as we entered, the torch went out, and for a second we stood in utter darkness. The second seemed to last a lifetime, and in that moment, I must admit, a flash of doubt about Mukhtar did cross my mind. Then there was the sound of a match being struck and the cave was full of light again. I saw my uncle crouching over an oil lamp, carefully lighting the wick. The chamber was not as big as I’d first thought, no more than ten feet by ten and the same in height. In the light of the lamp I saw that its walls were decorated with the effigies of ancient Egyptian gods — Anubis, Osiris, Horns, Thoth — with scores of hieroglyphs and cartouches. But I wasn’t looking at the wall-paintings. Over in the corner of the cave, standing upright like model soldiers, were no less than ten perfect Akhnaton ushabtis — each different in detail, but each as exquisitely made as the one I had seen at Rabjohn’s. Next to them stood a small wooden chest, green with age. Mukhtar took a key from his pocket and opened
the chest. From inside he brought out a tattered book, which he held out to me, lifting the lantern so that I could read it properly. It was a standard British Army Field Memorandum. I flipped open the cardboard cover. On the first page, in pencil, was written, ‘The Journal of Lt. Orde Wingate, RA. Western Desert, Egypt, 1933’.

  ‘What is it?’ Elena asked.

  ‘I think we’ve found the Missing Journal,’ I replied.

  33

  Elena examined the ushabtis by the light of the torch. ‘These are exactly the same quality as the ones Julian brought back,’ she said. ‘You realise what they’d be worth!’

  Mukhtar eyed me uneasily. ‘So Cranwell was here, Uncle,’ I said. ‘I thought your sign against the evil eye was a bit anaemic; Mansur’s was even more feeble.’

  He hunkered down and uncapped a water-bottle, offering it first to me and then to Elena. Finally, he took a gulp, screwed on the cap, and fixed his steady eyes on my face. Lamplight flickered, bringing the wall-figures to life. ‘Yes, your friend was here. God forgive me, Omar, but I didn’t know why you’d come back. I thought you might be connected with the government. I know you used to work for them, and dealing in antiquities is illegal. They can lock you away for that. A Hazmi can’t be locked away.’

  I felt a surge of resentment against my uncle, who could seriously consider I might be here on behalf of the government. It was a clear statement of what I’d always suspected: despite my blood, and despite their enthusiastic welcome, the Hawazim had never really considered me one of them.

  ‘Uncle,’ I protested, ‘I’m enough of a Hazmi never to betray my own blood.’

  Mukhtar looked down at his feet. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘God forgive me. It was an unworthy thought. Last night Mansur told me so frankly; he said that he’d known you since you were a baby and you could never betray us. He reminded me you’d said others could die, and advised me to show you this.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘All I know is that it was built by the Ancient Ones in the First Time, ages ago, and probably as a hiding-place. Our people — some of them — have known about it for a long time. The secret has been handed down. I learned about it from my father when I was very small.’

  I took the torch from Elena and began to scrutinise the hieroglyphs. They were definitely New Kingdom and probably late 18th Dynasty, indicating that the chamber was much more recent than the ruins above. It was the size and shape of a tomb, yet it wasn’t a tomb. The ancient Egyptians hadn’t built tombs in wells. There were no texts from the Book of the Dead, no Anubis or Osiris symbolism, no scenes from the life of the departed. In fact, the only thing I’d ever seen like it was the chamber at Madinat Habu where I’d found the Siriun Stela. That had also looked superficially like a tomb, yet had turned out to be some kind of secret store-room.

  ‘Was there ever a door to this place?’ I asked Mukhtar.

  ‘They say there was, long ago. You’d probably find it in the water if you looked. They say that it was decorated with a flying disc and a Wedjet Eye, like the one on the stone above.’

  I peered at the hieroglyphs again and noticed for the first time that there were a number of cartouches referring to Horemheb as Pharaoh. So it was late 18th Dynasty. Why had Horemheb built such a secret chamber out here in the desert? Had he built a similar one at Madinat Habu to hide the Siriun Stela? Why?

  ‘Have these ushabtis always been here?’ I asked Mukhtar. ‘Good God, no! You haven’t worked it out yet? Wingate brought them out of the desert.’

  ‘Wingate!’

  ‘Yes. When Wingate and Hilmi came out of al-Ghul half demented, in that year long ago, they brought these things with them in their saddle-bags — a dozen of them. Hilmi just blubbered, and the Englishman wasn’t much different. We thought he might die, but after three days the light came back into his eyes and he seemed a bit better. We begged to know what had happened to our relatives, but he said he’d lost his memory. I tried The Shining to help him.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Men screaming. Guns firing. Camels floundering in drumsand. That was all. No place, no details. Strange thing was, Wingate had power in The Shining too.’

  ‘You mean he was an amnir?’

  ‘His power was weak, like mine, but it was certainly there. Couldn’t bring back his memory though. He said that he thought something really dreadful had happened, and that we were all in danger. We had to get rid of the ushabtis, he told us. Some of the elders were for destroying them, but most were against it because The Fallen One is pure evil — the Devil — and if we smashed his statuettes, there’s no telling what misfortune might befall us. Now I wish to God we had destroyed them.’

  ‘So you hid them away here?’

  ‘It was the perfect hiding-place. Wingate said he didn’t want to know where they were hidden. He gave us this box with the book inside, together with the key and made us promise never to touch them or reveal where they were. One day, many years in the future, he said, they might be of use.’

  ‘So they lay here in the well for sixty years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Until Cranwell came along, and you sold him two.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s not like you to break a promise, Uncle. Or did you think the time had come when they would be of use? What happened?’

  Mukhtar’s gaze wavered, then held mine again. ‘I have been responsible for this family ever since my father was lost,’ he said. ‘Of course, my uncles gave me advice for a time, but they passed away one by one. This year, I had to make a decision concerning one of the family, Aziz, my son Bakri’s boy.’

  ‘The one who died earlier in the year?’

  ‘Yes, may God’s mercy be upon him. He was dying from some terrible sickness that eats away your heart. He was in terrible pain, and Bakri was frantic. Of course, it was the will of the Divine Spirit, we all knew that, but my son begged me to help. He said he’d heard of a place in Cairo where they could cure it. I was tempted, Omar, tempted to think I could save him. May God forgive me. This place cost money, of course, and I had none, but just at that moment your friend Cranwell arrived, asking about Wingate and Zerzura and it seemed like a sign from God. I thought about the ushabtis for the first time in years. It was true that we’d all promised never to touch them, but there were so many, I thought two wouldn’t matter, if they went for a good cause. I showed them to Cranwell. I didn’t bring him here, of course, or reveal how many there were. He said they might be fakes, but he was willing to buy them, anyway, for a good price. Then he asked if I had any souvenirs of Wingate, and I showed him this book; it was the only thing Wingate left behind. When he read it he got very excited. I thought I could sell him the book, too, but he said no, put it back where you’ve been hiding it, it’s safer there. That was the first sign I’d let a Demon out of a bottle. Anyway, off he went with the ushabtis and the very next day, Aziz died. I burned the money: it was dirty. I knew I’d done wrong. That’s two mistakes I’ve made this year, Omar: doubting the will of the Divine Spirit and doubting the loyalty of one of the family, yourself. No Hazmi betrays another. Even if your father was a stranger, he was accepted by the tribe, and you’re one of us. God forgive me for questioning your intentions. Like I say, I am only amnir because I was the best of a bad bunch. My grandson’s illness was the will of the Divine Spirit. I should have accepted that rather than dipping my hands in evil. Now I’ve brought this great catastrophe down on us all.’

  Mukhtar spoke the last words in deep anguish and I realised how difficult this confession had been for him. All his life he’d had utter and complete faith in the benevolence of the cosmos. Only once had that belief wavered, and it had brought tragedy. For a moment he looked a very old, exhausted man. ‘You know what the Hawazim say?’ he commented sadly, ‘“Ghaltat ad-dalil bi ‘alf ghalta” — the guide’s mistake is a thousand mistakes.’

  ‘You know what the Alexandrians say, Mukhtar!’ Elena interjected suddenly, “Illi faat
maat” — the past is dead, let’s face the future.’

  I saw him blink in surprise. In his entire life no one had spoken to him like that, probably — certainly not a woman. His mouth groped fish-like for something to say, but he thought better of it.

  ‘Jamie,’ Elena said, ‘let’s have a look at the diary while we’ve still got light.’ She held the torch for me, as I opened the first page and read aloud from Wingate’s pencilled scrawl:

  Zerzura, the oasis of fluttering birds, is the only one of a number of oases referred to in old manuscripts and travellers’ tales that has not been identified. Following the finding of the anachronae by Carter and Carnarvon in Tut’s tomb, we have every reason to believe that a mystery of earth-shattering importance will be solved by the discovery of the Lost Oasis — not to mention incredible riches. The Zerzura Club have been scouring the desert with their planes and Model-T Fords for two years, with no result as far as I can ascertain. I feel I can beat them to it, using the traditional methods — camels, and an escort of the Ghosts of the Desert. We do not know what Zerzura looks like — perhaps it is entirely hidden. Nor do we know exactly where it lies, except that it is meant to be in the Sand Sea somewhere to the north of Jilf Kibir — the Zerzura Club have played their cards very close to their chests. However. I feel confident that even without their data, I can locate the Lost Oasis. Zerzura is more likely to be found by a man who travels slowly by camel and on foot than by the man in a motor-car whose contacts with the surface he is investigating occur at 20-mile intervals...

  I stopped. In places the writing was entirely illegible and in others devolved into brief notes so cryptic that it was impossible to understand. ‘Go on, Jamie,’ Elena said.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ I said. I read on, silently now, picking up bits here and there. The fragments sketched in the story of an incredible journey through al-Ghul, battling sandstorms, heat, thirst, hunger and fatigue. Though the account was episodic, I became utterly absorbed by it. I turned the pages avidly. Many were missing and it looked as though they’d been deliberately torn out. Yet I was completely absorbed. It wasn’t until Elena nudged me almost an hour later and pointed to the guttering wick of the lamp, that I remembered where I was, closed the book and let out a long sigh. A deep sense of excitement was stirring inside me. I had the strong feeling that something had guided me here, that I was meant to be here all along. It was hot in the chamber and sweat had soaked my jibba. Mukhtar offered me water, and I drank it down in long gulps. ‘Time is like a sword, Omar,’ he growled. ‘If you don’t cut it, it cuts you. We’ve got to get out before the ghibli strikes.’