The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘I said I don’t know if he’s dead,’ I went on. ‘Someone was there and he sounded like Cranwell, but I don’t know if it was him or not. Same at Kolpos’s shop. I caught a glimpse of someone who might have been Cranwell, but I’m not sure.’

  I stopped suddenly, realising I’d come round a full circle. All four men were staring at me like mandarins, their faces completely expressionless. I’d been expecting derision like I’d experienced in the years when I’d been expounding my Atlantis theory, only worse. This silence was more intimidating. I realised that I’d just said enough to get myself certified.

  Suddenly, the old colonel cleared his throat. Hammoudi and Rasim looked at him deferentially. ‘This space-ship you claim to have found,’ he asked in a voice that was surprisingly soft, gentle and cultured — not your average Mukhabaraat colonel by a long shot. ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘It was destroyed,’ I said. ‘Some kind of self-destruct device.’

  ‘Then there’d be debris wouldn’t there — I mean, if it was as big as you say?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then we can easily prove or disprove your story by taking a look out there, can’t we?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He stood up and the ‘monk’ followed. They filed out as quietly and solemnly as a funeral cortege. Hammoudi walked a few steps behind the others but as he reached the door he turned. ‘Nice going, Ross,’ he whispered, grinning. ‘They’ll give you thirty years in the cuckoo-house for this!’

  49

  It was three days before I had another visitor, and the time dragged on endlessly. As soon as I was off the drip and allowed to get up, I made a bee-line for the window. I pulled up the blinds and saw through the bars that I was on the first floor of a modern two-storey building looking straight out into the Western Desert. The landscape was a featureless ripple of ridges — sun burning on flint, shale, and amber sand stretching on as far as the pre-Nile escarpment — the banks of a much older, wider Nile Valley, the Ur-Nile of prehistory, whose ragged lines faded into the dust-sheen on the horizon. Nothing moved out there apart from phantom lights and purple shadows, and the occasional kite, falcon or sulphur-headed vulture. It was desolate but its desolation called to me. A thousand times better to be out there in the bigness than shut up in this cell. Still, I gained something from the view — I recognised the shattered canine protrusion of Jabal Barqa, slightly to the north, which told me I was on the edge of the Nile Valley, a little below Kom Ombo. This place seemed to be a high-security establishment, ringed with razor wire, replete with ‘keep out’ signs and patrolled by black-suited guards. In front of my window, about fifty yards away, was a steel gate opening on a packed gravel drive. The gate was manned by a sentry, but was rarely opened, it seemed; at least during the time I watched it was never opened at all. Within the perimeter someone had busied themselves in laying out a garden — the Egyptians of the Nile Valley turned the desert a homely, familiar green anywhere a trickle of water could be found. There were acacias, bougain-villeas, palm-saplings wired against goats, and fast-growing pencil cedars. A young Arab boy in a torn black headcloth and cast-off dungarees was working amongst the shrubs, moving methodically from tree to tree with a hosepipe. There was a track outside the gate, but I saw no asphalt roads and no motor-vehicles. There must have been an airstrip nearby, though, because the occasional light plane flew low overhead, and once a helicopter.

  The cheerful nurse called Thalwa returned on the second day with a white towelling dressing-gown that I could walk about in, and instead of bed-pans let me use the bathroom in the corridor outside. At least this was a change. The corridor was painted brilliant white with spotless lino floor, and the only living soul there apart from the nurse and myself was the police guard on duty. I kept my senses alert for any sign of Elena, but though there were rows of glass-panelled doors, there seemed to be no activity in any of the rooms. I guessed I was the only patient on the floor, and that worried me. I reasoned that she had to be in the building somewhere. You and your friend almost died. You and your friend. Almost...Thalwa had said that, so the odds were she’d actually seen her. The question was how to ask her in secrecy. She’d said they were listening, so the room was bugged, and even going to the bathroom I could hear the clump of the guard’s boots close behind us. When Thalwa was away I searched the room silently for any trace of writing materials, without success. They hadn’t left so much as a paper clip lying around, and the eating utensils they gave me were of brittle plastic. I began to feel claustrophobic and to stump aimlessly round the floor. I would spend hours dreaming, staring at the desert horizon. My Hawazim relations would have been half demented by now, I knew, but I’d lost my fear of confined spaces to some extent as a boy in England. Never completely, though. In desperation I picked up the telephone, to be told sharply, ‘Put the phone down, Ross.’ It didn’t take much to guess that was where their bugging device must be.

  The next time Thalwa came in I decided to take a chance. As she was bending over me to remove the eating things, I suddenly snatched the ball-point and notepad out of her top pocket. She tried to snatch it back, and mouthed silent warnings. One peep from her could bring the guard, I knew. It might result in me being handcuffed or even strait-jacketed. But it was worth the risk. I fought her off long enough to scribble in Arabic ‘Wayn sadiqati?’ ‘Where is my friend?’ on the paper. She grabbed it, took the pen and waggled her finger at me. She slipped the pad back into her pocket, unread. Her next move might be to go straight to Hammoudi with it. If so, there might be repercussions, but the situation couldn’t be that much worse, I reasoned. At least I’d done something to assert my independence, no matter how futile.

  The following morning, after I’d washed and eaten breakfast, the same crew-cut lab-assistant came in carrying a small Korean TV with built-in video-player, which he set up on the table and plugged in. ‘Now this is what I call a change for the better,’ I said. He ignored me just like the first time, and cleared the table. A moment later Hammoudi flung open the door and marched in briskly carrying a battered briefcase under his arm. He dismissed the assistant, opened the briefcase and dumped a pile of documents and a video-cassette on the table. He removed his jacket and hung it from a hook on the wall and laid out a pack of Cleopatras and a lighter on the table, side by side with his pocket cassette-recorder and a pile of tapes. This looked as though it was going to be a long session. ‘Sit,’ he told me, and I settled in the upright chair opposite the table, while he took another behind it. An aircraft drummed in to the airstrip over our heads. ‘Smoke?’ he said, offering me the Cleopatras, ‘you don’t, do you?’

  ‘I’d be very grateful for my pipe,’ I said.

  ‘If you keep your nose clean we’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He lit a Cleopatra and snorted smoke, pushing himself back against the chair back until it creaked. For a moment I thought the backrest would shear off — these hospital chairs weren’t designed for six-foot-three, seventeen-stone giants. The great domed head puckered into what was meant to be an attitude of sympathy, and he smoothed his small moustache with his finger and thumb.

  ‘I’ve been wrong about you three times, Ross,’ he said. ‘First I had you down as a murderer and a racketeer, second I thought you were some kind of foreign infiltrator, and third, I thought you were a head-banger. That’s the received wisdom right now after your little performance the other day. I warned you to play it straight, but would you listen? See that little guy wearing the dog-collar?’

  ‘The monk?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s a Benedictine, Father Mikhaelis, but he’s also a Ph.D. in head-shrinking with a list of qualifications as long as your arm. If he says you’re nuts, you’re nuts — and right now he swears you’re a head-banger of the highest order.’

  Hammoudi pulled a slim file with a transparent cover from the pile of documents.

  ‘You can read it yourself, Ross...Paranoia, delusions of persecution, hallucinations,
talking to the dead...classic symptoms of schizophrenia. And you know what they do with schizophrenics here, Ross? They lobotomise ‘em, that’s what. Turn you into a bloody zombie for the rest of your days.’

  I think I actually smiled at the absurdity of the notion. It was a relief to talk about something — anything — and for some reason I found this new gambit highly amusing.

  ‘But you think he’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘The more dirt I’ve dug out the more I’m certain that you were just a dupe. You’ve been had, and I feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Oh, by whom?’

  ‘By Karlman and Wingate.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

  ‘I’m talking about your conspiracy theory — the Eye of Ra business. It was a hoax invented by Karlman and Wingate back in the 1930s.’

  ‘You’re the head-banger not me.’

  The domed head furrowed again, this time in irritation. I could see he wanted to snap something, maybe even lash out, but he was keeping a tight rein on himself. He was trying to be Mister Nice Guy — and I wondered why.

  ‘Look Ross, you better take note, because if bloody Rasputin there has his way you’ll be in the funny-farm until your hair turns white.’

  ‘And you want to prove I’m sane so I can go to the hangman, I suppose.’

  ‘Right now I’m the best friend you got, OK . Let me tell you, I’ve really done my homework these last few days. I’ve had my people working round the clock. Look, all the shit is here: times, dates, places. Karlman was a real loony-toon right from the start, a pervert who got off watching young boys whacking it in each other’s asses. Karlman ran across Wingate in Egypt when he was on leave from his posting in Khartoum, and they hit it off. Wingate was another one who wasn’t quite the full tea-service, and they must have recognised each other as brother weirdos. You should see Wingate’s medical record: a manic depressive and misanthropist who hated society and had an inclination to violence. Anyway they were both misfits with a grudge against the establishment and they decided to concoct a massive hoax that would really set the cat among the pigeons. Akhnaton’s tomb was the last great mystery of Egyptology, like you said, and they had a clever idea — they knew the old legend of Zerzura, where there was supposed to be a pharaoh and his queen asleep on a hoard of treasure, and they decided that Zerzura would be Akhnaton’s tomb. It just about fitted, because since Akhnaton was a hated heretic it was possible he might have been buried far out in the desert as a way of protecting his mummy. But there was another layer of hoax too — the suggestion that Akhnaton was an alien and that the ancient Egyptians had contact with the stars.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘There’s stuff on file about both Karlman and Wingate going way back.’

  ‘But I’ve seen the ushabtis Wingate brought back from Zerzura.’

  Hammoudi stubbed out his cigarette-butt and stood up, stretching his arms and rolling up his sleeves to reveal powerful forearms covered in coarse black hair. He looked out of the window for a moment, then he turned back to me and shook his head.

  ‘You disappoint me,’ he said, ‘I thought a sharp guy like you would’ve known that a whole heap of Akhnaton ushabtis was discovered in 1931, in Akhnaton’s official tomb at Amarna. They were dug out by a Brit called Pendlebury who was working for the Egypt Exploration Fund on behalf of the Antiquities Service. September 1931 — note the date — only eighteen months before Wingate set off to find Zerzura in January 1933, and pretended to have found the ushabtis there.’

  ‘You mean Wingate got hold of these Amarna ushabtis?’

  ‘There’s no record of them after the 1931 excavation until they turned up this year. I reckon they found their way into the hands of private collectors, one of whom was Wingate. The point is that the ushabtis were genuine, but they didn’t come from Zerzura.’

  ‘What about the Missing Journal?’

  ‘Oh yeah, that was smart. I’ve seen it — gives you just enough to sell you on the idea that there’s a link between Tut’s tomb and Zerzura, and that Zerzura was Akhnaton’s tomb, without providing the details. Bits apparently missing and torn out to whet your appetite. A very astute bit of forgery.’

  ‘Look, my uncle told me that Wingate hired my grandfather and a lot of other Hawazim to take him to Zerzura in 1933. They never came back. We found the remains of my grandfather’s camel at Abu Simm, a quicksand in the Desolation. There were human skeletons, too.’

  ‘Your uncle? That old bag of bones we arrested at Khan al-Anaq? He’s already got one foot in the grave and his mind is playing tricks. As it happens we’ve got a detailed report of Win-gate’s trek in January 1933. He employed only five men, all of them from Dakhla, except for Hilmi who was from Kharja. I can even tell you their names. They found bugger all out there, but that wasn’t the point. At the end of the trek, Wingate sent his four Dakhla men home and turned up at al-Maqs with Hilmi frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog and the ushabtis which he’d had with him from the beginning. Seems your relatives were too superstitious even to question him.’

  ‘How do you explain the fact that Hilmi came out of the desert completely wacko?’

  Hilmi was bloody wacko long before Wingate met him. I pulled the files of the local administration office at Kharja for the late twenties and his name turned up. Seems he’d been mixed up with the Senussis — a fanatic religious brotherhood back in the twenties — and had a reputation for inciting people to attack the government or go on mad escapades. In December 1932, Hilmi got a lot of Hawazim interested in the idea of Zerzura. Those were hard times and he persuaded them there was treasure to be found and they’d all be rich. So off they toddled on their camels, not having the least idea where Zerzura was, and stumbled into the quicksands. Hilmi was the only one who made it back, and by then he really was raving mad. Wingate heard the story when he arrived the same month and used it. He even took Hilmi on to make it more convincing. Your grandfather died in Abu Simm all right, but not with Wingate.’

  ‘But the sand around was full of spent cartridge-cases — .45 calibre bullets.’

  ‘Did you find any .45 bullets actually embedded in the bones?’

  ‘No, but...’

  ‘Then how do you know those cases didn’t belong to some other event entirely? You wouldn’t make a very good detective, would you, Ross!’

  I watched Hammoudi light another cigarette. I had to admit his story didn’t sound implausible. It was just possible that a couple of twisted souls might have launched a hoax — after all, it had happened plenty of times before: the Piltdown Man case was an excellent example. The only thing was that I’d seen the ship and Akhnaton’s remains.

  ‘Look, I saw Akhnaton,’ I said, ‘and he wasn’t a human being.’

  ‘You thought you saw him, but you found what you expected to find. You were dying of thirst and suffering from hallucinations. Akhnaton can’t have been in any space-ship in the desert, because as Karlman well knew, his mummy’d been found by a Yank called Theodore Davis in the Valley of the Kings in 1907.’

  He dug another folder out of the pile and waved it in front of me. ‘Read this. It’s the Davis Report. He dug up a tomb known as “55” and found in it the mummy of a man with an elongated skull and bisexual features which he was certain belonged to Akhnaton. The coffin itself was engraved with Akhnaton’s name, but someone’d tried to scratch it out.’

  ‘I know all about it, but it’s old hat. The Davis theory has been disproved — the age of the mummy in Tomb 55 at death was shown to be no more than twenty-three. We know Akhnaton reigned for seventeen years, so if the body in Tomb 55 was Akhnaton, he could only have been five or six when he became pharaoh.’

  Hammoudi shrugged. ‘Ross, scientists are like everybody else. They believe what they want to believe. All your life you wanted to believe that ancient Egyptian civilisation came from Atlantis, and you leapt at anything that seemed to fit your own ideas. You were easy meat for Karlman. Read the anatomical reports
— I’ve got the lot here, and the weight of the evidence suggests that the Davis mummy was Akhnaton. Only no one wanted to believe the evidence.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘Because everyone likes a mystery, and a lot of people wanted to believe Akhnaton had never been found. The truth was that the “Great Heretic” had been shoved into an insignificant grave without any of the treasure and trimmings that everyone dreamed of finding. It was a big let-down, so the Egyptologists just ignored it and went on hoping they’d find the “real thing” some day. Karlman knew that, of course, and he played on it. Wingate let drop in the journal that the search for Akhnaton’s tomb — i.e. Zerzura — was started by something they’d found in Tut’s tomb. That’s poppycock too. You ever hear of Hassanein Bey?’

  ‘Yes. Discovered Kufra Oasis with Mrs Rosita Forbes in...1920, was it?’

  ‘Spot on. Well this Hassanein was an Egyptian nob — well in with the Khedive, educated at Oxford University — and he was the first to start looking for Zerzura. He set off with a caravan of camels from Mersa Matruh and crossed two thousand miles into the Sudan in December 1922 — that’s before Tut’s sarcophagus was opened in February 1923. Never found Zerzura, of course.’

  ‘So you’re saying that proves there was no connection?’

  ‘There was a connection. Hassanein admitted that to the National Geographic magazine when they did a write-up on his jaunt. But it wasn’t literal. The discovery of Tut’s tomb in 1922 made him wonder what other treasures might lie undiscovered in the desert sands, that’s all. There was no direct link. The link was made up by our boys Karlman and Wingate. “The Mummy’s Curse” spiel had been concocted by the press back in the twenties. Karlman dug it up in the thirties and worked in the idea that there was some secret organisation wheeling and dealing behind the scenes. But look at the facts: Carter didn’t croak till 1939, and a stack of those mixed up with Tut’s tomb pegged out much later. Carnarvon’s daughter, who saw the tomb opened, popped off in 1980, aged seventy-eight. Pierre Lacau — a French guy involved in the opening of the tomb, croaked in 1965, at the ripe old age of ninety-two, and there was even an ex-Brit military cop called Adamson whose job was to sleep in the tomb itself, and who bit the dust in 1980 aged eighty-one. And those weren’t the only ones. If it was my case, I’d say any conspiracy to murder theory was unproved, but the brilliant Cranwell swallowed it hook, line and sinker — so did you.’