The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  I tried to picture Julian Cranwell and found I could hardly remember his face any more. I’d long ago ceased wondering if he was alive. ‘You’re suggesting that all this was set up just for Julian Cranwell to find?’

  ‘Look at it like this. Cranwell might have been a maverick, but he was highly respected. He’d taken up causes that everyone pooh-poohed and been proven right time and time again. He was just the person Karlman needed as his patsy. If Cranwell swallowed it, everyone else would and the hoax would be on.’

  ‘It doesn’t add up. I mean we’re talking about a sixty-year gap here. If it was a hoax, it was a long time brewing.’

  ‘The war and the Nasserite revolution put the kibosh on any digging from the late thirties till the sixties.’

  ‘It’s still a long time.’

  ‘Maybe Karlman had dropped the whole scheme. Wingate’d been killed accidentally in a plane crash in Burma in 1944. Karl-man was in the States at Harvard until the 1970s, then he got appointed to a post back in Egypt. It went well for a while, but then he got the heave-ho for porno-trafficking and all the old bitterness came back. He realised the ushabtis and the journal were still there, and Cranwell was the ideal man for the job. But Karlman didn’t reckon with Cranwell’s nose. When Cranwell found the ushabtis and the Missing Journal he got very enthusiastic: then he began to smell a rat. He got too close too quick, and Karlman whacked him.’

  ‘Oh, please! That feeble old man murdered Julian?’

  ‘Cranwell had a heart condition. Perhaps you didn’t know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well Karlman probably did, and I suspect he put the screws on Cranwell — deliberately gave him the jitters. Maybe sent some thugs dressed up in Halloween costumes to knock him about a bit, cut the phone, rough him up. Cranwell ended up having a massive coronary — splat — that was the end of him. They dumped him at the pyramids, carried him in at night and disguised their own tracks. Made it look like he’d materialised out of thin air.’

  ‘So you spotted the absence of Julian’s footprints.’

  He tapped his nose with a finger. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘But Julian was missing for three days. Where was he?’

  ‘His ghaffir told me he’d left with two nasty-looking types. They probably kept him holed up somewhere. Cairo’s a big place.’

  ‘What about his body? It was missing from the morgue.’

  ‘I told you the truth. The stiff went to the British Consulate at the request of relatives before the autopsy could be performed. If you’d enquired at the Consulate they’d have told you.’

  ‘I did, or rather Dr Barrington did. They wouldn’t talk.’

  ‘I expect they have their own rules. Always been tight-arsed with information, the Brits.’

  ‘That night at Giza, the time you jumped me, I met Cranwell. He was my secret contact.’

  ‘You saw him close up, made positive ID?’

  ‘No, but he rang up Dr Barrington earlier and she identified his voice.’

  ‘Dr Barrington was another one with paranoid delusions. I’ve turned up her file too — taken off the active list with the Brit MI6 because she went scatty and hit the bottle.’

  ‘Still, there was somebody there — at Giza. And he had a voice like Cranwell’s.’

  ‘Karlman probably sent him to give you goosebumps. The rest was your imagination working overtime. You’ve had plenty of exercise in imagination just recently, Ross.’

  ‘OK, but what about Kolpos? I saw him nailed to his desk with a garotte round his neck.’

  Hammoudi sighed and sifted through his files. He brought out a pink folder and slapped it down on the table. ‘Read,’ he said, ‘I told you we’d had our eyes on Kolpos for years. Perhaps you thought I was swindling you. Kolpos was a villain. He had his thumbs in all sorts of pies, especially smuggling antiquities. This is the confession of a guy called Abdallah Foulah, a professional hit man, who admits to having rubbed out Kolpos and blitzed his shop with a grenade. Foulah said he was paid for the job by a rival smuggling-gang Kolpos had double-crossed. You with me?’

  I nodded. ‘I know you were at the scene, Ross,’ Hammoudi went on, ‘but Foulah thought you were part of the operation. How you got out, I don’t know. The girl Anasis says she knew nothing about it, but Kolpos must have known he had it coming when he sent her away.’

  Elena’s face came into my mind suddenly — the tortured, ravaged face I’d last seen in the cave. I’d abandoned her without even thinking and wandered off following a phantom of my mother to Zerzura, the Lost Oasis. Only it wasn’t a lost oasis, it was also Akhnaton’s tomb and a giant star-ship hidden under the desert, that had been preserved by some mysterious angel-like race for some three and a half thousand years. Just so I could get there and receive a message for all mankind. Which sounded like the ramblings of a maniac, I had to admit. Was it more plausible, I wondered, than a hoax devised by two cracked and embittered souls sixty years ago?

  But I’d seen it. I’d touched it.

  Remarkable what thirst will do.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ Hammoudi said, as if reading my thoughts, ‘you’ve been bamboozled. You never found Zerzura, or Akhna-ton’s tomb, or a star-ship under the desert. It was a delusion brought on by fatigue, thirst and hunger. I suspect that’s true of everyone who claims to have seen Zerzura: for the Bedouin it was a lush oasis, for the Greeks a white city. For you, the modern scientific man, it was some miracle of high technology, a space-ship.’

  ‘And I suppose I just imagined that Akhnaton was an alien? That idea wasn’t given to me by Karlman or anyone else.’

  Hammoudi chuckled and his dome crinkled again. ‘It’s a pretty daft idea, you’ve got to admit. OK, I’m convinced you believe it, I mean, nobody would invent a story so wacko. First, Karlman definitely tried to suggest some connection between the ancient Egyptians and outer space. He used the Dogon stuff recently dug up by Dieterlen and Griaule and forged the Siriun Stela you found at Medinat Habu. You were convinced the stela was authentic, so it was only one more step to imagining Akhnaton was actually an alien. It’s true, Akhnaton does look like something from the twilight zone but there’s a rational explanation for that. He probably had what they call Frohlich’s Syndrome — a condition that gives you a head like a balloon, thighs like sides of beef, and shrinks your prick.’ He paused and handed me a typewritten sheet. ‘Read,’ he said.

  ‘Frohlich’s Syndrome may arise from several different causes,’ the report ran, ‘but the most common is a tumour on the pituitary gland. There may be a fugitive over-stimulation of the pituitary which results in distortions of the skull and the elongation of the jaw. After puberty the voice remains high, body hair does not develop and the sexual organs remain infantile. In a later stage, there is the plumping out of abdomen, breasts, buttocks and thighs. The condition may also result in hydrocephalus manifesting itself by the bulging of the parietal areas of the skull.’

  I handed the paper back to Hammoudi. ‘Poor old Akhnaton was a mini-prick,’ he said. ‘He just couldn’t get it off with the girls. Poor bloody sod — and you called him an alien.’

  ‘But we know he had a whole string of daughters as well as two sons.’

  ‘Children can always be adopted. There’s no proof they were actually his, is there?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  He chuckled again. I have to confess that for a minute I began to doubt. Hammoudi’s explanation made more sense than mine. The more I thought about it the less certain I was that I’d seen Akhnaton or the ship. I’d had bits missing out of my life before — like the time the Kolpos shop went up. I didn’t remember seeing Elena after I’d left her in the cave, but they’d found me wandering around with her, and Hammoudi claimed she’d said I’d never left her. The only thing that nagged at me was Hammoudi’s manner — anxious, as if he desperately needed to sell me something.

  ‘What about the Space Shuttle Columbia?’ I said.

  ‘
I thought that question would come up. I’ve got here a report by the FBI, concluding that the SIRA mission analyst, Lynne Regis, was killed accidentally in a car-smash in California in 1983. The film was damaged in a fire at the JP S Labs in Pasadena, sure, but it was also proved to have been accidental, started by a faulty electrical circuit.’

  ‘Just like the fire in my room at Shepheard’s.’

  ‘It does happen.’

  ‘But the Siriun Stela...I’m certain it was genuine.’

  ‘Are you? Then I think you’ll be interested in this...’

  He stood up and fed the video cassette into the machine. There was a fuzz of grey static and then a slightly blurred colour picture — obviously an amateur job — flashed on to the screen. I blinked and then realised I was watching the last moments of a committee-meeting at the Antiquities Service, chaired by Rifad. In fact I even recognised the conference table as one standing on the top floor of the Egyptian Museum. I’d sat at it myself plenty of times. The faces looked tired and slightly bored as if they’d already sat through an endless debate — the table was covered in ash-trays, teacups, and half-empty bottles of Perrier. Rifad, in shirt-sleeves, sat at the head of the table, and before him, standing on a cardboard base, was the Siriun Stela I’d found at Madinat Habu. I suddenly realised that these men were deciding my fate. The soundtrack crackled. ‘...So,’ Rifad was saying, ‘your conclusions on the so-called Siriun Stela are generally unfavourable, gentlemen?’

  The camera passed to a squat man with popping eyes and a goatee beard. It was Holzmann, a Swiss professor who sometimes worked for the EAS. ‘It’s a very interesting notion,’ he said, ‘that the ancient Egyptians had the technology to see a white dwarf that wasn’t identified until 1915, but there seems to be no corroborating proof whatsoever. If it were true it would revise all our accepted concepts about ancient Egypt — indeed world civilisation.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said another voice, then the camera switched belatedly to a deep-jowled, clean-shaven Egyptian, whom I recognised as Abd al-Bakr Guwaira, an epigraphy specialist known for his uncompromising views and his pompous delight in airing them. Guwaira and I had tussled on many occasions; he was just the sort of long-winded pedant that Julian and I had loved to hate. ‘We have to evaluate all evidence as objectively as possible,’ Guwaira droned, ‘not just in terms of our accepted ideology, since then it becomes simply dogma. If evidence is valid, we must change our dogma accordingly.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Rifad, a tad impatiently.

  ‘This stela cannot be easily dated — not organically obviously. That is why it falls to me to try and date it stylistically. We have the hieroglyph for the Dog Star Sirius, and an ellipse consisting of fifty dots around it. The ellipse is most unusual. Indeed, I’d venture to say it’s never been seen before in ancient Egyptian epigraphy.’

  ‘Ye-es?’ said Rifad again, with obvious impatience this time.

  Guwaira looked entirely unruffled. ‘It does however appear in Dogon mythology,’ he went on, ‘in which this ellipse is known as “the Sorghum Female”. It was recorded by Dieterlen in 1930, and described as representing the orbit of the star Sirius B around its sister-star Sirius A. The question thus arises as to how a pre-literate people could have known of the existence of Sirius B, an invisible white-dwarf, which actually does orbit Sirius A every fifty years.’

  There were audible groans from the rest of the committee. Rifad’s voice said, ‘Could we keep to the stela?’

  ‘The point is,’ Guwaira continued, ‘that this ellipse on this stela bears so close a resemblance to the Dogon drawing recorded by Dieterlen that I can only conclude that it has been carefully copied from his book. That would seem to me to date the stela as post-1930. Moreover, when I examined the hieroglyph of Sirius, I concluded from the depth and technique of incision that it was a careful copy of an 18th Dynasty hieroglyph. My general conclusion is that this stela is a forgery and almost certainly a contemporary one.’

  ‘Who is the likely forger?’ Rifad asked.

  ‘In my experience, the most likely perpetrator of a hoax is the supposed finder — in this case it was Omar James Ross.’

  There was a long silence and mumbles of ‘disgrace’ and ‘inexcusable’ as the camera panned swiftly along the faces of the committee. They’d selected it very carefully, I realised. Julian Cranwell wasn’t present, and there was scarcely one of them I hadn’t disagreed with violently at one time or another. Suddenly I had a sense of something out of place — a glimpse of familiar features in the wrong background. ‘Could you rewind?’ I asked Hammoudi.

  He grunted but pressed the controls. There was a whirr of tape and I watched the sequence again. This time I was sure of it: the face belonged to Robert Rabjohn. Hammoudi flicked the TV off.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘Karlman saw you coming. He planted the stela and along you came and found it, right on cue.’

  He stood up again and began packing away his materials. If nothing else, I thought, he’d exonerated me from the charge of forgery, and I had to admit to myself that he’d sown the seeds of doubt. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you’re so sure it’s a hoax, why don’t you let me confront Karlman himself? If I was unfairly dismissed from the EAS, then at least you owe me that.’

  Hammoudi grimaced. ‘Nothing would give me more pleasure than to put that twisted old bastard on the rack myself. But no can do, Ross. Karlman was found dead in his flat at Imbaba a week ago, strangled to death. His Nubian servant and some of his most valuable books are missing.’

  50

  Even before Hammoudi left I’d noticed a blemish at the edge of my retina — a tiny, dense star that I knew would expand within half an hour until it obliterated my peripheral vision entirely. Then the searing pain would start. ‘Nurse!’ I called, banging on the door. The guard outside stood up and peered through the glass at me uncertainly. ‘Call the nurse!’ I shouted, clutching my head, play-acted a little. He dithered for a moment, then dashed off down the corridor shouting and disappeared round the corner. The door wasn’t locked and for a moment I thought about making a run for it. Then I remembered that I didn’t yet know where Elena was, and this time I wasn’t going anywhere without her. A moment later Thalwa arrived, anyway. ‘What is it?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Migraine,’ I said, ‘I get terrible attacks.’

  ‘I’ll bring you paracetamol.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t work. I need something stronger.’

  She hurried off and returned five minutes later with a tiny paper cup and a larger one of water on a tray. ‘Valium,’ she said. ‘Take two now, and another two every four hours.’ There were six capsules in the cup. That, I thought, was slip number one.

  I took two of the capsules with a gulp of water, and as soon as she’d gone I spat them out again. I had six Valium caps as ammunition — enough to make someone groggy. I didn’t have a plan, but at least it was something. The migraine was jabbing a fiery lancet through my skull, though, so I relented. I took one capsule anyway, and hid the other five inside my pillow-case. Then I lay down on my bed and tried to think clearly through the migraine aura and the growing Valium-induced numbness. Hammoudi had given me a lot to think about, and I wasn’t completely sure any longer that I’d really experienced what I remembered. I’d started to recall seeing ‘things’ out there in the desert before I’d found the ship — yellow slit eyes behind me, demonic shapes on the dune-tops. Perhaps I’d merely passed into a shadow-land inside my own head, where all sorts of fantasies were playing themselves out. There seemed to be no collateral for anything I remembered — no water, no demijohns, no fruit. Elena had told Hammoudi I’d never left her side. I’d always been a clear and logical thinker — Oceam’s Razor, slicing away the illusions, and this time there was a great deal at stake. If I could believe what I’d seen and heard was true, I was carrying a valuable message for my species — the news that we were no longer on our own. Now, I realised, it came down to one thing: faith. Did I believe in
my own senses or not?

  By late afternoon the migraine had gone, and in the slightly euphoric state induced by the Valium I stood staring out of the window at the desert. The sand mist had shifted and the crags of the limestone plateau were in sharp focus across the great beach of pebbles. This plateau divided the Nile valley from the oasis-chain of Kharja—Dakhla—Farafra—Bahriyya — about two days’ fast journey away — and was criss-crossed by a network of routes known only to the Bedouin, marked by cairns, stones and ancient piles of broken pottery. The Bedouin had brought their herds to market at Isna, Idfu and Aswan this way for centuries. The sun was drifting towards the plateau, turning the pebble beach to soft gold, expanding the shadows of the saplings in the garden. A couple of black-jackets slouched along the wire perimeter casually, their AK-47s slung from their shoulders. They halted by the gate and lit cigarettes, watching the young Arab gardener who’d just come into view with his hose-pipe, moving from tree to tree, giving each what seemed to be a well-measured dose of water. The boy didn’t have a watch, and the sureness with which he measured out the water-flow impressed me. There was something familiar in it, as there was in the way he moved — that springy quality to his step that seemed to be an expression of boundless nervous energy. I watched him closely, taking in the angular shape of the face, the wedge-shaped torso, the jaunty way he tied his headcloth. As he leaned over a bush, his headcloth snagged suddenly on a thorny limb and was pulled back. I saw the fidwa earring sparkle clearly for a fraction of a second before the boy, with a nervous glance at the smoking guards, hastily covered it up. He was not my clan — probably from one of those more settled along the rim of the oases — but he was a Hazmi nevertheless, and a Hazmi was the sworn ally of any other.