Firebird

by Michael Asher

  45

  The sand was like ice water on our bare feet as we toiled up the leeward face of the dune. The camels groaned and their nostrils steamed, and often they pulled back on the headropes, digging their flat feet into the sand and threatening to send us tumbling down the slope. I coiled the rope round my hand and once round my body to give me more leverage, but every step was an intense effort of will. We drove, bullied and cajoled the camels on in fits and starts, but by the time we’d got halfway up the face we were all panting and bathed in sweat.

  ‘Come on!’ I bellowed from the front. ‘Keep them moving or they’ll sit down!’ We heaved them on again, and I leaned into my headrope, feeling it cutting into my shoulder. Every inch was a battle, but at last I was standing on the crest, waving my camel stick triumphantly. I slithered down to help Mansur, who was next in line leading Ross stumbling through the soft sand. When he was safely at the top, we both sashayed down to help Ahmad. As each new camel arrived on the summit its owner would return to the column to help the next one, straining together on the headrope or driving from behind with threatening flicks of their camel sticks. Daisy was the last in the caravan and by the time we got to her, her old she-camel had sat down. Ahmad fondled the beast’s lips and she snapped at him lazily.

  ‘Come on, Grandma!’ he said. ‘I know you’re not as young as you used to be, but don’t let the tribe down!’ All of us hauled, shouted and cursed, but the she-camel wouldn’t budge.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Mansur said at last, ‘we’ll have to unload her.’

  We unslung the heavy woven saddlebags filled with grain, and unlaced the wooden saddle. Ahmad and I carried them on our shoulders to the top. A hundred kilos lighter, the old camel rose to her feet with trembling legs and allowed herself to be dragged to the summit. Finally, we threw ourselves down into the sand.

  ‘Well, there it is!’ I told Daisy, gesturing to the west, ‘the Sea Without Water, the Bahr Bela Ma!’ I glanced at Daisy and saw that her eyes were full of the same kind of wonder and confusion she’d displayed on our first day in the limestone desert.

  ‘There’s no way through,’ she whispered shakily, ‘this first dune almost finished us. We can’t keep on doing that!’

  The Hawazim heard her out in silence, and I saw some worried glances exchanged. Even Ahmad, Mansur and ‘Ali had nothing to say for once. The three half-brothers looked towards Ross, waiting for his guidance. The amnir eased himself shakily to his feet, whipped off his useless glasses and began to clean the lenses on his shirt, taking a series of long, deep breaths. He replaced his glasses, and expelled air in a rush.

  ‘There is a way,’ he said, ‘and I can find it. But Sammy must be my eyes.’

  I nodded, strode over to my camel and took her by the headrope. ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘Let’s move!’

  The windward slope was scattered with the runners of desert melons I’d found earlier that morning, and we tied the camels together for the descent, and ran about collecting them, slicing some open and gobbling down the mellow pulp greedily, feeding the green rinds to the camels and saving the rest in our saddle bags for later. ‘Ali and Ahmad collected armfuls of the green shoots and tied them in bundles on to our saddles so that the camels would have green vegetation to eat at the evening halt. The way down was a breeze after the climb, but Ross warned us to be alert for patches of drum sand, which were more frequent on the slip slopes. At the bottom there was a corridor of pea gravel, like millions of tiny black droppings, and instead of broaching the next dune face, Ross turned and led us up the avenue between the dunes. It seemed to be a cul-de-sac leading straight up to a wall of sand, but just when I was certain we were trapped, Ross — riding in the shibriya behind me — told me to swing suddenly to the west, and we found ourselves in yet another natural boulevard weaving through the sand skirts.

  For the rest of the day and all through the next, Ross pushed me on unerringly, never faltering, never floundering, never turning back. Each time it seemed certain that he’d led us into a dead end, there’d be an exit waiting for us, unseen except by the amnir’s inner eye. Sometimes we were obliged to climb gentle slopes, pick our way gingerly between pits of drum sand, dice with illusion as the silicon grains sparkled in the high sun. But I realized that we’d never have lasted even the first day if we’d tried to go straight across. I knew Ross was being guided by a beacon in his head, because I’d experienced the same thing myself when I’d led the boys through the ghibli, years ago and again, more faintly, earlier on this journey. But I also knew that my ability was puny compared with his. He was guiding us through what appeared to be an impenetrable morass of sand, through a place he’d never been in before, without map, compass or GPS, or even eyes, and without making a single false move. I saw the admiration and wonder in the faces of the other tribesmen as we struggled on, and I knew this feat would be talked about in hushed voices round campfires for centuries to come.

  After the first day there were no more melons, and though we’d saved over fifty of the little green balls, their moisture content was small and never really satisfied us. On the second day, Ahmad spotted some fennec foxes scampering for their burrow, and he and Mansur dug them out. One of them gave Mansur a nasty bite on the hand before he bopped them on the head. That evening we camped in the lee of a great dune, and two of the tribesmen — Mamoon, and his brother Abd al-Hadi, went off to track down sandrats. They came back with seven of the little rodents tied to their camel sticks, and we roasted them in their skins, next to the diced foxes, on a smoky fire of camel dung. Daisy wrinkled her nose in revulsion at the tiny rat carcases, but the smell of the roast flesh — even half burned as it was — was so tempting to our half-starved bodies that she was soon eating ravenously with the rest of us.

  ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going to treat myself to a buffet at the Nile Hilton,’ Daisy said through a mouthful of tough desert fox, ‘lobster thermidor, fresh salad — definitely no rats or foxes!’

  The food was pitifully little for the eight of us, and on the morning of the third day I awoke in biting cold with a hollowness in my stomach and a raging thirst that our few remaining melons couldn’t satisfy. We didn’t bother to light a fire — camel dung was the devil to light, and it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead we just loaded the camels, moving slowly and ponderously like deep sea divers, mumbling at each other through parched lips. To cap it all, a northerly wind started up as we set off, blasting a stream of fine particles into our faces. We clung on to the camels and bent into it, staggering like blind men through pillows of soft sand. The force of the storm seemed to get more and more powerful as the morning wore on, and each step into it became an agony. The sand sea seemed to be mocking us, cackling and jeering, screaming abuse from a billion demonic throats. I saw Daisy staggering, pushing herself on with a pale, haggard face, her lips white and her teeth set hard in utter determination. I put my arm round her as we pulled our camels up a slope and down again.

  ‘This is what madness must be like!’ she rasped in my ear. ‘The noise of it drives you crazy!’

  When the storm stopped suddenly about midday, the silence was unexpected and eerie as though there was suddenly something missing. Ross urged me down a slip slope and into a wide valley of apricot coloured pillow sand, whose surface had been swept clean and stippled into a rainbow of colours by the storm.

  ‘Stop here!’ Ross said, and I held up my camel stick to halt the column and couched my camel.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  He gazed sightlessly around him, sniffing the chalky after taste of the storm, while my eyes darted back and forth along the walls of the dunes which here looked like giant organ pipes. ‘This is it,’ he said with certainty, ‘we’re here.’

  He couched his camel awkwardly and felt for the ground with his stick before stumbling off. I gaped around in astonishment. The place looked no different from the dozens like it we’d passed through on the way. I choked back a remark, and watched Ross staggering blindly tow
ards the nearest slope. The rest of the company couched their camels and Daisy came up beside me.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ she said. If this was where the Germans and the others were digging, where’s the detritus — camp rubbish, broken boxes, old fires, squashed tin cans?’

  I bit my lip and glanced at Ross. He was feeling his way clumsily along the edge of the dune, leaving a pattern of footprints like the stitch marks of a giant beetle. Suddenly he stopped, probed the sand with his stick, and began scraping it away with his hand. Daisy and I hurried over to him, and by the time we got there he’d already uncovered what looked like the massive stone lintel of a doorway that was still buried. It appeared to be carved from a single piece of granite that certainly wasn’t from anywhere round here, polished smooth over millennia by the work of the sand. It was decorated in relief with a symbol whose outline had been eaten away by sand abrasion, but which was still recognizable. When I stooped to look at it, my heart started thumping madly. It was a heron with a human eye perched on a cone shaped object — the same image we’d seen in Sanusi’s book, now almost two weeks ago.

  Ross ran a hand along the lintel, felt the reliefs, and took off his glasses. ‘The Firebird tells us we’re in the right place,’ he said, smiling wearily through bloodshot eyes. ‘Welcome to the hidden mansion of the Benben Stone!’

  46

  A few minutes later the others joined us and we worked with our hands and sticks in the burning sun to clear the doorway. In less than an hour we’d uncovered two massive granite uprights that must have weighed as much as the blocks in the Valley Temple at Giza, framing a door wide enough to admit a small motorcar. The door was made of a single piece of some heavy metal and seemed to be sealed airtight. It was covered from top to bottom in ancient Egyptian images and hieroglyphs, prominent among them the ferocious goddess Sekhmet, the wild jackal Anubis and the Eye of Ra. In the very centre of the door was a elliptical cartouche bearing a strange motif — two lion-headed sphinxes standing back to back, and carrying between them a conical object with a T-shaped protrusion on top, like a perch or a handle. The cartouche itself stood at the centre of a larger ellipse, which was made up of a number of small circles or dots.

  ‘What’s that?’ Daisy asked. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  I examined the cartouche closely. ‘The bell-shaped object is the omphalos,’ I said, ‘that’s another form of the Benben Stone. The lions are probably the Aker-lions which guarded the entrances and exits of the ancient Egyptian Duat, which meant both the celestial realm and the Underworld. One was a mirror of the other. The beauty of the cartouche is that it folds meanings within meanings — on one level it’s a kind of warning.’

  Daisy gasped and stepped back. ‘Look at this door!’ she said. ‘It must be thousands of years old, yet it’s in perfect condition. And what’s it made of?’

  I ran my hand over it. ‘Seems almost like lead,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know the ancient Egyptians even worked in lead.’

  ‘And what about the lintel and uprights? I’d say they’re marble, and they’re bigger than some of the blocks in the Great Pyramid. How the hell could they have dragged them across hundreds of miles of desert? It’d be virtually impossible even today!’

  Ross felt the door thoughtfully. ‘Lead’s a soft metal,’ he said, ‘how could it have retained its shape so perfectly for so many centuries? Unless it just looks like lead.’

  ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s pretty damn strong whatever it is. The question is, how do we get in?’ He braced a shoulder against the door and heaved. After a second, Ahmad, Mansur and a handful of the others joined him. The door didn’t give a millimetre. ‘Well,’ Ross said, ‘it seems the Germans got in, and so did Ibram and Sanusi. If they did, we must be able to. Now, let’s see...’ He sniffed, adjusted his glasses and ran his fingers down the door, touching hieroglyphs and pressing the cartouche. Nothing happened. He took a step back suddenly and began to feel the dots in the larger ellipse surrounding the cartouche, counting them. ‘Fifty!’ he said, almost to himself. ‘I knew it! They must have been testing our knowledge of advanced astronomy!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  Ross looked excited now. ‘See these dots,’ he said rapidly, ‘there are fifty of them, arranged in an ellipse. A few years back I found a stela at Medinat Habu with an identical design. It signified the orbit of Sirius B around its sister star Sirius A, which is complete once every fifty years.’

  ‘But Sirius B’s invisible isn’t it?’ Daisy asked. ‘How could they have known...’

  But Ross wasn’t listening. Instead he was feeling a row of hieroglyphs above the ellipse. ‘Isis!’ he said, pointing to a female deity with a fish tail. ‘In ancient Egyptian symbolism she signifies Sirius. Whoever built this place was testing our knowledge of astronomy by presenting the orbit of a star that can’t be seen with the naked eye, and Isis is the key!’ He pressed the Isis icon and there was a clunk as a hairline crack appeared in the door, dividing it neatly in two. There was a second clunk as both halves of the door folded inwards with a hiss of air.

  ‘Jesus!’ Daisy gasped, and the Hawazim gaped in surprise. Some of them made the sign against the evil eye. The open door revealed a tunnel descending at a gentle angle into the belly of the earth, lit dimly by what appeared to be luminous strips. Daisy peered into it. ‘Surely the ancient Gyps never had anything like this!’ she said. ‘Those doors must have been put in by Ibram.’

  ‘No,’ Ross said, ‘I think they’re original.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘From what I’ve felt, I can remember that I’ve seen something like it before,’ Ross answered. He turned towards the Hawazim, who I saw were hanging back diffidently. ‘So who’s going?’ he enquired. ‘I can’t. I’ve got no eyes.’

  No one answered, not even his cousins ‘Ali, Ahmad and Mansur.

  ‘Well,’ Mansur said at last, his dead eye blinking rapidly, ‘someone has to look after the camels.’

  Ross smirked. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘and we’d better take full precautions. ‘Ali — you set up the machine gun in a commanding position just in case anyone approaches. Mansur, you and Ahmad rig up some kind of sun shelter, then take the others to look for sip wells or melons —anything we can use.’

  They nodded, and Ross felt for me and Daisy, placing his hands on our shoulders. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘looks like it’s down to you two. You going or not?’

  ‘All right,’ we both said. Ahmad brought us two powerful flashlights from the camels, and at Ross’s insistence, our handguns.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked him, as we switched on the torches.

  ‘I wish I could come,’ he said, ‘but in there I’ll just be a burden to you. The Divine Spirit go with you. Good luck!’

  47

  The tunnel was oval in shape, made of the same bluish metal as the door, vaulted over our heads with curving walls covered in hieroglyphs and cartouches. The floor was a granite walkway notched to prevent slipping, thick enough to absorb the sound of our footsteps. The air was stale, and I couldn’t make out where the dim green glow came from. There seemed to be strips of luminous tape somewhere up in the curve of the ceiling, but when I shone my torch beam up there, they were gone. I advanced slowly down the corridor, tying my headcloth around my waist and peering at some of the tens of thousands of hieroglyph figures all painted in what seemed to be their original colours.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ I said, ‘I’ve never seen hieroglyphs in relief on metal before. It’s something entirely new!’ I stopped to examine a particularly interesting portrait of Sekhmet — a grim faced, terrifying figure with a lion’s head, carrying the sacred sun disc and breathing fire. ‘Whoever built this place was preoccupied with the idea of devastation,’ I commented. I pointed to a stela portraying starving people with the ribs showing through their skin, and read the tiny hieroglyphs underneath. ‘The people of the valley are starving,’ I read alo
ud, ‘and terror stalks the land.’

  Suddenly there was an audible clunk as the outer door snapped shut without warning, extinguishing the daylight. We rushed back to it and knocked, and there were answering thumps from the other side, though the door remained solidly in place. A second later the green glow strips went out.

  ‘Great!’ Daisy said. ‘We’re trapped! And the door looks airtight — we’re going to asphyxiate too!’ I caught the whirr and rumble of machinery from somewhere beneath the floor, and a moment later I sensed a faint stream of cool air. Then the glow strips came on again, bathing the tunnel in eerie green light. ‘There’s some kind of air circulation system at work,’ Daisy said. ‘Ibram’s team must have constructed it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it would have cost millions. No, this is the original technology.’

  ‘The ancient Egyptians didn’t have stuff like this,’ Daisy said. ‘How can you be so certain?’

  I said nothing, and we walked to the end of the tunnel and found it sealed by a second blue metal door. I examined it in the light of my torch and saw what appeared to be the marks of an axe or some other sharp, heavy instrument, which had cut into the surface of the metal but done no serious damage. ‘I guess this is where Ibram or his predecessors got impatient!’ I chuckled, traversing the door with my torch beam. ‘Let’s see.’ The centre of the door was marked with the Aker-lion cartouche just as the other had been, but this time the cartouche itself lay in the middle of ten separate ellipses, each one containing a circle or dot of a different size. One of the circles — the sixth in sequence from the centre — had a ring placed horizontally around it.