“I'm jammed in tight,” he called to her. “Better go for help.”
Help. A memory of the hike and the long donkey ride rose up like a thermal from below. The feeling was hot and hopeless. It could take hours. Still she looked down at him.
“Are you going to leave me here?”
Chapter 47
IN THAT MOMENT of extremity, he realized how little he knew about Kalila.
The few things he knew about her tumbled through his mind like passing floors in a high-speed elevator descent or the dizzying fall he had just made down the rock face.
She was a shy yet spirited girl who had taken to him very readily. An Egyptian student, yet studying in America. A student of his father, yet someone who claimed to have a limited knowledge of his discoveries and of his enemies.
He remembered the feel of her hand in that eerie walk through the tomb and the sound of her fervent murmurings. Then how it had ended with their intimate commingling in the burial chamber.
In the darkness of the tomb chamber Kalila had opened herself up to him as entirely as any woman could. But that too had surprised him. She had revealed unexpected layers of herself, the heat of a hidden appetite that had swept over him like a warm, tender wave.
Now this.
Perhaps he had made a terrible mistake about her.
Would she literally leave him hanging?
Had his father taken her on faith too, not knowing her real motives? What would an avid believer see in a cynical old archaeologist?
His fall of speculation came to an abrupt halt at this point and he found himself jammed in a conclusion he could not resist – this girl may have had something to do with his father’s death.
The cleft of rock pinned his body, but his mind struggled to free itself from the conclusion he had just reached. I just don’t believe it. He saw sunlight spangle off a jewel above, her Coptic cross dangling from her neck.
No, not Kalila. I couldn’t be that wrong.
Chapter 48
SHE BROKE the silence. “I’m trying to decide what’s best.”
"Go for help."
That seemed to make up her mind. “No. I’ll lower the rope to you. Hang on.”
“I'm not going anywhere.” His voice rattled off the cliff wall.
A breeze whipped up and he saw it blow the hat clear off her head. She made a grab for it, but it floated over the edge.
Her hair whipped around her face.
She lowered the rope to him. But only one of his hands was free. The other arm lay jammed at his side. He reached up and took hold. The rope snapped taut.
It creaked. He saw her cast a fearful glance at the piton that held it secure. It held fast. She knelt to look over the edge. He tried to lift himself in order to free the other arm. But it was impossible with one hand.
It wasn't going to work.
“I'll have to come down to help you,” she called to him.
“No, don’t. Too risky. Get help.”
Her hair flew in front of her eyes like a veil. She caught it up in her fingers and pulled it back, twisting it in a topknot. “I'm coming.” She slipped the rope around herself in practiced fashion and launched herself out over the edge, descending in a series of tethered leaps from the rock face.
She was soon at his side, level with him, looking into the travail of his face. “Let’s try to work you free.”
She found a foothold to support herself and tested her weight on it. Then, still clinging to the rope with one hand, she pulled up the loose end of the rope and threaded it under Anson’s shoulders. Then she knotted it securely in a loop.
“Now try to pull yourself up on the rope. I'll help.”
His fist closed tightly around the rope and it stiffened along her body. She held on to it with one hand and used the other hand to grab him under the shoulder and tug. The rope creaked. Anson’s shoulder cracked. No movement. He was wedged as tightly as a piton.
“Try to wriggle free in small movements,” she said. “Like a snake.”
She perched over him and pulled under his shoulders as he tried again. There, a distinct movement. He budged. He was edging free. Another tug and his boots, jammed in the narrowest choke of the cleft, scraped free. He was edging out.
“Keep going. I'll shimmy up to the top and pull you from there.”
She did just that and was soon hauling him up. With both hands free, he came up swiftly hand over hand. She grew in his vision as first her down turned face and then her shoulders came into view. She added her strength to his to haul him the rest of the way to safety.
He clambered onto the shelf of rock.
She grabbed him in a relieved hug. They lay exhausted on the shelf.
She found a water bottle and gave him a drink. It was warm and faintly metallic tasting, but it opened up the coarse dryness of his throat.
“You keep surprising me. Thanks.”
“What are we going to do now? Are we going to give up, go back up after coming this far, or continue down and see your father’s tomb?”
He looked up at the topknot of her hair and then at her face. There was more than amazement in his eyes. Kalila was growing in his respect.
“Why stop now?” he said.
He went down first, abseiling in bounds down the rock face. He was soon safely on the ledge below. Kalila followed. Next to the ledge, a small hole in the rock disappeared swiftly into blackness.
“Is that the tomb?”
“Yes. Emory found some loose stone and flood debris and dug until he found a way through. He left only a small opening to keep it hidden.”
The archaeology student produced two pencil torches from her bag, gave him one and snapped on one herself. She bent low and crawled into the hole. He crawled after her. They came to a tangle of flood debris in a widening passage. She pressed on. They straightened as they reached an antechamber with decorated walls. It showed scenes of a young woman being led by a pharaoh into the presence of the god Amun-Re, with a jackal-headed god in attendance.
Kalila flashed her torch on the woman.
She had a long waterfall of dark hair and was dressed in sheer pleated linen that revealed the paleness of her breasts beneath.
It was a banquet scene. The beautiful young partygoer held a water lily in front of her nose.
“Not all their art is timeless,” he said. “This one has a hidden clock in it. Do you see it? You can tell from this clock that it’s a daytime party. Look at the flower she’s holding. It’s a blue water lily and the flower is open.”
Egyptian water lilies appeared in frescoes in tombs and on monuments all over Egypt, but they were more than decorations to an archaeologist’s eye. They were floral clocks. You could always tell the time of day when a scene took place.
He pointed to the water lily in the lady’s fingers, the petals clearly open. The flower appeared flattened in profile, as objects were always shown in carvings and frescoes, a triangle with delicate blue points spraying out in a starburst, like a living graphic of Egypt’s delta. The blue Egyptian water lily had the peculiar habit of opening up in the morning and closing in early afternoon. This scene of a lady at a banquet, inhaling the fragrance of a blue Egyptian water lily, was not only locked in time, it was also locked into a specific time - the daylight hours. “Since the petals are open, the banquet must have taken place at noon or early afternoon,” he said. “By contrast, the Egyptian white lily opens at sunset and closed at sunrise, so when you see open white lilies in a painted scene it tells you that the event is taking place at night, lit by the glow of oil lamps.”
“Do you think she was wrong about eternity, Anson? Do you think she would have taken this much trouble to hide her remains in such an inaccessible spot if she didn’t truly believe in the afterlife?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “But I nearly discovered the truth about the afterlife back there. You were pretty impressive.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Are
you sure? Nothing broken?”
“Nothing that a little ecstatic union wouldn’t help fix.”
“Maybe I should have left you there,” she said, smiling.
“Too late,” he said, grabbing her by the waist.
Chapter 49
ANSON WAS THE FIRST to go back up the rope.
As he neared the end of his climb and the top of the cliff came into view, he saw a figure in a grey galabea, knife in hand, leaning over his rope where the piton secured it in the rock.
He was going to cut it.
“Hey!”
The man, intent on his work did not even turn his head. The blade came down to meet the rope. But then a large hand came from nowhere and yanked the man to his feet.
Bloem.
The man swung at him with the knife. Bloem dodged and went with the lunge, tipping the man off his feet. Then he swept him up, one hand on his sleeve and the other at his rear and he threw the man spear-fashion over the cliff.
The man sailed past Anson. Maybe Bloem was still feeling raw about being thrown off a walkway. A single, thin yell and it was over. He helped Anson to his feet. Browning and the other two appeared behind.
“Sorry, we nearly missed the excursion,” Bloem said. “We had a hell of a time catching up. But I’m glad I could return the favour of catching you.”
“Hope we didn’t miss anything,” Ears said with a smile, unplugging his iPod.
Anson once again felt the clutter of interrogative pronouns jam up like old-fashioned typewriter keys in his brain. Who was the attacker? What was the purpose of the attack? Why now? Was he a lone operator? Some fundamentalist, offended by his father’s theories, and trying to take out his revenge on the son?
“Should we go down and try to look for him?” he said. The man could not have survived the fall.
Bloem shook his head. “I doubt he was up for any Citizen of the Year award. Somebody will find him.”
Chapter 50
“IF WE’RE LOOKING for a site more impressive than the Pyramids,“ Anson whispered to Kalila, remembering Daniel’s revelation: “this would have to be a good candidate.”
“Iput-Isut,” the ancients called it,” she said. “The most Esteemed of Places.” Karnak. It was late afternoon. They wandered through the field of ruined stone buildings and obelisks, the largest place of worship in history.
Finding the truth about his father and this mysterious threat to America and the West was like trying to find one stone in this jumbled universe of stone, he thought. Except this temple was anything but a jumble. Added to by a succession of pharaohs, Karnak had not simply grown like topsy. Accretions grew in accordance with an organic template known as the Fibonnaci series, the numerical law of balance and harmony that ordered the growth of plants, galaxies, a ram’s horns or the nautilus shell.
Another disturbing idea for mainstream Egyptology.
He twisted to stare up at the towering columns, some topped with spreading capitals, others with bundled papyrus heads. The columns were as stupendous as multi-stage space rockets and reared to a height of more than seven stories.
This was the great temple of temples where the priesthood worshipped and developed their religious beliefs about the gods and eternity. Once, just a few sunbeams slanted down from its enclosed stone roof and it would have been as dark in here as the primeval swamp. To the Egyptians, temples signified Heaven On Earth. Did his father discover a lost temple like Karnak somewhere in Egypt?
He passed through the hall and went among other ruined courts and halls, smaller temples and shrines, past miles of hieroglyphs, statuary of kings, queens, gods and goddesses and processional scenes in raised and also incised relief.
The smiting pharaoh was waiting here too.
On a pylon of the temple of Amun, he came upon Thutmosis III smiting foreigners, alongside a list of cities and towns captured in his campaigns.
He noticed that conservationists had roped off a few of the areas, a courtyard and several side chapels. Salt damp. They were working to fight the worst outbreaks but it was a guerilla war. The Aswan High Dam and the cancer of progress were eating away at the foundations of Egypt’s past, the change in the water table placing the carved reliefs in peril.
He joined Kalila and the Americans strolling among a vast and bulging thicket of columns. A whiskered Egyptian in a blue galabea sidled up to them.
“You want ushabti from tomb, sir?” The Egyptian spoke in a surreptitious whisper.
“What?” He had chosen the most unlikely mark in Browning.
“Ushabti. Genuine. From tomb.”
The man slid a look around, then fished inside his galabea to produce a rag. He opened it to reveal a blue faience ushabti - a mummy-shaped figure of a servant statue wrapped around with hieroglyphs.
“You trying to sell me that?” he said suspiciously.
“Genuine. Do you think me liar, sir?”
“That’s not for me to say,” Browning replied.
“It’s a fake,” Anson said.
The Egyptian frowned.
“No, Sir. Genuine artefact.”
“Fake,” Anson said firmly. “And if it were real I would be even more upset.”
The seller wrapped the figurine impassively and left.
“You reckon you know about fakes?” the Homeland security man said. It was the closest thing to a criticism that Browning had ever leveled at Anson.
Anson smiled.
“You get to know fakes. Fakes are the real plague of Egypt," he said. “And ushabtis are a favourite. An object can look good at first glance, but there is an indefinable maker’s mark about ancient Egyptian art. It’s almost impossible to forge. Their work was touched by a sensibility that’s hard to emulate. I think it’s because, through the power of magic, they were infused with a spark of eternity. They had to be. In order to function in the afterlife, objects needed to transcend materiality.”
I think I convinced Browning about the ushabti being a fake, Anson thought. But maybe not about me.
Kalila was walking alone with Anson when she went ahead into the columns and then disappeared. A blur of a hand shot out from a dark sleeve and grabbed her arm, yanking her out of view
“Abuna!”
“Sh!”
Anson ran around the column to find Kalila beside the figure of the monk, his features hidden behind dark glasses and a sunhat.
“We need to talk, Anson, but we need to find a place where I won’t be seen.”
“Follow me.”
Anson remembered the roped-off areas he had seen earlier. He led them to a chapel that was under restoration and appeared to be deserted. They stepped over the rope and went into the comparative gloom.
Daniel cast a glance at the base of a wall where a white encrustation crept up on the reliefs like a rising frost.
“Salt. It has the power to preserve and transform,” he said, “but it can also destroy. Good for preserving mortal flesh yet deadly to immortal stone.”
Chapter 51
THEY SQUATTED on the floor of the ancient chapel.
“First, what progress have you made my young friends?”
“A linear progression down the Nile,” Anson said. “Starting at Abu Simbel and Philae, then Kom Ombo, Edfu and Luxor, but I did have an interesting interlude in a local market.” He told Daniel about the meeting in the gold shop with the man from Zagazig University and of the shadow with a gun.
“Her again! She is following us like the shadow of death.”
The monk’s dark eyes bored into his face. Abuna was evidently on the run. The clean-shaven look was gone and an incipient beard shadowed his blocky face.
“And what have you turned up for us, Daniel?” Anson said.
The monk’s eyes now brightened in the gloom.
“I have some pearls to lay before you.”
Daniel told them about the Book of Buried Pearls.
Both had heard of it. Kalila said:
“Yes, I have certainly heard of it, but this
is a very different copy - in Sahidic, not Arabic, you say?”
He nodded. “And the book is filled with clues to perplex the mind. One speaks of Abydos and the staircase of the god, another of a twisted nether road above ancient Lake Moeris, now called Birket Qarun, in the Fayoum. Do you seek an ancient wonder? What is greater the Pyramid? it asks. But how many of these leads did Emory follow?”
“Ancient tradition would point to Abydos as the best possible site for his discovery,” Kalila said. “Whatever it may be.”
“Something Emory called his ‘heaven-and-earth-shaking’ discovery - sensational proof in Egypt that would turn our ideas of heaven upside down, that heaven was not a spiritual realm, but a real, three dimensional underworld and that this was the birthplace of the concept of a heaven.”
“You would think of Abydos first, but the Fayoum can’t be discounted either,” Daniel said. “The ancients looked upon Lake Moeris as Nun, the mythical primordial ocean, the origin of creation upon the first primeval mound. Myths also tell that the body of Osiris rested in the Lake district and that a flood carried the scattered parts of the dead god Osiris along the length of the Nile until they came together at this spot. Fayoum was said to be the true centre of the pantheon, lying as it does on the Western frontier of Egypt where the sun dies each night and where Re lives and Osiris rests.”
“A twisted nether road at the Fayoum,” Kalila said thoughtfully. “That sounds like a labyrinth. But the remains of the Great Labyrinth have already been found at Hawara.”
“That’s what bothered me. Perhaps it’s a dead end. Although the reference to a twisting path would seem to fit the clue Emory gave me,” Daniel agreed. The Coptic monk shrugged his bulky shoulders. “The other troubling fact is that the Labyrinth is too young to contain the remains of Osiris. Any tomb of Osiris would have to be exceedingly ancient, whereas Pharaoh Amenemhat III built his labyrinth in the Middle Kingdom.” He sighed. “I suppose Abydos is our best hope.”
THE SMITING TEXTS Page 20
