Pharaoh jh-7

by David Gibbins

‘That’s bad enough,’ Ormerod grumbled. ‘A twelve-foot killing machine.’

  ‘And you?’ Tanner asked.

  Mayne looked at him. ‘Me?

  ‘What do you think?’

  Mayne paused. ‘I think this expedition needs to disencumber itself of as much baggage as possible, and I think we are in danger of being weighed down by a leviathan of the mind.’

  Ormerod grunted, then gestured towards the clifftop. ‘If that was you, it was a hell of a shot, Mayne. The Mohawks talk about your shooting from the Red River expedition, but that’s the first time I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Service rifle, that’s all,’ Mayne said. ‘It shows what our soldiers could do if we trained them properly in long-distance marksmanship.’ He reslung his water bottle and reached for his bags, but Ormerod put out a hand to stay him. ‘There’s something we want you to see first. At the base of the cliff.’

  ‘Jones told me. But I don’t have time.’

  ‘You’ve got half an hour. The boat leaked during the trial, and Charrière’s caulking it with some foul mixture the Dongolese concocted from camel dung and grass. There’s nothing you can do to help, so you might as well take a look.’

  Mayne glanced at the green-brown smudges from his camel’s greeting on his tunic, mingling with the dark spots of blood from the soldier who had been shot beside him. He had probably had enough of camel dung for one day. ‘All right. But let’s make it quick.’

  He followed them about twenty yards along the base of the cliff, stopping where a cluster of shovels and picks had been leant against the rock beside a portable gas lantern. Tanner, in the lead, pointed to an opening about two yards wide and a yard deep, evidently revealed by recent digging. It was the upper part of an ancient doorway, hewn out of the living rock. He picked up the lamp and sat on the sand, sliding himself feet first into the entrance. ‘It was completely buried when we arrived, but one of the officers’ dogs got up here and dug his way to the slab covering the entrance,’ he said, his voice edged with excitement. ‘I don’t think it had been opened up since the time of the pharaohs. Follow me.’

  Mayne sat down on the sand beside Ormerod and they pushed themselves in after Tanner, ducking under the rock. It was suddenly cool, so much so that Mayne caught his breath, and the air was damp. They were on a slope of sand that had evidently poured into the chamber since it had been opened, cascading down to the floor and nearly filling it. Inside, the only light came from the narrow slit at the entrance, and as they slid further down they descended into gloom. ‘There’s about two feet of water at the bottom,’ Tanner said from ahead of them, his voice sounding distant and hollow. ‘It’s below the level of the Nile, and would have been in antiquity too. I think it was deliberately built that way. The water’s surprisingly clear, and I’m sure there’s a lower entranceway buried under the sand that must come out on the edge of that pool in the river, though I haven’t found it yet.’

  Mayne caught a waft of gas as Tanner opened up the lamp, and heard the clicking of the flint as he tried to ignite it. The hiss turned to a roar and suddenly they were bathed in orange light, too dazzling to see anything. Tanner turned down the flame until it was white, and then Mayne could make out the walls, their own forms looming as shadows cast by the lamplight, giant and overarching. The chamber was about the size of the nave of an English country church. Where the walls had been cut from sedimentary rock it was eroded and covered in green slime, but the right side directly in front of Mayne was black basalt, polished smooth and free from growth.

  He stared at what he suddenly saw, astonished. ‘Good God,’ he murmured. He took the lantern from Tanner and slid down the sand closer to the wall, sloshing in the cold water that filled the edges of the chamber. The wall was covered in relief carving, deeply etched into the stone. He put his hand on it, feeling the cool, clammy surface, drawing his fingers along the lines. He remembered from his geology instruction at the School of Military Engineering how difficult it had been to chisel igneous rock, and he marvelled at the ancient masons who had managed such a prodigious feat in this desolate place, so far away from their homeland in the lush flood plains of the Nile to the north.

  He backed off a few steps to take in the whole image, sitting down on the sand. It was unquestionably carved by the ancient Egyptians, its shapes and hieroglyphic symbols familiar from others he had seen at Luxor and Amarna to the north. It showed a procession of skirt-clad Egyptian soldiers heading into battle; ahead of them was a naked enemy with spears and little round shields, running and lunging at the Egyptians. Tanner slid down beside him. ‘That’s what first amazed me when I came down here,’ he said. ‘I was at El Teb with Burnaby. Those look just like the Beya we were fighting.’

  Mayne raised the lantern and peered closely. Tanner was right. The enemy had their hair in plumes and rat-tails, exactly as the Beya wore theirs, greased with animal fat. These were Corporal Jones’ fuzzy-wuzzies, fighting off intruders three thousand years ago just as they were now, and just as terrifying. The scene seemed suddenly immediate, as if past, present and future were caught together in one image. But there was more, and he moved a few steps to the right, slipping back and holding up the lamp to stop it from falling into the water. The next scene showed men with raised hatchets and swords, hacking at a jumble of bodies and at prisoners with arms raised in supplication. The victors were exacting their usual price; in the register below was a ghastly melange of severed heads and limbs and genitalia, the carvings half submerged by the edge of the water, as if they were floating in it.

  But there was something wrong. This was not the usual picture of Egyptian conquest. It was not the Egyptians who were the victors; it was the enemy. The prisoners were receiving the same treatment they were shown inflicting on enemies in countless other wall reliefs in Egypt, depicting conquests real or glorified. And yet this had clearly been carved by Egyptian hands, by masons who had toiled here in this chthonic place under instruction from someone who wanted to celebrate defeat, not victory. What was going on? Mayne stared at the awful image in the lower register and remembered Jones’ account of General Hicks’ last stand two years before, of the Mahdi’s men ripping the genitalia off Egyptian prisoners before they fed them to the dogs. Seeing this image sent a chill through him, as if he were looking not at the ancient past but at history foretold, at the fate that lay ahead of them now.

  And there was yet more. Tanner pointed further along, and Mayne raised the lantern. Filling the entire wall at the head of the army was the huge figure of their leader, striding forward. It had none of the usual appurtenances of kingship, but Mayne instantly recognised the bulbous belly and distended chin he had seen on wall carvings at Amarna. He remembered the scarab he had been given by Shaytan, hanging round his neck now, and where he had seen the inscription on the base before: it was the hieroglyphic cartouche of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh shown here wearing nothing but a robe and sandals. Akhenaten had led his army south and yet seemed divorced from his soldiers, turning away from the carnage of defeat and striking off alone, his eyes determinedly ahead. And in front of him, radiating from the corner of the chamber, was his most characteristic symbol of all, the Aten sun-disc, its rays extending outwards towards the pharaoh and seeming to embrace and draw him forward, each ray ending in a hand with palm outstretched.

  Mayne stared at the image. He had seen the fragmentary remains of a wall carving like this somewhere else, two weeks earlier, near the wells of Jakdul, not in an underground chamber but scattered over a windswept ruin scarcely visible above the surface of the desert, its walls reduced to foundation courses and the spread of rubble buried in dust and sand. Shaytan had told him that eight years earlier he had guided Gordon Pasha himself to the place, when Gordon was touring the Sudan during his first period as governor general and had a burning passion to discover the antiquities of the place. He had been accompanied by a flamboyant American, Charles Garner Wright, an army officer and adventurer who still wore the uniform of the Confederate South, o
ne of several Civil War veterans who had sought employment with the Khedive’s army; and by a German archaeologist who Mayne realised from Shaytan’s description was Dr Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, a man greatly admired by Gordon. The three men had spent days at the site, digging into the sand yet revealing little more than the fragments that were almost completely buried when Shaytan showed it to Mayne.

  Tanner nudged him. ‘You haven’t seen the best. Look at the wall opposite the entrance.’

  Mayne turned and raised the lantern, and then gasped. Leering out of the gloom high above was the head of a giant standing sculpture, or more accurately the snout. He could see that it was a figure striding forward, carrying a staff in one hand and the ankh symbol in the other, a statue in the round carved out of the living basalt. But it was the head that was extraordinary. It was not a man’s head, but the head of a crocodile, with eyes carved deeply on either side and jagged teeth encircling the mouth, the fourth incisor from the front on either side lodged in the upper jaw.

  ‘It’s Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god,’ Tanner said, his voice hushed. ‘The built-over recess behind it is cracked at the top, so you can see inside. It’s filled with mummies. Crocodile mummies, that is. I think this was a temple that adjoined the pool in the river, with a channel running into it. During the annual flood of the Nile it would have provided refuge for crocodiles from the rushing water of the cataract. I think crocodiles actually lived here.’

  Mayne stared at the statue. He remembered the evening he had spent with Tanner and Jones picking through the ancient sources for mention of crocodiles, and what Plutarch had said about them: the Egyptians worship God symbolically in the crocodile, that being the only animal without a tongue, like the Divine Logos which stands not in need of speech. They had checked it themselves on a rotting carcass they had found downstream, and it was true: the Nile crocodile had no tongue, and a top jaw that could detach itself to accommodate prey far larger than itself, like a snake. The divine word that shall not be spoken. It struck him that the early Christians who reviled the Egyptians for making idols, and all those since who thought they worshipped animal deities, were wrong, and should return to the ancient authors to seek the truth. Sobek was not a god, but the divine presence manifesting itself through the crocodile. Just as the Mahdi and his followers saw Allah in the works of man, so the ancient Egyptians perceived the divine presence in all the facets of nature. In his mind’s eye, Mayne saw Akhenaten, the pharaoh who had experienced the revelation more strongly than any other, marching ever southward to free himself from the shackles of the priests and the old religion that had empowered those images, drawing from them and taking with him the divine presence. Perhaps he had built this temple on the very edge of the Egyptian world beside the crocodile pool as a last gesture to the old ways before leaving it all behind and plunging into the desert. It was out there that the archaeologists should be searching for him, not at Amarna or in the monuments to the north, yet Mayne knew it was a place where little evidence of his passing would ever be found: no ruins or statues or temples, except the distilled desolation of the desert and the brilliance of the sun.

  Tanner turned to him, his face flushed in the lamplight and his voice edged with excitement. ‘I have a theory, Mayne. I think they were doing something here that they couldn’t do in Egypt, something that the priests would have banned, an ancient ritual from their prehistoric past. I think that’s why Akhenaten came here and had this place carved out far beyond the control of the priests, back in the land of his ancestors. I think this was a sacrificial chamber. And look at those images of dismembered bodies. I mean human sacrifice.’

  Mayne stared at the wall, his mind reeling. Human sacrifice. Did that scene of violence show a real battle, or was it allegorical? He looked at the procession of soldiers again, and then at the image of the pharaoh. He realised that there was something missing: images of Egyptian military expeditions always showed priests. There were none here, and the image of Akhenaten lacked the usual priestly equipment of a pharaoh, the staff and the ankh symbol and the crown. Had he cast them off, and come to the desert already divested of the old religion? Or had he done so here, beyond the borders of Egypt, having reached a place sacred to his early ancestors where only the river and the desert held sway? Had the sacrificial victims been the priests?

  Mayne remembered Corporal Jones and the leviathan, his description from the Book of Job: His neesings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. He strained to see the head of the crocodile, raising the lamp as high as he could. The eyes were made of crystal, a deep red, perhaps agate, but the nostrils were crystal as well, brilliant pellucid stones cut in facets that reflected a dazzling light even from the sputtering flame of the gas lamp. He looked back at the slit of light through the entrance, realising that the chamber was aligned east–west. Now, with the sun on the horizon, the light was shining high above the statue, close to the roof. But an hour ago, about the time he had been waiting for the sun to drop enough to see the sharpshooter, it would have shone directly into the eyes and nostrils of the crocodile, reflecting a brilliant, shimmering light, as if the crocodile itself were emitting a beam towards the sun. He thought of what this place might have been like three thousand years ago: down below, beneath the sand that now obscured it, a passageway through the rock to the river for the crocodiles, and up above, far above the reach of anyone sealed in the chamber, a slit just wide enough to let that flash of light through, a beam of red and green that those watching outside might have seen as the beginning of a new dawn, as the last ray of a godhead who had consumed the victims needed to release his energy in one flash towards the divine light of the Aten, allowing the chamber and the last exhalations of the old religion to be sealed up for ever.

  ‘Good Lord,’ murmured Ormerod after they had stood in silence for several minutes, hearing only the dripping of condensation from the walls, tiny splashes magnified in the chamber as it fell into the water. ‘Not a word of this to the men. They’re jittery enough about crocodiles as it is.’

  Mayne heard a hollering outside; it was Charrière, calling his name from the river. Tanner and Ormerod began to make their way up the slope towards the entrance, but he lingered, staring at something he had seen in the wavering light of the lantern. It was a small slab of stone about eight inches square, partly detached from the wall; it had once been fixed into a depression below the image of Akhenaten, but the mortar around its edges had evidently crumbled in the dampness of the chamber. The decoration on its surface seemed continuous with the surrounding image, a series of radiating lines from the sun symbol, and in the top left corner an acute angle overlaying the lines that corresponded to the lower hem of Akhenaten’s robe. Yet with the slab detached from the wall, it also seemed as if it might form part of something else, one quarter of a larger square with lines that radiated out from a shape in the centre, formed from the acute angle. He picked it up, feeling the weight of the basalt. He remembered Shaytan’s account of Gordon and Schliemann and the American excavating the temple in the desert. They had been looking for a carving, something that might be like this. On a whim he decided to take it. Someone at headquarters might know its meaning, perhaps Kitchener, another engineer officer who had been close to Gordon and shared his archaeological interests.

  As he pocketed the slab, he accidentally caught and broke the thong around his neck that held the scarab that Shaytan had given him. He cursed under his breath, scrabbling around where it had fallen into the water at the edge of the sand, knowing that he was probably only digging it in deeper. He heard the hollering again, and looked up to the sunlight streaming in from the entrance, seeing the silhouetted forms of the two men waiting for him. He would look for it when he returned. If he returned. He held the weight of the slab in his pocket, and struggled upright in the sand. He seemed to be taking one artefact at the expense of another, the one in his pocket of uncertain meaning and the other a sacred relic from a man he rated
highly, a gift to protect him in the desert. It was as if something within was pulling him away from the bonds that tied men to each other; ever since his parents’ death he had been destined to live as an outsider. He had begun to understand better what had made him sit at night with his back to the fire while Shaytan was asleep and stare into the darkness of the desert, wishing he could walk out and let it enfold him, to disappear forever from the affairs of men.

  He felt himself sink further into the sand. Below him the ground was saturated, and he realised that there was no certainty that the floor of the chamber continued at the same level, that it might be a deeper pit full of quicksand that could suck him down. He hauled one leg out, then the other, and began to make his way laboriously up the slope. He remembered what the Mohawks had said when he overheard them talking apprehensively about the river ahead, about the feeling of heaviness; perhaps that was what they had meant. He laboured on, making little progress, his heart pounding. It occurred to him that Tanner and Ormerod could dislodge the sand and it could slide down like an avalanche and engulf him, entombing him forever with the crocodile god. He remembered his mission to Wolseley; disappearing in a place like this was decidedly not the fate that he had envisaged.

  He took one last look back, then released himself from the grip of the sand and scrambled up to the chamber entrance until he stood outside beside the other two, blinking in the waning sunlight. He walked over to his gear, opened up his saddlebag and pulled out the robe he had been wearing in the desert, then unsheathed the knife he kept on his belt and cut into one edge of the cloth. After replacing the knife, he tore off a strip, then took the stone slab out of his pocket and wrapped it in the material, tying it with a length of cord from his pocket and handing it to Tanner. ‘See that this gets to Corporal Jones, would you? He looks after my belongings. We’ll have a good look at it when I get back. And I’d like him reassigned to the Railway Company at Korti. You’ll be the senior remaining Royal Engineer with the river column after I’ve left, so he’s your responsibility. Can you see to that?’