Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by David Gibbins

  Jack felt the shaking in his bones beginning to subside. ‘Walking would be good,’ he said.

  There was a bump against the back window, pushing the Toyota sideways. ‘Or take the camel,’ Ibrahim said.

  ‘What camel?’ Costas asked.

  ‘That one.’ He turned round and pointed to the window. Costas sprang sideways, staring at it. A large face was looming beside him, its huge hooded eyes staring, its jaw moving from side to side. ‘Are camels another favourite of yours?’

  ‘Childhood trauma,’ Costas said. ‘My parents took me on a trip to Jerusalem, and a camel giving tourist rides on the Mount of Olives spat on me.’

  ‘Actually, it’s not spit. It’s regurgitated food.’ Ibrahim craned his neck around, grinning at Costas. ‘Anyway, you’ve got a keffiyeh. It’ll take to you like a native.’

  Costas and Jack opened their doors and got out. Ibrahim quickly drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving them beside the camel, which stood chewing its cud and staring into the middle distance as if nothing had happened. Jack breathed in, tasting the tang of the desert, and then shaded his eyes and looked towards the river, just visible beyond a ridge of sandstone about a hundred metres away. He could see a cluster of large tents and several parked vehicles a few hundred metres further away to the south, and guessed that the main area of excavations must lie between where they stood and the tents, behind another low ridge ahead. Maurice had warned him that the site might appear deserted; most of the team would be at the other excavation on the far side of the river, having cleaned up the trenches on this side in preparation for an inspection by the Sudanese antiquities people scheduled for later on today.

  A figure suddenly appeared over the ridge, barrelling towards them. He was wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with desert goggles pushed up his brow, the tattered remains of an IMU T-shirt, ancient desert boots and a pair of outsized khaki shorts that Jack had given him years ago, a relic of the German Afrika Korps that he had found in a back-street market in Tunis. The shorts had a dangerous tendency to fly at half-mast, especially when Maurice was squatting down with a trowel, lost in enthusiasm. Jack looked hard, and heaved a sigh of relief. Maurice was wearing a garishly coloured pair of lederhosen braces, which were holding up the shorts. Aysha had sworn that she would only marry him if he did something about them, and Maurice had responded in flamboyant Austrian fashion. But Jack knew that the image of the reformed married man only went so far, and that very little else had changed.

  He nudged Costas. ‘Don’t say anything.’

  ‘Why not? Somebody should. How can anyone take that seriously?’

  Jack turned and gazed at him pointedly. Costas was wearing baggy shorts, an outsized Hawaiian flower shirt, aviator sunglasses and a precarious lopsided turban he had made up out of the keffiyeh scarf. ‘Have you looked at yourself recently?’

  ‘What?’ Costas pushed up his sunglasses and adjusted his turban. ‘Desert chic.’

  ‘Not. As Rebecca would say.’

  ‘She would never, ever diss Uncle Costas like that.’

  Hiebermeyer bounded up, shaking hands with both of them and slapping Costas on the shoulder. He gently pulled the dangling end of the keffiyeh and the entire cloth unravelled and dropped around Costas’ neck. ‘Mein Gott,’ said Hiebermeyer, eyeing Costas critically. ‘You need to get yourself a stylist.’ He pursed his lips. ‘And Hawaiian is so out this year.’

  ‘What did you just say?’ Costas exclaimed, smoothing his shirt down and pulling off the cloth. ‘So out?’

  ‘Aysha’s sister runs an haute couture chain in Cairo. She keeps me abreast of the latest fashions. They’ve even employed me as a consultant, to develop a line of evening wear based on Nefertiti’s robes in the Akhenaten relief carvings we found at Amarna. It’s always good to diversify.’ He grinned at Costas, then turned and strode off through the wadi in the direction of the river. ‘Come on, you two. Too much to see, too little time. I’ve got the inspectors coming in a couple of hours.’

  They followed quickly behind, barely keeping up.

  ‘And speaking of Akhenaten, Jack, that’s a fantastic discovery. Wunderbar. The sarcophagus of Menkaure. I can’t believe it, found after almost two hundred years. If you can raise it, I’m going to see whether I can have it put back in the pyramid. I was only there the other day. It’d be a logistical challenge, but it might be fun to see if I can get a team of Egyptian students to do it the authentic way, with ropes and logs. I’m into experimental archaeology like that at the moment. And that plaque. Marvellous. I showed the image to Aysha and emailed it to my team at the Institute in Alexandria. It looks like some version of the Aten symbol, but nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it. They’re doing a full database check against every known wall painting and carving to see if we can come up with a match. As a wedding present Lanowski gave me a program he’d developed based on fingerprint recognition technology used by the FBI in America. It’s revolutionised our study of Egyptian iconography. If we can’t find a match using that, it doesn’t exist.’

  Costas stumbled up alongside him. ‘Lanowski gave you that as a wedding present?’

  ‘And this hat. A twelve-gallon hat from his home state. I always loved the cowboy stuff. He’s a good man. The best. Never appreciated him until he told me that Egyptology had been his passion before he turned to computer nanotechnology at the age of twelve. His new wife and Aysha get on like a house on fire. We’re planning a joint delayed honeymoon to the pyramids at Giza to test a new program he’s devised to study the alignments. It’s going to blow all that astrological nonsense out of the water.’

  ‘Hang on, Maurice. A joint delayed honeymoon? You and Lanowski? Something not quite right there.’

  ‘Everything right. It’s the dawn of a new era in Egyptology.’

  Costas dropped back, shaking his head. Jack smiled to himself as they trundled forward. He loved being with Maurice when he was on a roll. He knew there would be a lot of discussion ahead about the shipwreck find, but now was clearly not the time.

  They came to a halt on a ridge overlooking the river. Costas had recovered his elan, and slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. ‘Okay, Maurice. Give us the low-down.’

  Hiebermeyer pointed to the river. ‘You have to imagine the Nile before the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960s caused the level of the water to rise, inundating all the features that made the Semna cataract so famous in history. Where we’re standing now would have been a cliff about forty metres above a wide pool at the base of the cataract. Above that the river was constricted within a narrow defile only about forty metres wide, bounded by large granite promontories that stuck out into the river on either side, almost damming it. During low water in the winter months the entire river was channelled through the constriction, pouring down from the rocky rapids to the south into the pool below us. You can get a great sense of its appearance and the drama of the place from sketches made by British officers when they were here in 1884.’

  ‘Come again?’ Costas said. ‘British officers?’

  Jack turned to him. ‘During the expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. A British force camped here on their way upriver during the final weeks of December that year, as the level of the Nile was dropping.’

  ‘Okay. Got you. What I was reading in that book of yours on the plane.’

  Hiebermeyer turned to the south, gesticulating grandly as he spoke. ‘To anyone coming here – the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British in 1884 – this place would have seemed like a gateway to another world, the last point you could reach before the cataracts ahead would force you to leave your boats and strike out across the desert. But the image of it as a portal to the riches of the south was only ever an illusion. Even today, standing here and looking south, it can seem a forbidding landscape, an endless expanse of desert with only jagged black basalt hills here and there to break the horizon. Imagine how it would have looked with the veil of spray rising above the cataract beyond that cons
triction and with a rolling tide of dust from the desert, and you can see why for a lot of people who came here, this place wasn’t a gateway but the last outpost of civilisation, the beginning of a no-man’s-land where many who ventured beyond never returned.’

  ‘So what’s the date of these ruins?’ Costas asked.

  Hiebermeyer beamed at him. ‘Follow me.’ He bounded along the edge of the wadi to higher ground, where a rectilinear excavation had taken the overburden of sand and dust down to bedrock, revealing the lower courses of a small square structure in stone about three metres across. A tarpaulin lay over one edge, and Hiebermeyer leaned down and carefully removed it, his back to them. ‘Prepare to be amazed,’ he said.

  Jack gasped at what had been revealed. It was a beautifully smoothed statue head of a pharaoh, life sized and broken at the neck. Above it, protruding from the wall, was a plinth with a pair of sculpted feet, in the same dark basaltic stone. The head was strikingly individualistic, with bulging eyes, sunken cheeks and a downturned mouth, the face of a hard man of war rather than the beatific image of youth so common among statues of the pharaohs. Jack stared at it, racking his brains, then remembered the report he had read from the first excavations that had taken place here back in the 1920s. ‘Sesostris III?’

  Hiebermeyer raised his arms in mock despair. ‘Typical Jack Howard to choose the Greek name over the Egyptian one.’

  Jack grinned at him. ‘You’ll never change me.’

  ‘One day, one day I’ll make you realise that ancient Egypt was the origin of Western civilisation, rather than that bunch of overwrought Greek muscle men in the Aegean and their mystical bards and philosophers, living up poles and in barrels.’

  ‘I thought excavating at Troy last year had won you over.’

  ‘Only because I proved that Troy had been ruled as an Egyptian vassal during the New Kingdom.’

  ‘If you hadn’t found those hieroglyphs of Akhenaten carved on the entrance passage into the underground chamber we discovered, you wouldn’t be here today. They specifically mentioned the Nubian desert and the fort at the cataract.’

  ‘I was coming here anyway,’ Hiebermeyer huffed. ‘Aysha had already agreed to conduct renewed excavations at Semna for the Sudanese government, who want to open up more sites along the Nile to attract tourists.’

  ‘Before we went to Troy, I distinctly remember Aysha saying that you had agreed to come here not to interfere with her site, but to look after the baby.’

  Costas guffawed. ‘Dr Maurice Hiebermeyer, director of the Alexandria Institute of Archaeology, the world’s pre-eminent Egyptologist, forced to become a nursemaid. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.’

  ‘It was payback,’ Jack said, grinning. ‘For Maurice spending three months during her pregnancy sealed up inside the main chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza.’

  ‘You did what?’ Costas exclaimed.

  Hiebermeyer looked defiant. ‘I’d been desperate to do it for years. It was a chance in a million, while the pyramid was closed to tourists for restoration work. For ages I’d wanted to see what the conditions would have been like for ancient artisans inside the tomb, to see whether it would have been too damp for wall painting. Experimental archaeology. Living in the past. I couldn’t turn it down.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Costas said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Hiebermeyer said, turning to Jack, ‘there’s nothing more important than my son. He’s the future director of the Institute, and I’ve already got him to trace hieroglyphs with his fingers.’

  ‘But he might be a marine archaeologist, specialising in ancient Greece,’ said Jack, a mischievous glint in his eye. ‘After all, I am his godfather.’

  ‘And so am I, remember?’ Costas said. ‘Last time I saw him, he gurgled just like a remote-operated vehicle itching to dive. I see a future submersibles engineer.’

  Jack grinned. ‘Okay. Back to Sesostris III. Or should I say Senusret III?’

  ‘That’s better,’ Hiebermeyer said, squatting down beside the statue. ‘The fifth pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, ruling in the nineteenth century BC. He set up a string of forts and other defensive structures in the Nubian desert, with Semna as the hub. Most of the ruins around us here are from a fort dating to his time, and you can see a second fort on the opposite side of the river where the excavation team are concentrating their efforts today. Aysha thinks there was a garrison of perhaps five hundred men, as well as a workforce based on the riverbank, where there was probably a harbour structure for supply boats coming up the Nile from Egypt. Senusret presided over it all, or at least his statue did, from this shrine. It was a pretty belligerent enterprise, focused on presenting the strength of Egypt to the kingdom of Kush to the south. Senusret gave the forts aggressive names like “Destroyer of the Nubians”, but he doesn’t seem to have advanced further south than here, and the forts were abandoned soon after his reign.’

  He took out his iPhone, pressed the screen and passed it to Jack. It showed a fragmentary papyrus document covered in cursive script, faded and illegible in places. ‘This is one of our best finds, from only two days ago, flown back immediately to the Institute in Alexandria for conservation. It’s one of the so-called Semna dispatches, and fits with others found in the temple of Ramses II at Thebes over a century ago. They’re administrative reports sent back to the pharaoh’s officials by the garrison commanders at the fort, and they mostly present a rosy picture, as if all the affairs of the pharaoh’s dominions are safe and sound. This one is different, and may reveal the truth.’ Hiebermeyer reached over and pressed the screen again, and a fragmentary translation came up:

  On the fourth month of the second year . . . my troop, called Repeller of the Nubians, went out on patrol with food to the outpost of . . . but all there had been slain and mutilated; a great drumming was heard from the south, a wave of darkness descended, we heard the shrieks of the enemy and the lamentation of the women . . . we have returned to Semna, and the river descends in full fury, bringing with it the bodies stripped and mutilated of the other outpost garrisons at Akhet-re (?), Semionate and . . . I recognised my own brother among them . . . darkness descends again, the pool blackens and boils, the god snarls forth . . . All business affairs that take place here (Semna) are prosperous and flourishing.

  ‘Pretty grim stuff,’ said Jack, pursing his lips. ‘All was definitely not prosperous and flourishing.’

  ‘That’s probably why this dispatch wasn’t sent in the end,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘I think it was written after the commander came back from a particularly arduous reconnaissance patrol, and then a few days later he thought better of it and binned it. To present anything other than a rosy picture was perhaps to risk his own neck, even though this makes it clear that naming the fort “Destroyer of the Nubians” was wishful thinking. It’s impossible to date precisely, but my guess is this was written soon after the death of Senusret, who seems to have been the only one who could hold things together down here. Shortly after that the forts were abandoned, perhaps overwhelmed by the dark force the commander describes here.’

  Jack stared again at the statue. ‘That face reminds me of another pharaoh, with similar features.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. ‘You mean Amenhotep IV, who became Akhenaten. He lived more than five hundred years after Senusret during the New Kingdom. He was another individualist, and may even have modelled his statues on those of Senusret, perhaps to show continuity in this place with a feared pharaoh of the past, but also because he was attracted by Senusret’s individuality, by how he seemed to have broken the mould. Akhenaten was trying to do the same throughout his younger life, culminating in his obsession with the cult of the Aten and his attempt to convert Egypt to faith in the one God. To me he’s the most fascinating of the pharaohs, and seeing that inscription at Troy awoke a desire I’ve always had to come down here and trace his quest into the Nubian desert. He had the same determination as Senusret, but was a different kind of warrior: a seeker of truth rath
er than a king bent on conquest.’

  Hiebermeyer paused, looking at them both expectantly, and Jack returned his gaze. ‘I know that look. The statue’s great, but what have you really found?’

  Hiebermeyer seemed to hurl himself out of the trench and disappeared over the rocky plateau behind them. Jack and Costas followed, coming down in a wide gully bound on either side by ridges some three to four metres high. One section of the far ridge had been excavated down to bedrock, and Hiebermeyer was already inside the trench, gesturing for them to come over. They followed him and squatted down on the edge as he clambered down a wooden ladder and made his way across to the base of the rocky bank. He picked up a piece of shaped stone and held it up so they could see it. ‘This is green schist, part of a saddle quern, a grinding stone. We’ve found lots of fragments of broken querns in this trench.’ He put the stone down, and then pointed to a section of the trench that had been left unexcavated, a layer of dust and sand filled with white chips and whitish streaks in the dust. ‘That’s what they were doing. Grinding down stone.’ He searched the exposed face of the bank and pulled out a fist-sized lump of rock, turned it over and inspected it, then dropped it and pulled out another, repeating the inspection. He nodded to himself, and then tossed it to Jack. ‘What do you make of this?’

  Jack caught the rock and turned it over in his hands, Costas peering alongside. It was cloudy quartzite, streaked with dark green and sparkly mineral inclusions. Costas lifted up his sunglasses and looked more closely. He pointed to a streak of colour in the rock. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  Jack held the quartz up to the sunlight. The streak of colour shimmered and sparkled, and he saw another vein on the other side. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he murmured. ‘It’s gold.’