by Paul Sussman
Last slide of the introduction – a blurred black-and-white shot of Almasy in shorts and military cap, the desert stretching away behind him.
‘So, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I invite you to join me on a journey of discovery – out across the desert, back through time, and in search of the long-lost temple-city of the Gilf Kebir.’
He fell silent, waiting for a reaction, any reaction.
‘There’s no need to shout,’ came a voice from the back of the room. ‘We’re not deaf, you know!’
Bollocks, thought Flin.
He ploughed on to the end of the lecture, jumping and cutting wherever he could so that the normal running time of ninety minutes was reduced to less than fifty. Compared to most of his fellow Egyptologists he was considered an exciting speaker, capable of bringing a dry and complex subject to life, holding people’s attention, enthusing them. In this instance, no amount of editing and simplification seemed to have any effect. Halfway through, one couple stood and left the room; by the end those who remained were openly fidgeting and glancing at watches. The man with the jug ears slept peacefully right the way through, head cradled on his wife’s shoulder. Only the overweight latecomer in the bow-tie seemed genuinely interested. Occasionally dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief, he focused unswervingly on the Englishman, eyes bright with concentration.
‘In conclusion,’ Flin said, bringing up the final slide of the talk, another shot of the towering orange flank of the Gilf Kebir, ‘no sign of the wehat seshtat, non Zerzura, nor any of the other legendary lost oases of the Sahara has ever been found.’
He turned slightly, looking up at the slide, smiling wistfully as if in acknowledgement of a long-time sparring partner. For a moment he seemed to disappear into his own thoughts before shaking his head and turning back to the audience.
‘Many people have argued that the whole idea of a lost oasis is precisely that. An idea, a dream, a figment of the imagination, no more tangible than a desert mirage.
‘I hope the evidence I have presented tonight will persuade you that the basis for all these stories, the wehat seshtat, certainly did exist, and was regarded by the early Egyptians as a cult centre of paramount significance.
‘Whether its location will ever be revealed is another matter. Almasy, Bagnold, Clayton, Newbold – all scoured the Gilf Kebir and returned empty-handed. In more recent times satellite imaging and aerial survey have likewise drawn a complete blank.’
Again he threw a glance up at the projected slide, again smiled that wistful smile.
‘And maybe it is better that way,’ he said looking forward again. ‘So much of our planet has now been studied and mapped and explored and laid bare, stripped of its magic, that it somehow makes the world a more interesting place to know that one small corner of it at least is still beyond our reach. For the moment the wehat seshtat remains exactly that – a hidden oasis. Thank you.’
He sat down to scattered, arthritic applause. The overweight man was the only one to show any real appreciation, clapping loudly before rising to his feet and, with a grateful wave, slipping out of the door. Flin’s friend Margot stood and came to the front of the room.
‘What an absolutely fascinating talk,’ she said, addressing the audience in a loud, schoolmistressy sort of voice. ‘I for one wish we could get straight into our coach and drive out to the Gilf Kebir for a good look around.’
Silence.
‘Now Professor Brodie has kindly agreed to answer any questions you might care to put. As I said before, he is one of the world’s leading authorities on the archaeology of the Sahara, author of the seminal Deshret: Ancient Egypt and the Western Desert and a legend in his field – or perhaps that should be a legend in his Sand Sea! – so do make use of this opportunity.’
More silence, then the man with the jug ears, now awake, piped up:
‘Professor Brodie, do you think Tutankhamun was murdered?’
Afterwards, once the tourists had trooped off to dinner, Flin packed up his notes and laptop while Margot hovered around him.
‘I don’t think they were especially inspired,’ he said.
‘Nonsense,’ insisted Margot. ‘They were absolutely … riveted.’
He’d only done the lecture as a favour to her, old university friends and all that, filling in at the last minute for some other event that had fallen through. He could tell she was embarrassed by her party’s reaction, was trying to make up for it and, reaching out, he squeezed her arm.
‘Don’t worry yourself, Margs. Believe me, I’ve had an awful lot worse.’
‘At least you only had to put up with them for an hour,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve got them for the next ten days. Was Tutankhamun murdered! Christ, if the ground could have swallowed me …’
He laughed. Zipping his laptop into its carry case, the two of them walked across the room, Margot threading an arm through his. As they reached the door there was a sudden, discordant cacophony of clarinets and drums from the foyer outside. They stopped and watched as a wedding party processed past in front of them – bride and groom followed by a crowd of clapping relatives, a video-camerman walking backwards at the head of the group, shouting instructions.
‘My God, look at her dress,’ murmured Margot. ‘She looks like an exploding snowman.’
Flin didn’t respond; his eyes were drawn not to the newlyweds but to the back of the group. A young girl, aged no more than ten or eleven, was jumping up and down trying to see what was happening ahead. She was excited, pretty, her long black hair whirling around her. Just like …
‘You OK, Flin?’
He had swayed against the doorframe, grasping at Margot’s arm for support, sweat glistening across his neck and forehead.
‘Flin?’
‘Fine,’ he mumbled, straightening and releasing her arm, embarrassed. ‘Fine.’
‘You’re white as a sheet.’
‘I’m fine, honestly. Just tired. Should have eaten before I came out.’
He smiled, not entirely convincingly.
‘Let me buy you dinner,’ said Margot. ‘Get your blood sugar up. It’s the least I can do after tonight.’
‘Thanks, Margs, but if you don’t mind I’m going to head home. Got a lot of papers to mark.’
It was a lie, and he could tell she knew it.
‘Just feeling a bit out of sorts,’ he added, trying to explain himself. ‘Always have been a moody bugger.’
Margot smiled. Leaning forward, she enveloped him in a hug.
‘It’s your moodiness I love, my darling Flin. That and your looks, of course. God, if only you’d let me …’
The hug tightened momentarily and then she broke away.
‘We’re in Cairo till Thursday, then down to Luxor. Call you when we get back?’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ said Flin. ‘And don’t forget to tell them about how the Pyramids are aligned with Orion because that’s where the alien builders came from.’
She laughed and bustled off. Flin stared after her, then returned his gaze to the wedding party. It was now passing into a room at the far end of the foyer, the young girl still hopping up and down at the rear. Even after all these years small things like that still pole-axed him, brought it all flooding back. If only he’d bloody got there on time.
He watched a moment longer as the wedding guests disappeared into the room and the doors slammed shut behind them, then, intending neither to go home nor to mark essays, but to get as drunk as he possibly could in what remained of the evening, hurried out of the hotel, followed a few moments later by a rotund, waddling figure in a cream-coloured jacket.
Freya only just made her flight: midnight from San Francisco International to London, and then a connection on to Cairo. She should have had plenty of time, but somehow, as was always the case when she had plenty of time, the clock mysteriously seemed to speed itself up and everything turned into a frantic rush. She was the last person to check in, and one of the last to board the plane, jamming her
knapsack into the already crammed overhead locker and squeezing herself into her seat between an overweight Hispanic man and a lank-haired teenager in a Marilyn Manson T-shirt.
Once airborne she flicked through the in-flight entertainment: repeats of Friends, an inane-looking comedy with Matthew McConaughey, a National Geographic documentary about the Sahara, which, given the reason for her journey, was the very last thing she felt like watching. She went through the menu a couple of times, then switched off the screen, reclined the seat and drilled the headphones of her iPod into her ears: Johnny Cash, ‘Hurt’. Appropriate.
Famous female travellers – that’s who their parents had named them after. In her case Freya Stark, the great Middle Eastern traveller, in her sister’s the Himalayan explorer Alexandra David-Neel. Ironically, each had ended up emulating not their namesakes, but that of their sibling, Alex, like Stark, drawn to heat and deserts, Freya, like David-Neel, to cliffs and mountains.
‘Nothing with you two ever goes to plan,’ their father had joked. ‘Should have swapped you round at birth.’
He had been a big man, their dad, bear-like, jovial, a geography teacher in their home town of Markham, Virginia. Aside from jazz and the poetry of Walt Whitman the outdoors had been his great love, and from an early age he had taken them on expeditions: hiking through the Blue Ridge Mountains, canoeing on the Rappahannock River, sailing off the coast of North Carolina, pointing out birds and animals and trees and plants, teaching them about the landscape and everything in it. It was from him that they had inherited their spirit of adventure, their fascination with wild places. Their looks, on the other hand – slim, blonde; translucent green eyes – they inherited from their mother, a successful artist and sculptor. Looks, and also a certain reservedness and introspection, a dislike of inane chatter and big crowds. Their father had been a gregarious man, delighting in conversation and social gatherings. The Hannen women, by contrast, were always more comfortable inside their own heads.
Alex was the older of the two by five years, not as obviously attractive as Freya, but cleverer – academically at least – and also less moody. They were never inseparable in the way some siblings are, the difference in age meaning that both were inclined to go their own way and do their own thing rather than spending every hour in each other’s company.
The family’s old clapboard house out on the edge of town had contained a treasure trove of maps, atlases, guides and travel books and on rainy days each would load themselves up with their favourite volumes and disappear into their own secret corner to plot future adventures: Alex into the loft, Freya the tumbledown summerhouse at the end of the garden. When they were outdoors – which they were most of the time – they would likewise head off in separate directions, Freya tramping for miles through the local woods and orchards, scrambling up trees, building rope-swings, timing herself to see how quickly she could complete a hiking trail or climb a mountain, always pushing herself.
Alex, too, loved to walk and explore, although in her case there was more of an intellectual edge to her rambles. She would take a notebook and colouring pens with her, maps, a camera, an old army compass that had, apparently, once belonged to a marine in the battle of Iwo Jima. When she returned home – invariably late in the evening – it would be with extended notes on her day’s travels, drawings, a precise record of the route she had taken, all manner of specimens she had picked up on the way – leaves and flowers, pine cones, curiously shaped rocks and, on one memorable occasion, a dead rattlesnake that she had draped triumphantly around her neck like a scarf.
‘And there’s me thinking I was bring up two young ladies,’ their father had sighed. ‘What in God’s name have I unleashed on the world?’
Independent they may have been, forever engaged in their own private adventures, Alex trying to map the world, Frey to conquer it, but that in no way diminished their love for each other. Freya worshipped her older sister, trusted and looked up to her, told her things she told no one else, not even their parents. Alex, for her part, felt a fierce protectiveness towards her younger sibling, sneaking into her room at night to comfort her when she had had a nightmare, reading to her from the books of travel and adventure they both so loved, braiding her hair, helping her with her schoolwork. When, aged five, Freya had been stung in the mouth by a wasp it was to her sister rather than her parents that she had run for comfort. A few years later she had been hospitalized with meningitis and Alex had insisted on moving in with her, sleeping on a cot-bed on the floor and clutching her hand when she had had to undergo a lumbar puncture (it was this, and Freya’s accompanying hysteria as the needle was driven into the base of her spine, that had sparked Alex’s lifelong horror of anything to do with injections). When, just shy of her seventeenth birthday, Freya had stunned the climbing world by soloing the Nose on Yosemite’s El Capitan, the youngest person ever to do so, who had been waiting for her at the top, a bunch of flowers in one hand and a Dr Pepper in the other? Alex.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ she had said, wrapping Freya in a tight embrace. ‘My fearless little sis.’
And of course when, just a few months later, their mother and father had been killed in the car accident, it was Alex who had stepped in as surrogate parent. By that point her own career as a desert explorer was starting to blossom: Little Tin Hinan, her account of the eight months she had spent living and travelling with the Tuareg Berbers of northen Niger, had briefly topped the bestseller lists. But she had put it all on hold and moved back into the family home to look after her sister, taking a job in, of all places, the CIA’s cartographic department over at Langley so she could put Freya through school and college, fund her climbing career, support and protect her.
And after all that Freya had repaid her love with betrayal. As her ears echoed to the gravelly croak of Johnny Cash, singing of pain and loss, of failing those for whom you most care, she closed her eyes and saw again the shock on Alex’s face as she walked into the room. Shock and, worse, the terrible, reproving sadness.
Seven years and Freya had never once said sorry. She had wanted to. God, she had wanted to. Not a day went by when she didn’t think about it. But she never had. And now Alex was dead and the opportunity was gone. Her beloved Alex, her big sister. Hurt. It didn’t even get close to describing it.
Reaching into her pocket she pulled out a crumpled envelope, postmarked Egypt, gazed at it for a moment then snatched the headphones out of her ears and switched on the Matthew McConaughey film. Anything to help her forget.
CAIRO
Flin didn’t drink much any more, certainly nothing like he used to. On the rare occasions he did drink, it was invariably in the bar of the Windsor Hotel on Sharia Alfi Bey, and that was where he headed tonight.
A quiet, sedate room on the first floor of the building, all polished wood floors, deep armchairs and soft lighting, it was a throwback to an earlier age of colonial gentility. The staff sported crisp white shirts and black bow-ties, a writing desk sat in one corner, the walls were hung with the sort of whimsical oddments you might find in an up-market bric-à-brac shop – a giant turtle shell, an old guitar, mounted antlers, black-and-white photographs of scenes from Egyptian life. Even the bottles behind the bar – Martini, Cointreau, Grand Marnier, crème de menthe – spoke of a different age, an era of cocktail parties, aperitifs and postprandial liqueurs. Only the piped Whitney Houston music spoiled the illusion. That and the jean-clad backpackers huddled in corners reading their Lonely Planet guides.
Flin got there just after eight and, taking up position on a stool at the end of the bar, ordered a Stella. When the beer arrived he stared at it, as a diver might before plunging off the high-board into the water far below, then brought the glass to his lips and emptied it in four long gulps, immediately ordering another. This too he knocked back swiftly and was just starting on his third when he happened to glance in one of the mirrored panels behind the bar. Sitting on a sofa behind and to his left, a newspaper clasped in his hands, was the overweight
man from the lecture. Flin didn’t remember him being there when he had come in. Not wanting company, he started to shift stools so as to bring a pillar between the two of them. As he did so, the man looked up, clocked him and waved, laying aside the paper and walking over.
‘That was a fine talk, Professor Brodie,’ he said in that curious high-pitched drawl of his, coming up to Flin and extending a hand. ‘Very fine.’
‘Thank you,’ said Flin, taking the hand and shaking it, groaning inwardly. ‘I’m glad someone enjoyed it.’
The man proffered a business card.
‘Cy Angleton. Work over at the Embassy. Public Affairs. Love ancient Egypt.’
‘Really.’ Flin tried to sound enthused. ‘Any particular period?’
‘Oh, all of it, I guess,’ replied Angleton with a wave of the hand. ‘The whole package. Although I do find the Gilf Kebir thing fascinating.’
He pronounced it ‘gilf kay-beer’.
‘Real fascinating,’ he continued. ‘You should let me take you to lunch some time. Pick your brains.’
‘Love to,’ replied Flin, forcing a smile onto his face. There was a silence, then, feeling he had no other option, he asked the American if he wanted to join him. To his relief the offer was declined.
‘Got an early start tomorrow. Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the lecture.’
The briefest of pauses, then:
‘We really must have that chat about the Gilf.’
Although it was said innocuously enough, something about this last remark made Flin feel uncomfortable, as if there was more to the comment than Angleton was letting on. Before he could pursue the matter, the American gave him a pat on the shoulder, complimented him again on the lecture and wandered out of the room.
It’s the girl in the hotel, Flin told himself, draining the rest of his beer and waving at the barman to indicate he wanted another. Got me on edge. That and every other bloody thing.
