The Hidden Oasis

by Paul Sussman

  ‘You’re a Bedouin?’ she asked, pushing the thought from her mind and making a renewed attempt to break the ice.

  A nod, no more.

  ‘Sanusi?’ It was something she vaguely remembered from Alex’s letters, a name somehow associated with the desert peoples. If she was hoping to impress him with her knowledge she was disappointed. Zahir let out an exclamation of disgust and shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Not Sanusi,’ he spat. ‘Sanusi are dogs, scum. We al-Rashaayda. True Bedouin.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  A clinking from the corridor outside interrupted her. A boy of no more than two or three came toddling into the room, followed by a young woman – slim, dark-skinned, attractive. She carried a shisha pipe in one hand and a tray with two glasses of reddish-brown tea in the other. Freya stood to help, but Zahir waved her back to the bench, motioning to his wife – or so Freya assumed – to lay the tray and pipe down beside him. For the briefest of moments her gaze met Freya’s, and then she was gone.

  ‘Sugar?’

  Zahir emptied a spoonful into Freya’s glass without waiting for a reply and handed it to her before sweeping the boy into his arms.

  ‘My son,’ he said, smiling for the first time since they had met, the tension of a moment earlier apparently forgotten. ‘Very clever. Aren’t you clever, Mohsen?’

  The boy laughed, feet kicking beneath the hem of his miniature djellaba.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ said Freya.

  ‘No beautiful,’ said Zahir, wagging a finger disapprovingly. ‘Women is beautiful. Mohsen handsome. Like father.’

  He chuckled and kissed the boy’s forehead.

  ‘You have children?’

  She admitted that she didn’t.

  ‘Start soon,’ he advised. ‘Before you too old.’

  He spooned three sugars into his own tea, sipped and, lifting the mouthpiece of the shisha, puffed it into life. A cloud of dense blue smoke drifted ponderously up towards the ceiling. There was another uncomfortable pause – or at least Freya found it uncomfortable; Zahir seemed oblivious. Then, raising the mouthpiece, he pointed above her head to a curved knife hanging on the wall, its bronze scabbard inlaid with intricate silvery tracery, its ivory handle tipped with what looked like a large ruby.

  ‘This belong my family in-sis-teer,’ he said. Freya was momentarily confused before realizing what he meant.

  ‘Ancestor,’ she corrected.

  ‘This what I say. In-sis-teer. He name Mohammed Wald Yusuf Ibrahim Sabri al-Rashaayda. Live before six hundred year, very famous man. Most famous Bedouin in desert. Sahara like his garden, he go everywhere, even Sand Sea, know every dune, every water-hole. Very great man.’

  He nodded proudly, hugging an arm around his son. Freya waited for him to continue, but that seemed to be all he wanted to say and they lapsed into silence again. The distant cough of an irrigation pump drifted through the open window and, from closer, the squawk of geese. She gave it another couple of minutes, sipping at her tea, the young boy staring up at her. Then she put her glass down, stood and asked if she could use the bathroom. Not because she needed to, just to get away from him for a while. Zahir waved a hand, indicating that she should follow the corridor they had come in along, towards the back of the house.

  She stepped out of the room, relieved to be alone. Passing a couple of bedrooms – bare walls and floors, curiously ornate wooden beds – she swished through a bead curtain and out into a small internal courtyard. A pile of bamboo cages was stacked against one wall, crammed with rabbits and pigeons. From an opening directly ahead came the clank of pots and the sound of female voices. To her right were two closed doors, one of which, she assumed, must be the bathroom. She crossed the yard and opened the nearest one. It was either an office or a storeroom, she couldn’t tell which, a desk, chair and ancient computer suggesting the former, sacks of grain, a rusted bicycle and various farming implements the latter. She started to close the door only to stop, her attention drawn to the far side of the room where the desk was pushed into a corner. Sellotaped to the wall above it was a photograph. She stepped into the room, staring.

  The picture was in colour, blown up to several times its normal size by the look of it so that even from the doorway she could make the image out clearly: a towering curve of glassy black rock erupting from an otherwise featureless desert like some enormous scimitar ripping its way through the sands. It was a dramatic formation, gravity-defying, its uppermost end tapering to a point, its sides notched and serrated from millennia of weathering giving it a curiously barbed appearance. Part of Freya couldn’t help thinking what an amazing climb it would make, although it was less the rock itself that drew her attention than the person standing in the shade at its base. She crossed to the desk and leant over it, gazing up. Although the figure was tiny, dwarfed by the curving monolith overhead, the smile, the battered suede jacket, the blond hair were all unmistakable. Alex. She reached out a hand and touched her.

  ‘This private.’

  She spun. Zahir was standing in the doorway, his son beside him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, embarrassed. ‘I got the wrong door.’

  He said nothing, just stared at her.

  ‘I saw Alex.’ She indicated the picture, feeling inexplicably guilty, as though she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t, like that day back in …

  ‘Bathroom next door,’ he said.

  ‘Of course. I didn’t mean to …’

  She paused, flustered, unable to find the right word. Intrude? Trespass? Snoop? She could feel tears starting to well up.

  ‘Was she happy?’ she blurted, unable to stop herself. ‘Alex. She sent me a letter, you see, just before she died, said things … she seemed happy. Was she? Do you know? At the end. Was she happy?’

  He continued to stare at her, face blank.

  ‘This private,’ he repeated. ‘Bathroom next door.’

  She felt a surge of anger.

  She’s dead! she wanted to scream. My sister’s dead, and you bring me here to drink tea and won’t even let me look at her picture!

  She said nothing, aware that her fury was directed as much at herself as at Zahir – for what she’d done to Alex, for not being there for her, for everything. She took a last glance at the photo, then walked back across the room and stepped out into the yard.

  ‘I don’t need the bathroom any more,’ she said quietly. ‘I just want to see her. Will you take me, please?’

  He gazed at her, expressionless, giving nothing away, then, with a nod, pulled the door closed. He propelled his son across the yard to the kitchen before leading Freya back through the house to the Land Cruiser. They didn’t speak on the journey back into Mut.

  CAIRO

  It was nearly midday when Flin woke. He was on his sofa, fully clothed, his head pounding, his mouth dry and crusty as though it had been rammed full of chalk. For a terrible moment he thought he’d missed his morning lectures, before remembering it was Tuesday, and on Tuesday he didn’t start teaching until early afternoon. With a muttered ‘Thank God’ he sank back into the cushions.

  For a while he just lay there, gazing up at the slats of sunlight that sliced across the ceiling, mulling over the events of the previous night while an incessant orchestra of car horns blared up from the street below. Then, heaving himself to his feet, he trudged through to the bathroom and took a cold shower, the apartment’s ancient plumbing groaning and rumbling as it delivered a heavy cascade of water onto his face and torso. He gave it fifteen minutes. His mind slowly clearing, he towelled himself off and brewed up some coffee – thick, black Egyptian coffee, as sharp and sour as lemon juice. Wandering back into the living room, he threw open the shutters. A chaotic mass of buildings spread away in front of him, sweeping eastwards like a surge of muddy froth before crashing into the distant, hazy wall of the Muqqatam Hills. To his right the dome of the Mohammed Ali mosque glowed dirty silver in the midday sun. Everywher
e minarets speared upwards from the confusion beneath, like needles through coarse fabric, their loudspeakers filling the air with the ululating wail of the city’s muezzin, calling the faithful to noon prayer.

  He had lived here for the best part of a decade, renting from an old Egyptian family who had owned the entire block since it was first built, back at the end of the nineteenth century.

  From the outside it wasn’t much to look at, the once proud colonial façade – ornate balconies, intricately carved window surrounds, florid glass and ironwork doorway – cracked and weathered and stained a dung-coloured brown by the smoggy air. Inside the common parts of the building were also well past their prime, gloomy and depressive, the walls scratched and chipped and scored with graffiti, the paintwork flaking.

  It was conveniently located, though – only a few streets away from the American University where he taught. And the rent was low, even by Cairene standards, an important consideration given that he only lectured part time. And if the block itself had seen better days, his apartment, on the top floor, was an oasis of calm and light, its rooms high-ceilinged, its windows affording spectacular views east and south across the city. He would always be most at home out in the desert, where he spent four months of the year, well away from everyone and everything, but so far as he could be happy in a city he was here. Even with that surly bastard Taib lurking downstairs.

  He knocked back his coffee, poured another and returned to the window, staring out across the jumbled flux of rooftops. Most of them, like the streets below, were covered with mounds of litter, as though the metropolis was sandwiched between twin layers of rubbish. He tried, and failed, to make out St Simon the Tanner and the other Coptic churches cut into the cliffs above the Zabbaleen quarter of Manshiet Nasser, then dropped his eyes to the alleyway directly below, where the remains of last night’s whisky bottle lay scattered in the dust. A cat sniffed inquisitively around them. He wasn’t sure whether to feel disgust at himself for so spectacularly falling off the wagon, or relief that he’d somehow managed to clamber back onto it again. A bit of both, he guessed.

  ‘Thanks, Alex,’ he murmured, knowing that if it hadn’t been for the photo, he’d still be drinking now. ‘What would I do without you?’

  He gazed out for a while longer, the coffee continuing the work of the cold shower, clearing and ordering his mind. He then returned the cup to the kitchen, dressed and padded along the corridor to his study at the far end of the apartment.

  Wherever he had set up home in his life – Cambridge, London, Baghdad, here in Cairo – he always laid out his work space in exactly the same way. His desk sat just inside the door, facing across the room towards the window. There was a row of filing cabinets lined up beside the desk, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along the side walls and an armchair, lamp and portable CD player in the corner, with a clock on the wall above them. It was exactly the same arrangement his father – also an eminent Egyptologist – used to have in his study, right down to the pot plants on top of the filing cabinets and the kilim rug on the floor. More than once Flin had wondered what a psychoanalyst would make of the similarity. Probably the same as they’d make of him following his old man into Egyptology: a sublimated need to please, to emulate, to be loved. All the usual crap psychoanalysts came out with. He tried not to dwell on it. His father was long dead, and when all was said and done he was by now so used to that particular furniture configuration it was easier to just let things be. Whatever the emotional subtext.

  Coming into the room now he paused, as he always did, to look up at the framed print hanging on the wall above the desk. A simple ink line drawing, it depicted a monumental gateway – two trapezium-shaped towers with between them, about half their height, a pair of rectangular doors surmounted by a lintel. Each tower bore on its face the image of an obelisk with inside it a cross and looping line symbol – sedjet, the hieroglyphic ideogram for fire. The lintel also bore an image, this time of a bird with a small beak and long sweeping tail. At the bottom of the print, in flowing script, ran the legend:

  The city of Zerzura is white like a pigeon, and on the door of it is carved a bird. Enter, and there you will discover great riches.

  He stared at it, repeating the legend to himself – as he always did – and then, with a shake of the head, crossed to the armchair and threw himself down, flicking on the CD player. The melancholy, tinkling strains of a Chopin nocturne rose around him.

  It was a ritual he followed every morning, and had done since he was an undergraduate (apparently the spy Kim Philby had sworn by it): a still, meditative thirty minutes at the start of the day – or in this case the middle of it – when he would sit back, block out the world and focus on whatever intellectual problem happened to be preoccupying him at that moment, while his brain was still fresh. Sometimes it might be an abstract problem – how to interpret the mythical struggle between the gods Horus and Set, for example; at other times something more specific: an argument he was developing for an academic paper, perhaps, or the translation of a particularly obscure inscription.

  More often than not he would end up pondering some aspect of the Hidden Oasis mystery. This, more than any other subject, was what had occupied his mind these last ten years. And it was the one to which, in the light of recent events, his mind turned this morning.

  It was a complex problem, impossibly complex he sometimes thought: an intricate jigsaw from which most of the pieces seemed to be missing and those pieces that did exist refused to fit into any sort of recognizable pattern. A handful of textual fragments, most of them ambivalent or incomplete; a couple of pieces of rock art, again open to interpretation; the Zerzura stuff; and, of course, the Imti-Khentika papyrus. Not a lot to go on, all things considered; the Egyptological equivalent of trying to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code.

  Closing his eyes, the Chopin swirling gently around him, Flin let his mind drift, going back into it all for the ten-thousandth time, meandering through the scattered evidence as though through a field of ancient ruins. He mulled over the various names by which the oasis had been known – the Hidden Oasis, the Oasis of the Birds, the Sacred Valley, the Valley of the Benben, the Oasis at the End of the World, the Oasis of Dreams – hoping that by scrolling through them again he might stumble upon some hitherto overlooked clue. Likewise the Iret net Khepri reference, the Eye of Khepri, which he was convinced was more than just one of those figurative phrases so beloved of the ancient Egyptians, but indicated something specific, something literal. If it did he hadn’t yet worked out what it was – and didn’t come any closer to doing so today.

  Thirty minutes went by, and then another thirty – the Mouth of Osiris, the Curses of Sobek and Apep: what the hell were they? – until his mind started to cloud and his eyes popped open again. For a moment his gaze wandered around the room, then came to rest on the drawing above the desk: The city of Zerzura is white like a pigeon, and on the door of it is carved a bird. Enter, and there you will discover great riches. Standing, he walked across to it, took it off the wall and carried it back to the armchair, sitting again and balancing it on his knees.

  It was the frontispiece – or rather a copy of the frontispiece, the original Arabic script rendered into English – of a chapter from the Kitab al-Kanuz, the Book of Hidden Pearls, a medieval treasure-hunter’s guide to the great sites of Egypt, both real and fanciful. This particular chapter was concerned with the legendary lost oasis of Zerzura – aside from a brief and rather cryptic mention in a thirteenth-century manuscript, the earliest known reference to the place.

  Although of no intrinsic value, the print was one of Flin’s most treasured possessions, a gift from the great desert explorer Ralph Alger Bagnold, whom he had met shortly before the latter’s death in 1990. Flin had been studying for his doctorate at the time (on Palaeolithic settlement patterns around the Gilf Kebir) and their mutual fascination with the Sahara had meant the two men clicked instantly. A series of happy afternoons had been spent together discussing the desert, th
e Gilf, and, most fascinating of all, the whole Zerzura problem – magical conversations that had first sparked Flin’s interest in the subject.

  He gazed down at the print, smiling, even now – almost two decades later – still feeling the thrill of excitement he had experienced at being in the great man’s presence.

  Bagnold had been in no doubt: Zerzura was just a legend, the descriptions of it in the Kitab al-Kanuz – heaps of gold and jewels scattered everywhere, a king and queen asleep in a castle – pure fairy tale, no more to be taken literally than Hansel and Gretel or Jack and the Beanstalk.

  There was no question that the Kitab was in large part fantasy, crammed full of sensational accounts of hidden riches. Despite that, the more Flin had researched the subject the more convinced he had become that when you stripped away the obvious embellishments, the Zerzura of the Kitab al-Kanuz was in fact a real place. Not only that, but – as he had outlined in his lecture the previous evening – it was one and the same as the Hidden Oasis of the ancient Egyptians.

  The name itself provided a clue. Zerzura came from the Arabic zarzar, or little bird, a clear echo of one of the ancient variations on wehat seshtat: wehat apedu, Oasis of the Birds.

  The image of the gateway was also intriguing: an almost perfect facsimile of a monumental Old Kingdom temple pylon. The obelisk and sedjet symbols likewise signalled an ancient Egyptian connection, as did the bird on the lintel, a clear rendering of the sacred Benu bird.

  It was, admittedly, all fairly tenuous, and when Flin had talked it through with Bagnold, the older man had been unconvinced. The similarity in names was almost certainly a coincidence, he had argued – all oases had birds in them – while the ancient architecture and symbols could easily be explained by the Kitab’s author having simply copied things he had seen in the temples of the Nile Valley, with which he would most likely have been familiar.