by Paul Sussman
‘Mr Angleton, it is Yasmin Malouff. There has been a call, on Kiernan’s mobile. The transcript runs as follows …’
She held her pad up and began to read.
‘Do you think it’s safe?’ asked Freya as Flin led her back into the museum. The image of their twin pursuers was still sharp in her mind, and the huge, crowd-filled gallery felt painfully exposed after the confined space of the photographic studio. ‘What if they’re still looking for us?’
‘It’s been over an hour,’ Flin replied, stopping beside a giant stone sarcophagus and scanning the scene ahead. ‘I’m guessing if they did think of coming in here they’ll already have been and gone. I can’t guarantee it, though, so keep your eyes open. If you see anything …’
‘What?’
‘Run.’
He looked around for a moment longer, then set off through the gallery, the photograph of the gateway still clutched in his hand. Freya trailed along beside him. He seemed, if not relaxed, certainly calmer and more assured than she did, as though the presence of so many ancient objects diluted the severity of the danger they were in. They covered about half the gallery’s length, the vast interior echoing with the babble of voices and the slap of feet, then Flin started talking.
‘Zerzura is a lost Saharan oasis,’ he explained, moving aside as a horde of schoolchildren in matching blue uniforms poured towards them, led by a harassed-looking teacher. ‘I’ve actually got quite a good Powerpoint presentation on it, but in current circumstances I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with the edited version.’
‘Fine by me,’ said Freya, gazing around uneasily, half expecting one of the twins to leap out from behind a statue.
‘The name comes from the Arabic word zarzar,’ Flin continued, warming to his subject: ‘which means starling, sparrow, a small bird. We don’t really know much about the place, save that it was first mentioned in a medieval manuscript called the Kitab al-Kanuz, the Book of Hidden Pearls, and supposedly lies somewhere in the vicinity of the Gilf Kebir, although De Lancey Forth put it in the Great Sand Sea, and Newbold …’
He saw that he was losing her and broke off, holding up his hands.
‘Sorry, too much information. One of the hazards of spending your life immersed in this stuff – you can never just tell it simply. All you need to know for current purposes is that it’s a lost oasis and most of the early twentieth-century desert explorers – Ball, Kemal el-Din, Bagnold, Almasy, Clayton – tried, and failed, to find it. In fact it was the hunt for Zerzura that drove much of that original exploration.’
They came to the high domed rotunda at the entrance to the museum and continued directly ahead, into a gallery marked ‘Old Kingdom’, its walls lined with statues and carved reliefs.
‘A lot of people have argued that Zerzura never actually existed,’ Flin went on, absorbed in what he was saying, seemingly oblivious to the displays to either side and the crowds all around. Unlike Freya, whose gaze continued to flick nervously back and forth.
‘That the whole thing’s just a legend. Like El Dorado, or Shangri-La, or Atlantis – one of those alluring but ultimately fictitious tales that wild places like deserts tend to inspire. I’ve always believed it did exist, and that Zerzura is simply another name, a much later name, for a place the ancient Egyptians referred to as the wehat seshtat, the Hidden Oasis.’
He glanced across to make sure he wasn’t losing her. Freya gave a nod to indicate she was keeping up with what he was saying.
‘Unfortunately, as with Zerzura, we don’t really know a huge amount about the wehat seshtat,’ said Flin, his brow furrowing slightly as if in frustration at this lack of information. ‘With one notable exception, which I’ll come to in a moment, the evidence is all extremely fragmentary and difficult to interpret: a few papyrus fragments, some badly damaged petroglyphs, a couple of inscriptions and a rather garbled mention in Manetho’s Aegyptiaca – I won’t bore you by going through it all. What we’ve basically managed to piece together – and I reiterate, much of this is open to interpretation – is that it was a deep gorge or wadi running off the eastern flank of the Gilf Kebir, and that from a very early date, before the Sahara even became a desert—’
‘This is how long ago exactly?’ asked Freya, interrupting. Despite her nervousness she was finding herself increasingly drawn into the story.
‘Well, it’s hard to give precise dates,’ he said, apparently pleased by her interest. ‘But we’re talking at least ten, twenty thousand years BC, possibly even as early as the Middle Palaeolithic.’
The term meant nothing to Freya but she didn’t pursue it, not wanting to hold things up.
‘Way back in the mists of prehistory, anyway,’ Flin continued, resuming the thread of his explanation. ‘Even then this gorge, oasis, whatever you want to call it, seems to have been considered a place of supreme religious significance, its precise location a closely guarded secret. When and why it first came to be regarded as such we don’t know, but it seems to have retained its status right the way through to the end of the Old Kingdom. About 2000 BC. After which knowledge of the oasis’s whereabouts became lost and it disappears from history.’
They reached the end of the gallery and started up a staircase, the press of tourists thinning around them as they climbed to the museum’s upper floor. It was quieter and less hectic here than on the building’s lower level. Flin waved her back the way they had come, towards the rotunda, turning into a small, deserted side room with display cases full of simple stone and clay artefacts, all clearly of a much earlier date than everything they had passed so far. He stopped in front of one case and pointed. Inside, flanked by a pair of ivory combs and a large earthenware bowl were three objects Freya recognized: small clay obelisks, each about the height of a finger, each incised with the same symbol as the one in Rudi Schmidt’s bag. She peered at the accompanying label: Votive Benben miniatures, Predynastic (c. 3000 bc), Hierakonpolis.
‘What’s a Benben?’ she asked, thoughts of their pursuers moving ever further back in her mind.
‘The Benben,’ corrected Flin, leaning in beside her, his elbow just touching hers. ‘I’m afraid this is where we have to sidetrack for a moment into the rather complex world of ancient Egyptian cosmology. I know it’s not top of your interest list, but bear with me because it is relevant. I’ll try to keep it simple.’
‘Shoot,’ she said.
A young couple wandered up to the case and glanced at its contents for a moment. Neither of them looked especially interested, and they moved on. Flin waited until they were out of earshot, then started talking again.
‘The Benben was a central feature of ancient Egyptian religion and mythology,’ he explained. ‘In many ways the central feature. Symbolically it represented the primordial mound of earth, the first small peak of dry land to emerge from Nun, the primal Ocean of Chaos. According to the Pyramid Texts – the oldest known collection of Egyptian religious writings – Ra-Atum, the creator God, flew across the blackness of Nun in the form of the Benu bird …’
He tapped the photo in his hand, indicating the long-tailed bird carved into the lintel above the doorway.
‘… and landed on the Benben, from where his song ushered in the first sunrise. Hence the name, from the ancient Egyptian weben, “to rise in brilliance”.’
The young couple wandered back past them, the girl now talking on her mobile. Again, Flin waited until they were gone before resuming his explanation.
‘The Benben was more than just a symbol, however,’ he said, his face pressed right up against the cabinet, his elbow still touching Freya’s. ‘We know from ancient texts and inscriptions that it was an actual physical object: a rock or stone shaped like an obelisk. There is some suggestion that it was originally a meteorite, or part of a meteorite, although the relevant texts are complex and open to interpretation. What we do know is that the Benben was housed in the inner sanctum of the great sun temple of Iunu and was, by all accounts, possessed of extraordinary supernatural pow
ers.’
Freya let out an amused snort.
‘I know, I know, it all sounds a bit Raiders of the Lost Ark, although we do have quite a number of corroborating sources – including one from royal Sumerian archives – that are remarkably consistent in their descriptions. They tell how the Benben would be dragged into battle at the head of the pharaoh’s army and would emit a strange sound and a blinding light that utterly destroyed the opposing forces. Which possibly explains two of the alternative names that were used to describe it: kheru-en Sekhmet, the voice of Sekhmet – Sekhmet being the ancient Egyptian goddess of war – and iner-en sedjet, the Stone of Fire. That’s what the symbol is, by the way’ – he pointed at the motif on the side of the clay obelisk – ‘Sedjet, the hieroglyph for fire. The cross-shaped terminal represents a brazier, with a flame rising …’
He broke off again, holding up his hands, as he had done before.
‘But that’s getting off the subject. The point is that the Benben and the wehat seshtat – the Hidden Oasis – were inextricably linked and you can’t really discuss one without reference to the other. It would appear that the stone was originally lodged in a temple inside the oasis; as I said, we’re talking tens of thousands of years BC here, long before the Nile Valley was even colonized. And although we can’t be certain, there’s some evidence to suggest that the reason the oasis was considered so sacred in the first place was because that’s where the Benben was actually discovered. They’re both part of the same package. Which is why, as well as wehat seshtat, the oasis was also referred to as inet benben – the Valley of the Benben.’
He glanced across, concerned he might have overwhelmed Freya with so much information. But she gave him the thumbs-up and after throwing a final look into the case he beckoned her away, leading her out of the room. They passed beneath the museum’s rotunda and along a balconied gallery overlooking the atrium.
‘There’s another reason the Benben’s relevant to all this,’ he said, holding up the photograph in his hand. ‘And that is that by far the clearest and most detailed description we possess of the Hidden Oasis appears in a text specifically relating to the Benben. In here.’
They turned right into another room, also deserted, this one exhibiting a selection of hieroglyph-covered papyri. On the room’s far side and stretching almost its entire width was a chest-high glass cabinet. Flin stopped in front of it and gazed down, a faint smile playing around the corners of his mouth. Inside was a papyrus covered from end to end in uneven columns of text in black ink. Unlike the other examples on display, most of which were exquisitely executed, with beautiful colours and intricate decoration, this document appeared bland and untidy, its hieroglyphs seeming to sway and knock into each other as if they had been written down in a hurry. Indeed they didn’t even look like proper hieroglyphs, the symbols messy and scrawled, overlapping, more reminiscent of Arabic script than traditional Egyptian pictograms. Freya leant forward, reading the explanatory note on the wall behind the cabinet:
The Imti-Khentika Papyrus. From the tomb of Imti-Khentika, High Priest of Iunu/Heliopolis, 6th Dynasty, reign of Pepi II (c. 2246-2152 BC)
‘Despite appearances, by some distance the most important papyrus in the room,’ said Flin, nodding at the sheet. ‘With the exception of the Turin King List and Oxyrhynchus texts, probably the most important Egyptian papyrus full stop.’
He laid a hand on the cabinet’s glass top, something almost reverential about the way he stared down at its contents.
‘It was discovered forty years ago,’ he continued, smoothing his hand gently back and forth across the glass as though petting some rare animal. ‘By a man named Hassan Fadawi, one of the greatest archaeologists Egypt’s ever produced and an old …’
He was about to say ‘friend of mine’, or so it seemed to Freya, but after a fractional pause changed it to ‘colleague’.
‘It’s an extraordinary story, right up there with Carter and Tutankhamun. Fadawi was only twenty at the time, just out of university. He was doing some routine clearance work in the Necropolis of the Seers – the burial ground of the high priests of Iunu – and stumbled on Imti-Khentika’s tomb completely by accident. The door seals were unbroken which meant the burial was untouched, exactly as it had been left the day it was closed four thousand years ago. I simply cannot overstate how important a find this was, one of the few intact Old Kingdom burials ever discovered, predating Tutankhamun by almost a millennium.’
Even though the papyrus was clearly familiar to him, its story one he knew well, he sounded awestruck, like an excited schoolboy. His enthusiasm was infectious, pulling Freya into the story, all her fears momentarily forgotten as if they were part of some different reality.
‘And what was in it?’ she asked, looking up at him expectantly. ‘What did they find?’
Flin paused as if building up to some spectacular revelation. Then:
‘Nothing,’ he replied, his eyes glinting mischievously.
‘Nothing?’
‘When Fadawi broke through the doorway the tomb was empty. No decoration, no objects, no inscriptions, no body. Nothing – except for a small wooden chest, with inside it …’
He tapped a knuckle on the cabinet’s wooden frame.
‘It was a huge embarrassment. All the world’s press were there for the opening, President Nasser – Fadawi was left with a lot of egg on his face. Until he actually read what was written on the papyrus, that is. At which point he realized the tomb was even more significant than if it had been crammed full of gold treasure,’
Something about the way Flin said this sent a tingle down Freya’s spine. Curious, she thought, that with everything that was going on she should find herself so engrossed in a history lecture.
‘Go on,’ she urged.
‘Well, it’s an enormously complicated document, and one that was obviously written in a hurry. It’s in hieratic – a sort of hieroglyphic shorthand. There’s still a lot of argument about how exactly to interpret certain sections of it, but in essence it’s both an account of Imti-Khentika’s life and times – his autobiography if you like – and also an explanation of why his body was never interred in the tomb he’d had prepared for himself. I won’t bother translating it from start to finish since the first part …’
He waved a hand to his left.
‘… isn’t particularly relevant, just a lot of stuff about Imti’s various titles, his duties as high priest, all standard formulations. It’s from this point on …’
He touched the top of the cabinet where he was standing, about halfway down the length of the papyrus.
‘… that it gets interesting. Apropos of nothing Imti suddenly launches into a long and rambling description of the contemporary political situation – the only remotely detailed account we have of the final years of the Old Kingdom and its collapse into the internecine chaos of the First Intermediate.’
Freya had no idea what he meant. As before she let it go, not wanting to interrupt him.
‘It’s all extremely garbled,’ Flin went on, ‘and I’m paraphrasing quite heavily, but basically Imti explains how Egypt is disintegrating. Pharaoh Pepi II is old and demented – he’s been on the throne for ninety-three years by this point, the longest reign of any monarch in history – and central authority has collapsed. There is famine, civil war, foreign invasion, general lawlessness. In Imti’s words: Maat, the goddess of order, has been usurped by Set, lord of deserts, chaos, conflict and evil.’
He had started to move along the cabinet, following the story as it unfolded on the papyrus.
‘According to Imti, in the face of this general collapse the leading figures in the land come together in secret conclave and take a momentous decision: for its own safety, and to prevent it falling into the hands of what he refers to as “the evildoers”, the Benben Stone is to be removed from the Temple of Iunu and, under Imti’s guidance, transported back across the desert to …’
He stopped, bent low over the cabinet and began to r
ead, his voice becoming deeper and more resonant, as if echoing from far back in time: ‘… setityu-en wehat seshtat inet-djeseret mehet wadjet er-imenet er-djeru ta em-khet sekhet-sha’ em ineb-aa en-Setekeh – the Place of Our Forefathers, the Hidden Oasis, the Sacred Valley lush and green, in the far west, at the end of the world, beyond the fields of sand, in the great wall of Set.’
He looked up at her, his face slightly flushed.
‘Extraordinary, don’t you think? As I say, by far the clearest and most detailed description we have of the oasis.’
‘That’s clear?’
‘Crystal by ancient Egyptian standards. The fields of sand refers to the Great Sand Sea, the wall of Set the eastern flank of the Gilf Kebir. Set, as I mentioned, being the ancient Egyptian god of the desert. Short of an actual postcode it doesn’t get more precise than that. And that’s not all.’
He started moving down the cabinet again.
‘Imti goes on to describe the expedition itself – a rather interesting perspective, since he wrote the account before he actually set out and is thus recording events that have yet to happen. Again, I won’t go through it word by word, but the last section is useful.’
He came to a halt near the very end of the papyrus, stooping once more and reading, his voice again assuming a deep, resonant timbre.
‘And so we came to the farthest end of the world, to the Western Wall, and the Eye of Khepri was opened. We passed through the Mouth of Osiris, we entered the Inet Benben, we came to the hut aat, the great temple. Here is your home, oh Stone of Fire, whence you came at the beginning of all things, and whither you are now returned. This is the end. The gates are closed, the Spells of Concealment are uttered, the Two Curses are laid – may evildoers be crushed in the jaws of Sobek and swallowed into the belly of the serpent Apep! I, Imti-Khentika, Greatest of Seers, shall not return from this place, for it is the will of the gods that my tomb remain empty for all eternity. May I walk in the beautiful ways, may I cross the heavenly firmament, may I eat beside Osiris every day. Praises to Ra-Atum!’
