Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  ‘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?’

  Tanner took the package and tucked it into his tunic. ‘Right away. I’m heading up to the sangar now.’ He paused, gesturing back at the entrance to the chamber. ‘What do you think of it?’

  Mayne nodded towards the river. ‘I think with what might be lurking in the pool, that’s one god you can’t afford to ignore.’

  Tanner grinned, shaking his head. ‘If I survive this little jaunt, I might just try to wangle a number like the one Kitchener had in Palestine and come back here as an archaeological surveyor. If there’s more like this to be found, we might be on to the greatest treasure trove from antiquity.’

  Mayne shouldered his bags and shook hands with Tanner. ‘Soldier first, engineer second. You remember what they drummed into us at Chatham? And archaeologist third. But I wish you the best of luck. The cataract ahead will be hard work, but by the time I’m back, the column should be well past it. And that sharpshooter won’t be the last. Where there are sharpshooters, there’s an army somewhere beyond.’

  Tanner nodded, his smile gone. He was ten years older than the subaltern in the sangar, due for promotion to captain that year, and had been in Afghanistan. ‘We’ve posted more picquets along the riverbank ahead of us, and a company of infantry has been put on alert to act as skirmishers should the need arise. Before he left for Korti, General Earle instructed us to proceed with extra caution. Direct orders from Lord Wolseley.’

  Mayne shook Ormerod’s hand, and watched the two men trudge up the scree slope. That was the problem with this expedition: too much caution. High overhead, half a dozen vultures circled, smelling the blood of fresh corpses. On the opposite cliff, two soldiers had reached the body of the marksman and tipped it off into the river. It came floating by now, down the torrent between the two rocks and into the pool, where soldiers crowded along the edge, peering at it as it rolled over and over in the current, unmolested by crocodiles. The sharpshooter had undoubtedly been disguised as a desert Arab, just as Mayne had been on his travels with Shaytan, but he had revealed his true colours before opening fire: the body was wearing the patched jibba of the Ansar, the white robe with the embroidered patches that made it look like the dress of a poor Sufi; and above the gaping hole where his face had been, Mayne could see that the man had been shaven headed. He had seen the Ansar before, fleetingly with Shaytan far to the south when they had watched a Mahdist force surge by in the distance, a storm of dust with banners above and the occasional flash of white as men disengaged from the main force to get out of the dust, riding their camels along the near flank. But seeing a jibba this far north was unnerving, as if the man had broken through the invisible membrane that still divided their world from the darkness ahead.

  He looked at the two rocks again, where Charrière had been standing when he had first seen him from the sangar. Down here, close to the river, they looked more impressive, like sentinels guarding a gateway to an unknown world. Through them he could see where the pellucid light over the pool, with everything sharply delineated, gave way to a haze and then an impenetrable miasma, the rocks of the cataract seeming to wobble and shimmer and then disappear from view entirely, as if he were looking into a mirage. He knew that his destiny lay somewhere out there, but for now he was glad to be turning north for a day or two, for a respite. He was desperately tired, and struggling up that slope in the chamber had given him a raging thirst.

  He heard a shout, then turned and saw Charrière standing in the boat in the pool, waving at him.

  It was time to go.

  PART 3

  10

  Near Semna, below the second cataract of the Nile, present day

  Jack Howard followed Hiebermeyer and Costas a
long the ridge from the sangar, towards the site where they had seen the sculpted head of the pharaoh Senusret beside the square structure of the shrine that had been revealed in the excavation. It was mid afternoon, and despite being November, it was still hot enough to send rivulets of sweat down his face and make a dive in the Nile seem more appealing by the minute. He could see the figure of a woman on top of the shrine, picking her way slowly around, squatting down to inspect something more closely. Below her in the wadi, a Jeep with a child seat strapped into the front passenger side was parked up against the ridge. A young man was leaning against the bonnet, smoking and talking on a phone. He saw them, pushed off and waved languidly, a holstered side arm clearly visible by his side.

  Jack waved back. ‘A bodyguard?’

  ‘Aysha’s cousin,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘He’s just finished his national service in Egypt, and was at a loose end. His military police unit was stationed at the frontier and liaised closely with the Sudanese border guards, so there was no problem getting him a temporary permit to carry a firearm in Sudan.’

  ‘You expecting trouble?’ Costas asked.

  Hiebermeyer shrugged. ‘You can’t be too careful. There’s always been a bandit problem in the desert and there’s a growing fundamentalist presence in Sudan. The bandits think any excavation is after gold, and the fundamentalists get itchy over anything they think might disturb Islamic history. Aysha’s cousin may be a one-man show, but the Sudanese police helicopter squadron at Wadi Halfa is only half an hour away.’

  They walked towards Aysha, who saw them and waved. Jack always relished spending time with her, not only for her sharp intelligence but also because she seemed to have walked straight out of the past; she had a face like one of the lifelike portrait plaques of the Hellenistic period found on mummies in the Faiyum, where Hiebermeyer had first met her. She was wearing a man’s keffiyeh headdress, a loose white long-sleeved shirt and a long skirt, but with robust desert boots and a workman’s belt with pockets and loops for tools. On her front was a swaddled bundle attached by cords around her waist and over her shoulders. Costas surged forward and peered at the face just visible beneath the protective sunshade at the front. ‘How’s my favourite small person?’ he asked.

  ‘Ahren’s fast asleep,’ Aysha said. ‘He’ll sleep for another hour, and then be bright and perky all night.’

  ‘This is his first taste of an archaeological excavation,’ Hiebermeyer beamed.

  Jack smiled at Aysha. ‘I was with Maurice at Heathrow when he bought him some blocks to build a model of an ancient Egyptian temple.’

  ‘Correction. Maurice bought Maurice some blocks to build a model of an ancient Egyptian temple. It was the centrepiece of the excavation tent until our lovely son brought it tumbling down.’

  ‘Earning his archaeological credentials,’ Hiebermeyer said proudly. ‘Far more interested in ruins than standing structures. That’s my boy.’

  Aysha walked carefully over to an awning on one side of the shrine, and sat down on a folding chair. The others joined her. Jack, who had been thinking hard since seeing the evidence from 1884 in the sangar, glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘Do you remember I promised to look out some material I had in the Howard family archive related to the Gordon relief campaign?’

  Hiebermeyer looked at him keenly. ‘Your ancestor, the Royal Engineers officer?’

  Jack nodded. ‘My great-great-grandfather, Colonel John Howard. He wasn’t part of the expedition, but he was in charge of a committee at the Royal Engineers headquarters at Chatham that looked after Gordon’s collection of antiquities. Howard passed through Egypt in March 1885 on his way back home from India, and picked up a crate of material in Cairo that had been sent down from the Sudan. I know it contained some archaeological finds that Gordon had dispatched from Khartoum the previous year, including ancient Egyptian artefacts from the desert. Those mostly went to the Museum of the Royal United Services Institute in London, and when that was disbanded in the 1960s they were dispersed around various museums in England.’

  ‘You told me there was some material related to Semna.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Just two envelopes, in the collection of his private papers that I have in that old wooden sea chest in my office on Seaquest II. But it’s frustrating because both are empty. One has the sender’s address as “River Column, Semna”, dated the twenty-fourth of December 1884, and is from Lieutenant Peter Tanner, a sapper friend of Howard’s from his time in India. I know they shared an interest in archaeology, and I’ve always imagined that was what the letter was about. Sadly Tanner was killed in battle alongside General Earle six weeks later, when the river column had its first major engagement with the Mahdi’s army, at Kirbekan, some sixty miles south of here.’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘That one’s a real puzzle. It’s a scuffed brown manila envelope about twenty centimetres across that had once been tied around, as if it had contained something heavy, an object the size of a large floor tile. It’s addressed to Howard at the School of Military Engineering, and was from a sapper in the 8th Railway Company, Royal Engineers. It was posted in May 1885 from a British army field hospital at Wadi Halfa. The 8th Railway Company weren’t meant to be a combatant unit, but they did fight one of the last battles of the campaign, when they were besieged at the fort of Ambikol at the end of the railway line and held off wave after wave of dervish attacks. The sapper must have been badly wounded to have been at that particular hospital. His name was Jones, and I realised I recognised him from his regimental number on the envelope. He’d been a sergeant with Howard in India during the Rampa Rebellion in 1879, and a bit of research showed that he was a corporal with the river column in 1885 before being transferred to the Railway Company. Sometime after that he must have lost his corporal’s stripes and been reduced to sapper, not for the first time in his army career, it seems. It was common for engineer officers and NCOs to have close friendships, as they often worked together for months on end with no other soldiers present. When Jones had been with Howard in the Rampa jungle they made some major archaeological discoveries. That might explain why he chose to send Howard what looks as if it must have been some kind of artefact from the desert.’

  ‘Is there any chance of following the trail further?’

  Jack nodded. ‘The sea chest only contains papers that happened to be among my father’s material when he died. But another couple of boxes of my great-great-grandfather’s papers were found when restoration work was carried out in the attic of the old hall on our estate last year. My grandfather was in serious debt following the Second World War and had to let the house, and it seems that he put a lot of family material into storage in the attic and then forgot to tell anyone about it. I’ve only managed to look through a few boxes so far, but I’ll go straight to it when I get back to the IMU campus after we finish our diving here. The attic is going to be converted to rooms for visiting scholars, and I need to supervise removal of all the material to the library before the end of next week. If Jones’ artefact came from Semna, which seems possible, then maybe it’s something that can shed light on the archaeology of this place. I’d love to go through the whole collection properly, but until now I hadn’t seen myself having the time. A retirement project maybe.’

  Hiebermeyer peered at him over his glasses. ‘Retirement? Jack Howard?’

  Aysha shifted the baby. ‘Why not put Rebecca on to it? John Howard’s her ancestor too.’

  Jack gave her a rueful look. ‘I don’t think family history is her cup of tea. At the moment she’s toying with applying to study theoretical physics at Caltech.’

  Aysha waved her free hand dismissively. ‘That’s just an act of rebellion against you. If you told her there was some kind of archaeological trail in those family papers, she’d be on to it like a shot. Remember, I’ve spent weeks sitting beside her in the finds lab cleaning bits of broken pot. I can assure you that she has
the Howard genes. Anything to get out of drudgery, and she’ll do it.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll set it up. But I want to have a look again as well. Especially after having seen this place.’

  ‘The Royal Engineers played a major part in the development of archaeology out here,’ Aysha said, gently rocking the baby. ‘It’s fascinated me since you first suggested that I study it for my masters dissertation project in London.’

  Jack looked at Costas. ‘It’s one of the unsung aspects of the development of archaeology in the Victorian period. One of the main jobs of the Royal Engineers was survey and mapmaking, and in the course of their explorations they laid the groundwork for archaeological research in many areas of the world that came under British influence, including Palestine and Egypt. A lot of them were also keenly interested in Biblical history and archaeology in its own right. That was the period when people were really beginning to put facts behind the timeline and geography of the Bible. The Royal Engineers attracted many men who today might well have become professional archaeologists.’