Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  Jack swam up to him, and gasped himself as the image came into view. ‘Holy crocodile, more like,’ he exclaimed.

  Maurice had been right. Only he could never have imagined anything like this. It was a statue of the ancient Egyptian god Sobek, half man, half crocodile, its snout flashing with jewels where their headlamp beams reflected off them. It faced directly towards the entrance to the temple to the west, towards the setting sun. Jack glanced at his air supply readout. ‘Fifteen minutes left: five for the chamber, five to get out, five to ascend, then pure oxygen for half an hour.’

  ‘Okay, Jack.’ Costas had pushed off and recovered his composure. ‘You take a quick look around. I’ll reactivate Walter and get him to dig us out again. If he’s got any battery left.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about it. Let me guess. You’ve never tried him before.’

  ‘Has to be a first time for everything.’

  Jack swam down to the centre of the chamber, and then panned his beam around the walls, starting at the buried entranceway and moving clockwise. He saw nothing but blank stone until he had passed the statue and was on the wall to his right, when an extraordinary scene came into view. It was a relief carving of an ancient battle, or rather its aftermath, with a wild-haired enemy executing and dismembering their prisoners, a jarring scene because the prisoners were unmistakably Egyptian. He panned the beam further on. A huge figure of a man came into view, the style different from the battle scene. He stared in amazement, barely able to think, memorising as much of the detail as possible, features of the carving that he would have time to ponder later. It was the same pharaoh he had seen two days before, fifteen hundred miles away at the bottom of the Mediterranean. He could scarcely register it. Akhenaten.

  ‘One minute left, Jack.’

  He saw something glinting in the sand below the image, hesitated, and then swam for it, in exactly the opposite direction from the exit route. He reached down and picked it up, clutching it as he swivelled round to swim back towards Costas. He looked at it for a second before shoving it in his leg pocket. It was a beautiful ancient scarab, carved out of green stone with a hieroglyphic cartouche on the base he recognised as that of Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s consort. It seemed an extraordinary artefact to discover in the empty shell of a temple, and he wondered whether anyone else had been in here since antiquity, whether anyone had come through the sand in the upper part of the doorway before the river level rose. Yet perhaps Nefertiti herself had been here, part of some ritual in this temple with Akhenaten. It was a remarkable find, but could scarcely prepare him for what he saw next, an object that Costas was holding up in both hands for him as he approached.

  ‘Walter came up with the goods,’ Costas said, his face beaming through his visor. ‘He dug this up when he went for his little snout around near the entrance.’

  Jack took it from him. It was a heavy rod about a metre long, of solid gold, the heaviest golden object Jack had ever held. But it was more than just an astonishing treasure in gold. It was the royal sceptre of an Egyptian pharaoh, the only one ever found. A pharaoh truly had been here, but for some reason he had left his greatest symbol of office on the floor of the temple, discarded in this most unlikely place so far from the royal palaces of Egypt hundreds of miles away down the Nile.

  Costas pushed him towards the hole. ‘Now, Jack. No time left.’

  Jack held the rod close to him and dived into the sediment, his free hand forward, following the tunnel that had been created again by Walter. Five minutes later he was free, swimming down the channel into open water, Costas behind him trailing Walter, seeing the sunlight flickering on the surface of the river some fifteen metres above. He glanced at his readout again. They had been in the temple for only eight minutes. Eight minutes. And yet what they had found in those minutes would have been the discoveries of a lifetime for an Egyptologist. He could hardly wait to show what he was carrying to Maurice and Aysha. He turned to Costas, who had come up alongside him, a broad grin on his face. ‘I know what you want me to say,’ Jack said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well done, Walter. Well done, Costas.’

  ‘See? A team. All three of us.’

  ‘A team.’

  ‘I’ve never seen gold like that before, Jack. Never.’

  ‘Nor me. It’s one of the most amazing things we’ve ever found. I’m itching to get back in there again. We need to think about a team, logistics, a time frame.’

  ‘I’m on to it.’

  Half an hour later they were floating on the surface a few metres off their planned exit point two hundred metres downstream from the pool, their visors lifted and eyes closed, drained by the exhilaration of the dive but revitalised after the final fifteen minutes breathing pure oxygen.

  Costas floated alongside, and Jack saw that his boiler suit was now suitably streaked with grime. Costas looked sceptically at him. ‘Did you really see a crocodile down there?’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t see it. I felt it.’

  ‘Felt it. You mean felt as in you somehow sensed it, you thought it was there? A fevered imagination, maybe?’

  Jack raised his hands. ‘No, I mean felt as in touched.’ He lifted one leg out of the water, showing the white striations on his fin. ‘And you can see the bite marks.’

  ‘You could have scratched your fin against the rocks going through that channel.’

  ‘If you don’t believe me, you can go down there and see for yourself.’

  Costas shuddered. ‘Not a chance. It’s bad enough thinking it might be there, let alone actually finding it.’

  Hiebermeyer came bounding down the slope, Ibrahim following behind, and squatted down by the shore. ‘Well, how did it go?’

  ‘We found it, Maurice,’ Jack said, his eyes gleaming. ‘You were right. It’s a temple to Sobek, with a huge statue of the god at one end. But it’s even better than that. There’s a massive wall relief showing Egyptian soldiers defeated in battle. I think it must have been carved during those years after the death of Senusret when things were falling apart down here. Maybe they thought they’d offended the gods in some way. My guess is the temple dates to that time too. But it gets even better. At one end of the relief there’s a huge image under a sun symbol, a pharaoh, but not wearing a pharaoh’s crown or carrying the sceptre, walking out as if he’s striding off into the desert alone. It’s Akhenaten.’

  ‘Mein Gott,’ Maurice said under his breath. ‘Lower your voice, Jack. Let’s keep this to ourselves for now, the four of us here and Aysha. Was there anything else? Any clues? Anything like the image on that plaque in the sarcophagus?’

  Jack pursed his lips. ‘In the lower folds of the skirt the lines of the sun symbol seemed to create a pattern. At the point where the lines converge, a square block is missing, cut out as if someone’s removed it. There might have been something in it, some recognisable feature, maybe some hieroglyphics.’

  Hiebermeyer exhaled slowly, shaking his head. ‘Still a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle.’ He stared at Jack, narrowing his eyes. ‘You’ve found something else, haven’t you?’

  ‘I always thought you wanted to be a pharaoh, Maurice. Well, today’s your lucky day.’ Jack heaved the golden sceptre out of the water and placed it in the other man’s outstretched hands. Hiebermeyer stared speechless, and fell back against the slope, sitting and holding the sceptre. As he turned it round, he noticed a cartouche. ‘Akhenaten,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Akhenaten’s royal sceptre. It’s the most astonishing find in Egyptology in my lifetime.’

  ‘The question is, how did it get there?’ Jack said matter-of-factly. ‘And I think the clues are in the wall carving and in the closed door of the temple. The carving shows Akhenaten stripped of ornaments, as if he’s walking away as an ordinary man, not as some priest-king. That fits in with the image of a penitent man going in search of the Aten, like a pilgrim who
has cast aside wordly goods. And the door suggests finality, as if he’s closing the door on the old religion and walking away free of it. Let’s imagine Akhenaten himself in there, carrying out some kind of propitiatory ceremony with the priests, maybe even something he’s told them will reaffirm his allegiance to the old gods, but then abruptly turning and casting aside his crown and sceptre and walking out, leaving his men to shut the door on the old religion for ever, even the priests themselves.’

  ‘Good crocodile food,’ Costas said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Well, Maurice himself said it. This was a place out of the way where they might have fed humans to the crocodiles, like the Hebrew slaves. What better way for Akhenaten to turn the tables than to release the crocodiles from this pool up that channel into the sealed temple, to feed on the priests themselves?’

  Hiebermeyer pulled a keffiyeh out of his satchel and wrapped it round the sceptre. ‘Not a word of this to anyone until we’ve finished here. If the locals get wind of a find like this, we’ll be swamped by gangsters searching for gold, and before you know it this place will be a battleground. And not a word to our new Sudanese inspector, al’Ahmed. This sceptre should go to the Khartoum museum, but I don’t trust him.’ He glanced at Ibrahim, who was standing beside him. ‘We’ll take this away in the Toyota and hide it in the conservation tent in the camp.’

  Ibrahim nodded, took the bundle and hurried away back up the slope. Jack held on to a rock by the shore, speaking to Hiebermeyer. ‘I want to get back in there tomorrow. Maybe we can find that missing piece of the relief carving. For starters, we need to establish a depot tent for our gear and hire a security guard.’

  Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘That can wait. Did you find anything down there from the 1880s?’

  Jack nodded. ‘A whaleboat and some steamer machinery. There’s probably more. What do you mean, this can wait? What’s more important?’

  ‘Good. That’s what I’ll tell al’Ahmed about. The reason you’re not diving here again tomorrow is that he’s arranged for you to visit the wreck site of the Abbas, the steamer that foundered upriver in 1884 with Gordon’s antiquities on board. It could be the only opportunity we get. It seems too good to miss.’

  Jack’s heart pounded with excitement, but he forced himself to think carefully. ‘What about the security situation?’

  ‘He says he’s sending in his own people to keep the local warlord at bay. I’m assuming he’s talking about Sudanese Interior Ministry police.’

  ‘You said you didn’t trust him,’ Costas said. ‘How can we?’

  ‘You can’t. But he talked about it while the other antiquities people were there, the ones we do trust. He said he was arranging a permit and fast-tracking the paperwork, and nobody there raised any protest; there was a lot of enthusiasm, in fact. They could all be in his pay, of course, but we have to take that chance. If this leads to a high-profile excavation and some spectacular finds, then it will justify his appointment and raise his status. It makes sense for him to want it to work.’

  ‘Or it could lead to us finding something he really wants, and then him booting us out,’ Jack said.

  ‘It’s your call.’

  Jack tipped over and floated on his back, smelling the Nile, enjoying the sun on his face. He thought of the site of the Abbas, upstream beyond the great gates, into the forbidding land that had terrified the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs, and thousands of years later when a new force had risen to confront them in the desert. He thought of the men of the river column, of the unknown man with the rifle in the sangar who had so intrigued him, and how he and Costas now seemed to be dogging the footsteps of the relief expedition. Travelling to a site upstream, they would reach the place where the column had fought its first bloody battles with the Mahdi. And he thought of the lure of something else that had brought Akhenaten here, and perhaps Gordon too.

  He thought of the sarcophagus and the plaque, and now the Sobek temple and the golden sceptre: they were extraordinary discoveries that had made pursuing this trail more than worthwhile. He could end the season on a high, and look forward to returning to both places next year, if nothing else got in the way. But right now, knowing that there might be more to be found, a potentially greater prize, put him on tenterhooks. He was on a roll, and he could not stop it.

  He lifted his head, and stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘Okay. I’ll go with it. Let’s get Ibrahim to load up the gear. We can leave this evening. It could be the only chance we’ll ever have to find out what General Gordon might have hidden in that boat.’

  13

  Near Korti, Sudan, 30 December 1884

  Major Edward Mayne opened the flap of the tent and stepped inside, his eyes smarting in the fog of tobacco smoke that filled the air. It had been hot outside, uncomfortably so in the late afternoon sun, but here it was like walking into the overheated parlour of a London gentlemen’s club, or one of the native sweat lodges that Charrière had shown him in Canada when they were boys. He envied Charrière remaining outside, sitting with the sentries in the shade of a palm tree close to the Nile. The British had not yet learned the Arab way of keeping a tent cool in the desert sun, and the heavy canvas was more suited to a Crimean winter than the furnace of the Sudan. To Mayne it was symptomatic of the campaign as a whole: the British had half adapted, wearing desert-coloured khaki instead of scarlet uniforms, riding camels instead of horses, some of them even ditching their pith helmets for Arab headdress, yet the tactics were those of earlier campaigns. Mayne knew that there were those in this tent now who had the originality of thought to break free, to adapt to the desert; yet with time running short and Wolseley in tight control, there seemed little chance of altering a course of action that had been fatally flawed from the start.

  Two officers were hunched over a portable desk in the far corner of the tent, one busy with a protractor and ruler and the other taking notes. Five other men sat around a trestle table in front of Mayne, dressed in the idiosyncratic mix of uniform and personal clothing typical of British officers on campaign. Wolseley himself sat directly opposite, a short, dapper figure immaculately composed, peering at a map along with three of the others. The only man who had seen Mayne enter was sitting to Wolseley’s right. There had been a decidedly exotic tang to the air, and Mayne remembered the taste for cherry tobacco that Burnaby had picked up on a recent sojourn in Morocco. He was there now, lounging sideways, cigarette held languidly and legs crossed, just like his famous portrait by James Jacques Tissot painted fifteen years before in London; only instead of the undress uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, he was wearing a kind of ersatz Scottish deerstalking outfit, with a giant howdah pistol holstered at his side. He nodded amiably at Mayne and took a deep drag on his cigarette, letting the ash fall in a shower on the floor and exhaling smoke rings upwards, watching them cascade against the tent roof and descend in a cloud over the other men.

  Mayne saw another difference from the portrait: the supremely self-confident cavalry officer of Tissot’s portrait had become heavyset, with dimmed eyes; he was a man who knew he could go no further in his military career, and whose time for shoehorning himself into adventure would soon be curtailed by age and a new world with fewer places for freelancers like him. Mayne knew that the indifference Burnaby affected here cloaked an acute mind, yet he sensed too that the detailed planning that was preoccupying the others truly was an irrelevance for a man who had perhaps been drawn into the Sudan for something of the same reasons that had compelled Gordon himself to return, attracted by the darkness that lay to the south and by the promise of apotheosis in the battles to come.

  ‘Ah. Mayne.’ Wolseley had spotted him, and quickly stood up and extended a hand. Mayne leaned over and shook it, feeling the skin of his arm prickle with the heat under his tunic. ‘You know the others around this table. General Earle of the river column, General Stewart of the desert column. A
nd of course Colonel Burnaby and General Buller.’

  Earle and Stewart both glanced at him and quickly turned back to the map, which Mayne could see showed the loop of the Nile surrounding the Bayuda desert on the way south to Khartoum. Buller was sitting at Wolseley’s left, a giant of a man with a face like a North American bison. He heaved himself up and extended a hand. ‘Edward, my dear boy. Had no idea you were here until Wolseley told me. You should have sought me out in my tent. You know there’s always a bottle to be uncorked for you.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Mayne, shaking hands. ‘I should like that above all things. Perhaps when this is over.’ Buller was one of Wolseley’s inner circle, his so-called ‘Ashanti Ring’. Mayne had first met him in Canada, and despite his bovine exterior had found him an agreeable companion who spoke with refreshing candour. Like Burnaby, Buller had grown stout and heavy jowled, fuelled by a prodigious appetite for alcohol; Mayne had seen his personal camel train arrive at Korti laden down with crates of Veuve Clicquot champagne, an outrageous indulgence that only Buller could pull off. But the men loved him because he was a soldier’s soldier, a celebrated winner of the Victoria Cross in the Zulu War, a warrior who fought at the bloody forefront of battle and had a reputation for fearlessness surpassed only by Burnaby himself.

  ‘Major Mayne has been attached to the river column,’ Earle said, peering at Buller over pince-nez spectacles as the other man sat heavily back down. ‘He’s been surveying the riverbanks, carrying out forward reconnaissance ahead of the boats.’