‘Close your visor,’ Costas boomed back. ‘It could be dazzling. Good to go?’
‘Good to go. See you on the other side.’
‘You better.’
Jack pulled down his visor and locked it shut, and then activated the polarising filter to reduce the brightness. On the way down he had seen a series of highly polished obsidian slabs built into the wall at alternating heights, and Costas had realised that one of the narrow sunlight shafts built into the side of the pyramid was angled into the burial chamber such that the light would strike the upper panel and reflect down to the pool below. A stone cover over the first panel pivoted back to expose it, but they had decided not to experiment in case the light dazzled Jack on his way down. But now, with only a few metres to go, it was time.
Jack heard the scraping of the stone cover being moved. Then it was as if he were staring into the flash of a camera, shocked and dazzled. The light from the sun was magnified by the panels and seemed to burn like fire at each stage down the shaft until it hit the water. The pool acted like a lens, focusing the light down on another mirror far underwater that reflected off into the unknown, in the direction of the Nile.
Jack suddenly realised what had happened. He was seeing what Akhenaten had seen, the light of the Aten; he was bathed in it, as Akhenaten had been. He remembered all the images that had brought him here, the clues in the carvings: the extraordinary image of the pharaoh and the labyrinth of channels and tunnels, the arms of the Aten spreading over it all. Akhenaten had not just built a new capital city at Amarna beside the Nile; he had come here, to the heart of Egypt, to the pyramids of Giza, to a place that all his energy and the light from the Aten would illuminate: a place where the wisdom of the ages and the knowledge of the world would be under his aegis, where he would reign for ever as one with the Aten, as king of kings.
There was a sudden jolt. The radiating slabs of rock above had snapped together, cutting Jack off from Costas and severing the rope. He fell, splayed out and spinning, managing to right himself so that he was falling feet first, and then he hit the water and fell far under, deep into another world, his eyes shut.
When he opened them again, he knew that he was about to make the greatest discovery of his career, one that could change the course of history.
He had found Akhenaten’s City of Light.
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Author’s Note
Menkaure and Akhenaten
The Gordon relief expedition has always fascinated me because of my own family connection with the story, outlined below, but I also have a long-standing interest in the archaeological backdrop to this novel. I first became intrigued by the story of the brig Beatrice while researching Greek and Roman antiquities lost during shipment to Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the risk of wreck for sailing ships was high. One artefact that never made it was the sarcophagus of the fourth dynasty pharaoh Menkaure, taken in 1837 from his pyramid by the British colonel Howard Vyse and loaded on board the Beatrice at Alexandria, never to be seen again. Apart from the fictional marginal note in Hiebermeyer’s copy of Vyse’s Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 (London, 1840), the evidence for the Beatrice discussed in Chapter 1 is genuine, including her previous use in trade to Canada as revealed in Lloyd’s Register. An unpublished watercolour of her in Smyrna harbour, Turkey, painted in 1832 by Raffaello Corsini, appears on my website. The wreck and the sarcophagus remain undiscovered, though there are indications that she may have foundered close to the location off Spain of the fictional excavation in Chapter 1.
It is not known whether Colonel Vyse had the sarcophagus of Menkaure packed full of other artefacts, and the plaque of Akhenaten discovered by Jack and Costas is fictional. Akhenaten for me is the most intriguing of all the pharaohs of Egypt, for having ‘broken the mould’ – albeit only for his lifetime – in a culture that resisted change and intellectual development for so long. His conversion to the one God, the Aten, and his likely identification as the pharaoh of the Moses story in the Old Testament, have made him the subject of extensive speculation and controversy, not least by Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism (London, 1939). The unusual physiognomy suggested in Akhenaten’s images may have set him apart as a child and caused him to be derided, just as the future emperor Claudius was to be in Rome; it is intriguing to speculate whether this was a factor behind his rejection of the world of his upbringing. The relief carvings of him with his beautiful wife Nefertiti and their children are among the most human of all pharaonic portraits, suggesting that his revelation of the Aten swept away not only the old gods and priests but also the unhappiness that he might have experienced in his youth.
Very little is known about the early life of Akhenaten, and the idea that he made a secret expedition to the Nubian desert to seek revelation is fictional. However, this idea is appealing on several counts: in the desert he would have been able to leave behind the gods and priests of the old religion whose existence clearly troubled him, and he may also have been visiting a place he saw as his ancestral homeland. At Buhen and Amada, two forts established in upper Nubia centuries earlier during the Middle Kingdom, inscriptions show that in year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign an expedition was sent south into Nubia, for an unknown purpose (Amada Stela CG 41806). What is certain is that two temple towns were constructed beside the Nile in upper Nubia during his reign, at Kawa and Sesebi. Both were focused on temples to the Aten, and both contained tantalising hints of the significance to Akhenaten of the southern desert: at Sesebi the finds include a unique depiction of the Aten as ‘Lord of Nubia’, and the ancient name for Kawa, Gem(pa)-aten, means ‘the Aten is discovered’.
The possibility that the year 12 expedition may have been sent to find gold is highlighted by the discovery of evidence for gold processing at Sesebi, the basis for Hiebermeyer’s fictional discovery near Semna in Chapter 6. The Middle Kingdom forts at Semna are among the best-known Egyptian remains in Sudan, not least for their dramatic location above the Great Gate of the second cataract, now submerged as a result of the rise in the level of the Nile caused by the Aswan dam. A vivid first-hand account of Semna as it once appeared is provided by Colonel William Francis Yates in The Campaign of the Cataracts: being a Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884–5 (London, 1887): it was a ‘wild and lonely spot’, where ‘from the ruin-crowned cliff on the east bank … one sees only the serrated ridges and calcined peaks of a savage solitude’. Yates describes the archaeological remains: on the ‘wind-swept summits of steep impending cliffs . . . lie two ruined temples [sic]; the massive but crumbling walls of a fortress crowns the whole crest of the cliff on the east side’. My depiction of the geology and river topography is derived from fieldwork carried out in 1902 by Dr John Ball (Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 59.1, 1903), as well as during excavations at Semna carried out from the 1920s to the final project in the 1960s before the sites were inundated.
In my novel I have imagined a lowering of the level of the dammed water that has allowed some of the upper-plateau ruins to be revealed. The excavations to the 1960s showed that Semna had been the hub of a complex of river forts built in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BC, when the pharaoh Semnosret I and his successors attempted to expand into Nubia; the finds complemented the ‘Semna Despatches’, an archive found in Thebes in 1896, to which the papyrus dispatch in Chapter 6 is a fictional addition. The cult of Sobek, the crocodile god, is particularly associated with the pharaohs of those dynasties, and large crocodiles may have been more prevalent in the south where there had been less hunting – some perhaps even the size of the behemoth in A Frightful Incident, a print from an account of David Livingstone’s explorations that can be seen on my website. A good deal is known of the cult from the temples at Arsinoe – known to the Greeks as Crocodilopolis – and Kom Ombo, as well as from
crocodile mummies, several of which have recently been subjected to CT scans at the Stanford School of Medicine in California. The submerged temple to Sobek in this novel is fictional, but is in a plausible location; Semna was a perilous point in the river where the risk of crocodile attack might have been high, so would have been a suitable place for acts of propitiation, even sacrifice. My idea of a submerged temple was inspired by the project in the 1960s to raise the Abu Simbel temple facade to its present location beside Lake Nasser, leaving the inner chambers deeply submerged within the cliff face where only divers can access them today.
The Gordon relief expedition
In the autumn of 1884, the world was gripped by one of the high dramas of the Victorian age, the plight of General Gordon in Khartoum and the progress of the expedition sent by the British to rescue him. Each week the Illustrated London News published beautifully detailed prints based on sketches sent by correspondents in the field, allowing readers to follow the expedition mile by mile as it struggled south through Sudan against the flow of the Nile. As a boy, I was given a bound annual volume of the Illustrated London News for that year by my grandfather, and I loved poring over those pictures: they seemed to show the ultimate imperial adventure. Readers saw the empire at its best: soldiers and sailors, Canadian voyageurs and west African boatmen, all banded together in harmonious resolve, for a cause that could not be more noble. And when the action shifted from the Nile to the desert, the illustrations showed thrilling scenes of battle, of bayonet against spear, of British resolve in the face of desperate savagery. By the time the stalwart few dispatched in the river steamers had fought their way up to Khartoum, the fact that they were too late was almost secondary. In that peculiarly British way, the failure itself became heroic, the more so after Gordon was elevated to saintly status for which martyrdom was almost a necessity. Generations of future soldiers could dream of fighting against the odds to rescue their own Gordons, yet worship the image of a man who had chosen to die honourably, revolver and sword in hand, grimly intent on taking as many of the enemy with him as he could, rather than make an easy escape and abandon the women and children he had sworn to protect.
This picture, of course, is only one take on these extraordinary events, and there is another, darker version, full of ambiguity and apparent contradiction. As I moved beyond my boyhood fascination and went on to study classical antiquity, I was much influenced by the ‘big man’ theory, in which domineering personalities provide the main driving force in history. Applying this prism to the events of 1884–5, against a backdrop of world events that would seem to have their own momentum – the resurgence of Islamic jihad, and the crystallisation of power politics in Europe that would eventually lead to the First World War – it is the extraordinary personalities that stand out, some with motivations far removed from the heroic ideal. The Victorian military, especially the more cerebral branches such as the Royal Engineers, could attract men of ambition, intellect and idiosyncrasy who were often given free rein in the field. The personalities in this story could not have been greater: Gordon himself, inscrutable and fascinating, with a messianic charisma that gripped the world during those months; Muhammad Ahmad, the self-styled Mahdi (Chosen One), a former boatbuilder and Sufi, who held more men under his sway than any European ruler; Lord Wolseley, the outstanding British general of his day, a fastidious stickler for detail and control; and men of lesser rank but expansive personality, including the flamboyant Colonel Fred Burnaby, arguably the greatest adventurer of the late Victorian age, and Major Herbert Kitchener of the Royal Engineers, future nemesis of the Mahdist revolt and commander-in-chief who would lead the British army into the bloodbath of the First World War.
Whether Gordon himself in the end really wanted to be rescued and whether those who were sent to rescue him ever really intended to do so are questions not easily answered. Looming in the background are the figures of Queen Victoria, ardent supporter of Gordon and spokeswoman for the vox populi, and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, a man who professed not to be able to abide Gordon, despite their shared fascination with the ancient history of Palestine and the lands of the Bible. Gladstone has appeared elsewhere in my fiction, in The Mask of Troy, where he sees the fall of Troy as a dark portent of modern times, yet where his aversion to war is tinged by realism. Once it had become clear that Gordon could not, or would not, be rescued, Gladstone may have been obliged to exercise a directive of appalling necessity in order to ensure that he was not captured; the image of Gordon in chains would have enraged public opinion and severely damaged British prestige at a time when international brinksmanship was the order of the day. Any sign of weakness might have led Russia to order the invasion of British India, as could have happened when the Russians clashed with the Afghans in the ‘Panjdeh incident’ of March 1885, a mere matter of weeks after the fall of Khartoum. Gordon the martyr was perhaps a weight that Gladstone could more easily have borne than Gordon the pitiful captive – or, worse still, Gordon the convert to Islam, driven to shocking apostasy by government indifference to the plight of his beloved Sudanese, standing alongside the Mahdi. If these were indeed Gladstone’s calculations, then events were to bear him out, conflict with Russia being avoided and British prestige left intact, though the great European war he most feared was only forestalled by a few decades, and the final destruction of the Mahdist revolt by Kitchener at Omdurman in 1898 did little to extinguish the flame of jihad kindled in the desert in the 1880s that has become such a dominating threat to world peace today.
The basis for the account in this novel of the Gordon relief expedition includes unpublished material related to my great-great-grandfather, Colonel Walter Andrew Gale, Royal Engineers (RE), who was a personal friend of Lord Kitchener and in charge of the Gordon Relics Committee while he was secretary of the RE Institute from 1889 to 1894. His Report of the Gordon Relics Committee (1894) is in the RE Library at Chatham, where the museum contains a fascinating collection of Gordon memorabilia that provided much initial inspiration for this story. Among published sources, I have relied where possible on first-hand accounts, notably Colonel Sir Charles Wilson’s From Korti to Khartoum (1885), Colonel William Francis Butler’s The Campaign of the Cataracts (1887) and Lieutenant Colonel E. W. C. Sandes’ The Royal Engineers in Egypt and the Sudan (1937), the last incorporating eyewitness records of RE officers present during the campaign.
Many contemporary accounts of Gordon are overtly hagiographical, extolling both his heroic attributes and his religious zeal; the same applies to many biographies of Lord Kitchener. I have sought to understand both men by reading their own writings and correspondence, in the case of Kitchener his contributions to the multi-volume Survey of Western Palestine, published in 1881–5 when he was in his early thirties, as well as accounts from 1884–5 that reveal a man of extraordinary energy and presence, a fearless adventurer quite distinct from the later image of the First World War field marshal so fixed in popular memory.
The essential source for Gordon is the compendious diary he wrote while besieged at Khartoum – unfortunately not including anything he might have written in his final days – published in 1885 as The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon, CB, at Kartoum, printed from the original mss; something of his religious vision is also revealed in the account of his time in Jerusalem, Reflections in Palestine, 1883, published after Gordon was already in Khartoum and possibly never seen by him.
Ironically, given the mystique that was built up around the man, his journals allow a more intimate, detailed picture of Gordon than is possible for any other of the main characters in this story. The tenor is overwhelmingly practical, not mystical; his daily concerns included the food supply, the likely arrival of the relief expedition, and the other professional checklists of a besieged garrison commander, including ammunition expended, a tally of incoming fire from the Mahdist forces, and lists of wounded and killed. His emphatic instructions to edit out extraneous material suggest that he wo
uld have been appalled by the notes that his admirers had seen fit to include in Reflections in Palestine. Several of the incidents he recounts in the fictional encounter with Mayne come from his journal, including the faulty ammunition in a Remington rifle that nearly blinded him (12 December), and his reflection on Abraham Lincoln and slavery (23 November, when he incorrectly identified 18 December as the date in 1862 of Lincoln’s proclamation). In creating dialogue, I have used words and phrases from the journal to represent his use of language, including his reference to the Mahdist forces as ‘Arabs’, as was the case for most of the British officer accounts of the campaign including that of Colonel Butler.
Gordon’s last journal entry, quoted at the front of this novel, has an air of finality about it, like Scott’s final entry from the Antarctic. Yet it was written on 14 December when he still had more than five weeks to live, and the assumption has to be that he continued to keep a journal to the end. Whether or not he would have chosen to reflect on his archaeological and ethnographic collections is unknown. However, he had shown much interest in these matters years earlier when he had even invited Heinrich Schliemann to join him, and several of his appointees to administrative and army positions in the Sudan, including the American adventurer Charles Chaillé-Long, had something of the treasure-hunter about them. It may never be possible truly to know what Prime Minister Gladstone thought of Gordon, but it is conceivable that their shared fascination with biblical history and archaeology would in private have transcended the gulf that had appeared between them publicly, one that widened after Gordon’s death when Gladstone was vilified for failing to order a rescue expedition in time.
Another pivotal character in this story is Sir Charles Wilson, who was blamed by Wolseley for failing to reach Gordon in time after Wilson was obliged to take over the desert column when its commander, Brigadier General Herbert Stewart, was mortally wounded in the battle that followed Abu Klea. Wilson’s own published book, noted above, rebutting the criticisms of Wolseley, is the best eyewitness account of the final stages of the campaign; much personal correspondence and writing related to his wider career is found in Colonel Sir Charles Watson’s The Life of Major-General Sir Charles Wilson, published by the Royal Engineers in 1909. The breadth of Wilson’s activities, as a mapmaker, geographer and intelligence officer, from North America to Asia Minor and the Sudan, make him one of the great unsung achievers of the Victorian age, and it is fascinating to speculate that his role as founder of the War Office Intelligence Department – the antecedent of the modern Secret Intelligence Service – might have included the sanctioning of a ‘mandate to kill’ that has become such an ingrained part of our view of covert intelligence activities since the novels of Ian Fleming were first published.
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