Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  ‘That’s because it’s not real. This is Kabir’s computer simulation of what the IVC city at Rakhigarhi might have looked like some four thousand years ago, based on what’s been uncovered there and similar finds elsewhere. You can clearly see the grid plan on which the Indus Valley architects designed the layout of the streets and buildings, much like a modern city, set out in blocks with distinct residential neighbourhoods, commercial centres, parks and recreation areas. They devised elaborate drainage and sewer systems employing underground pipes. Many houses had running water. Even the baked mud bricks from which their cities were built were manufactured according to a standard system of weights and measures, using a 1:2:4 ratio that is quite unlike any found in Mesopotamia or Egypt. The same remarkable degree of sophistication is reflected in the quality and craftsmanship of the countless items of pottery and art objects and even children’s toys that have been recovered from these sites. This was definitely no primitive culture, as you can see.’

  As he gazed at the screen, Ben was trying hard to imagine what was here that Kabir could have cryptically confided to Amal. The trace of a scent that he had picked up on earlier on seemed to be fading fast. Maybe he’d wasted his time coming here after all.

  He said, ‘You said there was a lot of controversy and hotly-contested debate around this Indus Valley Civilisation research. It seems that an awful lot is known about it. Where’s the mystery?’

  Gupta turned away from the computer screen to look at Ben. ‘Indeed we know a good deal, and are learning more all the time. But that is only a tantalising fragment that has captured the imaginations of every specialist in the world. Kabir being one of them. He has for some years now been one of the leading lights in the quest to discover the secrets of this lost culture. And believe me, there are many secrets, which remain incredibly resistant to our understanding to this day.’

  Ben wanted to fish for all the secrets he could get. He said, ‘Give me an example.’

  While Ben and Gupta were continuing their discussion inside Kabir’s office at the Archaeology Institute, a separate conversation was going on elsewhere. Separate, but very closely related. It was a three-way merged phone call between two groups of men, each inside a separate vehicle in a different part of the city, and a third party who was the overall boss of the operation and calling from a base elsewhere.

  One vehicle was a black Mahindra four-wheel-drive, India’s answer to a Jeep Cherokee or a Honda CR-V. It was parked not far away from a silver Jaguar that its occupants had been following that morning, doing a better job than the inept cops who’d temporarily interrupted things earlier that day. Four men inside, one of them being the leader of the crew, phone in hand. He reported, ‘He’s still in there.’

  The other vehicle was a rusty, dirty Tata Motors light commercial truck with side and rear windows painted over except for a few deliberate scratches that allowed a view out. Like the Mahindra, there were four men inside, and the driver was on the phone as his three passengers watched the driveway entrance across the quiet, leafy street within the upmarket neighbourhood where their target lived. The driver of the van waited until his crew leader in the black Mahindra had finished speaking. He was much more afraid of him than he was of the third party. After a deferential pause he said, ‘No movement here either. She’s still in the house.’

  The third party listened to both reports in turn, then replied, ‘Stay on both of them and let me know if anything changes.’

  The crew leader in the black Mahindra asked, ‘So when do we move on the guy?’

  The third party replied, ‘When the time is right. Not a moment before.’

  The crew leader in the black Mahindra asked, ‘When’s that?’

  The third party said, ‘When I tell you. Then you can do whatever you want to him. String him up by the ankles and make Bihari kebabs out of him. What do I care? As long as he’s out of the way.’

  The crew leader smiled and said, ‘That’s what we like to hear. Because we’re not patient people. And all this waiting around shit, that’s not what we do.’

  The third party said, ‘It’s what you’re getting paid for. Until I give the word, you do exactly as I say, understood? No mistakes this time. When Hope leaves, you follow him. Do not allow him to see you. I want to know where he goes next.’

  ‘And the woman?’

  ‘She’s part of the deal too, as agreed,’ the third party said. ‘But same terms apply. Only when the time is right.’

  ‘Better be soon.’

  ‘Relax, Takshak,’ the third party said. ‘You won’t be waiting around much longer.’

  Chapter 24

  Gupta thought about Ben’s question for a moment, then replied, ‘What makes the Indus Valley people so mysterious? All right, consider this. Here is a magnificent and, for its time, incredibly advanced society that flourished and spread at a phenomenal pace for a thousand years or more to become greater in scope than the mighty kingdoms of Egypt and China. Yet, by around 1700 BC, it was falling into sudden and catastrophic decline. Why?’

  Ben said, ‘You’re the professor. You tell me.’

  Gupta explained, ‘The answer is one that’s been eluding archaeologists and historians ever since the Indus Valley Civilisation was discovered. They weren’t overthrown or invaded by a rival neighbour, as so many other cultures in history were. Rather, their decline appears to have been an internal one, occurring over a remarkably compressed period of time.’

  ‘Meaning it happened quickly.’

  ‘And radically. Later examples of their arts and crafts show a dramatic lowering of sophistication and quality of workmanship. Their houses during this declining period were less carefully built and have survived less well than earlier ones. Even their traditional standards of weights and measures seem to have been abandoned, so that builders resorted to using whatever rough materials were at hand. The examples of complex street planning that had been the culture’s hallmark become less and less common as it moves into its later phase.’

  Ben asked, ‘And is this what Kabir was investigating?’

  Gupta said, ‘It’s what everyone’s investigating. Every specialist in ancient archaeology wants to know what happened to these people. It’s as if they simply didn’t care any more, as if all their drive and energy had drained away and they were no longer prepared to make the effort. Like a kind of collective apathy or depression that was contagious throughout the whole culture, and from which they never recovered. Eventually, predictably, they simply died out. And while many archaeologists have offered speculative reasons why, nobody knows for sure how such a long-established and widespread society could have simply disappeared, its very existence known to us only by chance.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ben conceded. ‘So that’s a mystery.’ He asked himself what relevance it could have to a modern-day kidnapper or killer, however. Answer: none in the slightest that he could see.

  Gupta nodded. ‘Certainly a mystery, though by no means the most baffling. Even when the Indus Valley Civilisation was at its peak, it was an enigma. They don’t seem to have temples or deities the way every other ancient culture does. There are no statues honouring the gods, no monuments of worship, nothing that teaches us about their religious traditions. Likewise, nothing about their architecture reveals a sense of social hierarchy in the way we would expect, with palaces for the ruling elite, bigger, better homes for the wealthier members of the society and smaller, humbler dwellings for the poorer citizens. Their social structure seems to have been strangely egalitarian, apparently able to organise itself without formal rulers or a class system. How did they govern themselves? What were their laws, their beliefs, their values, their traditions? We simply don’t know.’

  Gupta shook his head in amazement, and went on. ‘Nor has any IVC excavation to date revealed evidence of forts, castles or military installations, which again is extremely unusual, virtually unique in fact. While experts have been able to devote entire careers to studying the weaponry, armour, military o
rganisation and battle tactics of historical civilisations all throughout the ancient world, we are yet to find as much as a bronze spear or sword among the excavations of IVC ruins. Were they a completely peaceful society, depending on no army to defend their territory? If so, how did such a spread-out and apparently defenceless civilisation manage to maintain the integrity of its borders for so long, in an age where marauding invaders were continually chasing conquest after conquest all across Asia? Once again, one person’s guess is as good as another. And on it goes. Almost everything about these people remains a puzzle, and will remain so until we decipher their language. Because that, Mr Hope, is the biggest mystery of all.’

  Ben was on more familiar ground now, as he cast his mind back to his theology studies and all the ancient languages that scholars had been able to translate and understand for centuries, like Persian cuneiform, Babylonian script and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He said, ‘That strikes me as pretty weird. What’s so different about their language that it can’t be understood?’

  Gupta smiled. ‘If there’s a Rosetta Stone waiting to be discovered that could give us the key to understanding the Indus script, we haven’t found it yet. It’s the last of the ancient languages to be understood. And so far, incredibly, it defeats all attempts to decipher it. The archaeologist who cracked the code would instantly become a superstar within the profession. And that was what Kabir was trying to do. In fact it was the main focus of his work.’

  Gupta turned and swept an arm around the piles of equipment that filled the room. ‘This is why he needed all this computer power, to build a modelling system that would help him to unravel the secrets of the Indus script. Four hundred different symbols generates a bewildering number of possible combinations, all of which needed to be analysed and cross-referenced in order to tease out their meaning. Let me show you.’

  He walked over to another desk, turned on another computer and within a couple of moments Ben found himself looking at a screen showing a sequence of strange symbol markings, arranged in a row of eight. They were nothing like Egyptian hieroglyphics, or any other language script Ben had ever seen, not that he was any kind of expert. One symbol crudely resembled a flower, or a child’s drawing of one. Another looked like a crooked wagon wheel with six radial spokes, and another brought back a childhood memory of the brass tongs that his mother had used to put logs on the fire, in the rambling old Hope family home in the Cambridgeshire countryside, a million lifetimes ago.

  Gupta said, ‘These are just a small sample of the Indus script glyphs. So far we have identified over four hundred different symbols, which appear on the large number of clay tablets, seals, pots and other objects excavated from IVC sites. Many of them are totally obscure, like these. Others represent animals, such as elephants, bulls, rhinos, and some creature that looks like a unicorn. Generally speaking, the symbols bear little or no resemblance to any used by other ancient cultures. Scholars can’t even fully agree on whether the writing flows from left to right, like English and all the other European writing systems derived from Latin and Greek, or whether it’s meant to be read from right to left like Hebrew, Arabic or Urdu.’

  Gupta went on, ‘That’s not the only puzzle. The very way the symbols are arranged remains a mystery. While most types of writing feature blocks of text, sometimes long ones conveying a lot of information, everything from legal contracts to epic poems, the Indus symbols never appear in a single line longer than fourteen characters long, the average being more like five. These abbreviated lines have led some scholars to believe that the Indus symbols don’t constitute a linguistic script at all, that is to say, they’re not really a language but instead just a kind of symbol graffiti. Kabir was firmly opposed to this idea, maintaining that the Indus script was not only a real, proper language, but a fully developed and highly sophisticated one that we just hadn’t yet learned to understand.’ Gupta affectionately patted the computer monitor, as though he was rewarding a child or a well-trained dog. ‘Thanks to the computer model that he developed with his graduate students, he was very close to proving his theory right. In fact, he believed he was just a few steps away from cracking the code entirely. That caused a lot of controversy, even furious anger, in some quarters.’

  Ben, who was listening to all this and remembering why he’d never been able to appreciate the joys of palaeography, or the study of ancient writing, suddenly felt his ears prick up. ‘Anger?’

  ‘Oh, you would be amazed how these matters that appear so dull and lacking in relevance to the modern world can cause tempers to flare in our closed little academic community. A lot of people become very worked up, and exchanges between rival debaters can get quite abusive. It might seem strange, but it’s really quite easy to understand why. As I said before, whoever finally managed to decipher the Indus script would become one of the most famous and celebrated archaeologists of all time. A superstar, a veritable hero. They would be like the future astronomer who discovers intelligent life in another solar system, or the physicist who finds a way to deliver cheap nuclear fusion power to the electrical grid, or the engineer who creates a car that runs on water. To us, it would be no less revolutionary. But in so doing, they would potentially kindle a lot of ill feeling among their peers.’

  Ben said, ‘Out of jealousy, because they didn’t discover it first?’

  ‘That would be the motivation for some. For others, it would be that they were deeply embarrassed and humiliated, having committed themselves publicly to the opinion that the Indus script wasn’t a genuine language, only to be proved completely wrong. Even worse, all the peer-reviewed articles and doctoral theses and research papers on which they’d built their academic reputation would become obsolete overnight and their contribution to our discipline would be consigned to the dustbin. In short, for there to be a winner, there must also be a loser. In this case, a good many losers.’

  Ben was sniffing the scent again, and this time it seemed to be getting stronger. Because the more powerful the negative emotions someone’s work could stir up, no matter how petty and trivial the whole thing might seem to outsiders, the higher the possibility of that negativity, anger and resentment tipping over into physical actions. The idea of squabbling scholars hiring gunmen to take out their academic rivals seemed crazy. But this was a crazy world.

  He asked Gupta, ‘And what kind of ill feeling did Kabir spark off with his computer model?’

  Gupta replied, ‘He mentioned to me that, not long after he published some of his initial findings, a few months ago, he received some very unpleasant anonymous emails.’

  Ben asked, ‘Did he show you these emails?’

  Gupta shook his head. ‘No, I believe he deleted them as soon as he received them.’

  ‘Maybe he described their content to you?’

  ‘He only said that his research had rattled some cages, so to speak, and that there were some nasty, spiteful little minds out there. Those were his words. “Nasty, spiteful little minds.” I don’t think that he took it terribly seriously. The hacking was a much more troubling matter.’

  Ben’s ears pricked up a little more. ‘Hacking?’

  Gupta nodded. ‘It happened twice. First, around the time of the anonymous emails. Then again more recently, perhaps five weeks ago.’

  Five weeks ago was just a couple of weeks before Kabir and his associates were attacked. Ben said, ‘Tell me more about it.’

  Chapter 25

  Gupta said, ‘It seems that some unknown individual, presumably motivated by the kind of professional ill-will that I described earlier, attempted to infiltrate the computer model, with the intention of infecting Kabir’s data files with some malicious virus. I gather that there are different kinds, some designed to provide access to the files from outside—’

  Ben said, ‘Spyware. Or rootkits.’

  ‘—and others that can cause havoc, delete entire programs and render the whole system inoperable. It seems this was one of those. Someone apparently wanted to ruin his Indu
s script research. Fortunately, after the first incident Kabir had taken the precaution of backing everything up on another server, protected by … what are those things called? Walls of fire.’

  ‘Firewalls.’

  ‘Yes, of course. As I told you, I’m hopelessly ignorant when it comes to all this high technology. The young ones are so much more knowledgeable.’

  Ben didn’t consider himself too much of an expert either. He belonged to a generation that had managed just fine growing up without computers, and as adults neither entirely trusted nor liked them. But he still had to live in the modern world, and he had some basic understanding of how these things worked. He asked, ‘Did Kabir have any idea who tried to hack into his research? If he could have found out their IP address, from there he could have managed to trace where the attack was coming from, and taken the appropriate action.’

  Gupta looked blank. ‘No, no, I don’t think so. I really couldn’t say.’ Then his face turned a shade paler as it dawned on him what Ben was thinking. ‘But surely you’re not suggesting that someone within the archaeology community could have … I mean, academic rivalry is one thing, but—’

  ‘I have it from a reliable source that Kabir was holding onto a secret. Most likely, from what I can tell based on limited information, it was connected to his archaeology work. I’m guessing that his helpers, Manish and Sai, must have been in on the secret too, but to my knowledge Kabir told only one other person outside his immediate circle of trusted associates. That person is now in a great deal of trouble. Is that a coincidence?’

  Gupta swallowed hard. ‘A secret of what kind?’

  ‘Specifically, to do with a discovery he’d made. He was very excited about it. Said it was something hugely important. That’s all the detail I have. Before, I thought perhaps it was something physical he’d found, or dug up, since that’s what field archaeologists do. Now we’re having this conversation I’m wondering if it was something else. Not physical, but information-based. Had he cracked the Indus script code?’