The Hidden Oasis (45 page)

‘The House of Millions of Years of King Men-Maat-Ra, Joyful in the Heart of Abydos,’ said Flin, coming up beside her. ‘Impressive, eh?’

‘Sure is.’

‘I’d offer you the full tour, but given the time constraints …’

He took her arm and steered her to the back of the Cherokee. Opening the rear door, he gathered the tools from the back seat. He handed Freya the torches and one crowbar, took the other crowbar and bolt-cutters himself and locked the vehicle. She started towards the temple, but he called her back with a click of the fingers and instead led her to the left, down a side street, past a donkey munching on a heap of fodder and deeper into the village.

‘The whole area’s crawling with guards,’ he explained in hushed tones, waving her right up another street. ‘We should keep out of sight as much as possible.’

They weaved through the houses, everything deathly quiet save for the dogs still barking in the distance, and, once, the sound of someone snoring. The ground climbed steadily, then started to flatten out. Turning down a narrow alley, they came back out onto the road on which they had parked. They were almost at the top of the hill now, the mobile phone mast rearing to their left, the Cherokee just visible at the bottom of the slope to their right. In front of
them a stretch of rubbish-strewn waste ground ran away towards a ragged barbed-wire fence. Beyond lay a confusion of broken columns and mud-brick walls, the tallest of them no more than chest height. And beyond that rose another, much more solid wall made up of a hotchpotch of stone blocks – the side of the temple compound. Flood-lamps bathed everything in a wash of orangey light; black-uniformed guards could be seen patrolling around the perimeter.

‘Like Hassan said on the tape, these guys tend to shoot first and ask questions later,’ said Flin, drawing her back into the shadows. ‘We need to be careful or they’ll end up doing Girgis’s job for him.’

He peered out, surveying the ground ahead, watching the way the guards moved, calculating the pattern of their patrol.

‘There’s a blind spot when that guy turns,’ he said after a few moments, pointing to one of the uniformed figures. ‘We can make it under the fence and in among the ancient storerooms. When he turns again we go through that small gateway in the corner and down onto the temple portico. OK?’

‘What if they see us?’

He didn’t reply, just tilted his head and raised his eyebrows as if to say: ‘Let’s hope they don’t.’ Thirty seconds passed, then, nudging Freya with his elbow, he started forward. She followed, and they hurried across the stretch of waste ground, ducked through a gap in the fence and worked their way into the maze of mud walls. Crouching down behind a row of pillar bases they felt horribly visible, the flood-lamps swamping the area with light, the windows
of the overlooking buildings seeming to stare directly at them. They held their breath, half expecting to hear shouts and the crunch of running feet. As it was, their presence went unnoticed, and after another thirty seconds Flin raised his head, took a quick look around and waved Freya on. They kept low to the ground, flitting among the ruins and through a narrow gateway in the wall of the temple enclosure. Four steps took them down to a terrace that ran along the building’s floodlit front.

‘Stay quiet,’ he whispered, drawing her in behind the first of the monumental pillars that lined the façade, holding a finger to his lips.

‘What the hell did you think I was going to do?’ she murmured. ‘Start singing?’

Again they paused, pressing themselves tight against the stone, listening for signs that they had been spotted. Then they began moving along the terrace towards the black rectangle of the temple entrance, scuttling from one pillar to the next, their silhouettes – towering, monstrous, misshapen – sliding across the floodlit walls to their left before disappearing again as they slipped out of sight behind each column. There was one agonizing moment when, as they reached the pillar adjacent to the doorway, Freya stumbled and clanged her crowbar against the stone floor. The sound reverberated around the enclosure, seeming to fill the night. They shrank back into the shadows, freezing, listening as footsteps approached across the courtyard in front of the temple, coming right up to the very edge of the terrace.

‘
Meen
?’ came a voice, no more than a couple of metres away, accompanied by a rustle and a click as of a rifle being unshouldered. ‘Who there?’

They stood motionless, neither of them daring to breathe, knowing that if the guard came up onto the platform itself they were sure to be found. To their relief he remained below, pacing up and down before eventually, satisfied there was nothing amiss, moving off, the clump of his boots slowly receding. Flin waited until he had disappeared altogether, then peered cautiously round the side of the pillar. The coast was clear. He handed Freya his crowbar and, clutching the bolt-cutters, stepped up to the iron gate that secured the temple entrance and sliced through its padlock, the cutters severing the metal link as though it were made of cheese. He eased the gate open, stepped through and, taking another glance across the courtyard, waved Freya in, pushing the gate closed after her and pulling her to the left, out of the pool of illumination thrown by the floodlights outside.

For a moment they stood there, catching their breath, eyes adjusting to the gloom, listening. Then, propping the bolt-cutters against the wall, Flin took a crowbar and a torch from Freya and, clicking the torch on, led her forwards.

They were in a cavernous, stone-floored hall. Twin rows of columns marched off to left and right, each column eight metres tall and thick as a tree trunk, every available surface – walls, columns, ceiling – carved with tangled thickets of hieroglyphs. Freya clicked on her own torch and circled it around, gazing in wonder. A couple of years back she had gone night diving on a coral reef off the coast of Thailand, and this had the same mysterious, sub-aquatic feel to it. Her beam cut through the murk, picking out curious shapes and images: figures with human bodies and the heads of animals – hawks and lions and jackals – a man kneeling with hands
raised in supplication, three statue heads lined up in a recess in the wall, their empty eyes staring blankly into the shadows. There were colours as well: reds and greens and blues loomed momentarily before fading back into monochrome as she swung her torch elsewhere, as though it were the beam itself that was creating the different hues.

They reached the far side of the hall – the only sound the soft pad of their feet on stone – and passed through a wall into a second huge space, this one also crowded with a forest of decorated columns. Even to Freya’s untutored eye it was clear the carving here was of a far higher quality, the hieroglyphs rendered in bas- rather than sunken relief, the images more detailed and subtle. A ladder of moonbeams dropped through a skylight in the ceiling high above. Otherwise everything was utterly black, the darkness so intense Freya could almost taste it.

They made their way across this room too and up a ramp onto a low platform at its far end. Flin played his torch beam across the hall’s rear wall, illuminating a row of seven rectangular doorways, deeper voids within the wider one all around. He made for the third door from the left, Freya following, passing beneath a badly damaged lintel and into a long rectangular chamber. Its vaulted ceiling was stained black with mould, its relief-covered walls patched here and there with eczema-like smears of concrete render where the stonework had disintegrated and been repaired.

‘The chapel of Re-Horakhty,’ Flin announced, still keeping his voice low even though they were now deep within the temple and the chances of anyone outside hearing them were minimal.

He flashed his torch around, then turned to the right and
lifted the beam, directing it into the very top right-hand corner of the chamber, to the point where the wall merged into the curve of the ceiling vault. There, just as Fadawi had described, was a small square block, no more than forty centimetres by forty centimetres, faded remnants of hieroglyphic text just visible beneath the mould which covered its face.

‘Now all we’ve got to do is reach it,’ he said.

They went back out into the hypostyle hall and split up. Wandering off in opposite directions, they slashed at the blackness with their torch beams, searching for something – anything – they could use to get up to the stone, neither of them wanting to vocalize the fear that having come all this way they might not actually be able to access the relevant block. Within less than a minute Freya heard a soft whistle. Retracing her steps, she found Flin standing in the doorway of the chapel next to the one they were interested in, a relieved grin on his face. Inside, against the false door in the chapel’s back wall and surrounded by sacks of cement, stood a portable aluminium scaffold tower, its legs fitted with castors for ease of movement.

‘Appropriate we should find it here,’ he said, going over to the scaffold and giving it a rattle. ‘This is the sanctuary of Ptah, god of – among other things – masons and stonecutters. Let’s hope it’s a good omen.’

The tower was too tall to push through the chapel door as it was, obliging them to remove its upper tier and transport it into the Re-Horakhty chapel in two separate pieces before reassembling it, losing them precious minutes. Once it was erected Flin clicked on the wheel locks and, clutching the crowbars and torches, the two of them
climbed up, Freya swiftly, Flin with rather less confidence.

‘Jesus, it’s wobbly,’ he muttered, easing himself onto the platform at the top. ‘Feels like it’s made of jelly.’

‘Stop fussing,’ she chided. ‘We’re only three metres up.’

He threw her a look as if to say, ‘That’s three metres too many’ and, shuffling forward, aimed his torch into the corner of the wall.

From ground level the stone block had appeared as tightly fitted as all the others of which the wall was constructed. Now they were up close, and their torch beams just centimetres away, they were able to see exactly what Fadawi had seen: a narrow gap running along the top of the stone with even narrower ones beneath and to either side of it, each no wider than a pencil stroke. Leaning forward, Flin held his cheek close to the wall.

‘Hassan was right,’ he said after a pause, eyes gleaming with excitement. ‘There’s definitely air moving around back there. Come on.’

He glanced at his watch – 4.24 a.m. – and positioned his torch on the platform so that its beam shone directly up at the block, then spat on the palms of his hands and grasped his crowbar.

‘OK, let’s get to work.’

Zahir al-Sabri stood over his son’s bed, smiling as he gazed down at the sleeping figure curled beneath him, one arm bent underneath his head, the other thrown out to the side,
palm open as though the boy was reaching for something. He remembered the day Mohsen had been born – how could he forget? – the wonder he had felt, the choking surge of euphoria. As a Bedouin it was not considered seemly to show emotion in public and so he had contented himself with giving the wrinkled bundle a kiss and embracing his wife before driving out into the desert where, crazed with joy, he had danced and yelped like a madman, watched over only by the dunes and the sky.

He would have liked more children, a dozen more, for what greater satisfaction can there be than to forge new links in the chain of life, extending it forward into the future? It was not to be, though. The birth had been difficult, there had been complications, bleeding – he hadn’t understood the details, only that to go through the same again would have put his wife’s life in danger, and that was not something he would allow to happen. Allah gives, and Allah takes. It was how things were. He had Mohsen, and that was enough.

He continued to look down, the moonlight wrapping a silver halo around the boy’s head. Leaning forward, he kissed his cheek, murmured
‘Ana bahebak, ya nooreanay’a’ –
I love you, light of my eyes – and slipped back into bed beside his wife. He stared up at the ceiling. For a while he just lay there, biting his lip, no nearer sleep than he had been four hours ago. Then, rolling to the side, he reached beneath the bed and touched the muzzle of the rifle he kept there, running a finger along the cold steel of its barrel.

He was ready. Whatever happened, whatever was asked of him, he was ready. In that, at least, he would live up to the memory of his ancestors.

‘
Ana bahebak, ya Mohsen
,’ he whispered. ‘
Ana bahebak, ya noor eanay’a
.’

‘You really think Fadawi hasn’t told anyone else about this?’ asked Freya as they worked their crowbars into the gaps around the stone block, Flin at the top, Freya the side. ‘Or that other guy, Abu whatever-his-name-was.’

Flin shook his head, pushing with his crowbar, trying to get the block moving.

‘I’d have heard about it if they had. Like Fadawi said in the tape, if there’s a dismantled Pepi II temple back there it would be one of the biggest finds of the last fifty years. Word would have got out. Come on, you bastard.’

He applied more pressure to the bar. Freya did the same with hers, the two of them falling silent as they focused all their energy on the job in hand, aware that time was ticking away and anxious to get the block moving. Sweat dampened their faces; the room echoed with the laboured grunt of their breathing and the clink of metal on stone. After a couple of minutes Flin changed his angle of attack, yanking the bar from the gap at the top of the block and working it into the one down the side instead, opposite Freya’s. They rocked their jemmies back and forth, pushing and pulling. Still the stone resisted and Freya was beginning to wonder if they would ever get it loose when, finally, there was a faint twitch of movement, just the merest shiver, barely noticeable. They adjusted their position,
wriggling the bars in another couple of millimetres and heaving. The movement became more pronounced. Flin freed his jemmy and forced it underneath the block, pushing down on it. The block lifted slightly.

‘Almost there,’ he puffed, eyes wide both with the effort of shifting the stone and excitement at what might lie behind it.