The Hidden Oasis (52 page)

‘I thought you said we were refuelling here.’

‘Indeed we are.’

‘So where’s the … ?’

‘Petrol pump?’ He smiled, waving her over to a heap of potsherds set slightly apart from the hill. They appeared to have been deliberately piled into a small cairn, with an upturned tin can resting on top.

‘The Abu Ballas gas station,’ he said. Dropping to his knees he removed a large, shovel-shaped sherd from the pile and started scooping away the sand to one side of the cairn, digging down until he hit something metal.

‘It’s a trick Alex and I learnt from the early twentieth-century desert explorers,’ he explained, brushing the object with his hand, revealing the upper part of a large metal jerry can. ‘You leave fuel dumps along your line of travel, insurance in case you start to run low. There are three
20-litre cans down here. We’ll fill up with one and leave the others in case we’re getting short on the flight back, although with the spare fuel we’re already carrying we really shouldn’t have any problems.’

He dragged the can free of the ground and lugged it over to Miss Piggy. He emptied the container’s contents into the microlight’s tank, the air filling with the pungent tang of petrol fumes. Once he was finished he handed the empty container to Freya and asked her to bury it again – ‘I’ll refill it when I’m next out this way’ – while he busied himself opening the maps he had taken from Alex’s house. He spread them on the ground and weighed down the corners with stones, poring over them.

‘Abu Ballas,’ he said once she’d joined him, pointing to the larger of the two charts, to a small black triangle in the middle of an otherwise blank expanse of yellow. ‘And here’s where we’re heading.’

He traced a finger diagonally down the map to an area where the yellow darkened to pale brown beneath the legend ‘Gilf Kebir Plateau’, giving Freya a moment to get her bearings before sliding the second map over the first. This depicted the Gilf itself on a scale of 1:750,000: what looked like two large islands, one to the north-west of the other, connected by a narrow isthmus and with a scatter of smaller islands floating around them. Their coastlines, if they could be called that, were jagged and broken, pierced by deep, snaking wadis and fringed with minute clusters of words giving the names of exotic-sounding features and formations: Two Breasts, Three Castles, Peter and Paul, Clayton’s Craters, al-Aqaba Gap, Jebal Uweinat.

‘Wadi al-Bakht,’ said Flin, pointing to one of a series of
wadis that descended ladder-like along the eastern face of the more southerly landmass. ‘If Zahir’s got it right the rock shouldn’t be too hard to find – thirty kilometres south of al-Bakht, three-quarters of the way between there and Eight Bells.’

He touched a finger to what looked like a chain of eight tiny islands stretching off the bottom of the Gilf.

‘And if he hasn’t got it right?’ Freya asked, looking over at him.

Flin folded the maps and stood.

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For the moment let’s just get ourselves out there.’

He checked his watch: 3.50 p.m.

‘And we should do it quickly. I don’t want to have to land in the dark. Do you need the ladies’ room?’

She threw him a look and shook her head.

‘Then let’s get going.’

They flew for another eighty minutes, the sun now dipping fast into the west, the air growing noticeably cooler. Freya was glad of the extra layer of clothing they had put on before leaving Abu Ballas. The desert looked if anything even more spectacular than it had on the first leg of their journey, the softening light teasing out its full panoply of colours – yellows and oranges and a dozen different shades of red – the lengthening shadows throwing the landscape into ever sharper and more dramatic relief. They passed over towering dune seas, vast lakes of pancake-flat white gravel and strange, primordial forests of shattered rock, venturing deeper and deeper into the mysterious heart of the wilderness. Eventually, with the sun balanced right on
the line of the horizon, a hazy band of red loomed into view across their line of flight, hovering in front of them like steam rising off the desert surface. Flin pointed to it.

‘The Gilf Kebir,’ came his voice over the headset. ‘
Djer
to the ancient Egyptians – the limit, the end of the world.’

He adjusted their course slightly, taking them higher and bringing them round more to the south. The haze drifted closer, seeming to expand and solidify the nearer they came, its colours to waver and change in the shifting late-afternoon light, red morphing into brown and brown into a soft orangey-ochre. Finally, like a genie rising from a bottle, it gathered into clear focus: an enormous upland plateau rearing 300 metres from the desert floor and stretching away as far as the eye could see to the north, south and west. In places its face was sheer, an impregnable wall of dusty yellow rock, the sands gently swelling against its base like waves against the flank of an ocean liner. Elsewhere it was convulsed, cut by deep valleys and inlets, the cliffs breaking up into rock shelves and scree slopes which in turn fell away into jumbled archipelagos of buttes and gravel hills, the plateau seeming to stumble down to the desert in a series of huge, uneven steps. Freya could make out distant patches of vegetation – specks and smudges of green against the yellow backdrop – and, as they came closer, the odd bird as well. Hardly teeming with life, but after the desolate tracts over which they had just flown it seemed positively abundant.

Flin had the map of the Gilf in his lap, folded in such a way that only the plateau’s south-eastern quadrant was visible. Bringing them closer to the cliffs, he turned due south, setting a course parallel to the massif and slightly
above it, working the control bar with his right hand while he held the map flat with his left, his finger tracing their course across its surface. Ten minutes went by, the sun sinking all the time until only its upper rim was visible, the western sky burning with brilliant swirls of green and purple. Then Flin pointed ahead and below, to a place where the face of the Gilf suddenly opened up into a broad, sand-clogged valley.

‘Wadi al-Bakht,’ his voice crackled. He banked to the right and took them directly over it. The valley snaked eastwards and out of sight, carving into the uplands as though someone had gouged a jagged slit through the bare rock. ‘Not far now, just another thirty kilometres. Less than twenty minutes. Keep your eyes open.’

He swung away from the Gilf again and brought them down so that they were now below the tableland’s summit. They continued south, the cliffs rearing to their right, dwarfing the microlight as though it was a dragonfly buzzing along the side of a skyscraper. The desert ahead was smooth and blank, a gently undulating swell of sand, devoid of features. They should have sighted the rock formation with ease, even with the sun now gone and twilight thickening around them. Twenty minutes came and went. Twenty-five. And when far ahead to the south a line of conical hills drifted dimly into view, Flin shook his head and started turning back.

‘That’s Eight Bells. We’ve come too far. We must have missed it.’

‘We can’t have,’ said Freya, buttoning her sister’s suede jacket up to the neck against the increasing cold. ‘The desert’s completely empty, we would have seen it.’

Flin just shrugged and put them back on a northerly heading, dropping even lower. The two of them scoured the desert beneath, anxiously searching for any hint of the crescent-shaped rock as what little light remained fast ebbed away and the tableland to their left faded into a mist of featureless grey.

Another ten minutes ticked by and it was looking as if they would have to abandon their search for the night and land the microlight before it was completely dark, when suddenly Flin gave an excited shout.

‘There!’ he cried, waving a hand down to their right.

How they had missed it before Freya had no idea. She recognized the cliffs at that point, which – even though they were now veiled in shadow – still towered noticeably higher and more vertiginously than anywhere else along that stretch of the Gilf. There had been no sign whatsoever of the rock the first time they had passed that way. And yet there it was below them, clearly outlined against the pale desert surface: a vast curving spire of black stone bowing upwards from the otherwise empty sands to a height of some ten metres, dominating the surrounding landscape. What titanic forces of nature had shaped and raised it, had left it standing there alone and surreal like a gargantuan rib thrusting from the wilderness she couldn’t even begin to guess. Nor did she care. They’d found it: that was all that mattered. She gave Flin a clap on the shoulder to show that she’d seen it and looked down as he took them in a wide arc around the rock, scanning the desert for somewhere suitable to land. It was impossible to judge the precise state of the surface below, the world having dissolved into a dull monochrome haze. It appeared perfectly flat and
compacted, and having circled a couple of times scouting for any obvious obstructions, Flin cut the revs, closed the throttle and descended to within a couple of metres of the ground. Gently easing the control bar forward, he landed the microlight with barely a bump, gliding across the sand and coming to a halt almost directly beneath the spire.

‘Welcome to the middle of nowhere,’ he said, stopping the engine and switching off the electrics. ‘We hope you enjoyed your flight.’

For a while they just sat there, the propeller slowly whirring to a standstill behind them, silence pouring into the void left now that the engine was no longer running; a deeper, heavier, more all-consuming silence Freya had never known. Then, unplugging their intercoms and removing their helmets, they heaved themselves out of the pod and walked over to the rock tower. Its curved, gently tapering length loomed above them, the black stone of which it was formed – obsidian? basalt? – even more eerie and unearthly now that they were close to it.

‘I just can’t believe I’ve never seen this before,’ murmured Flin, contemplating the summit ten metres above, silhouetted against the night sky like the tip of some gigantic tusk. ‘I must have flown over this area a dozen times, and driven through it almost as many. It’s impossible I could have missed it. Impossible.’

They wandered around the rock, hands trailing across its surface, which was still warm from the day’s sun and curiously smooth, almost glass-like. Coming back to the microlight, they stood staring upwards, the Gilf rearing to their left, an orange moon slowly climbing to their right.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Freya.

‘We wait.’

‘For what?’

‘Sunrise. Something happens here at sunrise.’

She looked across at him; his face was only just visible, angular and handsome and shadowed with stubble.

‘What happens?’ she asked.

Rather than explain he turned to the microlight and rummaged inside its pod, pulling out a Maglite pocket torch and the book he had taken from Alex’s house. He’d marked a page about halfway through. Opening it, he handed it to Freya and switched on the torch.

‘Khepri,’ he said, shining the beam on the page. ‘God of the sunrise. Notice anything?’

In front of her was an image of a seated figure, viewed in profile, clutching an ankh sign in one hand and a staff in the other. While the body was human, the shoulders were topped not with a head and face, but with a large black scarab beetle, its oval body culminating in a pair of …

‘The legs,’ she said, touching a finger to the curved limbs rising to either side of the beetle’s head. ‘They look just like …’

‘Exactly,’ said Flin, lifting the torch and running its beam along the arc of stone curving above them. ‘Christ knows how, but this rock’s been weathered into almost the exact shape of a dung beetle’s foreleg. It’s incredible – look, it’s even got the barbs the beetle uses to burrow and grip.’

He played the light around the upper part of the spire. Its surface was jagged and notched, giving it a curiously serrated appearance, reminiscent of the barbed protrusions rising from the legs of the scarab in the picture.

‘Any ancient Egyptian who saw this rock would
immediately have made the connection,’ he continued. ‘We already knew Khepri and the oasis were closely linked – remember the stele text at Abydos:
When the Eye of Khepri is opened, then shall the oasis be opened? When his eye is closed the oasis shall not be seen, even by the keenest falcon.
There was always something missing though, some crucial part of the equation. You found it when you recognized the image of the rock on the stele. It would seem that when they talk of the Eye of Khepri the ancient texts aren’t just using the phrase in a figurative sense, they’re referring to something very specific: this.’

Again he ran the torch up and down the curve of black stone.

‘How it all fits together I’ve no idea – just that there’s some interplay between the rock, the sunrise and the oasis. Somehow they all connect, and that connection will reveal the whereabouts of the oasis. Or at least I hope it will. It’s a bloody long way to come to find out I’ve got it wrong.’

He played the torch around for a moment longer, then switched it off.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s make camp.’

There was a refuelling problem with the Learjet, which meant that it was dark when Angleton finally arrived back in Cairo. He briefly toyed with the idea of dropping into the Embassy for a shower and a bite to eat – his last proper meal had been the previous afternoon – but time wasn’t on his
side and instead he took a taxi straight down to Molly Kiernan’s bungalow in the city’s southern suburbs. No sign of her there and so back into the taxi and on to the USAID building where the security guard on the front desk – Mohammed Shubra according to the name tag pinned to his shirt – informed him that yes, Mrs Kiernan was still in the building, working late in her office on the third floor.

‘Gotcha,’ hissed Angleton, slipping a hand inside his jacket and crossing to the lifts, too distracted to notice the guard behind him lifting his phone, dialling and whispering into the receiver.

The third floor was dark and deserted, the only sign of life a thin strip of light emanating from beneath a door at the far end of the corridor. Kiernan’s door. Removing Missy from the shoulder holster, checking the safety catch was off, Angleton made his way towards the light, sweat beading his forehead even though the building’s air conditioning was still on. He reached the door, again checked the safety catch and raised a hand to knock, then dropped it. Instead he grasped the door’s handle and threw it open, bringing Missy up in front of him as he did so and stepping into the room. Molly Kiernan was sitting at her desk opposite. She started to rise.