The Hidden Oasis (57 page)

When they were children Freya and her sister had imagined that behind the moon there existed a secret world: a pristine, magical place full of flowers and waterfalls and the music of birdsong. Alex had alluded to it in her final letter to Freya, albeit in a different context, and it was the thing that immediately sprang to mind now as she stood gazing at what she could only describe as the paradise in front of her.

They were at one end of a long, deep gorge, hemmed in by towering cliffs down which slim water cascades streaked
like dangling threads of silver. At this, its narrower end, the gorge was little more than twenty metres across. As it drove backwards into the Gilf, however – a gargantuan axe-cleft shearing through the bare rock – it rapidly started to broaden, its floor rising at a slight gradient, its sheer walls angling away from each other like a pair of opening scissors. At its far end, Freya guessed, the valley must have measured four or even five hundred metres from side to side, although it was hard to be sure as it was a long way away. Birds swooped and dived overhead; a babbling matrix of streams and water channels cut this way and that across the canyon floor, dampening the sand and giving rise to a rich profusion of plant life: trees and bushes and multi-coloured carpets of flowers. Even the cliffs had been colonized, heavy clumps of foliage sprouting along ledges and from cracks in the stone like explosions of green hair.

‘It’s not possible,’ murmured Flin, head shaking in wonder. ‘I flew over here and there was nothing. It was just rock and desert.’

They stepped forward out of the doorway, hands instinctively reaching out and clasping as they peered into the mesh of leaves and branches ahead. It took a while for their eyes to adjust to the tangled interplay of light and shadow, then they started to notice shapes amid the vegetation – curves and angles of dressed stone, sections of wall, columns and sphinxes and giant figures with human bodies and the heads of animals. Here a pair of empty stone eyes glared at them from beneath a face-pack of moss, there a monumental clenched fist punched out from amid a grove of palm trees. To the left the remains of a paved street disappeared into the undergrowth, to the right a row of
obelisks speared up through the leaf canopy like a line of javelin tips.

‘How could they have done all this?’ whispered Freya. ‘Out here in the middle of nowhere? It must have taken them centuries.’

‘And some,’ said Flin, moving further forward into the sandy clearing in front of the tunnel entrance. ‘It’s just beyond anything I could have … I mean I’ve read the texts, seen Schmidt’s photographs, but to actually …’

He didn’t seem able to finish a sentence, his voice drifting off into dreamy, awestruck silence. Five minutes passed, the two of them just standing there staring, the sun now riding well up in the sky, which was curious because according to Flin’s watch it was still only 8.09 a.m. He looked up, shielding his eyes and shaking his head as if to say ‘Nothing about this place surprises me.’ Another couple of minutes went by, then, releasing Freya’s hand, Flin lifted his arm.

‘That must be the temple,’ he said, pointing into the far distance, towards the very upper end of the valley where what looked like a vast natural rock platform thrust above the tree-tops. On it stood a dense honeycomb of stonework, including a structure that Freya thought could well be the gateway in Rudi Schmidt’s photograph.

‘Are we going up there?’ she asked.

Although his expression suggested he would dearly have liked to, Flin shook his head.

‘We need to find the Antonov first, check what state it’s in. Then we can explore.’

Freya looked across at him.

‘Shouldn’t we have, like, a Geiger counter or something?

In case, you know, any of the uranium containers were damaged in the crash.’

Flin smiled.

‘Whatever else we have to worry about, radiation poisoning isn’t on the list. Uranium-235’s no more toxic than a granite kitchen surface. I could take a bath in the stuff and it wouldn’t harm me. Although if you happen to know a Geiger counter store around here I’m happy to get one, just to put your mind at rest. Come on.’

Giving her a playful wink, he led her across the clearing and into a deep glade of trees, acacia and tamarisk for the most part although there were also palms, figs, willows and a lone, towering sycamore. The air was warm but not uncomfortably so, heavy with the scent of thyme and jasmine, alive with birds and butterflies and the biggest, brightest dragonflies Freya had ever seen. Sunbeams poured down through the branches like sheets of gold cloth; glinting rivulets wound to and fro among the tree roots, in some places simply petering out, in others joining up to form pools of clear water fringed with banks of orange narcissi and dotted all over with the cupped pods of blue and white water-lilies.

‘It doesn’t seem real,’ she said, marvelling at the Eden-like beauty of the place. ‘It’s like something out of a fairy tale.’

Flin was turning round and round, his expression a mix of rapture and disbelief.

‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘There’s a fragment of inscription in the Louvre which refers to the oasis as
wehat resut,
the oasis of dreams. Now we’re here I can understand why.’

They continued onwards, the gorge steadily rising and widening, walls and statues and hieroglyph-covered blocks of stone looming everywhere. Some were perfectly preserved, others cracked and tilted and toppled by the slow bulldozering of tree roots and flash floods. The more they saw the clearer it became to Flin and Freya that what, from the tunnel entrance, had appeared a random confusion of masonry was not so random after all. Far from it – the stonework must once have formed an architecturally ordered environment of streets and avenues and buildings and courtyards, its basic pattern still just about discernible amid the jungle that had overwhelmed it.

‘Christ, it must have been amazing,’ said Flin, his voice quivering with excitement. ‘I always thought it was hyperbole when the texts describe Zerzura as a city, but that’s exactly what this was. Blows away everything we know about ancient Egyptian technology.’

They came into a meadow ablaze with poppies and cornflowers; ibises and white egrets strutted back and forth, cawing and pecking at the ground. The rock platform they had seen from the bottom end of the oasis was much closer now although still some distance away, rearing above the tree-tops like a gigantic stage, the monumental pylon gateway in Rudi Schmidt’s photograph clearly visible. They stopped and gazed at it, then walked on, following a stretch of weed-covered marble paving that ran across the centre of the meadow, twin rows of interspersed sphinxes and obelisks running to either side of them – some sort of processional way, thought Flin.

They had covered about half the meadow’s length when Freya stopped and grabbed Flin’s arm.

‘There,’ she said, pointing away to the right, to where a dense grove of palm trees crowded up against the side of the gorge. Just visible above their arching fronds, like a tattered white dorsal fin, was the tail of a plane, glimpses of its fuselage peeping through the trunks below.

‘Bingo,’ said Flin.

Another paved avenue, narrower if equally overgrown, ran off perpendicular to the one they were on. It seemed to lead directly to the grove and they turned onto it, passing a succession of giant granite scarab beetles before reaching the palm trees. They weaved their way through them and into a small, sun-dappled glade. The Antonov slumped in front of them: white and battered and eerily silent, draped with nets of ivy and bougainvillaea.

Although it had crash-landed and then tumbled the best part of a hundred metres into the gorge – the scars of its cartwheeling descent were still plainly visible on the rock face above – the plane was surprisingly well preserved. Its right-hand wing had sheared off completely and was nowhere to be seen, half of its left wing had gone as well and the propellers of its remaining engine were buckled and bent. A ragged hole gaped midway along the underside of the fuselage as if some large predator had taken a bite out of it. It was the right way up, though, lying flat on its belly, and while badly bruised and dented, was still pretty much in one piece, its tail fin rising defiantly through the trees, its nose pressed up against the face of a monumental sphinx.

They took in the scene, then approached the rear of the plane, stopping in front of three rectangular mounds lined up in the shadow of its tail. At the head of
each a crude, makeshift cross was hammered into the earth.

‘Schmidt must have buried them,’ said Flin. ‘Hard to feel sorry for him given that he was smuggling 50 kilos of uranium to Saddam Hussein, but even so … Christ, it must have been horrible.’

Freya stood beside him, trying to imagine what Schmidt had gone through: alone, frightened, probably injured, scooping out shallow graves, dragging corpses from the plane …

‘How long do you think he was here for?’ she asked.

‘A while, by the look of it.’ Flin nodded towards the remains of a campfire, the ground around it scattered with empty tins. ‘I’m guessing he’d have waited at least a week to be rescued, probably longer. Then, when no one came, he decided to try and walk his way back to civilization. Although how the hell he got out of here I’ve no idea – certainly not the way we came in.’

They stared at the graves a while longer, then moved along the fuselage to the front exit. Flin put his head through the open door before clambering in and helping Freya up after him. It was gloomy inside and it took a moment for Freya’s eyes to adjust. When they did she let out a retching gasp, throwing her hand up to her mouth.

‘Oh God. Oh Jesus.’

Ten seats back from where they were standing was a man. Or rather the remains of one. He was sitting bolt upright, perfectly mummified in the dry desert atmosphere, eye sockets empty, skin leathery hard and the colour of liquorice, mouth clogged with cobwebs and stretched wide open as though frantically gasping for breath. Why he had been left there and not buried with the others was not
immediately obvious. Only as they came closer did the reason become apparent: the force of the crash had shunted all the seats on the right-hand side of the cabin forwards and into each other, concertinaing them together and trapping the man’s legs just above the knees, holding him fast. It looked unbearably agonizing, the kneecaps crushed as though in the jaws of a vice, although it wasn’t this that appeared to have killed him. Rather it was the large metal case he was holding flat on his lap and which the movement of the seats had driven backwards into his stomach, mashing his internal organs, compressing his midriff into a space less than ten centimetres wide.

‘Do you think it was quick?’ asked Freya, looking away.

‘You’d hope so,’ said Flin. ‘For his sake.’

He dropped to his haunches and carefully examined the case. It was still secure and didn’t seem to have been damaged or tampered with. A quick search revealed three identical cases on the floor between the seats on the opposite side of the aisle. These too were still locked and in good condition.

‘All present and correct,’ he said. ‘And all in one piece. Come on, let’s get out. Molly’s people’ll be here in a couple of hours and they can deal with all this. We’ve done our bit.’

He touched a hand to Freya’s elbow and she turned, ready to move back to the exit. As she did her gaze again brushed across the corpse’s desiccated face. Only for the briefest of instants, but enough for her to notice movement, something shifting inside one of the eye sockets, squirming around. Initially she thought she had imagined it, then, her throat tightening in disgust, that it must be a worm or a
maggot. Only when she forced herself to look closer did she see to her horror that it was actually a hornet: fat and yellow and as thick as her finger, creeping out of the corpse’s head and onto the bridge of its nose. Another one followed, and another, and then two more, a low buzzing sound suddenly emanating from inside the dead man’s skull.

Anything else she could have handled. Wasps and hornets, however, were her primal terror, had been since she was a kid, the one thing she could neither bear nor cope with. Letting out a scream, she started to back away, hands flapping in front of her. The movement startled the insects. The ones that had emerged lifted menacingly into the air, more and more spewed out of the nest behind, buzzing angrily. One got caught up in Freya’s hair, another banged against her cheek, increasing her hysteria, which in turn inflamed the swarm further.

‘Stay still!’ ordered Flin. ‘Just stand where you are!’

She ignored him. Wheeling round, she launched herself towards the exit, arms flailing. She only got halfway before her foot snagged on a tendril of creeper and she crashed to the floor, the commotion sending the hornets into a frenzy.

‘For Christ’s sake stay still,’ hissed Flin, easing himself along the aisle and dropping on top of her, shielding her with his arms and body. ‘The more you move, the more it agitates them.’

‘I have to get out!’ she wailed, bucking and writhing underneath him. ‘You don’t understand, I can’t … aaargh!’

A searing barb of pain lanced into the back of her neck.