The Hidden Oasis (6 page)

‘Allez,’ she murmured, rubbing chalk onto her hands from the pouch at her waist. ‘Allez’, and then, as if prompted by the similarity in sound, ‘Alex’ again, her voice all but lost in the roar of Nevada Falls below.

Later, back down at her motorbike, the climb done, she bumped into a couple of guys she knew, fellow wall rats, one of them pretty good looking although at this moment that was the last thing on her mind. They chatted for a while, Freya describing her ascent – ‘You soloed Liberty Gap? Jesus, that’s impressive!’ – before she cut the conversation short, explaining that she had a flight to catch.

‘Anywhere nice?’ asked the good-looking one.

She rolled the bike off its stand and swung her leg over the saddle.

‘Egypt,’ she replied, starting the engine, revving it.

‘To climb?’

She clicked the bike into gear.

‘For my sister’s funeral.’

And with that she roared off, her blond hair whipping behind her like a flame.

Flin Brodie adjusted his reading glasses and glanced up at the audience: fourteen elderly American tourists scattered amongst the fifty or so chairs in front of him, none of them looking especially interested. He ventured a quip about how he was glad they’d all managed to find a seat, which brought a guffaw of laughter from his tourist-guide friend Margot, but was otherwise greeted with blank stares.

Oh Christ,
he thought, fiddling nervously with the pocket of his corduroy jacket.
It’s going to be one of those.

He tried again, explaining that years of working as an archaeologist in the western desert had got him well used to large empty spaces. Again, the joke fell horribly flat, even Margot’s supportive laughter starting to sound strained. He gave up and, hitting a button on
his
laptop to bring up the opening Powerpoint slide – a shot of the receding dune ridges of the Great Sand Sea – was about to start the lecture when the door at the side of the room clicked open. An overweight man – extremely overweight – in a cream-coloured jacket and bow-tie, leaned in.

‘May I?’ His voice was curiously high-pitched, almost feminine, the accent American, Deep South. Flin glanced at Margot, who shrugged as if to say ‘why not?’ and waved the man forward. The newcomer closed the door and sat down in the seat nearest to it, removing a handkerchief and dabbing at his forehead. Flin allowed him to settle, then, clearing his throat, began talking,
his
accent English, the diction clipped and clear.

‘Ten thousand years ago the Sahara was a considerably more hospitable place than it is today,’ he told them.
‘Radar imaging of the Selima Sand Sheet by the Space Shuttle
Columbia
has revealed extensive fluvial topography – basically the outlines of long-lost lakes and river systems. This was a landscape much like the savannah of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa.’

Next slide: the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

‘There were lakes, rivers, forests, grasslands – home to an abundance of wildlife: gazelles, giraffes, zebras, elephants, hippos. And to humans as well – itinerant hunter-gatherers for the most part, although there is also evidence for more permanent Middle and Upper Palaeolithic settlements.’

‘Speak up!’

This from a woman right at the back of the room, a hearing aid clamped to her ear like a plastic barnacle.

Why in God’s name do you sit at the back if you can’t bloody hear properly?
Flin thought.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said aloud, lifting his voice. ‘Is that better?’

The woman waved a walking stick to indicate that it was.

‘More permanent Palaeolithic settlements,’ he repeated, trying to pick up the thread of what he was saying. ‘The Gilf Kebir Plateau in the south-western corner of Egypt – an upland region covering an area roughly the size of Switzerland – is particularly rich in remains from this period, both material …’

Slides of, respectively, rearing orange cliffs, a grinding stone and a collection of flint tools.

‘… but also votive and artistic. Some of you may know the film
The English Patient,
which featured the prehistoric rock paintings in the so-called Cave of the Swimmers, discovered in 1933 by Hungarian explorer Ladislaus Almasy in the Wadi Sura, on the western side of the Gilf.’

A picture of the cave came up: stylized red figures with bulbous heads and stick-like limbs appearing to swim and dive across the uneven limestone walls.

‘Anyone seen the film?’

General murmurs of ‘No’, which persuaded him not to bother with the brief critique of the movie he usually slipped in at this point. Instead he pushed straight on with the talk.

‘Towards the end of the last ice age,’ he said, ‘around the Middle Holocene, about 7000
BC,
this savannah-like landscape underwent a dramatic change. As the northern ice sheets retreated so aridification set in, the verdant plains and river systems giving way to the sort of landscape we see today. The desert peoples were forced to migrate eastwards into the Nile Valley …’

Scenic slide of the Nile.

‘… where they developed the various pre-dynastic cultures – Tasian, Badarian, Naqada – that would eventually coalesce to form a single unified state. The Egypt of the pharaohs.’

One of the listeners, Flin noticed, a jug-eared man in a New York Mets baseball cap, was already starting to nod. And he hadn’t even finished the introduction. Christ, he needed a drink.

‘I have travelled and excavated in the Sahara for well over a decade,’ he continued, running a hand through his unkempt black hair. ‘Primarily at sites in and around the Gilf Kebir. In this lecture I wish to put forward three propositions based on my work. Three rather controversial propositions.’

He emphasized ‘controversial’, scanning the audience for
any sign of interest. Nothing. Not a flicker. He might as well have been talking about vegetable-growing. Would probably have done better if he had been.
Christ,
he needed a drink.

‘Firstly,’ he went on, struggling to sound enthusiastic, ‘I believe that even after they had migrated eastwards into the Nile Valley, the ancient Sahara dwellers never entirely forgot their original desert home. The Gilf in particular, with its dramatic cliffs and deep wadis, continued to exert a strong religious and superstitious influence on the early Egyptian imagination, its memory kept alive, albeit in allegorical form, in a number of myths and literary traditions, notably those relating to the desert gods Ash and Set.’

Slide of the god Set – human body surmounted by the head of some indeterminate animal with a long snout and pointed ears.

‘Secondly I intend to demonstrate that not only did the ancient Egyptians preserve memories of their former home in the Gilf Kebir, but also, despite the formidable distances involved, actual physical contact with it, sporadically returning across the desert to worship at sites of special religious and sentimental significance.

‘One wadi in particular, the so-called
wehat seshtat,
the Hidden Oasis, seems to have been held in particular reverence. Although the evidence is scanty, this latter site appears to have continued as an important cult centre right the way up to the end of the Old Kingdom, almost a thousand years after the emergence of Egypt as a unified state.’

The listener who had been nodding, Flin noticed,
had now fallen asleep. He raised his voice another couple of notches in a vain effort to jolt him out of his slumber.

‘Finally,’ he went on at something just short of a shout, ‘I will argue that it it this mysterious and to date undiscovered wadi that served as the inspiration and model for a whole series of subsequent legends of lost Saharan oases, notably that of Zerzura, the Atlantis of the Sands, for which the aforementioned Ladislaus Almasy spent much of his career vainly searching.’

Last slide of the introduction – a blurred black-and-white shot of Almasy in shorts and military cap, the desert stretching away behind him.

‘So, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I invite you to join me on a journey of discovery – out across the desert, back through time, and in search of the long-lost temple-city of the Gilf Kebir.’

He fell silent, waiting for a reaction, any reaction.

‘There’s no need to shout,’ came a voice from the back of the room. ‘We’re not deaf, you know!’

Bollocks,
thought Flin.

He ploughed on to the end of the lecture, jumping and cutting wherever he could so that the normal running time of ninety minutes was reduced to less than fifty. Compared to most of his fellow Egyptologists he was considered an exciting speaker, capable of bringing a dry and complex subject to life, holding people’s attention, enthusing them. In this instance, no amount of editing and simplification seemed to have any effect. Halfway through, one couple stood and left the room; by the end those who remained were openly fidgeting and glancing at watches. The man with the jug ears
slept peacefully right the way through, head cradled on his wife’s shoulder. Only the overweight latecomer in the bow-tie seemed genuinely interested. Occasionally dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief, he focused unswervingly on the Englishman, eyes bright with concentration.

‘In conclusion,’ Flin said, bringing up the final slide of the talk, another shot of the towering orange flank of the Gilf Kebir, ‘no sign of the
wehat seshtat,
non Zerzura, nor any of the other legendary lost oases of the Sahara has ever been found.’

He turned slightly, looking up at the slide, smiling wistfully as if in acknowledgement of a long-time sparring partner. For a moment he seemed to disappear into his own thoughts before shaking his head and turning back to the audience.

‘Many people have argued that the whole idea of a lost oasis is precisely that. An idea, a dream, a figment of the imagination, no more tangible than a desert mirage.

‘I hope the evidence I have presented tonight will persuade you that the basis for all these stories, the
wehat seshtat,
certainly
did
exist, and was regarded by the early Egyptians as a cult centre of paramount significance.

‘Whether its location will ever be revealed is another matter. Almasy, Bagnold, Clayton, Newbold – all scoured the Gilf Kebir and returned empty-handed. In more recent times satellite imaging and aerial survey have likewise drawn a complete blank.’

Again he threw a glance up at the projected slide, again smiled that wistful smile.

‘And maybe it is better that way,’ he said looking forward again. ‘So much of our planet has now been studied and
mapped and explored and laid bare, stripped of its magic, that it somehow makes the world a more interesting place to know that one small corner of it at least is still beyond our reach. For the moment the
wehat seshtat
remains exactly that – a hidden oasis. Thank you.’

He sat down to scattered, arthritic applause. The overweight man was the only one to show any real appreciation, clapping loudly before rising to his feet and, with a grateful wave, slipping out of the door. Flin’s friend Margot stood and came to the front of the room.

‘What an absolutely fascinating talk,’ she said, addressing the audience in a loud, schoolmistressy sort of voice. ‘I for one wish we could get straight into our coach and drive out to the Gilf Kebir for a good look around.’

Silence.

‘Now Professor Brodie has kindly agreed to answer any questions you might care to put. As I said before, he is one of the world’s leading authorities on the archaeology of the Sahara, author of the seminal
Deshret: Ancient Egypt and the Western Desert
and a legend in his field – or perhaps that should be a legend in his Sand Sea! – so do make use of this opportunity.’

More silence, then the man with the jug ears, now awake, piped up:

‘Professor Brodie, do you think Tutankhamun was murdered?’

Afterwards, once the tourists had trooped off to dinner, Flin packed up his notes and laptop while Margot hovered around him.

‘I don’t think they were especially inspired,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ insisted Margot. ‘They were absolutely … riveted.’

He’d only done the lecture as a favour to her, old university friends and all that, filling in at the last minute for some other event that had fallen through. He could tell she was embarrassed by her party’s reaction, was trying to make up for it and, reaching out, he squeezed her arm.

‘Don’t worry yourself, Margs. Believe me, I’ve had an awful lot worse.’

‘At least you only had to put up with them for an hour,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve got them for the next ten days. Was Tutankhamun murdered! Christ, if the ground could have swallowed me …’

He laughed. Zipping his laptop into its carry case, the two of them walked across the room, Margot threading an arm through his. As they reached the door there was a sudden, discordant cacophony of clarinets and drums from the foyer outside. They stopped and watched as a wedding party processed past in front of them – bride and groom followed by a crowd of clapping relatives, a video-camerman walking backwards at the head of the group, shouting instructions.

‘My God, look at her dress,’ murmured Margot. ‘She looks like an exploding snowman.’

Flin didn’t respond; his eyes were drawn not to the newlyweds but to the back of the group. A young girl, aged no more than ten or eleven, was jumping up and down trying to see what was happening ahead. She was excited, pretty, her long black hair whirling around her. Just like …

‘You OK, Flin?’

He had swayed against the doorframe, grasping at
Margot’s arm for support, sweat glistening across his neck and forehead.

‘Flin?’

‘Fine,’ he mumbled, straightening and releasing her arm, embarrassed. ‘Fine.’

‘You’re white as a sheet.’

‘I’m fine, honestly. Just tired. Should have eaten before I came out.’

He smiled, not entirely convincingly.

‘Let me buy you dinner,’ said Margot. ‘Get your blood sugar up. It’s the least I can do after tonight.’

‘Thanks, Margs, but if you don’t mind I’m going to head home. Got a lot of papers to mark.’