The Hidden Oasis (61 page)

‘The gods Ra and Sekhmet,’ explained Flin as they drew near, pointing left and then right, ‘each embodying a different aspect of the Benben’s powers: Ra, a blinding light, Sekhmet, a deafening sound.’

‘You don’t say,’ muttered Freya, no more ready to believe any of it than she had been ten minutes previously.

They walked on through this second gateway, across another court – this one crowded with dozens upon dozens
of obelisks, some plain, others inscribed, some no taller than a man, others ten times as high – and through a third pylon. As they emerged, Kiernan and Girgis came to an abrupt halt. Even they were now gaping in astonishment.

In front of the group a third courtyard opened out. It was twice as big as the previous two, which had themselves been enormous, its enclosing walls lined with gigantic statues of gods and men. At its opposite end the façade of a colossal temple reared skywards, every inch of its monumental stonework – walls and columns and architraves and cornices – painted in brilliant shades of red and blue and green and yellow, the colours rich and vibrant even in the glaring sunlight, every bit as fresh as when they had first been applied thousands of years previously.

It was not the temple itself that took their collective breath away, however. It was the gargantuan obelisk that erupted, rocket-like, from the centre of the space in front of it. Well over thirty metres tall and covered from base to tip in beaten gold, it gleamed in the rays of the sun, filling the court with a dazzling blaze of light as though the air itself was on fire.

‘Holy God Almighty,’ growled Girgis.

For a moment they all stood there staring at it, spellbound. Even the normally expressionless twins were wide-eyed with wonder. Then, with a click of her fingers to drag them back to the business in hand, Kiernan led them on. Passing the base of the obelisk – now they were up close they could see that each of its four faces was inscribed with minute columns of alternating
sedjet
signs and Benu birds – they approached the temple entrance.

Three muscular figures in sunglasses, combat trousers and flak jackets stood guard amid the columns lining the front of the building.

‘Who’s the boy band?’ asked Flin. ‘Special Forces? Or have you gone private for this particular jaunt?’

Kiernan didn’t respond, just threw him a withering look and continued on into the temple. A man in a white lab coat and what looked like a surgeon’s scrub cap came forward to meet them, speaking in hushed tones to Kiernan before ushering them forward. They passed through a succession of halls, each, it felt to Freya, as big as the entire interior of the temple at Abydos. Some were filled with towering, papyrus-shaped pillars, others were empty, their walls decorated with spectacular polychrome reliefs. One was overgrown with a tangle of monstrous tree roots, another lined with rows of alabaster tables on which were displayed thousands upon thousands of miniature clay obelisks, just like the ones Freya had seen in Rudi Schmidt’s knapsack and the display cabinet in the Cairo museum.

‘Christ, it makes Karnak look like a suburban bungalow,’ muttered Flin, gazing around.

Further and further they walked, moving ever deeper into the building – the only sounds the pad of their feet and the wheezing of Girgis’s cigarette-smoking colleague – until eventually they emerged into a courtyard at what must have been the very heart of the temple complex. It was a secluded space, smaller than the courts at the front of the temple, with a lotus-filled pond at its centre and a giant eucalyptus tree pushing up through the paving against its left-hand wall. Opposite, on the far side of the pond, stood
a squat stone building. Plain and unadorned, it was constructed of crudely cut and unevenly laid blocks and seemed wholly out of place amid the imposing architecture that surrounded it. Although she couldn’t be sure, Freya sensed that it was far older and more primitive than the rest of the temple complex and had probably already stood on the site for an immeasurable age before the earliest foundations of the adjoining structures had even been dug.

‘
Per Benben
,’ Flin informed her. ‘The House of the Benben.’

Despite his obvious interest, Freya couldn’t help but notice a hint of anxiety in his voice.

They circled the pond and came up to the building’s single low doorway, which was covered by a reed curtain. A tangled spaghetti of cables snaked out and across to a row of portable generators grumbling in the corner of the yard. The man in the lab coat drew the curtain aside, revealing a short passage with a second drape blocking the other end. Again he spoke to Kiernan in hushed tones before waving them in.

‘Whatever happens in there, stay beside me and do what I do,’ Flin whispered to Freya as the twins shoved them from behind. ‘And don’t touch anything.’

He clasped her hand and, ducking, they pushed their way through the two curtains. A sharp icy light enveloped them as the hum of the generators gave way to the blip and squeak of electronic equipment.

Freya had seen many unusual sights in her life – a fair proportion of them over the last few days – but nothing to match the scene that now greeted her.

They were in a large, square room, very basic, with a compacted dirt floor and bare stone-block walls and ceiling, the polar opposite of the ornately decorated halls through which they had just passed, more reminiscent of a cave than something man-made. Four halogen lamps bathed the space in a cold, piercing light; a dozen men and women dressed identically in white lab coats and surgical-style scrub caps pored over an array of monitors and computer screens, the latter bleeping and pulsing, displaying graphs and number sequences and rotating 3-D graphics of strange geometrical shapes.

All of this Freya absorbed in a matter of seconds before her attention zeroed in on the most unlikely element of the whole scenario, and the one that was obviously the focus of everything else that was going on: what looked like a quarantine chamber sitting right in the centre of the space. A heavy, tank-like cube of amber-tinted glass, it had a bulbous ventilation tube feeding into one side of it while on the other a two-door airlock provided access. Enclosed within was a large wooden sled on which rested an indeterminately shaped object wrapped in thick strips of linen. Two men in full-body radiation suits were probing at it with instruments resembling cattle prods – these presumably feeding information back to the monitors outside the chamber – while a third man, also in a radiation suit, was kneeling on the floor with his back to them, examining the sled.

The whole thing was so surreal, so wholly wrong and spooky and out of place, more akin to a film set than real life, that Freya’s immediate, disjointed thought was that she must be dreaming it all. Had indeed been dreaming right
from the very start and was in fact still asleep back in her apartment in San Francisco, snug and safe and secure and with a sister who was very much alive. For a euphoric instant the thought took hold. Then she felt Flin’s hand tightening around hers. It
was
happening, she realized, she
was
in a temple in a lost oasis, and while
she
might have been struggling to buy into the whole Benben script, everyone else in the room was taking it extremely seriously.

‘Bullshit,’ she repeated underneath her breath. ‘Hocus-pocus bullshit.’

For the first time there was doubt in her voice, as though rather than making a confident assertion of fact, she was now trying to reassure herself.

‘So what exactly have we got here, Dr Meadows?’

The question came from Molly Kiernan.

The man who had led them through the temple and appeared to be in overall charge – of the scientific operations at least – raised his head from the monitor over which he had bent. Coming across, he motioned them all forward so that they were standing close to the chamber’s thick glass wall.

‘Preliminary scans are showing a solid core,’ he intoned, his voice nasal and monotonous, ‘with elevated levels of iridium, osmium and ruthenium, which would tie in with it being of meteoric origin. That’s about all we can establish at this stage. For anything more we’re going to need full physical contact.’

‘Then I suggest we make full physical contact,’ said Kiernan. ‘Mr Usman, as the Egyptologist here – the
other
Egyptologist –’

She threw a sideways look at Flin.

‘… maybe you’d like to do the honours.’

The figure kneeling beside the sled raised a hand in acknowledgement and stood up, moving around the cloth-swathed object so that he was standing directly opposite them. Now that she could see his face through the radiation hood, Freya recognized him as Girgis’s companion from the night back in Manshiet Nasser: plump cheeks, pudding-bowl haircut, thick plastic spectacles.

‘Molly, I’m begging you,’ Flin pleaded. ‘You have no idea what you’re playing with here.’

‘Oh and you do?’ said Kiernan with a dismissive snort. ‘Suddenly you’re the great physicist?’

‘I know what the ancient Egyptians thought of the Benben. And I know they hid it out here for a very good reason.’

‘Just as we’ve found it for a very good reason. Now if you don’t mind, Professor Brodie …’

There was scorn in her voice as she said the name.

‘… we’ve got the future of the world sitting in front of us and I for one would like to take a look at it. Dr Meadows?’

The man in the lab coat gestured to one of his colleagues. The four halogen lamps suddenly dimmed and then went out, leaving just the ghostly glow of the monitors and the beam of a single, small pin-spot angled at the mysterious, cloth-swathed object on the sled. One of the scientists picked up a video camera and started filming.

‘If you please, Mr Usman,’ said Kiernan, folding her arms.

Usman nodded. Stepping right up to the sled, he reached out, allowing his hands to hover over the object for a moment before his fingers started to tweak at the cloth
wrappings. They were tightly bound, and his protective gloves made it difficult for him to get a grip on the material. There was something vaguely comical about the way he fumbled and clawed at it, puffing and muttering to himself, struggling to get it loose. Several minutes passed and both Kiernan and Girgis were starting to look distinctly impatient before he finally managed to prise one end of the cloth free, after which it started to unravel more easily, the material unwinding in a succession of long linen strips like the bandaging around a mummy. He started to work faster, using both hands, circling them round and round, pulling the fabric away, loose folds of material spilling down onto the sled and floor like shedding skin, the man with the camera moving around the chamber, capturing the scene from different angles. Wads of protective linen packing started to emerge, bound in among the wrappings, bulking the object out so that what had initially appeared quite sizeable gradually diminished as more and more of its covering was removed. Smaller and smaller it became, less and less impressive, shrinking before their eyes as layer after layer of its binding was removed until the last of the linen strips fell away and the object within was revealed: an ugly lump of greyish-black stone, squat and dumpy and less than a metre in height, its top blunt and rounded, more like a traffic bollard than a traditional obelisk. After all the buildup it was, to Freya’s thinking, a distinct anticlimax. Judging by their nonplussed expressions, it was an opinion shared by both Girgis and Kiernan.

‘Looks like a dog turd,’ muttered one of Girgis’s companions.

There was a pause as they all stared, Kiernan frowning,
her head shaking slightly as if to say ‘Is that it?’ Then the halogen lamps burst full on again and there was a flurry of activity. More men in radiation suits joined those who were already inside the glass chamber, crowding around the stone, attaching electrodes to it, wires, a barnacle-like excrescence of adhesive pads. The blipping and bleeping sounds suddenly grew faster and louder, the monitors and computer screens more animated as a rush of new information was fed back to them. A printer started chattering madly, spewing out a rush of digit-covered paper; voices babbled, calling back and forth, conversing in a jargon that Freya couldn’t begin to decipher or understand. From inside the chamber microphones relayed a high-pitched whizzing sound as what looked like a miniature dentist’s drill was applied to the base of the stone, scoring its surface, releasing a gritty residue that was collected in sterile sample bags and passed out through the airlock for further analysis.

‘God help us,’ groaned Flin, looking on in horror, his hand clasped so tightly around Freya’s it was starting to hurt her. ‘They don’t know what they’re bloody doing.’

If he was expecting something to happen – as he clearly was, everything about him bearing the look of a man who has been made to stand beside a ticking time bomb – it singularly failed to do so. The white-coats continued their scraping and chipping and listening and monitoring, Usman all the while gently caressing the top of the stone as though to comfort and reassure it, his voice intermittently audible as he chanted softly:
Iner-wer iner-en Ra iner-n sedjet iner sweser-en kheru-en sekhmet. Iner-wer iner-en Ra iner-n sedjet iner sweser-en kheru-en sekhmet.

Through all of which the stone just sat there, as in any other circumstances one would unquestioningly expect a stone to do. Mute, motionless, it neither exploded nor screamed nor emitted any toxic rays or whatever it was that Flin feared it would do. A drab, uninspiring spit of murky grey-black rock – no more, no less. After twenty minutes Girgis’s thickset companion excused himself and went outside for a cigarette. Ten minutes later Girgis’s other colleague and the twins went out to join him, then Girgis himself, with Flin and Freya. And finally Molly Kiernan. She paced up and down beside the pond, talking to herself, her brow furrowed, her hands occasionally clasping and her eyes flicking up to the sky as though she was praying. Twice Flin and Freya tried to edge out of the courtyard, twice – inevitably – they were spotted, the twins trotting over and waving them back.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Kiernan, her voice harsh, devoid of its earlier jocularity. ‘You hear me? Don’t even fucking think about it.’