The Tower (24 page)

Colonel Jobert knew he had to return and decided to leave immediately. He gave a last glance at the battlefield but did not notice that one of the thousands of dunes stretching out to the horizon had a shape that was too perfect. By the time he had disappeared over the northern horizon, the wind had bared the hemispherical mound and the sun sculpted its smooth basalt surface.

It took him nearly four days to reach Kalaat Hallaki. When he saw the oasis sparkling like a jewel with its glittering canals and springs, the fruit-laden palm trees waving their leaves towards the sky, the children frolicking in the pools, he could not hold back his tears.

‘What will you do now?’ asked the old man when he saw him, tattered and bleeding, his face burnt and his lips cracked. ‘How can you go back alone? How will you explain the loss of all your men?’

‘I have fulfilled my mission, at this terrible price,’ replied Jobert. ‘Now I know what is hidden in that stretch of the desert . . . and to think that I refused to believe . . .’

‘To believe in what?’

‘In a legend. The legend of the Blemmyae. But, my God, how is such a thing possible?’

‘You know nothing,’ said the old man, ‘and your mission has failed. You have lost all your men but you have nothing to report.’

‘Nothing?’ Jobert said, turning towards him with wild eyes. ‘I saw faceless monsters who lurk in the sand like scorpions, capable of striking out with deadly strength even after they’d been hit by two, three bullets . . . and you say that I didn’t complete my mission?’

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘You don’t truly know what those beings are, and how they can live on such barren land, without water, plants or animals. You don’t know who they are, or what they think, or if they have feelings. If they feel pain or despair.’

‘They’re monsters. They’re nothing but monsters.’

‘We’re all monsters. We who live at Kalaat Hallaki can afford to have noble sentiments because we have everything we need. The blazing sun is tempered by the shade of the trees and the cool waters, we harvest our fields three times a year, we have a choice of fresh, abundant foods, the sky is clear, our women and children are beautiful . . . You stayed a mere week in that hell and there is more hate and savagery in your eyes than you have ever felt in your whole life. The Blemmyae have been confined to that furnace since the beginning of time . . .’

‘I’m familiar with this sort of philosophical digression, my friend. I chose to leave the empty quarrels and gossiping of the city to live in the austere immensity of the desert. I’m a man worthy of your respect.’

‘You are,’ agreed the old man. ‘That’s why I’m telling you that you are still far from the truth. Have you ever heard of the Tower of Solitude?’

Jobert shook his head.

‘That’s where you’ll find the answer, if you ever get there. The tower is beyond the Sand of Ghosts, at the very end of the sea of sand, but if you want my advice, forget everything, even Kalaat Hallaki. This war is too tough for even the most inveterate soldier.’

Jobert did not reply, overcome by emotions too diverse and too strong.

‘Sleep now,’ said the old man. ‘Rest. Tomorrow I’ll give you abundant food and water so that you can cross the wall of dust and the arid lands that separate you from your territory. Forget what you have seen. Tell your commanders that your men died of hunger and thirst. Fight your battles against men who look like you do and have the same weapons. Forget Kalaat Hallaki and the Sand of Ghosts for ever.’

D
ESMOND
G
ARRETT WAS SLEEPING
soundly under a starry sky in the middle of the wide valley. The dying embers of his campfire cast a faint glow on his face and on the sparse bushes around the clearing. His horse was grazing nearby, abruptly raising his head and cocking his ears now and then when there was a rustling in the undergrowth or the hoot of some nocturnal bird.

He suddenly snorted and kicked at a rock, letting out a low whinny of alarm.

Desmond threw back his blanket and jerked into a sitting position, looking all around. Silence and tranquillity reigned. Even the birds were sleeping in the niches they’d found between the rocks or inside the tombs dotting the mountainside. His attention was attracted to one tomb in particular, a monumental mausoleum with an impressive decorated pediment resting on a row of Corinthian columns in ochre-streaked brown stone. With every passing moment, a reddish glimmer became more apparent in the inner chamber, as if someone had lit a fire there.

Perhaps a shepherd had entered the valley to find shelter for the night, thought Desmond, but the hour was late and he could not understand why he would have waited so long to start a fire. The light was becoming stronger now, setting the inside of the tomb aglow, flames flickering outward as if licking at the columns. The tomb opening looked like the mouth of a furnace. Or the gate to hell.

Desmond had already got to his feet and drawn closer, to try to understand what was causing that strange phenomenon, when he saw a black figure wrapped in a cloak standing out against the red glare. The cloak fell to the ground and a sabre flashed in the hand of the mysterious man.

Desmond bent to unsheathe his own scimitar and continued to advance slowly towards the tomb entrance. The other man turned his head to face him and Desmond recognized him: it was Selznick!

‘It’s you, you dog!’ he shouted, and lunged forward with a downward slash of his weapon.

The other side-stepped the blade and responded with a sudden thrust; Desmond just barely managed to avoid a direct blow to his chest by twisting to the side. The sabre grazed his flesh under the armpit and blood began to pour down his side. He could feel its heat on his skin and smell its cloying odour in his nostrils. The wound intensified his energy because he had no idea how badly he was hurt and did not know how much longer he had to live. He had to strike back and kill his detested enemy.

Desmond launched an all-out attack, lashing out again and again until his adversary began to draw back. But as Desmond was seeking a way to stab him in the exact spot where his blade had already penetrated once, he felt his strength leaving him. He focused all of his hate into a single thrust and drove the blade into his enemy’s side. Selznick’s face twisted into a mask of pain as Desmond struck out again and again.

The clanging of the blades as they collided with such violence echoed between the walls of the valley and roared inside the tomb itself. But every swing, every jab, was slower, more sluggish. The two bodies clutching at each other in the ultimate struggle seemed to be floating in the air now, weightless, even as their movements became more and more arduous.

Selznick’s voice seemed louder than ever, nonetheless, as he shouted, ‘We’ll see each other in hell, Desmond! We’ll finish this fight in hell!’

Desmond felt Selznick slipping away from him; his foe was losing a great deal of blood from the reopened wound and was retreating towards the mausoleum’s back wall. Desmond couldn’t follow, couldn’t finish him off with the one last blow that was needed. His limbs were stiff, wooden, no longer responding to his will. Not even the hate he felt was sufficient to instil strength into them. With a last, impossible spurt of energy he forced himself to get up and make his way down the long corridor at the end of the funeral chamber.

He found himself inside a vault carved into the solid rock. Drops of water seeped from the many cracks in the walls. It felt refreshing at first, but then he understood with horror that the drops were blood, not water. The entire mountain was bleeding on him.

The insistent neighing of his horse woke him and Desmond scrambled up from his bed, somewhere between waking and sleeping, and brought his hands to his face. It was wet, from the rain! Clouds had gathered over the valley, driven by a strong western wind, and the sheer walls of the immense basin were lit up now by flashes of lightning. He ducked into one of the tombs to seek cover from the storm. The same one he had seen in his dream.

It was dark and silent, now.

Desmond lit his lantern, took a look around and was gripped by a strong, precise sensation. The Fateh’s words came back to him: ‘The beast in you will sniff him out.’

He said, out loud, ‘This is where he is, then. This is where he slept in his sixth tomb.’

He took the lantern and went in, past the great stone façade. At the back, in what had once been the funeral chamber, there were signs that the room had been reused as a chapel in the Christian era. The same circumstance as he’d found in Aleppo. Perhaps these ancient believers had sensed the traces of an enemy presence and felt they had to neutralize it?

On the back wall, amid a number of pagan motifs, he saw a painted crucifix. The wound on Christ’s side was in relief, looking like living flesh.

‘The beast in you will sniff him out,’ he repeated to himself. His hand mechanically reached for his belt and he took out a long dagger. What he was about to do revolted him and his forehead beaded up with sweat in that airless atmosphere. He drew close to the painting. Although his posture had been stiffened by death, this Christ had the serene expression of one who has found peace after a long martyrdom. Desmond could hear the sound of thunder in the distance. It was raining upon Petra, a winter rain, a useless rain that would not help anything to grow.

His features hardened at the moment in which he drove the blade into the wound in Christ’s side, and he felt something snap inside of him. He knew that he had cast off another of the moorings that had once kept him anchored to the rest of humanity.

A sharp click shook him from that painful tension. He thought with relief that his intuition had been correct, but nothing happened. He tapped the wall to check for hollows, using the round pommel at the end of his dagger, but his raps sounded as dry as if he were hitting solid rock. Perhaps he’d been fooled; he’d let a dream get the better of him and now he had no idea of the direction in which to go.

Desmond turned back towards the monumental gate of the tomb and leaned against its gigantic columns to contemplate the rain falling on the valley. He listened to it pelting against the rocks and the ruins of the vanished city.

In that atmosphere outside of time and place, he imagined that he could see his wife rising up at the centre of the valley under the silvery rain. He imagined her walking towards him without even touching the ground, a light gown clinging to her body as if she were a deity sculpted by Phidias.

For years now, ever since he had chosen to leave civilization, he had grown accustomed to seeing her in his dreams, to calling up her ghost and seeing her appear like a desert flower after a rainstorm, but his absorbed contemplation was abruptly broken by a noise like that of two boulders grinding one upon the other. It was coming from behind him.

Desmond turned around and saw, to his great amazement, a crack snaking through the plaster on which the crucifix was painted. It split open above the cross and at its sides, and then the entire portion of the wall began to tilt inwards like a drawbridge, revealing a dark opening that descended into the centre of the mountain.

He held out his lantern to light up the tunnel that branched off from the wall. He looked down and saw that beneath his feet a deep trench had opened. The painted plaster slab stretched over the void like a bridge. To cross it he would have to tread on the crucifix. ‘This certainly won’t stop me,’ he thought, reasoning that the mechanism must have been devised in ancient times for those who lived their religion as superstition. Yet he couldn’t help but recall how he had become imprisoned in the crypt under the mosque in Aleppo and so, before he proceeded, he stuck two large wedges of stone between the base of the painted slab and the sides of the opening so that no one could close it behind him. He tied a rope around his waist and got out his pickaxe. Then he went forward, holding his lantern high to illuminate the passage in front of him.

Desmond considered trying to balance his weight on either side of the slab, but he saw that he would only risk falling into the abyss yawning at his feet. He had no choice but to walk over the body and the face of the sacred image. The tunnel continued with a slightly downward slope, and he began to make his way along the passage at a slow pace, taking care to light up every centimetre of the ceiling, walls and floor. At a certain point he saw several asymmetrical niches off to his left containing images of Romanized Nabataean divinities carved into the limestone.

The smell of burning petroleum that came from his lantern stagnated in the heavy, still air, creating a suffocating atmosphere. Rounding a bend in the tunnel, he found himself in front of a massive structure unlike anything he had ever seen in his life.

In the middle of a vast chamber was a cubical structure, completely carved in stone, as tall as the ceiling. A round opening in its front wall was closed by a millstone. There were no other chambers or niches, nor were there any other passages leading out of the main room. The walls were bare and rough, cut from solid rock. He examined the system of closure attentively; the millstone had simply been rolled along and inserted into the wall opening. The words of the Gospel came to his mind: ‘They rolled a stone in front of the entrance and left.’ This is how he imagined the tomb of Jesus.

He approached and saw that the track that had been used to slide the stone forward was nearly flat and that the stone itself was not very large. He slowly nudged it sideways using the lever on his crowbar, and once the entrance was free he placed a quantity of debris from the floor into the track to block the stone in place, making sure that there was no way its weight could make it slip forwards.

He entered and found himself inside a chamber measuring four metres by four, at the centre of which there was a Nabataean sarcophagus of painted wood in the Egyptian style. The paintings depicted peasants working in the fields, sowing or pushing ploughs. Others held sickles and were harvesting wheat or tying it into bundles. There were pastoral scenes on the other side: flocks at pasture, sheep being shorn, women weaving cloth and carpets on their looms.