Napoleon's Pyramids (31 page)

They watched me in fear and fascination.

I began moving around their dim quarters looking for the medallion. Hidden to be seen? Did she mean by a window? All were shielded with
mashrabiyya
screens. The harem had one large central room and a warren of small ones, each with a rumpled bed, chest, and pegs hung with clothes, some revealing and others concealing. It was a world turned upside down, all color turned inward, all thought confined, all pleasure locked.

Where had I hidden it? In a shoe, a cannon, a chamber pot. None of those were “hidden to be seen,” it seemed to me. I bent to lift up a bed covering, but the young woman who was my guide stayed my hand. They were waiting for me to spot it, I realized, to prove that I knew what I was looking for. And then of course the obviousness of my task became clear to me. I straightened, looking around more boldly. Hidden in plain sight, she’d meant. Round a neck, on a table, on…

A jewelry rack.

If there is one thing universal in human culture, it’s the love of gold. What these women would never display on the street they would drape on their skin for Yusuf and each other: rings, coins, bracelets and bangles, earrings and anklets, tiaras and waist chains. On a dressing table was a waterfall of gold, a yellow delta, a treasure like a small echo of
L’Orient
’s. And there in the midst of it all, thrown as casually as a copper in a tavern, was the medallion, its shape obscured by the necklaces atop it. Bin Sadr and Silano never got in here, of course, and no one else had bothered to look.

I untangled it. As I did so, a heavy bangle of an earring came off the table and dropped to the floor like a gong.

I froze. Suddenly other heads came up from beds, these faces older. One started at the sight of me and leaped out, pulling street robes around her.

She spoke sharply. The young one replied impatiently. A hissing conversation broke out in rapid Arabic. I began easing toward the window. The older one gestured at me to put the medallion down, but instead I slid it over my neck and inside my shirt. Isn’t this what they’d expected? Apparently not. The older one gave a shout, and several of the women began to wail and scream. Now I heard a eunuch’s cry from outside the door, and male shouts from below. Was that the scrape of drawn steel? It was time to go.

As I made for the window the older woman tried to block me, arms flailing, sleeves wide, like a huge black bat. I shoved past, even as her fingers scrabbled creepily at my neck. She fell away, yelling. A bell began clanging, and there was a gunshot of alarm. They’d rouse the whole city! I grabbed the frame and kicked, busting out half the wooden screen. Pieces rattled down into the alley below. I rolled out the window and started slithering down the rope. Below, I saw the rear door burst open and servants, armed with clubs and staves, stream out. Other men burst into the harem behind me. Even as I descended, someone began trying to haul the rope back up.

“Jump!” Ashraf shouted. “I will catch you!”

Did he know what I weighed? And I didn’t want to simply let go because I figured we might use the line I’d bought just that afternoon. I grabbed the tomahawk from my belt and chopped at the rope above my head. It snapped and I fell the last thirty feet, landing with a whump in something soft and stinking. It was in an alley cart that Ash had wheeled to catch my fall. I heaved myself over the side, clutching the remains of the rope, and braced to fight.

There was a bang, the sound of Ashraf ’s musket, and one of the servants charging from the rear door pitched backward. My rifle was shoved into my hands and I shot a second man, then whooped like an Indian and cracked the head of a third with the tomahawk. The others fell back in confusion. Ashraf and I dashed the other way, vaulting a low wall and sprinting down twisting lanes.

Yusuf ’s men came in a mob after us, but were shooting blind. I paused to reload my own rifle. Ash had his sword out. Now we had only to escape the city…

“There they are!”

It was a French military patrol. We cursed, wheeled, and fled back the way we had come. I heard the French commands to aim and fire, so I grabbed Ash to pitch both of us down to the dirt of the street. There was a roar, and several bullets sizzled overhead. Then cries and screams ahead. They’d hit Yusuf ’s men.

We crawled into a side street, using the smoke as cover. Now we could hear shouts of alarm and wild shots in all directions.

“What was that excrescence I fell into?” I panted to Ash.

“Donkey dung. You have fallen into what the Franks call
merde,
my friend.”

Another bullet wanged off a stone post. “I can’t disagree.”

At length we rose to a crouch and rounded a corner. Then we trotted until we entered a wider avenue leading more or less to the southern gate. We seemed to have lost immediate pursuit.

“We’ve also lost my provisions. Damn that old woman!”

“Moses found manna in the desert.”

“And King George will find crumpets at his tea table, but I’m not him, am I?”

“You’re becoming surly.”

“It’s about time.”

We were almost to Cairo’s wall when a squadron of French cavalry turned onto our street. They were on routine patrol, not yet spotting us, but they blocked our path.

“Let’s hide in that alcove,” Ashraf suggested.

“No. Don’t we need horses? Tie our rope to that pillar, as high as the shoulder of a mounted officer.” I took the other end and did the same on the opposite side of the street. “When I shoot, get ready to steal a horse.”

I strode to the middle of the street, facing the approaching cavalry, and casually waved my rifle to let them see me in the dark.

“Who goes there?” an officer called. “Identify yourself!”

I fired, plucking off his cap.

They charged.

I darted toward a pool of shadow, slung my rifle, jumped to catch a pole, and swung myself up to an awning and sill. The cavalry patrol hit the rope at a dead run. The lead troopers were plucked from their saddles like puppets, colliding with the rank just behind. Horses reared, men toppled. I leaped, knocking a rider loose from his plunging mount. Ashraf had wrestled his way onto another horse. Pistols went off in the dark but the bullets whined harmlessly. We lashed our way out of the tangle.

“The French are going to begin wondering whose side you’re on,” Ash gasped as we began our gallop, looking back at the shouting troopers.

“So am I.”

We rode for the wall and the gate. “Open wide! Couriers for Bonaparte!” I cried in French. They saw the cavalry horses and tack before they spied us, lying low in our Arab robes. By then it was too late. We burst through the sentries toward the desert beyond, shots buzzing overhead as we galloped into the night.

I was out, the medallion mine, free to rescue Astiza, find the Book of Thoth, and become master of the world—or at least its savior!

And I was now prey for every Bedouin, Mameluke, and French cavalryman in Egypt.

T
he Egyptian desert west of the Nile is a trackless ocean of sand and rock, interrupted by only a few oasis islands. The desert east of the Nile and south of Cairo—a sterile plateau separated from the Red Sea by moonlike mountains—is emptier yet, a roasting pan seemingly unchanged from the birth of the world. The blue sky bleaches to a dull haze on the shimmering horizon, and dryness threatens to mummify an intruder each pitiless afternoon. There is no water, no shade, no birdcall, no plant, no insect, and seemingly no end. For millennia, monks and magi retreated here to find God. When I fled I felt I’d left him far behind, in the waters of the Nile and the great green forests of home.

Ashraf and I rode in that direction because no sane man would. We passed first through Cairo’s City of the Dead, the Muslim beehive tombs as white as ghosts in the night. Then we trotted quickly through a ribbon of green farmland that followed the Nile, dogs barking as we passed. Long before sunrise we were dots on an arid plain. The sun rose, blinding as we angled east, and arced so slowly that it became a pitiless clock. The saddles of our captured mounts had canteens that we made last until noon, and then thirst became the central fact of existence. It was so hot that it hurt to breathe, and my eyes squinted against desert whiteness bright as snow. Powdery dust caked lips, ears, clothes, and horses, and the sky was a weight we carried on our shoulders and the crowns of our heads. The chain of the medallion burned into my neck. A mirage of a lake, the cruel illusion all too familiar by now, wavered just out of reach.

So this is Hades, I thought. So this is what happens to men without proper direction, who drink, fornicate, and gamble for their daily bread. I longed to find a scrap of shade to crawl into and sleep forever.

“We must go faster,” Ashraf said. “The French are pursuing.”

I looked back. A long plume of white dust had been caught by the wind and spun into a lazy funnel. Somewhere under it was a platoon of hussars, following our hoof prints.

“How can we? Our horses have no water.”

“Then we must find them some.” He gestured ahead at undulating humps of hills that looked like cracked loaves.

“In a bed of coals?”

“Even in a bed of coals a diamond can hide. We’ll lose the French in the canyons and wadis. Then we’ll find a place to drink.”

Kicking our tired horses and tightening our cloaks against the dust, we pressed on. We entered the uplands, following a maze of sandy wadis like a snarl of string. The only vegetation was dry camel thorn. Ashraf was looking for something, however, and soon found it: a shelf of bare, sun-blasted rock to our left that led to a choice of three canyons. “Here we can break our tracks.” We turned off, hooves clacking, and picked our way across the stone table. We took the middle limestone canyon because it looked narrowest and least hospitable: perhaps the French would think we went another way. It was so hot that it was like riding into an oven. Soon we could hear the frustrated shouts of our pursuers in the dry desert air, arguing about which way we’d gone.

I lost all sense of direction and docilely followed the Mameluke. Higher and higher the crests reached, and I could begin to see the jagged lines of real mountains, the rock black and red against the sky. Here was the range that separated the valley of the Nile from the Red Sea. Nowhere was there a spot of green or glisten of water. The silence was unnerving, broken only by our own clop and creak of leather. Was this desert—the fact that ancient Egyptians could walk from the fertile Nile to absolute nothingness—the reason they seemed so preoccupied with death? Was the contrast between their fields and the ever-encroaching sand the origin of the idea of an expulsion from Eden? Was the waste a reminder of the brevity of life and a spur to dreams of immortality? Certainly the dry heat would mummify corpses naturally, long before the Egyptians did it as religious practice. I imagined someone finding my husk centuries from now, my frozen expression one of vast regret.

Finally the shadows seemed to be growing longer, the sounds of pursuit fainter. The French must be as thirsty as we were. I was dizzy, my body sore, my tongue thick.

We stopped at what looked like a rock trap. High cliffs rose all around us, the only exit being the narrow canyon we’d just ridden through. The towering walls were finally so high, and the sun so advanced, that they cast welcome shadow.

“Now what?”

Ashraf stiffly got down. “Now you must help me dig.” He knelt on the sand at the base of a cliff, at a cleft where a waterfall might have pooled if such an absurdity could exist here. But perhaps it did: the rock above was stained dark as if water occasionally flowed down. He began burrowing into the sand with his hands.

“Dig?” Had the sun driven him mad?

“Come, if you don’t want to die! It rains a torrent once a year, or perhaps once a decade. Like that diamond in coals, some water remains.”

I joined in. At first the exercise seemed pointless, the hot grit burning my hands. Yet gradually the sand grew gratefully cool and then, astonishingly, damp. Smelling water, I began throwing sand away like a terrier. At last we reached true moisture. Water oozed, so thick with sediment it was like coagulating blood.

“I can’t drink mud!” I reached to dig again.

Ashraf grabbed my arm and rocked us back on our heels. “The desert asks patience. This water may have come from a century ago. We can wait moments more.”

As I watched impatiently, sweet liquid began to pool in the depression we’d dug. The horses snorted and whinnied.

“Not yet, my companions, not yet,” Ash soothed.

It was the shallowest bowl I’d ever seen, and as welcome as a river. After an eternity we bent to kiss our puddle, like Muslims bowing to Mecca. As I lapped and swallowed the dirty leakage it gave me a shiver and a glow. What bags of water we are, so helpless if not constantly replenished! We slurped until we’d drained it back to mud, sat back, regarded each other, and laughed. Our drinking had made a circle of clean wetness around our lips, while the rest of our face was painted with dust. We looked like clowns. There was an impatient wait for our meager well to refill and then we cupped some for the horses, guarding that they didn’t drink too much too soon. As dusk settled this became our job, carrying water in a saddlebag to the thirsty mounts, sipping ourselves, and slowly mopping the rest of the grit from our heads and hands. I began to feel faintly human again. The first stars popped out, and I realized I hadn’t heard any sounds of French pursuit for some time. Then the full panoply of the heavens blossomed, and the rocks glowed silver.

“Welcome to the desert,” Ashraf said.

“I’m hungry.”

He grinned. “That means you’re alive.”

It grew cold but even if we’d had wood, we dared not light a fire. Instead we huddled and talked, giving each other small comfort by sharing our grief about Talma and Enoch, and small hope as we talked about vague futures: with Astiza for me, and with Egypt as a whole for Ash.

“The Mamelukes are exploitive, it is true,” he admitted. “We could learn things from your French savants, just as they learn from us. But Egypt must be ruled by the people who live here, Ethan, not pink-skinned Franks.”

“Can’t there be a collaboration of both?”

“I don’t think so. Would Paris want an Arab on its town council, even if the imam had the wisdom of Thoth? No. This is not human nature. Suppose a god came down from the sky with answers to all questions. Would we listen, or nail him to a cross?”

“We all know the answer to that one. So each man to his place, Ash?”

“And wisdom to its place. I think this is what Enoch was trying to do, to keep Egypt’s wisdom locked away where it belongs, as the ancients decided.”

“Even if they could levitate rocks or make people live forever?”

“Things lose value if they’re done too easily. If any nation or man could make a pyramid with magic, then it becomes no more remarkable than a hill. And live forever? Anyone with eyes can see that this goes against all nature. Imagine a world full of the old, a world with few children, a world in which there was no hope of advancement because every office was filled with patriarchs who had gotten there centuries ahead of you. This would not be a paradise, it would be a hell of caution and conservatism, of stale ideas and shopworn sayings, of old grudges and remembered slights. Do we fear death? Of course. But it is death that makes room for birth, and the cycle of life is as natural as the rise and fall of the Nile. Death is our last and greatest duty.”

W
e waited a day to make sure the French weren’t waiting for us. Then, assuming a lack of water had driven them back to Cairo, we started south, traveling at night to avoid the worst of the heat. We paralleled the Nile but stayed many miles to the east to avoid detection, even though it was a struggle to negotiate the serpentine hills. Our plan was to catch up with Desaix’s main column of troops, where Silano and Astiza rode. I would pursue the count as the French pursued the Mameluke insurgents up the river. Eventually I would rescue Astiza, and Ashraf would have revenge on whoever had killed poor Enoch. We would find the staff of Min, unscramble the way into the Great Pyramid, and find the long-lost Book of Thoth, protecting it from the occult Egyptian Rite. And then…would we secrete it, destroy it, or keep it for ourselves? I would cross that bridge when I came to it, as old Ben would say.

Along our way, we found nests of life in the desert after all. A Coptic monastery of brown domed buildings sprouted like mushrooms in a forest of rock, a garden of palms promising the presence of a well. The Mameluke habit of carrying their wealth into battle now displayed a practical purpose: Ashraf had retrieved the purse he’d thrown at me and had enough coins to purchase food. We drank our fill, bought larger water bags, and found more wells as we continued south, spaced like inns on an invisible highway. The dried fruit and unleavened bread was simple but sustaining, and my companion showed how to coat my cracked lips with mutton fat to keep them from blistering. I was beginning to become more comfortable in the desert. The sand became a bed, and my loose robes—washed of donkey stink—caught every cooling breeze. Where before I had seen desolation, now I began to see beauty: there were a thousand subtle colors in the sinuous rocks, a play of light and shadow against crumbled white limestone, and a magnificent emptiness that seemed to fill the soul. The simplicity and serenity reminded me of the pyramids.

Occasionally we would zigzag closer to the Nile, and Ashraf would descend to a village at night to barter as a Mameluke for food and water. I’d stay up in the barren hills, overlooking the serene green belt of farmland and blue river. Sometimes the wind would bring the sound of camel or donkey bray, the laughter of children, or the call to prayer. I would sit on the edge, an alien peeking in. Toward dawn he would rejoin me, we’d make a few miles, and then as the sun rose over the cliffs we’d shovel away sand at places he knew and creep into old caves cut into the bluffs.

“These are tombs of the ancients,” Ash would explain, as we risked a small fire to cook whatever he had bartered for, using purchased charcoal and washing our meal down with tea. “These caves were hollowed out thousands of years ago.” They were half-filled with drifting sand, but still magnificent. Columns carved like bundles of papyrus held up the stone roof. Bright murals decorated the walls. Unlike the barren granite of the Great Pyramid, here was a representation of life in a place of death, painted in a hundred colors. Boys wrestled. Girls danced and played. Nets drew in swarms of fish. Old kings were enveloped in trees of life, each leaf representing a year. Animals roamed in imagined forests. Boats floated on painted rivers where hippos reared and crocodiles swam. Birds filled the air. There were no skulls or morbid ravens as in Europe or America, but instead paintings that evoked a lush, wild, happier Egypt than the one I was traversing now.

“It looks like a paradise in those days,” I said. “Green, uncrowded, rich, and predictable. You don’t sense a fear of invasion, or a dread of tyrants. It’s as Astiza said, better then than at any time afterward.”

“In the best times the whole land was united upriver as far as the third or fourth cataract,” Ashraf agreed. “Egyptian ships sailed from the Mediterranean to Aswan, and caravans brought riches from Nubia and lands like Punt and Sheba. Mountains yielded gold and gems. Black monarchs brought ivory and spices. Kings hunted lion in the desert fringe. And each year the Nile would rise to water and renew the valley with silt, just as it is doing now. It will peak about the time you said your calendar indicated, on October 21. Each year the priests watched the stars and zodiac to keep track of the optimal times for sowing and reaping and measured the level of the Nile.” He pointed to some of the pictures. “Here the people, even the noblest, bring offerings to the temple to ensure the cycle continues. There were beautiful temples up and down the Nile.”

“And the priests took those offerings.”

“Yes.”

“For a flooding that occurred every year anyway.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“That’s the profession for me. Predict that the seasons will turn, the sun will come up, and rake in the common people’s gratitude.”

“Except it was not predictable. Some years there was no flood, and famine followed. You probably didn’t want to be a priest then.”

“I’m betting they had some good excuse for the drought and asked people to double the tribute.” I have an eye for easy work and could just imagine their tidy system. I looked around. “And what’s this writing?” I asked of graffiti atop some pictures. “I don’t recognize the language. Is it Greek?”

“Coptic,” Ashraf said. “Legend has it that early Christians hid in these caves from the persecution of the Romans. We are the latest in a long chain of fugitives.”

Another wall took my eye. It seemed to be a tally of something, a series of hash marks in the old language none of us could read. Some seemed plain enough: one mark to designate 1, three for 3, and so on. There was something familiar about those marks and I mused about it as we lay on sand that had sifted through the entrance, half filling the cave. Then it came to me. I took out the medallion.