Sphinx (27 page)

‘That I can do.’

He pulled his lighter out of his trouser pocket and lit the corner of his piece of paper, watching the page curl and turn to ash.

‘Goodbye, oh sister mine,’ he whispered.

That night, too drunk and jet-lagged to make my way home, I slept in Gareth’s bed. He’d gone to stay at Zoë’s place. I collapsed onto the sheets beneath an old quilt that I recognised from my childhood. With my head buried in a pillow that smelled of patchouli oil and stale sweat, I fell asleep instantly.

Isabella appeared to be sitting on the pebbled lane that I recognised from my childhood, the road that ran outside my father’s house. Her black hair spilt over her olive skin and she was clothed in the embroidered dress that she’d married me in. Looking up at me, she smiled, then threw two small grey stones onto the concrete as if she were playing jacks. As they hit the concrete, the stones began to spin; balanced on their ends, they turned faster and faster, like two magnets spinning around each other.

I awoke not knowing where I was, the angled walls of the darkened bedroom completely alien to me. I stared up at the ceiling covered with glowing fluorescent stars and planets. As I watched they dissolved into a greenish fiery loop, travelling faster and faster until they lifted away from the ceiling and swooped towards me in the shape of a body in flight.

I woke again, this time for real, drenched in sweat, dehydrated, the beginnings of a hangover pounding my temples.

 

When I got back to my building it was early morning and as I made my way wearily up the steps I passed Raj in his bus conductor’s uniform. He stopped me.

‘Oliver, a parcel was delivered early this morning. When you were not there they rang my bell instead, so I brought it up. I hope it brings good news.’ Before I could thank him he’d hurried off to work.

A box marked ‘Private Air Delivery’ was sitting outside my front door. I instantly recognised the insignia of Bill Anderson’s company, Runaway Wells, and my own scrawled handwriting. As if propelled by my nightmare the astrarium had arrived.

Set on the Formica kitchen table, the mechanism looked as if it were from another world entirely. I sat down at the table, part of me hoping the cogs might have assembled themselves into working order during the journey to reveal their secret. But the device continued to sit there motionless.

The outer bronze dial etched with symbols for the five major planets glinted dully under the light. The middle dial, made of a silver-like metal, was etched with Greek zodiac symbols - the twins, the archer, Taurus the bull - along with the crocodile and the ibis. The smallest dial, made of a gold alloy, was etched with Egyptian hieroglyphs and seemed to contain the centre of the mystery.

I peered through the small opening at the base of the main shaft around which the cogs turned. Hidden in the middle of the mechanism were two magnets facing each other - small grey discs that looked like stones; a little like the pebbles in my nightmare. They appeared to be waiting - to be set spinning?

If I found the key to activate the mechanism, would that put Isabella’s spirit to rest? Was it possible, in some abstract, esoteric way, that she herself had ended up living out one of her worst fears, hovering in a halfway world - a trapped soul? If I found the Was, would the astrarium give up its destiny? Isabella had a plan for it, one with me in mind. What could it be?

Through the thin wall, the abrupt ringing of my neighbour’s alarm clock made me jump. I was being ridiculous, I told myself; the nightmare meant nothing. Still, the vividness of it haunted me. I needed to work out what the astrarium could do and then find a safe place for it, for Isabella’s sake, for mine and, if Hermes was to be believed, for the safety of the fledging and fragile structure that was the new Egypt. Suddenly, the enormity of the task overwhelmed me.

I reached for the telephone and called the operator to get the number of the British Museum.

 

The sarcophagus stood in an alcove in the large hall. Hieroglyphs encircled it, describing the life of Nectanebo II - his military conquests, his wives, his palaces and wealth. They also narrated the journey he would take in the afterlife, even though the sarcophagus had never actually fulfilled its function.

I was acutely aware of the astrarium in the rucksack as I walked slowly around the granite coffin studying the hieroglyphs. I stopped at a small doorway etched into the side - the gateway for the Pharaoh’s Ba. What had happened to Nectanebo II? Had he died in some obscure corner of Africa? Or had he ended up as an official in some foreign court, living under a secret identity?

Suddenly the desire to reach out and run my fingers across the hieroglyphs was overpowering, as if by touching the gateway I would be able to tell where the Pharaoh’s restless Ba still hovered - Greece? Iran? Egypt? If I lifted out the astrarium now and held it up against the tomb, would there be some kind of synchronicity between the two?

I scanned the display hall - the security guard had turned his back. Quickly, I reached out and stroked the carved surface, the narrative whispering out from under my fingertips.

‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’

Snatching my hand back, I swung around. A stocky man in his late forties with bright red hair, a large band of eczema covering his forehead, stood before me. Despite his naked pate, he sported sideburns that ran thickly down each cheek. He was dressed in maroon corduroy trousers and an orange shirt, the vivid colours giving the impression that he was compensating for his unprepossessing physical appearance.

‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said. ‘People touch it all the time, they can’t help themselves. It’s compulsive - subconsciously we’re all searching for a gateway into the afterworld.’

He gave a bark of a laugh riddled with irony, then held out his hand. I shook it tentatively.

‘Hugh Wollington. You must be Oliver Warnock.’

‘I am. Thanks for making the time to meet me.’

‘My pleasure. Besides, it’s flattering to be sought out. I don’t get that many enquiries - my area of Egyptology is rather specialised.’ He looked at me appraisingly and I suddenly had the fleeting impression that his surprise at my phone call hadn’t been entirely genuine. I quelled my feeling of unease - I needed to get a step further, and Wollington was my one chance.

I turned back to the tomb. ‘So tell me, is it true no one knows where Nectanebo II is buried?’

‘He fled Egypt, abandoning his post, so to speak—’

‘After retreating to Memphis . . .’

‘You do know your stuff.’ Wollington began pointing out the various inscriptions. ‘Here the scribes have written how the Pharaoh was known as the Great Magician. Nectanebo II was famous for building a record number of temples and thereby reminding the populace of his own divinity - basically using mysticism and religion as tools for political propaganda. Irrational to our way of thinking, especially in the context of modern politics—’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Apparently the King of Saudi Arabia frequently consults astrologers about political decisions.’

‘He does indeed. Do you know the king?’

‘Not personally, but I worked on some of his oilfields.’

‘I know the whole family. I worked for one of his distant relatives - Prince Majeed. An interesting chappie, a little heavy-handed with his subjects, but then that is the way to get things done out there.’ Wollington smiled, clearly warming to his subject. I was happy to let him talk - the less I had to say the better. ‘I was Majeed’s personal curator for a number of years. He had amassed an extraordinary collection of antiquities, many of them of great religious and mystical significance. Ah, yes, I loved the Middle East. I was posted out there in the 1950s when I was still in the army - it’s a landscape that burns away all affectation, don’t you think? But you’d know all about that in your industry.’

‘I don’t know - plenty of affectation in oil.’

We both laughed again, and despite myself I warmed to his enthusiasm, our shared love for a country so difficult, so intense and fraught as Egypt. His passion seemed to be anchored in a pragmatism that was appealing after Hermes Hemiedes’s fantastical interpretation of Egyptian theology; and the fact that he was ex-army was reassuring - it grounded him somehow.

‘The challenge is to put yourself into the cultural mentality of the Ancient Egyptians,’ Wollington went on, ‘virtually impossible for a Judaeo-Christian Anglo-Saxon living in a modern democracy. But if you can imagine a total belief in the power of sorcery, and a regular dialogue with a whole swarm of deities whom one had to appease and second-guess in order to survive, then you begin to get the picture.’ He pointed to a particular hieroglyph. ‘This tells us that at one point Nectanebo decreed that he was the living embodiment of Horus - an astute political decision, as this was a way of using the myth of Horus’s defeat of Seth as an allegory for his own power over the Persians. As a marketing strategy it worked brilliantly until—’

‘Until they invaded for the second time.’

‘Exactly. Nothing like a second invasion to destroy one’s reputation for invincibility.’ We both laughed again.

‘I’ve been fascinated by Nectanebo II since I was a student, ’ Wollington said. ‘It’s the combination of military strategist, wizard, spiritual visionary and the puzzle of his disappearance. I was an impressionable youth, always looking for heroes, probably because I was so patently unheroic myself - anything to get out of Hendon, you see. Suburbia is a great motivator. I suppose that’s why I joined the army, but you can blame Luxor, the ancient city of the Pharaohs, for making me into an Egyptologist - seems like centuries ago now.’

His evident intelligence endeared him to me even further. I wondered if I could trust him.

As if he read my hesitation, he lowered his voice. ‘I heard about your wife, Mr Warnock. Archaeology is a small community. My deepest condolences - Isabella’s death is a great loss. I met her at a conference once. She was a lovely woman, passionate about her subject. So many of us are fossilised old sticks - I mean, reassembling shards of ancient pottery can make one rather introspective . . .’

Smiling, I glanced at the sarcophagus. The desire to take out the astrarium and place it next to the hieroglyphs was almost unbearable. I turned back to Hugh Wollington, teetering on the edge of confession. I needed his expertise desperately, and he seemed to have respected Isabella. In that second, I made a leap of faith.

‘If I told you I have with me an artefact that might be Pharaonic, would you examine it for me?’ My words spilled out recklessly.

He drew back, startled. ‘You do realise possession of such an object could be illegal?’ He looked at me searchingly. Momentarily, I wavered; worried that I’d just made a disastrous mistake.

‘I realise I’m taking a huge risk trusting you,’ I said. Then I lowered my voice. ‘My wife found the artefact just before she drowned.’

Hugh Wollington glanced at the rucksack. ‘Please, come this way.’

He led me into a vast hall and towards the colossal granite head of Amenhotep III. The beatific expression of the young Pharaoh was somewhat ruined by the fact that he was missing most of his chin and the royal false beard that was an indication of his deity-like status. Had the false beard been hacked off by early Christians in an attack on the old pagan icons? Or had the rough handling of irreverent English sailors destroyed it during transportation on some nineteenth-century sailing ship? Either way the young Pharaoh now suffered the indignity of gazing into infinity while missing half his face. Taking me by the elbow, Hugh Wollington guided me around the statue.

There was a discreet door set into the wall behind it.

As we stepped through, the lofty ambience of the museum gave way to the civil service’s atmosphere of musty neglect. Here was the private face of the institution, a labyrinth in which historians made fetishes of their particular domain - Greek, Roman, Celtic - absorbed in their individual worlds, like fishermen throwing out their nets and painstakingly hauling in each forgotten clue. Several small offices led off the passage and some cell-like rooms were visible through glass windows, their occupants bent over lamplit desks, busily categorising and assembling new exhibits, restoring the old, casting moulds from the broken - an ants’ colony of activity.

We arrived at a door painted hospital green and embellished with a small brass plaque bearing the legend H. W. Wollington.

‘The W stands for Winston, in case you’re wondering. My mother was a huge Churchill fan,’ Wollington remarked cheerfully as he pulled out from a waistcoat pocket a key attached to a chain. ‘Welcome to the inner sanctum - beyond the yellow brick road.’ He ushered me in.

The strong odour of preserving fluids assaulted my nose immediately. I recognised the smell from the laboratories that Isabella had taken me to: acids to eat away layers of calcification, along with desalination chemicals. I moved towards the desk by the window and glanced outside. Then, carefully reaching into the backpack, I drew out the elaborately wrapped package. Slowly I unpacked the astrarium, then placed it on the desk where it sat glinting under the lamplight. Wollington inhaled sharply - almost in wonder - then sighed.