Sphinx (6 page)

‘The Mediterranean makes brothers of us all,’ he’d once said to me. ‘She is like a language - you either speak her or you don’t.’

 

‘Are you going to venture in, my friend?’ Faakhir asked me.

I wasn’t too keen on diving, feeling slightly claustrophobic underwater. Also, I wanted to keep an eye on Omar. ‘Maybe later. I’m happy to watch for the time being.’

‘Oliver, wait until you see the shipwreck for yourself,’ he said dreamily. ‘The royal boat is a skeleton but you can still see its shape. To imagine, Cleopatra herself would have sailed in it!’

Isabella appeared, an oxygen tank slung over her shoulder. ‘Ready, Faakhir?’

Faakhir smiled. ‘I have studied the map so many times I could swim to the site blind.’

‘With the amount of sand that’s shifted in the last few nights you probably will be. You know the drill. Let’s cover the area evenly, side by side, until something registers on the metal detectors.’

Isabella’s voice had the clipped authoritative tone she adopted when she was nervous, and I felt another stab of apprehension.

‘How long will you be?’ I asked.

‘We’ve narrowed down the location to a few feet with the help of side-scan sonar. We have a window of opportunity of about three hours.’

‘A mystery thousands of years old! We are going to make history - I know it.’

Faakhir’s excitement was infectious and I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Just stay safe,’ I told them both.

‘Don’t worry.’ Isabella was impatient as she handed an oxygen tank to Faakhir.

Two metal detectors - clumsy Soviet-designed devices the navy used for detecting underwater bombs - lay on the wooden deck. Isabella and Faakhir placed the attached headphones over their ears and tested for sound. Both of them sat concentrating, eyes shut as they strained to hear the dull bleeping, already lost in concentration on the task at hand. There was a strange intimacy to the act and, for a moment, I found myself irrationally jealous.

The plan was that they would swim along the seabed at a distance of about half a metre from the bottom. As soon as they heard anything, they would signal me and I’d lower a steel tube, which they’d then sink around the bronze artefact. The tube would be lifted off the seabed with the artefact preserved in the mud packed around it. Later, they would clean and desalinate the artefact, first in a bath of salt water and then in fresh water.

Opening her eyes, Isabella checked her watch, then stood decisively. Faakhir followed and solemnly they pulled on their diving masks. Isabella sat on the side of the boat before she threw herself backwards into the sea. A moment later, Faakhir - flippers kicking like black fins - disappeared into the blue. Jamal and I carefully lowered the metal detectors after them. Within minutes the only evidence we could see of their presence underwater was the movement of the rope leading down to them and the dull torchlight that rapidly vanished in the rippling depths.

Omar was sitting on an upturned lobster cage, his head tilted towards the sun as if he were sunbathing. I was convinced his indifference was disingenuous.

He leaned towards me. ‘Mr Warnock, we are very pleased with your wife’s work. We think she has much talent. But maybe a little crazy too,
non
?’

Hiding my distrust, I smiled and nodded.

I took my own seat on the deck and stared back at Alexandria, its skyline of hotels and apartment buildings broken by the occasional distinctive minaret of a mosque. It was hard to believe that Isabella might finally locate her holy grail.

I sat back remembering the first time Isabella had told me about the astrarium, sitting there at that bar in Goa. The establishment was a small bamboo-and-brick structure run by a German hippie and her Hindu husband. Incense burnt in the corner and the Rolling Stones played incessantly through a small tinny speaker. Appropriately named ‘Marlene Chakrabuty’s Sanctuary from Hell’, they were famous for their Bloody Marys - my favourite cocktail. The air was constantly filled with the treacly aroma of hashish and an autographed cover of the Abbey Road album hung proudly above the bar.

I had just finished a job with Shell and was consumed by the ennui I always experienced after a successful exploration. Then I lived solely for the elation of the chase, the feeling of using all my senses, the intellectual rigour of the geological calculations involved as well as the emotional groping - the blind intuitive flash that always came to me standing out there in the field, sniffing the air, feeling the vibration of the rock beneath my bare feet; the roustabouts joking nervously amongst themselves as they watched me take off my shoes and socks to stand there in silence, eyes shut, reading the land under my naked soles.

In those days I was always running to the next job as quickly as I could. It was the exhilarating rush of finding the next potential new oil reservoir and not the money that kept me running. From what, I never really knew, not back then - I just knew there was some part of myself I had been denying for as long as I could remember. I was thirty-three, a dangerous age for a man, a craggy lump of graceless Anglo-Saxon masculinity drooped over his bar stool.

I’d grown up in Cumbria, between the Lake District and the Irish Sea. Out there your body forms an island, a wind-battered automaton of pounding legs and flaying arms. Hot breath warming icy cheeks in the folds of a scarf as you tear jagged through the antediluvian landscape. This self-sufficiency, the dogged struggle against the elements, starts to define you and before you know it, you have become a curmudgeon - bristling, impenetrable and ready to deal with a hostile world. Not the most attractive proposition and I knew it. But none of these characteristics had deterred Isabella.

She’d introduced herself by dropping a necklace of amber beads into my Bloody Mary. I looked up and was startled by the vivid energy that seemed to dance around her face - the ferocious intelligence that sharpened her features. I pulled out the amber beads, sucked the vodka off them and, after holding them up to the light, guessed that the amber came from Yantarny, Russia. To my surprise she seemed to find the fact that I was a geophysicist intriguing and, determined to engage me in conversation, she’d sat down next to me and demanded that I buy her a drink. I remember noticing how she seemed a little wild and reckless, almost as if she were determined to shake off some recent trauma. But back then India was full of lost souls.

Three whiskies later Isabella was telling me about her visit to Ahmos Khafre. My seduction plans were momentarily derailed. I had a strong aversion to mysticism and disliked the dispossessed Westerners I often came across floating aimlessly, with their long hair and loose mock-native clothes, through the same geography as myself. However, I found myself suspending disbelief when Isabella went on to tell me about the topic of her doctorate.

‘It’s a kind of portable astrarium - a mechanised model of the universe that doesn’t just tell mean time and sidereal time but also incorporates a calendar for movable feasts, and has dials illustrating the movements of the sun, moon and the five planets known to the ancients. Leonardo da Vinci saw one that was built during the Renaissance - he described it as “a work of divine speculation, a work unattainable by human genius . . . axles within axles.” Another was found in 1901 - the Antikythera Mechanism. My hypothesis is that an earlier prototype existed.’

‘And your mystic?’

‘Ahmos Khafre - you should meet him. He’s a really serious archaeologist as well as a world-famous astrologer.’

‘Before you go on, I’d better warn you I’m a complete sceptic.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Isabella hiccupped and I guessed she might be drunker than she realised. ‘A sceptic does not use sorcery to tell me the exact place my amber came from.’

‘That wasn’t sorcery, that was just training, extremely good detective work and a tiny bit of guesswork. Plus . . .’ I held the beads up again. ‘I recognise the fossilised insect in this piece as the rare Slavic wasp.’ It was a ruse I often applied to cover guesswork - the trickster covering his tracks with a pseudo-fact.

She stared at me, her huge black eyes widening.

‘I think, Oliver, that you are a man who is not entirely integrated with both his intellect and intuition. But that’s okay: we will be good for each other - I can make you whole and you can protect me.’

Isabella’s quaint use of English and her Italian accent had me hooked, but her uncanny observation made me uncomfortable. I decided that if I was to bed her it would be sensible to steer her away from any further analysis of my personality.

‘So let me guess: your mystic told you about a wonderful but deeply cynical Englishman with an interesting Northern accent . . .’

‘Not if you intend to ridicule me.’

‘I promise to keep an open mind.’

‘Really?’ Her lack of guile was utterly disarming.

‘Cross my Newtonian heart and hope to die.’

Isabella smiled. Then, after finishing her drink, she moved closer.

‘Years ago, Ahmos Khafre was given a letter rumoured to have been written by Sonnini de Manoncour, a naturalist who had travelled with Napoleon’s troops. He wrote that he had come across information that a ship carrying Cleopatra, retreating from the Battle of Actium and sunk in the Alexandrian Bay, had been carrying a famous astrarium. One day I’ll find that astrarium, I know I will. I have to.’ She hesitated as if she were about to tell me something else, something of greater importance. Then in the next instant she looked pensive. I remember, even to this day, that intensity. Her narrow triangular face collapsing into vulnerability and, to my great surprise, I instantly wanted to rescue her, a sensation that only fuelled my desire.

‘Can I be with you tonight?’

I could barely hear her over the noise of the revellers behind us and, sitting there wanting her in all my low self-esteem, I thought I had misheard. It was only after our lovemaking later the same night that Isabella told me about how Ahmos Khafre had also insisted upon giving her a birth chart that predicted the date of her death. Furious at the irresponsibility of such an action I’d sat up in bed and had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her that it was all superstitious nonsense. I’d failed. We were married three months later.

I stared down at the murky water, incredulous at how we’d come from there to here and that Isabella had actually carried out her quest.

My reverie was broken by Jamal’s shout - the rope was twitching. Was it possible she’d actually found it? Against my reservations, I felt some of the same elation that Faakhir had shown earlier. If this was it, this was truly a momentous event in history. I tugged the rope, the signal to Isabella that I was ready, and she replied with four twitches. I fastened the steel clip attached to the thick tube to the cable and lowered it into the water; in seconds it had disappeared, sliding down to the divers below.

Jamal reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a battered packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, which he offered to both Omar and me. I’d given up smoking a year before because I’d noticed it was affecting my sense of smell - an essential asset for my oil hunting - but that morning I lit up.

‘Now we wait,’ Jamal announced ponderously, then began to hum ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by the Bee Gees under his breath while Omar stared fixedly out at the horizon. I exchanged glances with Jamal. It was as if our thoughts drifted up with the cigarette smoke - independent patterns curling around each other, then merging in a secret shared anxiety: what if we get caught?

A speedboat roared past, seemingly coming out of nowhere. Startled, my stomach tightened as I steeled myself for a raid by the coastguard. But Omar leapt to his feet and waved. A man on board waved back and the boat continued on its course.

Omar smiled, reading my expression. ‘Don’t worry, he is a friend. Besides, we have nothing to hide.’

I had the distinct impression that he was enjoying my discomfort.

Just then a flock of pigeons flew overhead. Both men looked up at the sight of the wheeling birds.

Jamal cursed under his breath and glanced nervously at the shoreline. ‘That is not good,’ he muttered.

‘A bad omen,’ Omar confirmed grimly, his gaze following the swooping mass.

‘It’s just pigeons,’ I said, wondering why they were so agitated.

‘Look again, my friend,’ Jamal said, and pointed. ‘These are land birds flying away from the land.’

‘Perhaps they’re flying towards an island.’

‘What island? There is no island - just Cyprus, too far for pigeons. No, something is not right. Maybe the storm is returning, or perhaps something more dangerous.’

I was relieved when Isabella and Faakhir surfaced in a great rush of silver bubbles. Pushing her mask up to her forehead, Isabella’s ecstatic face appeared.

‘We found it, Oliver! Isn’t that amazing? We have it! The tube’s sunk and fitted - all we have to do now is lift it out! I’ve found the astrarium!’