The Deceit (29 page)

They woke to enormous noise. The sun was high: it was almost noon. Something was happening outside, some ceremony: there was singing and chanting. Urgently Ryan threw on his clothes; Helen did the same.

He stared at her. ‘What are you doing?’

Her smile was brave. ‘I have been lying here for a decade, soon I will be a fossil. The wound is healed. The fever is gone. I feel fine. Come on.’

Slow and quiet, Ryan opened the door: he was engulfed at once by the urgent hubbub. There were laughing children and dark-haired Coptic women and priests who smelled of fortified wine, clapping and singing as they thronged the courtyard, and stepped into the church.

Albert saw him, and stole up, beaming. ‘How is Helen?’

‘Good. She wants to move on.’

‘Ah yes. Yes, I think we must.’ Albert nodded, eagerly. ‘And this gives us excellent cover. The crowds! It is a special service, Saf El-Rouh: “send away the soul”. A great Coptic businessman died, he came home from America very ill, he wanted to be buried here. This is the third day after his death. Look.’

The crowds were shuffling into the baroquely ramshackle old church, following a priest, assisted by a young deacon. The white-robed priest was reciting, ‘
Iftah laha yaruh Bab al-Rohena
.’

Albert whispered, amidst the noise: ‘It means, “Open the door for the soul, O God.”’

Ryan couldn’t resist a look. Inside the white-domed church many candles had been lit. Their light glittered off primitive icons, and flickered before the relics of St Theodore the Martyr. Handwritten signs in English hung on the white painted mud-brick wall:
HOW DREADFUL IS THIS PLACE, THIS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOUSE OF GOD AND THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN.

Some of the brickwork was obviously rescued from Egyptian palaces or temples, and retained the ancient decoration: Ryan could still see, low on one wall, the shape of an extended wing, the wing of Isis, next to a Coptic cross. In the middle of it all, the people were praying, and singing, and eating. Plates were piled on a table, with bread and watercress, alongside two symbolic glasses, one filled with water, one empty.

It struck Ryan at once: how closely the scene paralleled Pharaonic mortuary rituals shown in ancient texts. The only missing ingredient was beer, but even as he wondered this the priest reached in his robes and pulled out some brown grains, barley maybe, and crumbled them in the water. It truly was an exact copy of ancient Egyptian funeral rites. The Copts were the Egyptians: they had the knowledge, even without knowing it, they were the key. They were the
ankh.

He stepped back into the courtyard. Helen was there, next to Albert. Her determined energy had returned.

‘We must pack our bags.’

It took fifteen minutes. And they were ready.

In that short time the crowds had grown, and it was apparent a full-scale
moulid
was underway: a Coptic celebration, a saint’s day, carnival and funeral all at once. Death was being celebrated because death did not sting. The Copts knew the soul had escaped the cage, and was flying to heaven.

‘OK,’ Helen said. ‘How do we get to Philae? That’s next, right?’

‘Albert?’

Hanna was staring at the worshippers as they filed into the church. Abruptly, he crossed himself. And then his lips moved, murmuring. He was praying? The cynical and sceptical Albert Hanna was
praying
?

Ryan nudged him. ‘Albert – Philae?’

‘Oh, yes.
Aiwa!
I have bought us a car. It is perhaps the oldest car in the Theban Nome. A donkey would attract more attention, it is perfect.’

They stepped through the crowds to the monastery gate. But the crowds were intense; there were so many people. Some younger women, their dark hair streaming in the desert wind, were worshipping beyond the monastery walls. Ryan stared at them, in wonder. The wild noise of their singing was discordant, yet beautiful, as they raised their arms with palms outwards, like ancient Egyptians, again, doing the
orant
.

Still more pilgrims were chanting as they strode towards the monastery, others were clapping and drumming to sustain the beat. A large bearded man in black, episcopal and magnificent, was carrying a processional cross.

Albert stopped. ‘We must pray,’ he said. ‘We must give thanks. Helen is alive: it is a gracious miracle; she was dead and now she has risen, like Jesus.’

‘Albert, what the hell? Come on.’

The Coptic man turned and his eyes were shining. ‘Are you surprised? Why shouldn’t I be religious? I am a Copt.
This is my faith
.’

‘But, Albert, we can’t stay here. It is dangerous to linger. You want the answer, make the film, you will make money. And we need your help, Albert.’

‘What is money, to the treasures one stores in heaven?’ Hanna smiled beatifically. ‘You think I am joking. Ah yes.’

‘Come on.’

Grabbing Albert by the arm, Ryan asked him where the car was. Albert shrugged, as if he didn’t care, then pointed towards a rusty green Chevrolet, maybe thirty years old, at the edge of the crowds. They ran to it, Ryan dragging Albert, and slung their bags in the trunk.

Ryan took the key from Albert’s pocket and Albert sat in the back. With wheels skidding, they took the desert road south. Philae was more than a day’s drive, beyond Aswan, right through the wilderness.

The desert was empty here, as Egypt slowly descended into real Africa: burning Nubia. There were no army checkpoints. The drive was long and the sun was hot and the car was air-conditioned by several hundred holes in the bodywork.

They talked as they drove. Ryan mentioned the frieze. Helen said, ‘I think it is just a Pharaoh. He is born of a god, is he not? The Pharaohs were regarded as divine.’

‘But there’s a hint of menace, or evil. Why is Thoth there, the god of magic?’

Albert spoke from the back. ‘It is the birth of magic. And what is wrong with that?’

Ryan shook his head. ‘But Macarius is saying, I think, that there is something magical at work in religion, and maybe in Christianity … Dark magic. Not good stuff. Remember that whatever it is, whatever the truth concealed in the Sokar Hoard, it shook Sassoon so much that he killed himself.’

Helen nodded. ‘It is all about magic: that would explain why the Sokar Hoard contained the Coptic spells. Religion is a kind of magic … But would that be enough to so unsettle a scholar like Sassoon? I do not think so.’

Magic.
Or voodoo
,
thought Ryan. That was what he’d thought when he’d listened to the nuns in the monastery: they were doing
voodoo
, whispering their desert spells to heal the sick.

The desert stretched out before them, the sun quenching itself in the sand, struggling in the quicksand, dying all over again.

They pulled over at an anonymous hotel on the outskirts of Aswan. Helen and Ryan shared a room. Albert watched them sign the register and raised a saintly eyebrow, then retired to his room, complaining of a headache.

Ryan and Helen climbed the stairs. Their room washot, stuffy and plagued by mosquitoes so big they wheeled, serenely, like condors. Helen wrapped herself with sheets to keep them away; but when it didn’t work, she wrapped herself tighter. ‘Do you think this is how mummies evolved? People just wrapped themselves in sheets to keep the damn mosquitoes away, then they wrapped themselves so tightly someone died. God.’

Ryan laughed. Helen was
funny
; beneath her stern exterior, her brusqueness, she was funny. He knew very well by now that he was falling in love with her. Quite passionately. As gently as he could, he kissed her wounded shoulder. And then he turned her over and kissed her properly.

They were back in the car before dawn and drove the last miles through a silent Aswan. The Nile shone like metal, the broad-shouldered rocks of Elephantine Island glistened darkly, the sails of the
feluccas
furled and sleeping.

Onwards they drove to the pier that led to the Philae temple on its little island: raised from the deluge that created Lake Aswan in the 1950s, when the Nile was finally stopped, after five million years, by the second Aswan Dam.

The sun was coming up. Birds swung in the violet air, snatching the last of the night’s mosquitoes. It was beautiful and quiet and yet the emptiness was also menacing. There were no tourists, of course; but there were no people either. One of the great tourist sights of the world was desolate.

Just one Nubian man was sleeping in his little boat, which was tethered to the pier. His djellaba was filthy and his teeth were white and his skin was darker than black; his sneakers were fake Adidas. Albert woke him by the shoulder, and spoke. The Nubian frowned, hawked some spittle into the lakewater, and shook his head.

‘Dammit,’ Ryan cursed. ‘The site is closed. The police have shut down everything. Too much trouble to keep it open with no tourists.’

‘So he is not going to take us?’ Helen said. ‘But we have to get there! Macarius says Philae is the key. We have to get there, we
must
!’

Ryan whispered, ‘Hold on … Look.’

Dollars were passing between the two men on the pier. Then Albert returned, a shine of sweat on his forehead. ‘I just about managed to persuade him. But he says it’s dangerous. The police come every day: they are desperate for bribes. If they find us they will arrest us again, and if we get arrested again, ah, then it will not be so easy to extricate us from trouble.’ He looked hard at Ryan. ‘They will surely have our names, on a list, after what happened in Luxor. In the temple. And the tombs.’

‘Then we have to hurry.’ Helen had made the decision. She marched down the pier and jumped into the boat.

The little wooden vessel puttered across the glittering lake. The sun was rising now, and slanting through the great pillars of Philae, the mighty kiosk of Trajan, the walls where the last true hieroglyphs in history were written.

Philae.

‘We need hours.’ Ryan said. ‘This temple is vast.’

Albert shrugged. ‘The boatman says he will just give us ten minutes.’

‘What?’

‘Or we are stuck on the island. He will leave without us. He is terrified of being caught by police. And, likewise, we mustn’t be stranded, it would be calamitous.’

Hanna was, of course, entirely right. If they waited they’d be swiftly arrested by the first tourist police patrol of the day. But swimming to escape would be way too dangerous: there was bilharzia in these Aswan waters: horrible parasites, the lake was notorious for it; and also water snakes, maybe even crocodiles. Swimming was insane.

‘Ten minutes it is,’ said Helen, grabbing Ryan’s notebook. She pointed at the page, and showed him. The process was the same as Luxor. A series of turns and directions.

‘OK?’

Albert said he would wait by the boat. He was hot and tired.

They ran through the mighty, silent pillars of the most beautiful temple in Egypt, utterly alone. Ryan yearned to linger: this was a unique experience, precious and memorable. Alone in Philae!

Eight minutes left: they passed the Nilometer. Six minutes: a glimpse of the Birth House. Four minutes: they saw the defaced images of Isis. Ryan had been here before but he’d never noticed it properly. Everywhere in Philae the face of the goddess Isis was brutally erased, chiselled out: by Copts, of course. And the inner halls were embossed with brutal Coptic crosses.

Ryan knew the history: in the fifth century the Copts had turned the abominable pagan temple, to the goddess of magic and fertility, into a proper Christian church. In doing so they had angrily chiselled out the visage of Isis herself, the mother of Horus, the tutelary deity of the entire Mediterranean. Isis the Beloved. Erased.

‘Two minutes!’ cried Helen.

Ryan searched the hieroglyphs in the Inner Sanctuary. This was the place. But where exactly? Where was it? What did Macarius come to see? Philae was the last place their scholar had visited, where he made his final conclusions. Tantalizingly yet predictably he had not written them down, not explicitly. But Ryan was sure he was on the very edge now, standing on the precipice. He was ready to make the leap of faith and discovery.

‘One minute!’

But he couldn’t find it. There was nothing here. He’d lost his chance.

Helen was tugging him. ‘We have to go!’

‘No—’

‘Ryan! Please! If they find us – we cannot risk it!’

He stepped close. What was this? He reached up a hand. What
was
this?

‘Ryan! We have to go!’

That had to be it. Right above Isis.