The Exodus Quest (29 page)

FIFTY-FIVE

I

The storm was finally raining itself out as the truck arrived at the end of the Royal Wadi road and parked next to Khaled’s truck. Naguib jumped down. The place was still awash with water; all around them was the sound of it trickling and splashing down the hillsides.

Tarek tapped his arm, pointed up at the cliff-top. ‘See that?’

Naguib squinted. The cloud-cover was just beginning to disperse, and one or two stars were peeking through, enough to show the silhouette of the wadi cliffs. He shook his head. ‘See what?’

‘A man. He ducked down. He’s hoping we haven’t seen him.’

‘Can you get us up there?’

Tarek nodded. He led them close to the base of the cliff to avoid making easy targets of themselves, then east along the wadi. It was Mahmoud who made the grisly discovery of one of Khaled’s men lying spread-eagled on the wet rocks. Naguib knelt down. A single glance was all it took to know it was too late for this one. They climbed the side of the wadi, the light growing stronger all the time. ‘Spread out,’ murmured Tarek as they reached the top.

‘And if we meet anyone?’ muttered a voice.

‘Order them to surrender,’ said Naguib.

‘And if they won’t?’

‘You’ve got a gun, haven’t you?’ said Tarek.

II

‘The Cave of Treasures?’ asked Lily.

‘A famous place in Jewish legend,’ Knox told her. ‘A cave in a desert beside a great river. Adam and Eve were sent there after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. But that was only the start of it. There’s a whole literature on it, not least because many of the Hebrew patriarchs were supposedly buried inside. Adam and Eve themselves. Abel, after being murdered by Cain. Noah. Abraham. Jacob. Joseph. Some even say Moses.’

‘Pretty big damned cave.’

Knox nodded. ‘Jewish archaeologists have been hunting it for centuries. Quite something to find the tombs of all those Bible legends.’

‘So what would it be doing in Egypt? Shouldn’t it be in Israel?’

Noise behind them. Someone had started wading through water. The passage ahead showed no sign of ending, though it curved sinuously this way and that, limiting their horizons. ‘You’ve got to understand,’ he told her, ‘that the Bible isn’t historical. It’s a collection of folk-tales designed to convince the Jews that they’d brought their Babylonian exile and the destruction of the Temple upon themselves. That’s why so many of the stories follow the same basic moral path.’

‘Man makes covenant with God,’ murmured Lily. ‘Man breaks covenant. God punishes man.’

‘Exactly,’ said Knox. He set Gaille down a moment, giving his arms a rest, flexing his fingers. ‘One explanation is that the person or people who put the Bible together actively looked for stories that fitted this pattern. But there’s another possibility. Take Adam and Eve. The first man and woman, right? Yet even the Bible tacitly admits there were other humans around.’ He picked Gaille up again, continued walking. ‘Cain was branded for killing Abel, for example, so that others would know not to harm him. Which others? He married and had a son called Henoch who founded a city, which you can’t exactly do if you’re alone in the world. So maybe Adam and Eve weren’t the first humans in a
biological
sense, only in a
spiritual
sense. That’s to say, maybe they were the first to understand the true nature of God.’

‘Akhenaten and Nefertiti?’ said Lily sceptically.

‘Think about it,’ said Knox. ‘Here you are, living in Amarna. It’s your paradise, your Eden, your Promised Land. You’re certain nothing can go wrong, because this is the home on earth of the One True God, and you’re under His protection. But something
does
go wrong. You’re expelled, forced to flee in the night, then to leave Egypt altogether. How is this possible? Surely the only explanation is that you made your God angry for some reason, that you failed him in some manner. You vow never to let that happen again. You renew your covenant. And in return God gives you a new Amarna, a new Eden, a new Promised Land. But not in Egypt this time. In Canaan.

‘Decades pass. Centuries. The people of the Exodus splinter into different settlements, different tribes, each with their own identity, though still with that common bond of flight from Egypt. They pass their stories down from father to son, time after time after time, so that they gradually blur with narrative invention and blend with local folklore until, hundreds of years later, they’re not only unrecognizable from what really happened, but from the folk-histories of their neighbours too, even though they’re describing the same events.

‘Then the Babylonians arrive. They defeat the Israelites in battle, destroy their temple, take them into exile. They become introspective, wondering once more how such a calamity could have overtaken God’s chosen people. They look to their heritage for answers, gathering all these different traditions together and weaving them together with their favourite Mesopotamian and Canaanite myths to create a single narrative about Adam and Eve, Abraham and Moses, all those journeys back and forth between Egypt to Canaan, all those Edens and Promised Lands and New Jerusalems. But in fact these stories aren’t about numerous patriarchs and ages and places at all. They’re about one patriarch, one age, one place. They’re about Akhenaten and Amarna.’

‘It can’t be,’ muttered Lily weakly.

‘Did you know that Akhenaten solicited gifts of exotic animals from his brother kings? He kept them here. The whole Amarna plain would have flooded during the annual inundation of the Nile. All those animals would have had to be loaded onto rafts. Remind you of any Bible story at all?’

‘It
can’t
be.’

‘When Adam and Eve were in the Cave of Treasures, God gave them the very first possessions ever owned by man: gold, frankincense and myrrh. We even know how much gold they got. Seventy rods of it. Which is really odd, because a rod’s not a unit of weight, but of
length
. About five metres, as it happens. Much the same as each of these steps.’

‘So seventy rods would make three hundred and fifty metres,’ murmured Lily.

‘Yes.’

Ahead, the passage opened up into a chamber, the golden thread coming to an end at the base of the wall opposite. ‘So how far do you reckon we’ve come?’ she asked.

‘About three hundred and forty-nine, I’d guess.’

III

Khaled joined Faisal at the foot of the shaft, peered through into the new chamber and passageway. A man’s body was floating face down in the water. He lifted his head by a hank of blooded hair to check. Stafford, the TV presenter. One down, three to go. He dropped him again, held his flashlight and the AK-47 at the ready as he waded through the chamber then along the passage. ‘Well?’ he snapped at Faisal, who was holding back. ‘Are you coming or not?’

‘Let’s just get out of here,’ pleaded Faisal. ‘We’ve still got time.’

‘And then what?’

‘What do you think? We vanish.’

Khaled hesitated. A new life somewhere no one knew him. Port Said. Aswan. Or over the border into Sudan or Libya. It was easy enough buying a new identity if you had contacts and
baksheesh
. But a new identity was only the start. And the prospect of starting over in a new land with nothing to his name made his heart sink to his boots.

Leave now and he’d be poor forever. He wasn’t designed for poverty. He was designed for good things. And they were so close. At the very least, he had to see what lay at the end of this passage. ‘We’re finishing this,’ he said. ‘Trust me. No one will ever find out.’ He smiled encouragingly, then turned his back on Faisal and walked on, knowing that the man was weak, that he’d buckle and follow.

And, sure enough, he did.

FIFTY-SIX

I

Knox laid Gaille down, brushed hair from her brow and cheek. The cut in her scalp was clotting, her complexion was perceptibly healthier, her breathing stronger. He stood up, took the torch from Lily, shone it around the new chamber, took it to the left-hand wall. It was coated with gypsum, and there were markings visible beneath the thick coats of dust. He took off his wet shirt, wiped it down, bringing a night-time scene to vivid life: people huddled in their beds as robbers roamed their houses, while outside lions prowled, snakes slithered, crocodiles lurked.

He went to the wall opposite, cleaned that too. A daytime scene. Akhenaten and Nefertiti handing out gold necklaces from a palace balcony while farmers went about their work, cattle grazed in the fields, ducks flew over the reeds and fish leapt in the lakes, all sporting in the beams of sunlight.

‘It’s
The Hymn of the Aten
,’ he murmured. ‘Akhenaten’s poem to his sun god.’ He illuminated the left-hand wall. ‘That’s the world by night,’ he said. ‘Lions coming forth from their dens, snakes preparing to strike.’ He pointed right. ‘And this is day. “Cattle and sheep welcome in the dawn, birds take wing as you appear. Boats sail upon the waters, all paths open through you.”’

‘What good is that?’ said Lily, her voice cracking a little. ‘We need to get out of here.’

The sunbeams converged towards the upper left-hand corner of the wall, Knox noticed. Yet they didn’t meet. They hit the junction with the neighbouring wall before reaching their focal point, then promptly vanished. He turned the torch upon this wall, noticed something that had eluded him before. It wasn’t a single flat surface, as he’d first thought. There was a recessed V-shaped section in its centre, set perhaps half an inch behind the rest, and it was actually at the base of this V that the golden thread stopped.

He placed his hand upon it, colder, smoother and altogether more metallic than he’d expected. He stepped back, illuminating the whole wall and the golden thread in the floor, and it reminded him of something. ‘It’s like a wadi,’ he said, pointing out the valley-shaped V to her. ‘You know, the one the sun rises over to make the sign of the Aten.’

‘Then where’s the sun?’

‘Exactly,’ nodded Knox. He went back to the wall, rapped his knuckles against it, listened carefully to the echo. He rapped again. Yes. No question about it. It was hollow.

II

Naguib, Tarek and the
ghaffirs
advanced cautiously across the hilltop, taking turns to scurry from cover to cover, keeping low to avoid showing their silhouettes.

‘Stay back!’ cried a panicky voice from the darkness. ‘Don’t come any closer!’

Gunfire rattled to Naguib’s left, muzzle fire leaving orange blurs dancing on his retinas. ‘Stop!’ he cried. He turned to Tarek. ‘He has information. We need him alive.’

Tarek shouted out the order. Silence fell.

‘Listen,’ called out Naguib. ‘I am Inspector Naguib Hussein. You saw me earlier. We know what’s going on. We know everything. You’re surrounded. Lay down your weapon. Put your hands over your head and then stand up.’

‘Go away. Leave me alone.’

There was laughter at this, the idea was so ridiculous. ‘You don’t have to die,’ called out Naguib. ‘You can surrender. A trial. A lawyer. I’ll tell the court you helped us in the end. Who knows how it will turn out? But otherwise… you don’t stand a chance.’

‘He’ll kill me.’

‘Who’ll kill you?’

‘Captain Khaled, of course. He’s mad. He made us do it. We didn’t want to. It was all his idea.’

‘Then help us stop him. The courts will have mercy on you. But right now put down your gun and surrender. You hear?’

‘You won’t shoot?’

‘You have my word.’

Something clattered on the rocks. The figure of a man rose in the darkness ahead, arms above his head. Within a moment, he was swarmed and pinned to the ground, Naguib kneeling beside him, asking about the others, where to find them.

III

Knox put his shoulder to the wall, tried to slide it to one side, lift it, press it down. Nothing worked. Down the passage, splashing noises were replaced by the scuff and patter of footsteps. By Knox’s best estimation, they had a minute at the most. And there was nowhere to hide, no way to spring an ambush. It was getting through this wall or nothing.

‘Look!’ said Lily. She steered the torch in his hand at the base of the wall. It was difficult to make out, dark against a black background, but there was an ankh-shaped hole there, the approximate size of a man’s hand. He went a little numb. The ankh was the great Egyptian symbol of life. It had evolved from a hieroglyph for magical protection, though there was still furious debate over what that glyph had originally symbolized. A ceremonial knot, said some. Or perhaps a sandal. Others claimed that it had represented the sun rising over the horizon, or even the fusion of male and female genitalia, a kind of hermaphroditism all of its own. But looking at it right now, Knox couldn’t help noticing how much it looked like a keyhole.

‘Hurry,’ said Lily. ‘They’re getting closer.’

Ancient Egyptians had invented mechanical locks at least five hundred years before Akhenaten. They’d typically been simple, wooden, cylinder-and-tumbler devices, fastened to posts outside doors. But there was no reason they couldn’t have fashioned more sophisticated examples. He knelt, pressed his cheek to the limestone floor, angled the torch. It was hard to see inside, but he glimpsed jagged teeth and an internal cylinder, components large as a child’s toy.

Memories of a desert drive with his late friend Rick, veteran of the Australian special forces. Killing time discussing methods of picking locks, the tools you needed. He opened up his scissors, twisted and turned the two blades until he’d wrenched them apart. Far too large and clumsy for a modern lock, but not for this. He pressed one blade against the cylinder, gently jiggled the tumblers with the other, listening intently as they clicked into place.

‘Quickly,’ begged Lily. ‘They’re getting closer.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need silence.’

The final tumbler slotted into place. He tried to twist the cylinder clockwise. It wouldn’t shift. He went counter-clockwise instead. It gave reluctantly, protesting at being disturbed after so long. Thirty degrees, sixty, ninety. And then it stopped altogether, no matter how hard he strained.

‘Come on!’ wailed Lily.

He lay on his back, slammed the wall with both bare soles. Nothing. He kicked again, a third time, a fourth. Something clicked inside. A releasing latch perhaps. The floor began to tremble, shaking dust into the air. The tortured groan of metal on rock as counterweights went to work. The wall began rising with painful slowness, like the curtain of a theatre. Its metallic surface began to glow in the torchlight, a yellowish tint to it, brighter and brighter, too golden to be silver, too silver to be gold. Electrum, then, a naturally occurring alloy of the two, so highly prized by the Egyptians for its sunshine dazzle that they’d coated the capstones of pyramids with it. And then the disk of the Aten itself appeared, climbing slowly up the wall. The sun was rising over Amarna.