The Hidden Oasis (29 page)

‘Which is where, exactly?’

To Freya’s annoyance, he didn’t answer. He looked back at the photo, then at his watch. Coming to a decision, he pulled his mobile out of his jeans pocket and dialled a number with his thumb, moving away to the far side of the room, out of earshot. She threw up her hands as if to say ‘What the hell’s going on?’ but he just held a palm towards her and spoke rapidly into the phone. When he was finished he pocketed the mobile, crossed the room again and took her arm.

‘What do you know about ancient Egypt?’ he asked, leading her back to the spiral staircase.

‘About as much as I do about quantum physics,’ she replied.

‘Time for a quick crash course.’

Yasmin Malouff had a secret, one that she kept from her parents, her siblings, her husband Hosni and also her American employer. She smoked.

As secrets go it wasn’t especially earth-shattering. It was not, however, in her opinion, the sort of thing a lady should flaunt. While Hosni would probably not have been overly perturbed had he found her out, her family would most certainly not approve. And Mr Angleton had made it clear from the outset that he would not tolerate smoking on the job. She was welcome to do anything else she wanted in the hotel room, he had told her – ‘Christ, you can even work in the buff if it’ll help you concentrate’ – but cigarettes were a strict no-no.

She wasn’t a heavy smoker – just three or four Cleopatra Lights a day – and it was no great hardship to stay off them while she was manning the listening station. Only in the late afternoon did the craving become unbearable. Then she would lock up the room, take the lift down to the floor below and, positioning herself at the end of the corridor beside an open window, light up.

Today, for some reason, the craving was even stronger than usual. Having finished one cigarette she immediately lit another, her normal five-minute break as a result expanding into ten. Then she discovered she was out of mints and had to take the lift all the way down to the shop on the ground floor to restock. By the time she got back to the room, her breath suitably disguised, the traces of ash dusted off her dress, she had been gone for the best part of twenty minutes. Which wouldn’t have been a problem had a call not come through to Molly Kiernan’s mobile in her absence: the red warning light on the recorder that was
monitoring that particular number was blinking furiously at her as she stepped through the door.

Any other call to any other number would not have been an issue. Following his visit earlier that afternoon, Mr Angleton had specifically told her that he was to be informed immediately of any traffic to Kiernan’s Nokia. Slamming the door and throwing her handbag onto the bed, Yasmin Malouff hurried across to the recorder. Snatching up her notepad and pen, she pressed the Play button, sitting herself down ready to transcribe. A hiss of static, then a voice, hushed and urgent:

‘Molly, it’s Flin. I’m in the Egyptian Museum. With Freya Hannen. We’re getting some photos developed – I’ll explain later – and then I’m taking her to the American Embassy. Can you meet us there? This is urgent, Molly, really urgent. OK, thanks.’

End of call.

She played it through again, making sure she’d got the transcription right, that she hadn’t missed or misheard anything. Then, picking up the special telephone Angleton had had installed in the room, she dialled. Her call was answered within two rings.

‘Mr Angleton, it is Yasmin Malouff. There has been a call, on Kiernan’s mobile. The transcript runs as follows …’

She held her pad up and began to read.

‘Do you think it’s safe?’ asked Freya as Flin led her back into the museum. The image of their twin pursuers was still sharp in her mind, and the huge, crowd-filled gallery
felt painfully exposed after the confined space of the photographic studio. ‘What if they’re still looking for us?’

‘It’s been over an hour,’ Flin replied, stopping beside a giant stone sarcophagus and scanning the scene ahead. ‘I’m guessing if they did think of coming in here they’ll already have been and gone. I can’t guarantee it, though, so keep your eyes open. If you see anything …’

‘What?’

‘Run.’

He looked around for a moment longer, then set off through the gallery, the photograph of the gateway still clutched in his hand. Freya trailed along beside him. He seemed, if not relaxed, certainly calmer and more assured than she did, as though the presence of so many ancient objects diluted the severity of the danger they were in. They covered about half the gallery’s length, the vast interior echoing with the babble of voices and the slap of feet, then Flin started talking.

‘Zerzura is a lost Saharan oasis,’ he explained, moving aside as a horde of schoolchildren in matching blue uniforms poured towards them, led by a harassed-looking teacher. ‘I’ve actually got quite a good Powerpoint presentation on it, but in current circumstances I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with the edited version.’

‘Fine by me,’ said Freya, gazing around uneasily, half expecting one of the twins to leap out from behind a statue.

‘The name comes from the Arabic word
zarzar
,’ Flin continued, warming to his subject: ‘which means starling, sparrow, a small bird. We don’t really know much about the place, save that it was first mentioned in a medieval manuscript called the
Kitab al-Kanuz,
the Book of Hidden Pearls,
and supposedly lies somewhere in the vicinity of the Gilf Kebir, although De Lancey Forth put it in the Great Sand Sea, and Newbold …’

He saw that he was losing her and broke off, holding up his hands.

‘Sorry, too much information. One of the hazards of spending your life immersed in this stuff – you can never just tell it simply. All you need to know for current purposes is that it’s a lost oasis and most of the early twentieth-century desert explorers – Ball, Kemal el-Din, Bagnold, Almasy, Clayton – tried, and failed, to find it. In fact it was the hunt for Zerzura that drove much of that original exploration.’

They came to the high domed rotunda at the entrance to the museum and continued directly ahead, into a gallery marked ‘Old Kingdom’, its walls lined with statues and carved reliefs.

‘A lot of people have argued that Zerzura never actually existed,’ Flin went on, absorbed in what he was saying, seemingly oblivious to the displays to either side and the crowds all around. Unlike Freya, whose gaze continued to flick nervously back and forth.

‘That the whole thing’s just a legend. Like El Dorado, or Shangri-La, or Atlantis – one of those alluring but ultimately fictitious tales that wild places like deserts tend to inspire. I’ve always believed it did exist, and that Zerzura is simply another name, a much later name, for a place the ancient Egyptians referred to as the
wehat seshtat,
the Hidden Oasis.’

He glanced across to make sure he wasn’t losing her. Freya gave a nod to indicate she was keeping up with what he was saying.

‘Unfortunately, as with Zerzura, we don’t really know a huge amount about the
wehat seshtat
,’ said Flin, his brow furrowing slightly as if in frustration at this lack of information. ‘With one notable exception, which I’ll come to in a moment, the evidence is all extremely fragmentary and difficult to interpret: a few papyrus fragments, some badly damaged petroglyphs, a couple of inscriptions and a rather garbled mention in Manetho’s
Aegyptiaca –
I won’t bore you by going through it all. What we’ve basically managed to piece together – and I reiterate, much of this is open to interpretation – is that it was a deep gorge or wadi running off the eastern flank of the Gilf Kebir, and that from a very early date, before the Sahara even became a desert—’

‘This is how long ago exactly?’ asked Freya, interrupting. Despite her nervousness she was finding herself increasingly drawn into the story.

‘Well, it’s hard to give precise dates,’ he said, apparently pleased by her interest. ‘But we’re talking at least ten, twenty thousand years
BC
, possibly even as early as the Middle Palaeolithic.’

The term meant nothing to Freya but she didn’t pursue it, not wanting to hold things up.

‘Way back in the mists of prehistory, anyway,’ Flin continued, resuming the thread of his explanation. ‘Even then this gorge, oasis, whatever you want to call it, seems to have been considered a place of supreme religious significance, its precise location a closely guarded secret. When and why it first came to be regarded as such we don’t know, but it seems to have retained its status right the way through to the end of the Old Kingdom. About 2000
BC
. After which
knowledge of the oasis’s whereabouts became lost and it disappears from history.’

They reached the end of the gallery and started up a staircase, the press of tourists thinning around them as they climbed to the museum’s upper floor. It was quieter and less hectic here than on the building’s lower level. Flin waved her back the way they had come, towards the rotunda, turning into a small, deserted side room with display cases full of simple stone and clay artefacts, all clearly of a much earlier date than everything they had passed so far. He stopped in front of one case and pointed. Inside, flanked by a pair of ivory combs and a large earthenware bowl were three objects Freya recognized: small clay obelisks, each about the height of a finger, each incised with the same symbol as the one in Rudi Schmidt’s bag. She peered at the accompanying label:
Votive Benben miniatures, Predynastic (c. 3000 bc), Hierakonpolis.

‘What’s a Benben?’ she asked, thoughts of their pursuers moving ever further back in her mind.

‘
The
Benben,’ corrected Flin, leaning in beside her, his elbow just touching hers. ‘I’m afraid this is where we have to sidetrack for a moment into the rather complex world of ancient Egyptian cosmology. I know it’s not top of your interest list, but bear with me because it is relevant. I’ll try to keep it simple.’

‘Shoot,’ she said.

A young couple wandered up to the case and glanced at its contents for a moment. Neither of them looked especially interested, and they moved on. Flin waited until they were out of earshot, then started talking again.

‘The Benben was a central feature of ancient Egyptian
religion and mythology,’ he explained. ‘In many ways
the
central feature. Symbolically it represented the primordial mound of earth, the first small peak of dry land to emerge from Nun, the primal Ocean of Chaos. According to the Pyramid Texts – the oldest known collection of Egyptian religious writings – Ra-Atum, the creator God, flew across the blackness of Nun in the form of the Benu bird …’

He tapped the photo in his hand, indicating the long-tailed bird carved into the lintel above the doorway.

‘… and landed on the Benben, from where his song ushered in the first sunrise. Hence the name, from the ancient Egyptian
weben,
“to rise in brilliance”.’

The young couple wandered back past them, the girl now talking on her mobile. Again, Flin waited until they were gone before resuming his explanation.

‘The Benben was more than just a symbol, however,’ he said, his face pressed right up against the cabinet, his elbow still touching Freya’s. ‘We know from ancient texts and inscriptions that it was an actual physical object: a rock or stone shaped like an obelisk. There is some suggestion that it was originally a meteorite, or part of a meteorite, although the relevant texts are complex and open to interpretation. What we do know is that the Benben was housed in the inner sanctum of the great sun temple of Iunu and was, by all accounts, possessed of extraordinary supernatural powers.’

Freya let out an amused snort.

‘I know, I know, it all sounds a bit
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
although we do have quite a number of corroborating sources – including one from royal Sumerian archives – that are remarkably consistent in their descriptions. They tell
how the Benben would be dragged into battle at the head of the pharaoh’s army and would emit a strange sound and a blinding light that utterly destroyed the opposing forces. Which possibly explains two of the alternative names that were used to describe it:
kheru-en Sekhmet,
the voice of Sekhmet – Sekhmet being the ancient Egyptian goddess of war – and
iner-en sedjet,
the Stone of Fire. That’s what the symbol is, by the way’ – he pointed at the motif on the side of the clay obelisk – ‘Sedjet, the hieroglyph for fire. The cross-shaped terminal represents a brazier, with a flame rising …’