Authors: Paul Sussman
They continued to work their way around the edges, sometimes coming at the block from the sides, sometimes from above and below until eventually it started to creep forward out of the wall – fractionally at first, millimetre by millimetre as though reluctant to show itself; then, as they were able to get a better purchase on it, more swiftly, the clink of their crowbars now accompanied by the grating rasp of stone scraping across stone. When they had prised it some fifteen centimetres out of its socket they laid aside the jemmies and clasped it with their hands, carefully easing it forward, adjusting their holds as more and more of the block emerged. At last, with a final heave, they were able to drag it free of the wall and take its full weight on their arms and shoulders. It was heavy, unbelievably heavy, far more so than either of them had expected, and it was extremely hard to manoeuvre, with the scaffolding wobbling beneath them and the limited space available on the platform. They shuffled a couple of half-steps away from the wall and started to lower it, sweat stinging their eyes, their breathing growing increasingly fast and frantic. They got it about halfway down before both of them simultaneously felt the stone starting to slip through their fingers.
‘I can’t hold it,’ gasped Freya. ‘It’s …’
She stumbled to her right, trying to keep hold before
realizing it was hopeless and letting the block go, leaping out of the way to avoid her feet being crushed. Flin lurched forward and also released his grip, a fraction of a second later than Freya, his momentum propelling the stone to the very edge of the platform and then off into space. The chamber – the entire temple – seemed to reverberate to a dull, hammer-like thud as the stone crashed to the floor below, the force of the impact breaking off a large chunk of its corner.
‘Oh God,’ Flin groaned, snatching up a torch and shining it down. Heavy wafts of dust undulated through the torch’s beam. ‘Two and a half thousand years that’s been there …’
‘Screw the block,’ said Freya. ‘What if someone heard?’
They stood still, listening, the echo of the crashing stone seeming to linger around the chamber’s vaulted ceiling, Flin looking as mortified as if he had unwittingly run over a close friend. There were no shouts or footfalls, however, no sign that the accident had attracted the attention of the temple guards, and with a last, pained look down at the shattered block, Flin turned his attention to the newly opened hole in the wall. Stepping up to it, he shone his torch through into the space beyond.
‘What can you see?’ asked Freya, picking up her own torch and moving in behind him.
He didn’t respond, just moved his beam to and fro, surveying the cavity, his back and shoulders blocking Freya’s view.
‘What can you see?’ she repeated, trying to look round him.
Still he didn’t say anything and she felt a momentary jolt of fear that maybe there was nothing there, that Fadawi had
been fooling with them after all. Then Flin turned to face her, his horrified expression of a moment earlier now replaced with one of startled awe.
‘Wonderful things,’ he said, giving her a thumbs-up. ‘I see wonderful things.’
He shuffled to the left, allowing her to slip in beside him and shine her own torch through the hole. Freya found herself looking into a narrow, shaft-like cavity, no more than two metres across and perhaps twelve metres long, a secret passageway hemmed in between the walls of the chapels. Its ceiling – made up of huge stone slabs – seemed to be on the same level as that of the chapel ceiling, and its floor, she assumed, must likewise be a continuation of the chapel floor. It was impossible to be certain, for along its entire length and up to a point less than a metre below the opening the cavity was packed with a confused jumble of stone blocks, the smallest at least twice the size of the one they had just removed. Some of the blocks were square, others rectangular, some blank, others decorated with images and hieroglyphic inscriptions. The carvings – like those in the hypostyle halls outside – still bore traces of their original coloration: greens and reds and yellows and blues. There were segments of column as well, random pieces of statuary – part of a granite torso; the front end of a sphinx – all of it thrown into the cavity seemingly willy-nilly, everything lying across and on top of everything else. The impression was of peering into a giant box crammed full of children’s play bricks.
‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ said Flin, leaning his head in so that his cheek was almost touching Freya’s.
He shone his own torch into the shaft, moving the light
around until it had settled on the face of one block in particular, illuminating a pair of what looked like elongated ovals, one beside the other, each encircling a row of hieroglyphic signs.
‘Nefer-Ka-Re Pepi,’ he read, his torch beam juddering slightly as if he was so overwhelmed by what he was seeing he couldn’t hold his hand still. ‘The throne name of the pharaoh Pepi II. Like Hassan said, there must have been an Old Kingdom temple on this site that was dismantled and recycled as wall-filling when Seti built his temple a thousand years later.’
He shook his head.
‘Christ, Freya, I can’t even begin to … I mean this is a period of history from which we have almost no material remains. Something like this could completely rewrite … Mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing!’
They gazed into the cavity for a while longer. Then, aware that time was short, Flin squeezed his head and shoulders into the gap in the wall and started to drag himself through into the space beyond, his legs and feet disappearing as he squirmed down onto the tangle of stone below. Freya followed, rather more dextrously, Flin helping her through from the other side and lowering her gently onto the uneven surface.
‘Careful where you put your hands,’ he warned. ‘The place is probably crawling with scorpions.’
She winced and whipped her palm away from the statue head on which she’d laid it.
Now they were inside, the cavity felt even more cramped and claustrophobic. The ceiling was too low for them to stand fully upright, and masonry pushed at them from all
directions, although there was the faintest hint of draught, a barely discernible movement of air – where it was coming from Freya couldn’t tell. They gave it a moment, squatting beside the opening in the wall, wheeling their torches about, getting the measure of the space. Then, with another glance at his watch – 4.51 a.m. – Flin started to clamber around, examining the inscriptions, looking for anything that might offer a clue to the oasis’s whereabouts. Freya angled her torch beam in his direction to give him extra light, but otherwise let him get on with it. She could no more read hieroglyphs than she could Japanese so there was little other contribution she could make.
Twenty minutes went by, neither of them speaking, the only sounds the scrape of Flin’s boots on stone and his occasional murmurs of ‘Wonderful. My God, it’s just wonderful!’ Then, suddenly, he clicked his fingers and waved her over.
‘Come and look at this.’
Freya stumbled across to him, head knocking against the ceiling, and crouched down at his side. Flin drew his torch back and played its beam along a length of greenish-black stone. After a moment she realized it was a small obelisk, lying horizontally and partially buried beneath a clutter of other blocks.
‘It seems to be some sort of hymn or prayer to the Benben,’ he said, indicating the hieroglyphic text with which the stone was inscribed.
‘That’s the Indiana Jones rock, right?’ she asked. ‘The one with the supernatural powers?’
He nodded, smiling at her description. Touching a dusty finger to the top right-hand corner of the inscription, he
started to recite, his voice – as it had when reading the Imti-Khentika papyrus – seeming to grow deeper and more plangent as though it was echoing from far back in time.
‘
Iner-wer iner-en Ra iner-n sedjet iner sweser-en kheru-en sekhmet
,’ he intoned. ‘Oh great stone, oh stone of fire, oh stone that made us mighty, oh voice of Sekhmet that we carry into battle before us and that brings us victories beyond number …’
‘Anything about the oasis?’
‘No, but this one mentions the Benben too …’
Flin moved his torch to the side, aiming the beam at a hieroglyph-covered limestone block, its text picked out in vibrant shades of red, blue, yellow and green.
‘… and this one …’
Now his torch swung over to what looked like a fragment of shattered column.
‘… which suggests the material towards this end of the cavity all came from the same part of the Pepi temple. Some sort of shrine dedicated to the Benben by the looks of it. And as I said back in the museum, where you find the Benben mentioned you usually find the oasis as well. Around here, that’s where we need to look. This is where it’ll be.’
He gave a satisfied grunt and resumed his search, examining each piece of masonry in turn, ignoring his own advice about scorpions and burrowing his torch hand deep into the gaps between the blocks in an effort to illuminate those sections of text that were partially buried or else lying at difficult angles.
‘What if the inscription we need’s right at the bottom?’
Freya asked. ‘This stuff must go down another two metres. There’s no way we can move it all.’
Flin didn’t answer – whether because he was too absorbed in what he was doing or simply didn’t want to contemplate that scenario she couldn’t tell. Another fifteen minutes drifted by. Freya, sitting on a statue head, felt distinctly useless as the Englishman continued to work his way across the confusion of rubble. Then he let out a sharp yelp and again waved her over.
He was now about two-thirds of the way along the cavity, his torch beam directed at a small block wedged between a clutter of other blocks, its face angled downwards so that he could only access it by lying on his back and looking up. He was grinning from ear to ear.
‘What is it?’ she asked, craning over him, trying to get a better view.
‘It’s part of a text discussing how to actually enter the oasis,’ he said breathlessly, his fingertips running back and forth across the stone as though he was caressing the skin of a lover. ‘Almost certainly from the innermost sanctum of Pepi’s temple, where only the pharaoh and the high priest would be able to view it. I just can’t begin to describe how important this is.’
He continued to gawp at the inscription, one hand angling his torch beam back and forth while with the other he traced the lines of hieroglyphs. Then, slowly, he began to translate:
‘Sebawy –
two gates – shall bring you to
inet djeseret,
the sacred valley.
Khery en-inet –
at the lower end of the valley – the
re-en wesir,
the Mouth of Osiris.
Hery en inet –
at the upper end of the valley – the
maqet en Nut,
the ladder of
Nut, which is beneath
mu nu pet,
the water in the sky. And these gates alone shall bring you there, only the two, at the bottom and the top, no others shall be found, for it is the will of Ra …’
He broke off, the inscription ending at that point.
‘The Mouth of Osiris we already knew about,’ he said, his voice calmer now, more controlled. ‘Although what exactly it refers to …’
He shook his head.
‘Osiris was the god of the underworld so maybe it’s just figurative … we simply don’t know. This ladder of Nut thing’s completely new, however. It’s not mentioned in any other extant text, or at least none that I’ve ever seen, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them all – absolutely fucking extraordinary.’
‘What does it mean?’ she asked, excited even though the text said nothing to her.
‘Well, Nut was the goddess of the sky,’ explained Flin, shuffling out from underneath the block, his face and hair powdered with dust. ‘And phrases like
mu nu pet,
the water in the sky, generally refer to high cliffs – during flash floods the water would pour down off the top of the cliff as if it was hanging from the heavens. The ladder bit … again, it’s impossible to know if it’s referring to something literal or is just metaphor, but the implication is that the ancient Egyptians used to access the oasis from the top of the Gilf Kebir as well as the side of it.’
He came up into a squatting position alongside Freya, ruffling the dust out of his hair.
‘Does any of that help us?’ she asked.
‘When’s there’s as little information out there as there is
about the oasis, every tiny clue’s important, but no, it doesn’t get us any closer to the precise location. What I’m guessing – what I’m hoping – is that if there’s a text explaining how to get into the oasis then somewhere around here there’s going to be one explaining how to actually find it. We’re getting close, I can feel it. We’re getting close.’
He reached out and squeezed her arm, then started picking his way over the masonry again, minutely examining every inch of stone. He had been energized before but now it seemed to Freya he became positively manic, hefting aside those blocks and fragments of statuary that were not too heavy to move in order to get at whatever lay beneath them, glancing constantly at his watch, muttering to himself, seemingly oblivious to her presence. His persistence bore swift results. In quick succession he found three more references to the Benben, a text describing the great temple that apparently sat at the heart of the oasis and another inscription repeating the punishments that would be visited on those who entered the oasis with evil intent:
May evildoers be crushed in the jaws of Sobek and swallowed into the belly of the serpent Apep. And inside the serpent’s belly may their fears become real, their evil dreams a living torment.
There was nothing that gave any indication as to where the oasis might be, though, not even the vaguest hint. Another thirty agonizing minutes ticked by, Flin becoming increasingly irate, cursing and thudding his fists against the blocks as if trying to bully them into giving up their secrets. Unable to bear the tension any longer, the oppressive, dust-choked atmosphere, Freya left him to it and clambered out of the cavity and down the scaffolding. She stood a moment stretching her arms and legs – the dull clunk of stones being
moved about echoing from the hole above her – then wandered back through the temple towards the front entrance, gulping clean, cool air as she went.