Authors: Paul Sussman
It was past 6 a.m. and the building seemed a completely different place. Shafts of early morning sunlight angled steeply down from the openings set high in the walls, bathing the hypostyle halls in a soft, dreamlike haze, driving the shadows back into the further corners and recesses. Moving cautiously, Freya made her way up to the entrance gate and peered though. Aside from a couple of black-uniformed guards sharing a cigarette, the courtyards outside were empty. Further down she could see coaches drawing up, people milling about, postcard and trinket vendors hawking their wares. She felt a brief shock of alarm that Flin had got his timings wrong and the temple was about to open, but no one seemed to be coming any closer and after a moment she relaxed. She watched a while, then turned and retraced her steps, birds fluttering overhead, weaving their way in and out of the giant columns as though skimming through a forest. Back in the chapel she called up to Flin in a hushed voice, asked how things were going. A despondent grunt was his only response. She climbed the scaffolding and squeezed herself back into the shaft. Flin was sitting right at its far end, bent over his torch, its weakened beam pointing towards the ceiling of the cavity, illuminating his face with a pale, deathly glow. His expression and posture told her everything she needed to know.
‘I’ve gone through it with a fine-tooth comb,’ he said, sounding as if he was about to start sobbing. ‘There’s nothing here, Freya. Or if there is it’s buried under a ton of masonry and we can’t get to it.’
She crawled over and crouched down beside him. The rubble at this end of the shaft was piled even higher than at the other end, leaving just over a metre of available headroom, hunching them up.
‘We can come back tonight,’ she said. ‘Try again.’
He shook his head.
‘The moment they find the hole in the wall, they’ll have more guards in this place than Fort Knox. We won’t be able to get near it. This was our only chance. There won’t be another.’
He glanced at his watch: 6.39 a.m. Only twenty minutes before the temple opened to the public.
‘We could try to get the block back up again,’ she suggested.
He didn’t even bother to respond, both of them knowing it was futile. There was a long pause. Then, with a sigh and another glance at his watch, he said they should think about getting out of there.
‘We can hide in one of the hypostyle halls, lose ourselves among the tourists when they start coming in. There’s always hundreds of them first thing. Shouldn’t be too difficult.’
He showed no sign of acting on his suggestion, just sat with his head thrown back and his elbow resting on what looked like a miniature tombstone – a rectangular, hieroglyph-covered piece of limestone with a rounded top. More for something to say than because she was interested, Freya asked what the stone was.
‘Hmm?’
She pointed.
‘Oh, a
wd.
A stele. A sort of votive tablet the ancient
Egyptians placed in tombs and temples. They recorded prayers, events, offerings, that sort of thing.’
He twisted and, lifting the stone – it was only about forty centimetres high – hefted it round and rested it on his knees. He pointed his torch at it.
‘It got me quite excited, actually. Talks about the
iret net Khepri –
the Eye of Khepri. One of those formulations that always seems to be associated with the oasis, like the Mouth of Osiris.’
He brushed a hand across the stone’s face, reading:
‘Wepet iret Khepri wepet wehat khetem iret nen ma-tu wehat en is er-djer bik biki –
when the Eye of Khepri is opened, then shall the oasis be opened. When his eye is closed the oasis shall not be seen, even by the keenest falcon.’
He hugged an arm around the stele, seeming to draw comfort from it, explaining that Khepri was a scarab-headed god, one of the manifestations of the sun god Ra, the name coming from the word
kheper,
’he who comes into being’. Freya was no longer listening; her attention had been drawn to the upper part of the stele, the area bounded by the arch at its top. There were images in there, separate from the columns of hieroglyphs beneath. On the left-hand side what looked like a red wall or cliff face, on the right the same wall only now there was a narrow green slit running down the middle of it. Between the two images ran an undulating band of yellow from which rose a scythe-shaped black curve, its edges curiously notched and serrated, its uppermost tip opening out into a large, finely detailed eye like a flower at the end of a stem. At first she had thought it was simply an interesting design. The more she looked, however, the more it reminded her …
‘I’ve seen that.’
Flin was still discussing the attributes of the god Khepri and didn’t appear to hear her.
‘I’ve seen that,’ she repeated, louder.
‘Seen what?’
‘That,’ she said, pointing.
He nodded, not particularly surprised.
‘Very possibly. The
wadjet
eye’s a common—’
‘Not the eye. That.’
She touched a finger to the curving black line.
‘What do you mean you’ve seen it?’
‘I’ve seen it. Or something very like it. In a photograph.’
‘You’ve seen a photograph of this image?’
‘No, no, it was a rock formation. Out in the desert. It was exactly the same, even the jagged sides.’
His eyes narrowed.
‘Where? Where did you see this photograph?’
‘In Zahir al-Sabri’s house. When I first arrived in Egypt. Alex was in it, that’s why I—’
‘Did he tell you where it was?’ he interrupted.
She shook her head.
‘He didn’t seem to want me to look at it, hustled me out of the room.’
Flin looked back down at the stele, fingers drumming on its sides, murmuring to himself: ‘When the Eye of Khepri is opened, then shall the oasis be opened? When his eye is closed the oasis shall not be seen, even by the keenest falcon.’ Minutes passed, Freya acutely conscious that their time window was rapidly closing, but loath to break his train of thought. Flin just sat there, utterly absorbed, until eventually, with the faintest of smiles, he lifted the stele
from his knees and laid it back in the corner of the shaft.
‘Must run in the family.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Must run in the Hannen family. A talent for saving the day. Alex was always doing it, and now you seem to be keeping up the tradition.’
He rolled onto his feet and started clambering back along the shaft.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, following on behind. ‘Is it important, this rock?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he replied, coming up to the hole in the wall and threading himself through, wriggling back into the chapel beyond. ‘Between you and me, though, I have a horrible suspicion I’ve spent the last ten years pissing around with all this stuff and it’s going to turn out to be you who’s made the crucial breakthrough. For which, frankly, I’ll never forgive you.’
He made it out onto the scaffold and turned back. His smile had now stretched into a grin.
‘I ought to bloody leave you in there – discovering things without my permission! Purely for the sake of Anglo-American relations, however …’
He winked and held out a hand to help her through. She reached for it, only for Flin to suddenly whip it back again and spin. For a moment she was uncertain what was happening. Then she heard what he must have heard – voices. Still muffled and distant, but definitely coming from somewhere within the temple.
‘Shit,’ he hissed, swinging back again, the smile now gone. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.’
He reached into the hole and pulled her through, helping
her upright before grabbing one of the crowbars and scrambling down to the floor below, the scaffolding creaking alarmingly. Freya followed and they hurried out into the nearer of the two hypostyle halls. The voices were now unmistakable, coming from the outer hall at the front of the temple; at least two or three people, by the sound of it.
‘Tourists?’ she whispered.
Flin listened a moment, then shook his head.
‘Guards. They must have found the cut padlock. Quick.’
He waved her across the back of the hall, past the last of the chapels and into a narrow corridor. Ten metres along a barred gate opened in the wall to their right. Beyond it a set of steps sloped steeply upward to a second gate and daylight.
‘The back of the temple,’ he explained, working his crowbar into the lock of the first gate. ‘We just need to …’
He heaved, the muscles of his neck bulging and twisting, his face purpling with the strain. He removed the crowbar and drove it in at a different angle, putting all his weight behind it, bracing his foot against the wall for extra leverage. Try as he did, he couldn’t snap the lock. With a despairing growl, he gave up and led Freya back down the corridor and into the hall of columns again. It was still empty. The guards, it seemed, had not yet come through from the outer hall, although the jabber of voices and thud of boots suggested there were now a lot more of them.
‘Ehna aarfeen ennoko gowwa!’
someone shouted.
‘Okhrogo we erfao’o edeko!’
‘Is there another way out?’ asked Freya, her voice an anxious whisper.
Flin shook his head.
‘Can we hide?’
‘Too many of them.’
‘What’ll they do if they catch us?’
‘If we’re lucky, stick us in prison for five years and then deport us.’
She didn’t bother asking what would happen if they weren’t lucky.
‘Ento met-hasreen!’
came the voice again.
‘Mafeesh mahrab!’
Flin looked around, trying to come up with a plan, any plan. With the footsteps and voices now almost at the doorway between the two halls, he grabbed Freya’s arm and pulled her along the back of the space again, past the chapel they had been working in and into the next but one along. Unlike the other sanctuaries this one had a doorway in its rear wall that took them through into yet another hall, much smaller than the two main ones. Twin rows of pillars ran down its centre, daylight streamed in through a pair of open skylights in the ceiling.
‘Where does this lead?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t.’
‘So why have we—’
‘Because there’s nowhere else to go! We can’t get out through the front, the back door’s locked …’
He threw up his hands helplessly.
‘We’re trapped, Freya. I’m just trying to buy us a couple of extra minutes, hoping against hope they might not come in here.’
Outside the chamber the shouts and thud of feet were growing louder as the guards worked their way through the temple towards them, tightening the net.
‘Sallemo nafsoko!’
‘There has to be another way out,’ she said. ‘There has to be.’
‘Sure, there’s a magic door and if you wave a wand and say abracadabra …’
More shouts, punctuated by a series of shrill whistle blasts. Freya circled her eyes frantically around the hall, looking for something that might help them. Ten squat pillars – two rows of five – smaller rooms opening at either end, relief-covered walls of which the right-hand one was roped off to prevent tourists from touching the inscriptions. Nothing that offered them any hope of escape.
‘When they come in just stay still and let me do the talking,’ said Flin. ‘And keep your hands visible.’
She ignored him, continuing to wheel her gaze around. The shouts and whistle blasts were now accompanied by the barking of dogs.
The two skylights – square blue holes in the concrete slab ceiling – were well out of reach even though the ceiling itself was much lower here than in the two main halls, only about five metres off the ground. Without a ladder or a scaffold they might as well have been fifty metres up. She dismissed them, staring again at the walls, the side rooms, the pillars, the flagstoned floor, back to the pillars.
The pillars.
Squat, trunk-like, made up of drum-shaped sections piled one on top of the other with clear gaps between each drum. She took a step forward and looked up at the skylights again. Each was a good metre and a half away from the top of the nearest column, too far to reach without a handhold. Except that there
was
a handhold – a rusted iron reinforcing bar protruding
from the further of the two skylights like some twisted root pushing its way down into the chamber. And the column nearest to it had a metal brace wrapped around its uppermost drum like a garter round the top of a thigh. Up the column using the gaps between cylinders for foot and handholds, finger jam behind the brace, lean out, jump for the reinforcing bar. It was a crazy manoeuvre, impossible, a Deadman into a Dead Hang, something she wouldn’t contemplate even in a training climb with safety ropes and a crash pad to break her fall. Crazy. Crazy. But …
‘I can get us out of here,’ she said.
Flin’s head snapped towards her.
‘What are you talking about?’
She didn’t waste time explaining. Waving him over to the rope strung in front of the wall reliefs, she told him to coil it up, then ran across to the column and started climbing. Although narrow, the joins between the stone drums afforded her just about enough space for finger – and toeholds, and while it would have been easier with chalk and proper climb shoes, she still reached the top of the column without too much trouble. Wedging her fingers in behind the metal brace, she balanced the tips of her toes on the raised reliefs with which the pillar was covered and gazed across at the iron reinforcing rod. From up here it looked an awful lot further away than it had from down below.
Flin was now standing at the bottom of the column, the coiled rope slung over his shoulder. The direction of Freya’s eyes told him all he needed to know about what she was planning.
‘No way! You’ll break your neck!’
She ignored him. Edging her way around the column, she brought herself as close as possible to the skylight, adjusting her toe – and finger-holds to give her sufficient leverage to make the jump.
‘For Christ’s sake, Freya!’
The shouts and barking were drawing ever closer. With every second now crucial, she threw a final glance across at the skylight, braced her feet and leapt, powering herself away from the column and through the air towards the metal rod.