Firebird (15 page)

16

‘If I may say so, that was most uncalled for, Officer,’ Andropov said. It was the first time he’d spoken and his voice was calm and steady — almost bored in fact. There was a touch of the pedantic academic there too, as if he was dealing with people who couldn’t possibly be expected to understand the exquisite construction of his mind.

‘Lieutenant.’

‘Lieutenant. I am a guest here, you understand.’ For a second he looked at Daisy and his eyes focused on her legs, encased in tight jeans. She felt the gaze and crossed them instinctively. I stood up, walked over to the door and turned the key in the lock. He watched me with the same haughty expression.

‘So you think it was uncalled for?’ I said. ‘Well, two days ago, a former colleague and friend of yours, a fellow member of the Millennium Committee, was murdered in cold blood in Khan al-Khalili. Saturday — yesterday — you resign from your post and hoof it out here. You don’t think you have any questions to answer?’

Andropov shrugged fleshy shoulders and looked at me placidly. ‘What has it got to do with me?’ he asked loftily. ‘I wasn’t close to him — haven’t been for years.’ He shook his Mongolian head wearily. ‘Poor Adam,’ he said, ‘his death was a loss to the scientific world, a great loss, but I am not involved, and I can’t tell you anything at all.’ His eyes seemed to beam at us. Maybe it was the high cheekbones, but despite the well-chosen words his whole manner seemed to be saying,
Ibram
had
it
coming
.

‘No?’ Daisy said suddenly. ‘Then why
did
you leg it down here so soon after Doctor Ibram was murdered? Are you saying there’s no connection?’

Andropov shrugged again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I was bored with the Militants and their hit-list, and bored with the millennium celebrations. When it all comes down to it, it’s just petty politics.’

‘So you think it was Militants who killed Doctor Ibram?’

His eyes twinkled slightly and he looked at me as if I was a complete bumpkin. ‘Naturally,’ he said, and I’d have sworn he was about to yawn, ‘they’ve been threatening me ever since I agreed to sit on the committee. I’ve had filthy letters, people spitting at me in the street, rocks through my windows, death threats, obscene phone calls — even a letter bomb. Adam’s death was the last straw. I’m bored with it. I resigned.’

For a guy who’d suffered all that he seemed amazingly unperturbed, I thought.

‘You have proof that you were threatened?’ I asked.

He looked up, his eyes momentarily hooded with anger. ‘Of course I have proof,’ he said evenly, ‘you think I’m lying?’

Daisy took the cue and smiled encouragingly. ‘You’re Russian, Professor Andropov?’ she asked.

‘Not really — never been near the place in my life. My father was a White Russian civil engineer who worked in Iran during the Shah’s time, but I was born and brought up in Tehran and I studied in London and Vienna.’

‘And you specialize in dryland ecology? That’s how you’ve been able to help the monastery.’

For a moment Andropov looked gratified. ‘My specialization is rainwater harvesting,’ he said. ‘You see, rain falls at some time even in the most arid places, although the showers may be rare and slight. The secret of good irrigation is to make sure you collect every drop of water and conserve it. If that water can be channelled even into a few hectares of fertile ground the product can be incredible. And a few productive plots can keep a community going for months.’

‘And you have practised these techniques at the monastery here?’

‘Yes, I mean theoretically this place shouldn’t exist — the desert here is as arid as anywhere in the world — two hundred times drier than California’s Death Valley. But even here by carefully husbanding resources you can survive. Under my supervision, the monks have built extensive cisterns all channelling water to a single point — even the roofs of the buildings are cisterns, linked by a complex system of drains to the internal plumbing, the sewers — everything is re-channelled and re-purified and recycled. When it doesn’t rain we use deep bores which are sunk into the water table, where the water is constantly replenished. True, we do often supplement the supply with Nile water, but in a good year the monastery works in pure homeostasis — a closed system.’ He was beaming proudly now. ‘In ecological terms,’ he added, ‘that’s a great achievement.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said. I understood enough about moisture conservation to know he wasn’t exaggerating, and I admired what he’d done here, but we had to get down to brass tacks. ‘So did Doctor Ibram share your enthusiasm for rainwater harvesting?’ I enquired.

Andropov sat back in his chair and sighed, as if the question exasperated him. ‘Adam was always fascinated by the desert,’ he said. ‘He had been obsessed with it since he was a child in Alexandria. We first met when we were doing postgrad work on environmental studies at Harvard. Our fields were very close and we often worked together. I was studying the irrigation methods of the ancient Nabataens — the people who built Petra. They were so advanced that even today their techniques cannot be equalled. The object of my study was to develop an efficient water conservation system which could be used for greening arid lands today. Adam was equally enthusiastic, because it was his dream that the whole of Egypt — even the whole of North Africa in time — could be turned into the vast garden he believed it once was.’

‘And you agreed with him?’

‘Without reservation. We spent a long time studying ancient rock art — pictures of elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos and antelopes apparently living in places where today nothing can survive. We studied lands at images which revealed that there were once rivers and lakes lying under what is now only sand dunes — images confirmed by rock pictures showing people fishing and hunting crocodiles in boats where there is now not a hint of moisture. We collected all the archaeological and geological data and proved quite conclusively that the whole of the Sahara desert had once been green and fertile. That much was indisputable. The next questions were closely linked — why and when? What had created the world’s most extensive desert — nine million square kilometres of arid land — and when had it happened? At that point Adam began to study ancient Egyptian records. He even taught himself to read hieroglyphics and got caught up in the whole ancient Egyptian thing. He started referring to it as his “destiny”. That was when I began to have second thoughts, I suppose. We were both scientists and I felt he was beginning to lose his scientific detachment. After a while Adam came up with the theory that the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom — the so—called Golden Age, when the pyramids are presumed to have been built — collapsed because of a sudden change in climate, from fertile to arid.’

‘And you disagreed on this point?’ I asked, interested now.

‘No, I thought his reasoning was fairly sound. It does seem certain now that some time around the middle of the third millennium before Christ — that is about 2500 BC —the climate of North Africa tipped over the fragile balance between desert and fertility. The rainfall belt retreated south, and the land started to become desert. The Nile Valley was badly affected, and for the first time we have records of famine. There is a block from the Unas Causeway at Saqqara, for instance, showing emaciated men, women and children, strikingly similar to the famine scenes from Ethiopia and the Sudan we saw a few years ago on our TVs. It seems also that great dust storms blew up from the south — there are references to the sun being occluded, and of arable land being buried under shifting dunes. The whole social system collapsed — the pharaoh was discredited, the kingdom broke into petty feudal states, bands of armed men wandered up and down the Nile searching for food, plundering less badly hit communities. There are even accounts of cannibalism. In fact, though the civilization recovered, it was never quite the same again, and Adam traced this whole thing back to a climatic upheaval that had taken place some time around 2500 BC .’

‘What was his proof?’ I asked.

Andropov beamed over the high cheekbones. ‘You’re a stickler for proof, aren’t you?’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said.

Andropov’s eyes narrowed even more tightly and his lips formed into an outright sneer. ‘Are you acquainted with ancient Egyptian epigraphic literature, Lieutenant?’ he enquired languidly.

‘Try me.’

‘Ever heard of a piece called
The
Admonitions
of
Ipuwer
?
’

‘Sure, it’s famous.’

He paused, trying to weigh up whether I was serious. ‘Then since you’re such an expert,’ he said, ‘you will know the text is thought to have been written during the reign of the Pharaoh Sesostris I, in the second millennium BC. The author was Ipuwer — a priest of the Ra Brotherhood at Heliopolis — and it indicates that there was total chaos in Egypt about that time. “The districts of Egypt are devastated,” it runs, “every man says, we do not know what has happened to the land.” The evidence seems clear that it was some natural cataclysm that brought about the devastation, which ended in social upheaval. Up till about 2500 BC, pharaonic tombs show the desert as being full of trees and animals. After that date, such images disappear.’

‘Are
you
familiar with the ice core samples taken by Blij and Neuven in Greenland in the nineteen seventies?’

I asked, remembering the report we’d found in Ibram’s case.

He glanced at me and smiled condescendingly. ‘So we’ve been doing our homework, have we Lieutenant? Actually, the Blij and Neuven findings confirm that there was some kind of environmental crisis around 2500 BC. If you must know, I never disputed any of Adam’s conclusions on this point — where we diverged was over the question of how and why this crisis had come about. The problem was that Adam felt the environmental change was made by interference in the biosphere. I couldn’t go along with that. I agreed that human activities might affect the environment on a micro-level, but a few nomads with their goats, for instance, couldn’t possibly have created the Sahara Desert. Adam was absolutely convinced. “Look at Chernobyl,” he would say. “Look at the hole in the ozone layer. Human activities
can
bring about massive environmental change.” I would protest that we were talking four thousand years ago. What could have had the power to change the environment on such a massive scale in that era? Volcanic activity, perhaps. An asteroid collision. But there weren’t any nuclear reactors or C F C gases in those days. “Oh,” he used to say, “How come you’re so sure?” That’s when I decided to part company. I concentrated on water harvesting and irrigation and left him to theorize on his own. We still spoke from time to time and were superficially friendly, but I couldn’t help noticing that over the last few years he’d got more and more political, more and more tied up with his influential friends. He became advisor to the U S president on environmental matters and was very friendly with the president of Egypt. Understandably so, of course. Only eleven per cent of Egypt is cultivable land, and every president since Nasser has been presented with the problem of a burgeoning population increasingly unable to feed itself. The only answer to that is to increase cultivation. Adam became an environmental guru — his ideas of turning the desert green again, however impractical, had huge political appeal.’

I sat down and looked out of the window into the quadrangle where a moisture haze rose from the mass of irrigated plants. I could feel the greatness of Ibram’s dream. No wonder he had been obsessed by it.

‘Would you say Ibram was an ambitious man?’ Daisy asked.

Andropov frowned as if it was a difficult question. ‘If you mean, was he ambitious for power and material wealth,’ he said, ‘I’d say no. Oh, he wanted the things his parents had been deprived of in Egypt, of course — a comfortable house, a car, enough to eat. He was happy with his American wife and two children and never played around. But that was as far as it went. I think he had a real social conscience. He won the NASA Medal for distinguished public service, did you know that? He was just so taken with his dream of greening the desert that he lost touch with reality — that’s my view.’

‘Do you happen to know what Doctor Ibram was working on just before he died?’ I asked.

He shrugged again as if it was a stupid question. ‘He always had a lot of irons in the fire,’ he said, ‘but I think his main interest recently was the Millennium Committee.’

‘Did that surprise you?’

‘In one way, yes. It didn’t fit in with his obsession with the desert. But in another way it wasn’t entirely new, because for a couple of years he’d been passionately interested in the Giza Plateau. Passion was part of him, naturally, I mean no one could have mastered all the subjects he did without it. Whenever he got interested in anything he rushed in full tilt — never rested until he knew it inside out. Anyway, about eighteen months ago I heard he’d managed to get funding for a project inside the Great Pyramid looking for some hidden chamber or other. If I remember rightly it was called the Chamber of Thoth. The pyramid was even shut down for a while. Personally I thought the whole idea was crazy — it was a measure of how far Adam had strayed from the orthodox scientific community. Of course he wasn’t known for his work in that field and he had the sense to keep his name out of the press. A guy called Monod — Christian Monod — ran the programme. He’s a talented Swiss engineer who’s been working on pyramid projects for years, and has written God knows how many papers on it. He was meant to be on the Millennium Committee too, but then, a couple of months ago he suddenly disappeared. One potential member vanished and another murdered — that was enough for me. I quit. That’s why I’m here.’