Sphinx (5 page)

Isabella rolled on top of me, her slim body pressed against mine as she stared solemnly into my eyes. I tried smiling but her face stayed serious, her gaze boring through any pretence, as if she were trying to look beyond the banter that had become the veneer of our relationship. I knew that I had no option but to support her. Isabella did not believe in compromise, emotional or otherwise. For her, this would have been surrendering to mediocrity. She threw herself recklessly from one experience into another. This impulsiveness was one of the reasons I had first been attracted to her. A characteristic so opposite to my own controlling nature, it had always provided a healthy counterbalance, but recently it had become something I couldn’t protect her from, as much as I longed to.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’ I asked, unnerved by her unblinking stare.

She appeared to be on the brink of speaking, but then hesitated before kissing me instead, her long hair falling either side of my face in a wave of musk.

I always wanted Isabella. I never understood why that was - maybe the differences between us created a space, a place I could eroticise. I couldn’t tell you how; it just worked. The touch of her lips, her fingers, the scent of her neck, made me stiffen. She was the first woman with whom I had truly understood the notion of desire, a thirst that was intensely emotional, not just physical. She was home to me; we made our own nation.

I pulled her down to me and, finally, she smiled.

 

I was woken an hour later by Isabella thrashing about in the bed. I shook her and she woke up - her heart racing against my chest; her face veiled with sweat.

‘The same nightmare?’ I asked.

‘Yes, except I don’t know if it’s a nightmare or a memory. This time it was clearer, more specific . . .’

She faltered, staring into the distance as she forced herself to remember. I waited, knowing that, for her, part of the exorcism was in the telling.

‘There’s a platform,’ she said slowly, ‘with a group of people standing on it. They’re dressed bizarrely, like animals. ’

‘Maybe they
are
animals?’ I said.

She waved the suggestion away. ‘No, they are humans, real people. There’s a man with the head of a dog - a jackal, I think - crouching by a large set of scales. Then a tall figure with the head of a bird, a big bird holding a quill, and a man dressed in white - he looks terrified. There’s blood on his robe. Another figure’s holding him - this one has the head of a falcon - and they’re in front of a throne. There’s a figure sitting on the throne - maybe the god Osiris . . .’

‘A ritual, perhaps?’

She was silent for a moment, then suddenly clutched at my hand. ‘Incredible! I’ve just worked out what it is, after all these years. It’s the ceremony of the weighing of the heart, Oliver! I’ve shown you the pictures, remember?’

The Ancient Egyptians believed that after a person died their heart was weighed by Osiris. Depending on the purity of the heart, the deceased was either allowed to pass into the afterlife or was denied entry - a terrifying concept for them. The idea of the ritual disturbed me, partly because of its sheer grotesqueness but also because it reminded me of my mother’s attempts to indoctrinate me with a notion of sin.

‘But why would I dream such a thing?’ Isabella said, now almost more distressed. ‘Over and over?’

‘It’s probably a motif you return to when you’re stressed - maybe a fear of being judged by your peers?’

‘But it’s so clear - the detail of Osiris’s headdress, his eyes, the terror of the man waiting to be judged, the heat of the flaming torches on the walls . . . I’m telling you, it’s like I have lived this. I just can’t remember . . .’

‘Buried memory?’

The thought that she’d already lived through this seemed to frighten her even more. Finally she said, ‘If it is, maybe it should stay buried.’ Restless, she got out of bed and went over to her desk.

‘Isabella, you need sleep.’

‘I couldn’t possibly sleep now. Besides, going over the plans for tomorrow will help relax me.’

Naked, she put on her reading glasses and switched on a desk lamp, illuminating several maps of the bay and the seabed. I knew she referred to two sources of expertise on the geography of the harbour. One was Kamel Abdou el Sadat who had campaigned tirelessly to try and get the Egyptian authorities to fund exploration. The other was an earlier enthusiast - Prince Thosson, who had created early twentieth-century aerial maps of the bay. And it was these two men’s own hand-drawn maps that now lay before her. She picked up a ruler and pencil and began to retrace her route for the dive, the defencelessness of her bare shoulders an innocent contrast to the intense expression on her face. My gaze moved down her body, along her legs curled together under the table and to the tattoo on her ankle - a sparrowhawk with a human face turned in profile. It was her Ba, the Egyptian representation of the soul after death. Traditionally these birds were sparrowhawks unless the deceased was a pharaoh in which case they were falcons - although, depending on the period of history and the school of thought, the Ba could also be a butterfly or even a heron. Isabella had had the tattoo for as long as I’d known her. She’d told me she’d got it on a drunken trip to London with a couple of her wilder girlfriends when she’d been a student. Isabella loved the hieroglyph for the Ba. It was like her personal totem. The Ba was always considered attached to the body and was only freed in death after which it could fly anywhere, even into open sunlight.

Isabella talked about Bas often, describing how, for Egyptians, they also represented individuality, the emotional characteristics that made up a personality - even a person’s own morality and inspiration. The other elements were Ka, the life force, defined as the spirit that entered the body at birth, Ren - name, Sheut - shadow, and Ib - the heart. A third significant hieroglyph was Akh, which depicted the successful union of the Ka and Ba that enabled the deceased to progress to the afterlife. A successful passing-over into the afterworld could only take place if the Ba was united with the Ka at the moment of death. If this union did not happen, the soul was thrown into oblivion, an annihilation that was the equivalent of Hell for the Ancient Egyptians whose afterlife was an imagined parallel world full of earthly pursuits and pleasures. Isabella herself was terrified of such a fate.

As I stood and walked over to the desk I noticed Isabella slip a small envelope under the ink blotter: a movement so tiny and mostly blocked by her turning her back to me that a second later I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d imagined it. She swung back around and smiled. ‘Recognise this?’ she said, and held up the drawing of the astrarium I’d seen on the floor the night before. ‘It’s a great rendering, I really think it’s going to look like this. Gareth’s a genius.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I replied gruffly; I couldn’t help thinking about my brother’s complete inability - genius or otherwise - to look after himself both physically and financially. I took the drawing from her and peered at it. The elegant ink drawing showed the jagged teeth of cogs set against more cogs, while another perspective demonstrated how the interior workings fitted within a wooden frame. Beneath the diagram was a series of six symbols or letters of an ancient script. I hadn’t noticed them before. ‘What’s this? It doesn’t look like Greek - is it meant to be Ptolemaic?’ I asked.

‘It is, but this is a cipher made of hieroglyphs. The Ptolemaic rulers took every opportunity to link themselves to Ancient Egyptian beliefs in order to legitimise themselves. I’ve found evidence that this cipher may be written on the mechanism itself. It’s a phrase from a temple wall, an Isis temple, only recently discovered. I had Gareth write it down, because he’s so good at riddles.’

‘Have you solved it?’ I was intrigued despite myself.

‘I have an idea, but I’ll wait until I have the astrarium before I reveal my theory to a cynic like yourself.’

‘Be careful of anything Gareth suggests,’ I said warningly, handing her back the drawing. ‘He’s such a conspiracist.’

Isabella threw her hands up in mock exasperation. ‘You see? No wonder I don’t confide in you. I’m too frightened of being ridiculed.’

‘Come back to bed, please?’ I begged, smiling.

Dawn was creeping under the blinds but by my calculations there was at least an hour before we had to get up for the dive. Sighing, Isabella switched off the desk lamp and skipped across the room. As she slipped in beside me, the familiar fragrance of her body was an immediate comfort.

‘You’ll always look after Gareth, won’t you? He needs you, even if he’ll never admit it.’

‘Of course I will,’ I answered, trying to ignore the fatalistic undercurrent in her voice.

My brother Gareth, born sixteen years after me, was an unexpected menopausal baby, adored by my mother but regarded as a late financial burden by my father. I had hardly known Gareth when he was a child, but when I did visit I would take him out for long walks across the moors, describing the rock formations in the hope that it would instil some greater ambition than my parents’ aspirations. It must have worked, for at the age of twelve he’d announced that he intended to become a landscape painter. We were close in those days and I would often make the effort to travel to Cumbria to see him. But suddenly, at sixteen, he began to reject openly both my parents and myself. He would argue furiously with my mother, and would not talk to my father for days. The first time he slammed the phone down on me I was devastated by the sense of alienation. I had loved the wild imagination and trust in the young Gareth: it was as if another, more sullen and closed individual had hijacked him. By the time he arrived in London to start art college he was already addicted to drugs. Despite this and determined to be supportive of his career as an artist, I’d tried openly to win him back. Regardless of my efforts it was always Isabella to whom Gareth turned in times of distress - our relationship from then on was never quite as it once had been.

Sighing, Isabella curled up against me. ‘If anything should happen to me, Faakhir will know what to do with the astrarium. ’

I pulled her closer, her leg over my torso, my arm slipped under her waist. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’

‘No, Oliver, you must listen to me: you must guard the astrarium with your life. If the astrarium really is all that I believe it to be, then a lot of people will want it, but it is crucial to keep it safe. Don’t trust anyone, except Faakhir. Follow your instinct - your natural gift will lead you. It believes in you even if you don’t believe in it. There is a journey and a destination for the astrarium.’

‘What do you mean?’ I yawned, tired from a long day and the prospect of getting up again soon.

‘I don’t know yet. There is so much we don’t know until I find the mechanism itself.’ She sighed. ‘All I know is I have a feeling that when we find the astrarium it could throw us into much danger. You’ll just have to trust me. Promise?’

I nodded and, reaching down, kissed her deeply, and there it was - a simple pledge given simply. With hindsight I wonder whether if I had argued with her, had made the case that perhaps sometimes it’s good to leave some treasures undiscovered, old hurts and dramas dormant, unanalysed, never to be returned to - would I have persuaded her not to have taken that dive? Maybe, maybe not, but I wasn’t that kind of man in those days. Then, with all the arrogance of a young gun who’d achieved a certain status and who believed Nature favoured the hard-working, I assumed our lives would go on for ever.

 

The boat - a small fishing vessel aptly named Ra Five, with an old rusting cabin and a pile of mended fishing nets on board - chugged determinedly against the incoming tide, ploughing through the great webs of seaweed the storm had thrown up in the days before. Faakhir’s cousin Jamal, a short muscular man in his late fifties with the calloused and scarred hands of a working fisherman, guided us out towards the bobbing red buoy that marked the dive site. He was the owner of the boat and, as Isabella had again reassured me, part of the coastguard, and had therefore secured the official permission necessary for her to take the boat out and make the dive. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. Jamal’s constant smile was betrayed by a nervousness in his eyes and I suspected bribery had played its part. But I knew better than to ask.

Hanging over the cabin controls was a miniature Michelin man, and a plastic hula-hoop girl with a painted green grass skirt hung alongside the eye of Horus as I steadied myself against the chipped wooden panelling.

‘Careful, you might fall overboard,’ Omar, the official Isabella had told me about the night before, joked. He was a plump man with a badly fixed broken nose and a thin white scar running vertically across one heavy eyelid down to his cheek. He wore a fluorescent pink life jacket strapped over his clothes and appeared to be taking little interest in the proceedings. After suffering two centuries of the illegal excavation and export of its ancient statues and artefacts, Egypt had finally established a policing system that required all archaeological sites to have at least one of their officers present. But even if Omar was really such an officer and not just moonlighting, I strongly suspected that Isabella had deliberately underplayed the significance of the astrarium.

Faakhir stood in the doorway of the cabin. He had a clumsiness on land that completely belied his grace when in the water. When I’d first dived with him I had been astounded not only by the fluidity of his movements but also by his uncanny ability to locate objects on the seabed, even in the murky waters of Alexandria’s harbour. The fishing hut in Al Gomrok he’d grown up in had a number of small Ptolemaic objects placed casually next to a radio or an old family photograph. Objects his father and grandfather had either caught in their nets or hauled up from the seabed over the decades. Faakhir himself had seen submerged statues and pillars, many of which had become reefs over the aeons, attracting schools of fish: the reason why the fishermen fished there in the first place. But there were levels of Faakhir’s diving expertise that were unfathomable to Isabella and he was always strangely vague about where he’d trained.