Sphinx (55 page)

‘The guy let us go! Moustafa, calm down, you’re driving like a crazy man. You’ll get us all killed!’ I tried to steady the steering wheel.

Moustafa slowed down, then looked at me. I’d never seen him so grim. ‘You don’t understand. That fourth man, he wasn’t a soldier.’

‘But he was wearing a uniform.’

‘That’s just it - his uniform wasn’t right. I know the soldiers around here, Oliver, I even served myself. That fourth guy, the young one, I swear he wasn’t working for the government.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Secret police, government, maybe even higher up. Whoever it is, I don’t like them.’

 

‘Is that it?’ Rachel asked, leaning out of the jeep window.

The mound loomed up to the left of the track. The area had already been fenced off, and the shothole scars where Moustafa’s seismic crew had inserted explosives to get the required seismic measurements were visible.

‘If you could read the land, you would hear it sing!’ Moustafa yelled as he revved the jeep’s engine over the rocky ground. ‘Tell her, Oliver! Tell her how we are driving over a miracle. How this land will make us both very rich!’

He pulled up beside a boulder and I jumped out. Rachel followed while Moustafa started unpacking the surveying equipment. Opening the back door, I pulled out a shovel and pick. I turned to Rachel. To my surprise she looked uncomfortable.

‘What?’ I asked, swatting the flies away from my face. ‘You don’t approve?’

‘I just think perhaps natural resources should stay that way,’ she said. ‘In nature, untouched.’

‘Rachel, it won’t just be Moustafa and me or our investors who’ll make a profit from this. Money will go to the government and in turn to the people. There will be employment for the locals.’

She looked around. ‘The locals are Bedouin - shepherds and traders.’ She asked, a trace of irony in her voice, ‘Do you think they’ll be interested in working on an oilfield?’

Ignoring her, I hauled the rucksack from under the back seat and, with the pick and shovel under one arm, strode off towards the far end of the ridge.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I don’t have time for ambivalence, Rachel!’

Rachel struggled up the mound behind me, while Moustafa, politely ignoring our argument, set up the surveying equipment. His industrious figure disappeared behind me as I clambered over the crest of the ridge.

Rachel, running, caught up with me. ‘Don’t do something rash just because you’re frightened, Oliver! Shouldn’t you find out more before trying to destroy it?’

‘I can’t take that gamble, Rachel - it could kill me!”

In the distance I could see the same Bedouin shepherd I’d met before. I recognised his headscarf with its distinctive pattern. He sat watching his scraggly herd of goats picking their way around a few clumps of long grass. I waved, but this time he didn’t wave back.

I put down the rucksack on a small flat area behind a boulder and slammed the pick into the stony ground.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Digging.’

‘Why?’

I pulled the astrarium out of the rucksack.

‘Oliver, you can’t bury that - it’s a priceless antiquity.’

‘So let someone else find it in a hundred years and have it screw up
their
life!’

Fuming, Rachel marched off back to the jeep. I glared down at the rocky earth, furious with her obstinacy, furious with myself, furious with the stony ground. A tiny scorpion stared back at me. Poised with its stinger erect, it was David waiting to take on Goliath. I didn’t have the heart to kill it. A second later it scuttled sideways under a rock. I drove the pick into the ground, the reverberation running up my arm.

An hour later I packed the last of the sand back over the astrarium, now buried at least two metres below the surface. An enormous sense of relief washed over me, of freedom, self-determination. Feeling more optimistic than I had in weeks, I joined Moustafa to help him with the surveying. Rachel took photographs of the landscape. The sun - a great red orb like a huge omnipresent eye - hung on the horizon.

‘And?’ I ventured.

‘It’s timeless, isn’t it? Elemental,’ she said finally, avoiding our previous debate.

‘The desert isn’t timeless. The changes are more subtle but they’re there.’

‘But without any evidence of human activity you can almost see history reaching back. You could almost believe time wasn’t linear.’

‘Maybe it isn’t,’ I replied, momentarily believing it.

‘Oliver, do you really think that by burying the astrarium you can destroy its influence?’

‘I have a hunch that it might have been responsible for the oilfield coming to light - the skybox that moves Earth, sea and sky
.
It’s a desperate long shot, but I thought that maybe here in the desert is where it actually belongs and maybe if it’s at rest its hold over me will cease. But I don’t know any more. I’ve lost my logic. Let’s hope it works, otherwise you will be writing my obituary.’

A breeze blew across the plain, foreshadowing the night.

‘We should get back before it is dark!’ Moustafa yelled from beside the jeep where he’d begun repacking the equipment. Dusting the desert from my hands, I ran over to help him.

 

It was already night by the time the guards pulled open the large wire gates and we drove into the Abu Rudeis camp. Out at sea, flares from the offshore rigs formed yellow smudges shooting up from a glittering black mirror. Already I felt better, more in control on my own known terrain. I parked the jeep outside my hut and jumped down from the driver’s seat, the familiarity of the camp enveloping me. Disco music blared out from a radio in a nearby hut and the air was filled with the distinctive smell of burning fuel and the fecund odours drifting off the top of the mud-logging bins - the signature scents of the oilfield. Rachel grimaced as she breathed it all in. I laughed, watching her.

‘It’s rough, but you’re probably used to that. The other drawback is that you’ll be sharing a hut with me.’

Behind us, Moustafa guffawed.

 

‘How many more days did the astrarium give you?’ Rachel asked.

‘Two, after dawn tomorrow. But it’s over, remember? The astrarium is dead and buried.’ I smiled, but a hint of concern laced my voice.

Rachel was lying on the bed and I was on the small couch pushed against the wall.

‘I once fell in love with a man who got killed by a land-mine three days later.’

‘Rachel, you’re not making me feel any better.’

I opened a beer and tossed the bottle cap onto the floor, together with the bottle opener, then watched in amazement as they slid across the room and stuck firmly against the side of the chair in the corner. In the same instant the electricity went out, plunging us into darkness, and the door flew inwards, revealing the scrubland outside, beyond a horizon broken only by the flares of the offshore rigs. Rachel screamed. I jumped off the bed and ran for the doorway, thinking we might be experiencing another earthquake. Dressed in knickers and T-shirt, Rachel cowered.

‘What was that?’

‘Another earth tremor, I think. A shift in tectonic plates . . . Christ, I’m not sure.’

A metal ashtray began to slide across the floor, first slowly, then accelerating as it neared the chair.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re a geophysicist! You’re meant to know!’ Rachel pulled the bedspread over herself, terrified.

I found a torch, switched it on and left it balanced on the side table, then tried to shut the door. It wouldn’t move.

‘It’s become jammed somehow.’

‘Just shut it!’

But the metal doorknob seemed governed by an invisible force: as I tried to push the door closed, it seemed to push against me.

Staring into the gloom of the room I noticed that the beam of the torch had lit up something in the chair, something that hadn’t been there before. For a minute, the shadow behind looked like the outline of a woman - Banafrit. The skin on my scalp prickled in sudden fear and I jumped. Gathering my courage, I peered closer.

To my amazement, it was my dusty rucksack. I picked it up, brushing off red sand. It was heavy and from inside I could hear the soft whirling sound of the magnets spinning.

Slowly, I lifted out the astrarium, gleaming dully in the darkness, and placed it on the table. The metal objects in the room moved with it.

‘What’s that doing here?’ Rachel said, horror in her eyes. ‘Didn’t you bury it?’

‘I did, I swear.’ I stared at the artefact, my mind scrambling to understand.

‘What’s happening!’ Rachel almost screamed the question.

The long shadows of the moving metal objects swung like ghosts across the walls. It was terrifying and disorientating.

‘It has some physical properties I don’t understand - magnetism is just one of them. It seems to be growing stronger.’ I tried to sound rational to calm Rachel, and myself.

‘But how did it get here into the hut?’

‘I have no idea.’

I sat down heavily, not taking my gaze off the mechanism, thinking over the details of the afternoon. The hole I’d dug was deep. No one had witnessed the burial, at least as far as I could remember. Moustafa had been on the other side of the ridge the whole time. Was it possible that the Bedouin shepherd had seen me bury the astrarium and had then dug it up and brought it back here to the camp? But why would he have done that?

Desperate to find some concrete explanation, I didn’t dare examine the terrifying thought that the device might actually have moved itself.

‘Okay, so now I’m a complete believer.’

Rachel’s voice broke into my thoughts. I looked across and saw real terror in her eyes. Leaving the astrarium on the table, I tried to think of something to say that might be reassuring. Something pinned to a reality that could defuse my fear.

There was nothing.

The door slammed shut again and the torchlight flickered. Then it died, the battery dead. Rachel whimpered. I felt along the edge of the bedside table for the drawer, found a box of matches and a candle that I knew were inside, and lit the candle.

‘Isabella knew when she was going to die,’ I told Rachel. ‘That was the real reason she was so desperate to find the astrarium, so that she could change the date of her death. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but she drowned on the exact date predicted by Ahmos Khafre, a date she might have been able to change if she’d found the astrarium in time
.
Maybe I could have saved her, but I just didn’t know how.’

I was unable to meet Rachel’s gaze. A large moth threw itself against the window with a dull thud. We both jumped, then laughed nervously.

I lay there staring up at the ceiling. Rachel was curled up asleep on the bed, snoring slightly. I envied the ease with which she’d fallen asleep. I guess it was from sheer exhaustion. My own mind was racing - working out my next step, now that the astrarium had found its way back to me. Obviously I couldn’t destroy it and yet I had a moral responsibility not to allow it to fall into the hands of my enemies. Again, I found myself craving Isabella’s wisdom and guidance. Restless, I got up.

The cry of a bird broke into my thoughts. It sounded again:
ke-ke-ke-ke
. . . The plaintive cry of a sparrowhawk. Careful not to wake Rachel, I slipped on my jeans and stepped out into the night.

A cloud of insects and moths swarmed around the lanterns. Over to the east, the pale glow of dawn had begun to creep over the horizon. The sparrowhawk cried again, somewhere high above me. I scanned the sky but saw nothing. I sat down on the wooden step of the hut and watched stars so bright that they made me imagine a brilliant cosmos hanging behind a curtain of night.

‘Isabella . . .’ My voice sounded naked and pathetically human. How does one talk to a ghost? I cleared my throat. ‘Show me how to stop the mechanism, to save myself . . .’ The utterance felt uncomfortably close to a prayer.

It was then that I became aware of the sensation of being watched - that distinctive prickling at the back of the scalp. Careful not to make any sharp movements, I looked over at the pool of light thrown by the nearest lantern. Just beyond its edge, two yellow eyes stared back. I froze. It had to be a jackal, or a hyena. It was hard to see the animal’s body. We stared at each other for only seconds but fear stretched time.

The beast jolted into movement, its haunches lowering in a blur as if readying itself to spring at me. Terrified, I scraped up a handful of stones and threw them. The creature spun and leaped back into the receding night - a swirl of tawny fur and slender legs - and I saw the tip of its forked tail sweep across the sand.

 

The next morning, Rachel departed reluctantly.

‘I don’t like to leave you with this,’ she gestured helplessly at the astrarium, ‘but I have to go.’ Moustafa had organised a lift for her with an engineer going to Port Tawfiq where she was going to join President Sadat’s anonymous motorcade for its secret mission. She embraced me briefly and I resisted the urge to hold on to her, to beg her to stay and help me. Here, and in this moment, she seemed like my last hope, my one link to safety. Watching her climb into the car and leave, I fought a sense of abandonment.