The Jerusalem Puzzle (17 page)

‘No,’ she said. ‘I feel a bit sick this morning. You’re well capable of taking pictures of a few papyri without me.’

‘One papyrus.’

‘But you want to see if there are others like it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I looked around. There weren’t many people staying in the hotel.

‘Kaiser is the key to everything,’ she said. She popped a piece of croissant with some quince jam on it into her mouth.

After breakfast I walked to the Antiquities Museum. It was only five minutes away. It was due to open at 9 a.m. The papyrus collection was on the ground floor. The golden treasures of ancient Egypt, which were still in the museum, were on the upper floor.

I arrived outside the gates at five minutes to nine. I was dressed in cream chinos, a loose black t-shirt and nothing else. Some of the locals had jackets on, but it was as warm as a good summer’s day in London, so I didn’t need one. I thanked God that we hadn’t arrived in the summer. The sweltering heat then, strong enough to melt tar, would not have been my idea of fun.

I wasn’t alone waiting. There was a slowly growing queue of tourists, as well as many Egyptians. We were a small demonstration of our own. There was a lot of shuffling and mumbling about the delayed opening, until finally the gates of the garden courtyard in front of the museum swung open and we were allowed in.

I had to go through two security checks, one near the steps of the museum and a second inside the doors. There was no photography allowed, but they let me keep my phone.

The museum was amazing. It was a relic of another age, a long colonial-era red stone Victorian museum. Outside in the courtyard, there were ancient statues, mostly all pale pink, including a small sphinx, stone pharaohs, and some mythical Egyptian animals. In its monumental entrance hall there were awesome twenty foot high statues of pharaohs.

I picked up a plan of the building at the entrance, headed to the papyrus collection. Most of them hadn’t yet been moved to the new museum. I passed through a long, double height hall, with tall pillars and a gallery level above. The hall had more stone pharaohs, mostly sitting down, with straight backs, and a collection of tombstones.

The papyrus room was full of flat oak and glass cases containing collections of papyri from all over Egypt, from almost the beginning of recorded human history. I hadn’t realised they had papyri going that far back, to the early First Dynasty, about 3,000 BC.

Glass-fronted cases lined the walls while others stood on their own in front of them. There was a dusty smell. I asked a guard standing in a corner to look at the picture of the hieroglyph and tell me where in the room the papyrus was. He looked at me as if I was an alien with flashing antennae.

‘It’s from the Black Pyramid,’ I said.

He grunted, walking towards a nearby case. There was a woman wearing a headscarf and a long blue smock dusting it. He motioned me close to him.

‘This, this,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. I peered at a black tray on its own.

‘Yes, that’s the one.’ I looked closely at it.

He stood right beside me.

‘Do you have anymore from that time?’ I gestured at the cases all around us. There were visitors in the room, but not as many as I’d seen heading up to the more popular treasure rooms.

‘You like the Black Pyramid?’ he asked. He smiled. His teeth were yellow and there were a few missing.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And symbols like this one.’ I pointed at the papyrus fragment with the arrow in a square symbol. ‘That symbol has been found in Jerusalem.’

His smile faded. ‘I must go,’ he said.

He walked fast from the room. I studied the papyri fragment, then the others in the surrounding cases. Then I looked in all the cases in the room to see if I could see the same symbol on any other papyri, but I couldn’t. I looked at my watch.

It was 9.50 a.m. I had maybe twenty more minutes. It was just enough time to look at some of the other rooms. I followed in the wake of some Japanese tourists heading towards the stairs.

As we reached the staircase an alarm started. Two nearby guards in brown uniforms began waving their hands in the air. ‘Everyone must go outside,’ they shouted. ‘Please, you must go.’

People were streaming toward the doors. I followed. Whatever was happening, a fire drill or a security alert, they were getting everyone out of the place fast. A twinge of anxiety passed through me. A bomb could be about to explode.

Outside, in the courtyard, guards ushered people towards a far corner, presumably to wait to go back inside. I glanced at my watch again.

I had no time for hanging around. I headed for the gate, then walked back to our hotel and went up to our room. It was still only twenty past ten. Isabel was packing toiletries. My backpack was waiting near the door where I’d left it.

‘The museum was evacuated while I was there,’ I said to Isabel, as I poured myself some water.

‘Did you get to see what you wanted?’

‘I did, but I was hoping to find other papyri with that symbol.’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just some symbol.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’

We were at the front of the hotel by 10.31 a.m. It was a narrow entrance with cars dropping off regularly. Some of the windows of the hotel were boarded up, but there were men working already to replace the glass.

Mark arrived ten minutes late. He left his engine running as he got out to open the back for us.

As I put our backpacks in, he said, ‘There’s been a security alert at the museum. The traffic around here is going to make it a nightmare to get to Taba on time. That’s why I’m late.’

Xena was not with him. He was driving himself. I sat in the front beside him. We inched our way through the traffic, and then, after half an hour of shuffling forward through packed streets, he found an elevated highway. Sand-coloured apartment buildings and office blocks three and four storeys high stretched away to the horizon in all directions. A haze, like a sandstorm, hung over the city.

All the houses, except for neighbourhood mosques, had flat roofs out here in the suburbs. Most of them had skeletal poles sticking up into the sky at each corner of the roof to accommodate a new floor, when a son or relative needed somewhere to live. There were piles of building materials and clothes lines and sacks of God only knew what on most of the roofs. The traffic was a constant flow of vehicles around us, an endless stream of logs moving down the tributaries of a river.

I saw a sign for the ring road in English and Arabic. Ten minutes later we were moving a lot faster, leaving the smoky haze of Cairo behind. I looked out through the back window. There was so much I hadn’t seen; the tourist sites mainly. I was determined to go back some day. The Nile, in particular, gave the place a grandeur as it flowed like a giant snake through the city.

We went through the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel, under the Suez Canal. It was modern and not very busy. We passed a line of trucks festooned with lights, going the other way. Once we were through we headed south. Much of the landscape was scrub and semi-desert now, though there were occasional villages with tall palm trees, goats and low, flat-roofed mud-brick houses with television antennas or satellite dishes. Some had wooden verandas projecting from their upper floors.

We stopped at a modern Co-op petrol station. It had miniature palm trees in front of it. At the side of the station there was a donkey and cart and an old Bedouin in an off-white headdress. He didn’t even glance at us. We all got out, stretched our legs. I bought French chocolate, Egyptian water and dates. Isabel found orange juice, but it didn’t taste right again.

Four hours later, the road was twisting and turning as it headed towards red-tinted mountains, off to our right. As they came closer they looked like mountains of sand, solidified, like something you might see on a relay from Mars. Among them, said Mark, was Mount Sinai, where Moses was given the Ten Commandments. The scrub and desert to our left extended off into a haze, broken by low bushes and occasional hills of sand or rock.

As we skirted the Sinai Mountains the landscape became paler in the afternoon light. Finally, as we neared the Red Sea the hills became rounded, more like sand hills than mountains. There were few people on the road except for the occasional bus, army lorries and trucks. Twice we passed Bedouins on camels by the side of the road.

As we approached the Israeli border we were stopped at a military checkpoint by the Egyptian army. We were all asked to produce our passports. Getting through wasn’t a difficulty. An officer spoke on a walkie talkie for a few minutes before letting us go on.

‘You’re lucky you’re with me. A lot of independent tourists have been turned back in the last few weeks,’ said Mark, after we got our passports back.

‘Why’s that?’ I said.

‘There was a roadside bomb on the Israeli side of the border last month. With everything that’s going on because of the new elections, and all the stuff that’s happening in Gaza, everyone’s jittery,’ he said.

I was tired at that point. My eyes were hurting after looking out at the sunbaked landscape for too long.

Luckily, Mark had tuned the radio to the BBC on a digital radio he had set up in the car. I couldn’t have taken listening to him chattering for hours. But as we approached the Israeli border he turned the radio down and began talking.

‘Taba was an Egyptian Bedouin village before ’46,’ he said. ‘The Israelis didn’t even want to return it after the Sinai Peninsula was handed back to Egypt in ’79. It didn’t actually become Egyptian again until 1988.’

Isabel groaned. ‘I’m sure Sean doesn’t want a history lesson, Mark,’ she said.

Mark shook his head. ‘You were always a bit touchy when you were tired, Isabel.’ He kept his gaze on the road ahead.

‘It only seems to happen when I’m around you,’ she said.

I couldn’t help but smile.

There was a long pause before Mark replied. ‘If you want anything else after this, Isabel, make sure you lose my number.’

She didn’t reply to that. We were coming up to what looked like the border post. We’d joined another highway and the Gulf of Aqaba was to our right now. It was a deep-looking, wave-flecked blue stretching away into a distant haze of land beyond it, which must have been Jordan.

Mark parked near a two-storey white concrete building with a glass entrance hall. The Egyptian flag was flying in front of the building. There were two sand-coloured military jeeps and four soldiers standing nearby cradling black machine guns. They were all staring in our direction.

‘Wait here,’ said Mark.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ said Isabel.

We waited, then waited some more. After half an hour I got out and had a walk around. There was a row of shops on the main road. I went and got water for Isabel. There was an English language Egyptian paper,
The
Egypt Times
in the newspaper rack. I bought it, stopping to look at the front page before I went back.

The lead story was an interview with an unnamed Egyptian army spokesperson. The article claimed there was a possibility of an Israeli surprise attack on Egypt in the near future. It said the Egyptian army was making all necessary plans to defend the nation. The army, they claimed, was confident they could defeat the Israelis.

The article was accompanied by a photo of a group of Egyptian schoolgirls wearing gas masks. A list of the military units defending Egypt, including 205 F-16s ready for action, was given in a side box along with a picture of
an air force pilot giving a thumbs up from his cockpit against a desert backdrop. Another article gave details of an anti-Israeli demonstration in Tahrir Square, planned for later that day, which a million people were expected to attend.

There was an article below that about an imam in Cairo who had been murdered. The headline had made reading it hard to resist:
Evil Spirits Kill Imam Say Locals.

By the time I got back to the car Mark had returned.

‘It’s all done,’ he said when I got in. ‘You can go through. I’ll drop you at the next checkpoint. But remember one thing.’ He turned to Isabel. ‘My friend won’t do this again. If you get into anymore trouble or meet anyone who was involved in your deportation, you’re on your own.’ He looked at me. His eyes were as hard as blue marbles.

‘We’re washing our hands of both of you.’

He drove us to the next checkpoint. The area was a mess of lamp posts, low concrete buildings, security cameras and rolls of razor wire on top of high mesh fences. The traffic going through was light. He pulled up near a pedestrian crossing, where other cars had stopped. He turned to us as he killed the engine.

‘I can drive you back to Cairo, Isabel. Why don’t you forget all this? You shouldn’t put yourself in anymore danger.’

‘What happened to you?’ she said. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Someone knock you on the head?’

‘No.’ He turned further in his seat. ‘I just don’t like the idea of you going back into Israel, that’s all.’

‘Should we be worried about something?’ she said. ‘Is there something you’re not telling us?’

His expression was troubled, as if he was struggling with himself.

‘There’s lots I’m not telling you,’ he said.

She sighed. ‘What about giving us a clue then? A hint as to why we shouldn’t go back.’

His voice went down a notch and he looked out of the window as he spoke. ‘Susan Hunter has been kidnapped. A brief signal from her phone was picked up west of Jerusalem a few days ago.’

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was what I’d feared. She hadn’t gone off into the desert somewhere, or into hiding.

‘Has there been any contact with whoever’s holding her?’ asked Isabel.

‘Not so far.’

This meant Susan could have been tortured or murdered grotesquely or she could be facing years in hellish captivity.

‘I won’t run back to London because of what’s happened to Susan,’ said Isabel.

‘It’s not just her being kidnapped that worries me,’ said Mark flatly.

‘What then?’ I said.