The Sleeper in the Sands (15 page)

Yet I was not so dazzled that I was unable to see, standing upon the facing cliff, the figures of two Arabs. As I emerged from the tomb entrance, they had both turned away; yet even as I inspected them, one of them glanced round again and I knew him at once. It was my old adversary from Saqqara, the man I suspected of killing my birds; and I straight away began to run towards the path which climbed the cliff. As I did so, both men started back and I realised, to my shock, that the second of the natives was Ahmed Girigar. They both turned and then, as I reached the path, I lost sight of them. By the time I had reached the top of the cliff, there was no sign of either man, and though I sought to follow their tracks, the sands soon gave way to a bare expanse of rock. I pressed onwards, however, to Ahmed’s village. His house was empty, and as I walked away from it I felt that sense of disquiet, of brooding menace, which so often seems to wait upon silence in the East, bred from heat and stillness, and the gaze of veiled eyes.

Uncertain now as to what I should do, and feeling oddly perturbed, I made my way back towards the tomb. But as I approached it I heard Davis’s voice, and immediately I froze. As though it were a coating of fine white dust, lassitude and disappointment had settled on me; and I could not face any meeting with my erstwhile patron. Turning and retreating from the Valley of the Kings, I walked as firmly as I could back down the track; but it was hot now, unbearably so, and my knees felt weak from the pounding of the sun. All around me the landscape was shimmering, and the brightness blinded me. I would find nothing now, I thought. Why bother to continue with the search? Where, and for what?

I walked the several miles back to my quarters. I had the dingiest room in the town’s dingiest hotel and the air, like myself, was sticky with dust. I crossed to my bed. Not bothering to remove my clothes, I pulled back the sheet. There it lay. Had I been expecting it? It may well be -- for how else to explain my lack of surprise? I picked it up and for a moment inspected it - an amulet stamped with the image of the sun.

Then I dropped it on to the floor. Vaguely I heard it clatter on the boards, but I must already have been drifting away into sleep for it seemed to echo and echo as though amplified by my dreams. Yet all the while I thought myself awake, for it was still too hot to fall truly asleep. And thus it was that I was claimed by the onset of fever, bred from my exhaustion, and my disappointment, and the heat; and still, all the while, I believed myself awake.

When I saw reliefs upon the walls of my room, then, it was with the keenest sense of their verisimilitude. They were carved in the style of Akh-en-Aten’s reign, grotesque and deformed. As I watched them, they began to emerge from the plaster, their swollen heads swaying and their thick lips parted in imbecilic grins. They were soon crowding my bed. As they reached for me, so their limbs seemed to crackle and their heads began to sway all the more, like those of insects of a monstrous size. It struck me now that I was surely dreaming; and so I sought to open my eyes.

When I did so, I imagined that I was alone again in my room -- until I saw, at the foot of my bed, a single figure standing motionless. I met the figure’s stare. He seemed much like the others had been, thin-limbed and swollen-skulled, save that he wore upon his head a Pharaoh’s double crown, and his smile was not greedy but blank, just very blank. And then he was gone; and I started suddenly. I opened my eyes. Where the figure of the King had been in my dream, there was now another man.

Although he was standing in a silhouette, I knew him at once. ‘Have you come to kill me,’ I asked him slowly, ‘as you killed my birds?’

The man did not answer immediately. Only as I stirred and sat up did he speak at last, as though he were afraid I might otherwise rise to my feet. ‘I have never willingly,’ he whispered, ‘harmed any human soul.’

And indeed, such was the effect of his voice, such its tone of weariness and seeming despair that I did sit motionless on the side of my bed. I had not expected him to speak in such a way, not this man who had assaulted me and destroyed my career, and scrawled violent threats against me in blood. I frowned as I sought to make out his expression, but his face remained in shadow. ‘What is your business with me, then?’ I asked. I reached for the amulet where I had dropped it on the floor. ‘What does this mean?’

‘It is not for me to say’ the man whispered at last.

‘Then who can tell me?’

‘In the mosque of the Caliph al-Hakim, there you will find your answers.’

‘What will I find there, which I have not found already?’

The man sighed. ‘Go there,’ he shrugged. ‘Go, and find out.’

He turned and, as he did so, at last I rose to my feet. Wait!’ I called; but the man did not look round. I followed him and reached out to seize him by the arm, for I could not allow him to depart, not with so many questions still unanswered. He turned to confront me -- and at once I was struck dumb. Never, I thought, had I seen such an expression of defeat before, such a compound of anger and violent despair; yet although it was twisting the man’s face grotesquely, in his eyes there was still a glare of deep warning. ‘Ask as I have told you,’ he hissed. He met my own stare fleetingly then turned and passed from the room. I did not seek to follow him, for my fever was too bad. Instead, I could only wonder what could have occurred, what dark and unforeseen event, to have opened the way when all had seemed so lost -- to have unlocked the door to the minaret.

So indeed I continued to wonder, even as I climbed the steps to the door several days later, even as I knocked upon it and heard it being answered. I was met by the aged scholar who had confronted me before. He gestured at me to enter. I passed him and, as I did so, I was able to see how on his face too, as there had been on his lieutenant’s, there appeared the mark of some defeat. His eyes, which had affected me so remarkably before, had nothing of their former brightness; his skin hung loosely in folds off his skull; he appeared old, and shabby, and not impressive at all. He said nothing as he led me up a further spiral of steps and then guided me, at their summit, into a tiny square room. I looked about me but I could see nothing of any interest. My bemusement must have been evident, for the old man smiled very bitterly and gestured towards the far corner of the room, where I realised in the shadows stood a further door. ‘There,’ the old man whispered, and as he spoke I felt a soft chill, a flickering of that effect which he had induced in me before. He grinned, but very horribly, curling back his lip to expose his blackened teeth. ‘In there is what you seek.’

I attempted to smile back. ‘I am not sure what it is that I am seeking.’

‘The secret of Pharaoh.’ The old man’s eyes slowly narrowed into slits. ‘The secret of al-Vakhel.’

‘And what might that secret be?’

Still lower the old man’s eyelids drooped, so that it seemed he was almost drifting into sleep. ‘A burden,’ he whispered at last. ‘One which I have guarded in this mosque these many long years. And so, before me, another did the same, and before him another, in an unbroken line, stretching back to that time when the True Faith was young.’

‘Is it so terrible, then,’ I asked him, ‘this secret which you keep, that it cannot be betrayed?’

The old man parted his eyelids a fraction. ‘It is a secret,’ he murmured, ‘from the realms beyond death.’

I frowned. There was an uneasy silence, for I felt embarrassed by such talk, and uncertain how to respond. At length, I cleared my throat. ‘In that case,’ I asked him as casually as I could, ‘why have you permitted me to come here now?’

‘I have been persuaded,’ the old man answered, ‘that I had no choice.’

‘By whom?’

‘By those who understand the way the world now behaves.’

He paused and I waited in silence, not wishing now to interrupt him, for I could sense that he was wrestling with powerful scruples and fears. Lower still his eyelids flickered. ‘You have heard,’ he said at length, ‘the story of how a tomb was disturbed long ago. Since that time, in the place which you know as the Valley of the Kings, there have always been those who have guarded the tombs, to ensure that they could never be disturbed again.’

‘Ahmed Girigar?’ I asked.

The old man nodded his head imperceptibly. ‘He is, much like me, one in a very long line of guardians. Yet now, so he says, the times have changed. There are strangers in the Valley. These strangers have new methods, new ambitions. They cannot be stopped.’ He paused a moment. ‘Men like yourself.’

I raised my hands. ‘I do not dig for gold,’ I protested, ‘nor to desecrate long-buried secrets, but in the name of science and knowledge alone.’

The old man smiled very faintly. ‘So you say’ He paused. ‘And so Ahmed Girigar says as well.’ He reached suddenly for my hands and, taking them in his own, squeezed them tightly. ‘He says that, of all the foreigners at work in the Valley, you are the best. The most likely to believe in the dangers which lie buried -- and the least likely to be corrupted by greed.’

‘Then I am flattered,’ I answered him, ‘more flattered than I can say . . .’

But the old man dismissed my effusions with a sweep of his hand. ‘Tell me it is true,’ he whispered. He fixed me with his stare. Again, I felt myself falling into its depths and I struggled to free myself.

‘Tell me it is true,’ he repeated.

‘It is true,’ I replied.

The old man shuddered; he gripped my hands more tightly ‘Then I hold you to your claim,’ he whispered. ‘For be warned how it is written in the words of the All High, that every soul will be held in pledge for its deeds. There have been those like you, long before your time, who have sought to gain knowledge, and yet still have been damned.’

He dropped my hands and, reaching inside his robes, drew out a key. Without glancing at me again, he crossed to the door and unlocked it. He passed inside and then I saw, from the darkness, the flickering of a candle. I moved over to the door. ‘Close it behind you,’ the old man ordered. I did so, blinking for a moment to adjust to the light before looking about me. There were shelves along the walls, and upon each shelf a row of bottles. The bottles were filled with a clear, thick substance, and floating in the liquid were the parts of various limbs. I inspected them more closely. Here there was a foot, there a fragment of a forearm, the flesh very black and shrivelled on the bone.

‘Mummia’,
the old man whispered in my ear. I glanced round at him. ‘Mummy,’ he grinned, using the English word.

I nodded, but could not restrain a frown of disappointment. Such fragments of blackened corpses were two a penny in the bazaars, for it was a common native superstition, I knew, that they possessed medicinal powers. But where was the great secret in nonsense of that kind? I pointed to a bottle. ‘Is this all you wanted to show me?’ I asked.

The old man grinned again. ‘It is true,’ he answered, ‘that they will never suffer from the breath of putrefaction, as other flesh must do, but will endure instead for as long as time itself. Were the secret of their ageless state to be revealed to you, then would you not consider that a wonder enough?’

‘It is no wonder to me,’ I retorted, ‘not in the slightest. For the secrets of the mummification process, the embalming techniques employed by the priests, are scarcely mysteries to modern science.’

The old man’s grin broadened into a hideous grimace. ‘Is that so?’ he nodded. ‘Is that truly so?’ He swept up his robes and then, still holding the candle aloft, crossed to the darkest corner of the room. I saw him reach for another key. He inspected it by the candle light, then glanced back at me. ‘Your science cannot know it all,’ he said. ‘For there are mysteries known only to the wisdom of God, lest the sight of them should blast our feeble, clay-bred minds. Yet if you dare, sir . . .’ He beckoned.
‘If you dare.’

I crossed to join him. I could see in front of me a tiny grille, clearly guarding a niche in the wall. As I bent closer to inspect it, I breathed in deeply, for I could see that there was an image upon it, painted in the Muslim style but derived, it was evident, from a far more ancient source. ‘ “Those who believe not in the Hereafter”,’ the old man muttered, ‘ “name the angels with female names”.’ I glanced at him, then back at the painting. ‘But she is not an angel,’ I answered him. ‘Her name was Nefer-titi, and she was a Pharaoh’s queen.’

The old man laughed hollowly, and opened the grille to reveal a second one. Painted upon it was the familiar image of the sun with two worshippers kneeling beneath. The old man pointed to one of them. ‘This Pharaoh?’ he asked me. He paused a moment, as though in mockery, before his finger crossed to the second worshipper. ‘And this queen?’

I shrugged, and shook my head. ‘How can I know?’

‘You will know soon enough.’

‘The secret?’

‘Here it is.’ The old man fitted a key into the second grille; he turned the lock; he swung the grille open. Burning with impatience, I stared inside. There seemed to be nothing but a tattered manuscript. The old man glanced at me; then he reached for the manuscript reverently, and lifted it out. ‘Guard this well,’ he ordered. ‘For the worth of it may not be told, and its weight in diamonds would not purchase a thousandth part of it.’

I took it. How fragile it seemed, and stained with age! ‘But what is it?’ I asked.

‘Read it,’ the old man answered me sharply. ‘Why else would I have given it to you? Read it, Mr Carter -- read it and understand.’

And so I did.

Of course I did - for why else would I be sitting here now?

A copy of the manuscript lies before me on my desk. I pick it up, I glance at the first line. And then I raise my eyes, to see the stars where they burn above the Valley of the Kings.

I wonder. I wonder and hope -- and sometimes feel afraid.

Manuscript, copy made by Howard Carter of an original of uncertain authorship and date, discovered by him in the mosque of al-Hakim, March 1905

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MERCIFUL,
THE COMPASSIONATE, IN HIM I TRUST

Praise be to Allah, the Creator of All, who raised the Heavens and peopled the World, there is no guidance save in Allah! For want of His protection, the City of Brass was overthrown, even from the very height of its pride, and all its great works made as silent as the tomb, so that now, across its monstrous expanse, its giant statues of metal, its domes of lighted jewels, only the owls can be heard to lament. Or think upon that city of the worshippers of fire, they who failed to heed the mighty voice of Allah, and all of whom, save one, were transformed into stone. Or think upon Pharaoh of the vast domains: none was mightier than he, and in his pride he proclaimed himself a god. Yet still there is a Master who breathes upon armies, and who builds a narrow and dark house for Kings, and his name is Death. Where, then, is Pharaoh? Fallen, forever fallen, for want of Allah’s grace. Truly, there is no guide, save for Allah alone.