The Sleeper in the Sands (6 page)

We arrived back at last, feeling weary and depressed. Not surprisingly in view of our state, Blackden and Fraser asked us where we had been. I told them about our discovery of the quarry, but nothing more. I noticed, however, that they both exchanged glances, and I knew that our purpose would not remain a secret for long. Newberry himself was growing steadily more frantic as the days slipped by and nothing more was found; and the more frantic he grew, so the more haphazard our search came to seem.

At length, the period of our holiday came to an end and I prepared to return to my work in the tombs. Newberry, however, had other plans, for he told me he had arranged with my sponsors that I should move to El-Amarna, where Petrie had offered to train me up as an excavator. Of course, I knew full well what Newberry’s motive was in all this: he wanted his own man in residence on the site, so that he would learn at once of any significant finds. But what did I care? Petrie was the greatest archaeologist of the age -- and now he had offered to teach me all he knew. Me! - a mere draughtsman -- in Egyptological terms, the lowest of the low! What would I not have done to be granted such a chance? I had been in Egypt a bare few months, but already it had confirmed me in all my boyhood fascination, and I knew that it had become my great love and perhaps, I thought, my fate. The lure of its mysteries had me in their grip - and it had grown my profoundest hope that I too, one day, would be an archaeologist myself.

I trusted that Petrie, who was self-taught himself, would understand this ambition -- and yet it was just as well that I possessed it, for he was not to prove an easy taskmaster. I had learned before of his eccentricities; now I was to suffer their full effect. My first day he put me to building a hut; for I found that - like furniture and linen - servants were sternly tabooed. The result of my efforts could hardly rank as luxury -- nor could the conditions under which I was then set to work. There was to be no galloping about in the pursuit of lost tombs now; rather, a painstaking sifting of rubble and dust; no searching for hidden mysteries or treasure; rather for shattered statues, the fragments of pots, and all the scattered pieces of an impossible jigsaw. How I loathed my teacher, for he was a pedant of the most ruthless and bloody-minded kind. And yet how I reverenced him as well, for he was certainly a genius as Newberry had claimed, with the most extraordinary aptitude for interpreting history out of chaos. I began to understand, as I sweated and toiled beneath the midday sun, how archaeology is dependent upon meticulous research - not the giddy pursuit of some dramatic find, but rather the labour of months, perhaps even years, and the mapping of an infinite number of clues. Petrie taught me, in short, the ABC of my profession -- how an excavator must be a man of patience and of science.

Yet for all the enthusiasm with which I accepted these lessons, I sometimes found myself missing Newberry - his faith in the extraordinary, the sense of passion he had brought to his quest. Petrie, I knew, mistrusted such emotions, and it was with something almost like relish that he informed me one morning, as I was panning mounds of dirt, that some French officials had been seen upon the cliffs. ‘I won’t let them come
here,’
he proclaimed, extending his arms outwards to gesture at the plain, ‘for all this site has been allocated to me, and to me alone. But if the French want to come and have a poke amongst the cliffs, then, well. . .’ - he paused, and stroked his beard -- ‘I think we can guess what it is they hope to find.’

I was not surprised that same afternoon when Newberry joined us, for his expression made it clear that he had also heard the news. He told us that he was planning to pay a visit on the French, and asked us if we would care to accompany him. The three of us duly set off into the desert, Newberry appearing much distracted, when suddenly he froze and his face grew pale. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. We looked -- and saw the prints of boots in the sand. Such a sight in the desert is a rare enough thing, and so we at once set off in pursuit of the trail. It led us for several miles over the sands, and then into a jagged and savage ravine. Down ahead of us we could see two figures, and as we slithered after them the mystery was solved. It was Blackden and Fraser -- both leading mules which were loaded down with spades.

Newberry greeted the two men with barely suppressed fury. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ he exclaimed. When Blackden muttered an inaudible reply, Newberry seized him by his shirt. ‘
What have you been doing?’

Blackden suddenly laughed. ‘Why’ he answered coolly, ‘hunting for the tomb of Akh-en-Aten.’

Newberry breathed in deeply. ‘And did you not realise,’ he hissed, ‘that I was hunting for the tomb myself?’

‘Oh, indeed,’ Blackden replied. ‘But one man may observe what another man overlooks. For instance’ -- he drew out from his pocket a sheaf of papers -- ‘we have completed a survey of the quarry in the desert. You missed some intriguing Middle Kingdom graffiti.’ He handed the papers across. ‘I have taken the liberty of publishing the details myself.’

Newberry gazed at the papers in disbelief. ‘But . . . but I discovered the quarry,’ he stammered.

‘Not the graffiti though,’ Blackden replied. ‘Some of it is really very interesting indeed.’

‘Of course,’ Fraser added, ‘we perfectly understand that you were . . .
preoccupied , . .
with your search for Akh-en-Aten’s tomb. But that need not concern you any more. For we have just discovered’ -- he smiled maliciously -- ‘that the tomb has been found.’

‘Wha . . .’ Newberry mopped at his brow. ‘Where?’ he whispered. ‘Where?’

Fraser pointed. ‘At the end of the
wadi
.’

Newberry gazed at him in fury and disbelief. A spasm seemed to pass across his face, before he turned and hurried off.

‘There is no point in calling on them,’ Blackden called out. ‘We have just been there ourselves, and they are not allowing anyone to look at the tomb.’ But Newberry, if he had heard him, gave no sign of it but continued to storm his way up the valley. Neither Petrie nor I sought to follow him.

I heard later that he had abandoned his work altogether and left for England, vowing that he would never return to Egypt. A few months previously, perhaps, I would have been astonished at such a display of intemperance, and not believed that the search for a tomb could grow so desperate and obsessive, nor that it could breed such heated rivalries. Now, though, already I could understand it, perhaps even almost share in it myself. Certainly, as Petrie expressed it one evening, the affair did not leave a pleasant taste in the mouth. ‘Learn your lesson,’ he advised me. ‘Do not focus your energies on a single goal, for then you run the risk of missing much else.’ I nodded: the point was well made. But then I reached inside my pocket and felt the paper with the inscription I had copied from the quarry. There was another lesson too, I thought, which one could draw from the affair: if you have picked up a trail, then keep it to yourself. In Egypt, closeness did not have to be a fault.

Some days later, in early January, Petrie gained permission to visit the much-searched-for tomb. I accompanied him in a mood of considerable excitement, for I was still intrigued to know what wonders it might prove to contain. My imaginings, however, were to be sorely disappointed. The tomb itself seemed empty, and even the paintings on the wall had been vandalised. I gazed about me in puzzlement. Was this what Newberry had sought so desperately to find? I wondered again what he had been expecting to uncover. I could recall vague talk of a secret wisdom: a deadly secret, faintly remembered - transcribed into the folk tale of a restless King. I turned to the Frenchman who was showing Petrie round. ‘What of the mummy?’ I asked as I peered into the darkness. ‘Have you found any trace of Akh-en-Aten himself?’

The Frenchman answered my question with the wryest of smiles, and beckoned us to follow him. We passed into the darkness, along an endless corridor and then, descending steeply, down a flight of stone steps; beyond lay a chamber, pillared around its edges, and as the Frenchman lifted his torch I gazed about me at the burial room.

Everywhere there was evidence of the most violent destruction. Reliefs on the walls had been literally defaced, for wherever the heads or names of figures had been painted, the plaster on the stone had been gouged away. The floor was covered with rubble, and as we picked our way across it I recognised a shattered sarcophagus, its base barely distinguishable, for its sides, like the plaster, had been smashed into pieces. I bent down and picked up a fragment of the stone. Holding it to the light, I recognised it as granite. What an effort it must have cost to shatter this,’ I exclaimed. I looked about me again at the debris in the chamber. ‘It is as though someone wished to obliterate the very memory of the person who was laid here.’

‘Yes,’ nodded Petrie. ‘I do not think there can be much doubt on that score.’ He turned to the Frenchman. ‘Can you even be certain this was Akh-en-Aten’s tomb at all?’

The Frenchman replied in his own language, which I did not understand, but I saw him pointing to a cartouche -- the traditional oval which framed the name of every Pharaoh -- still preserved above the door. Petrie inspected it closely, then turned back to me. ‘Well’ -- he shrugged -- ‘a single cartouche, and that is all which has endured. It must have been overlooked in the general destruction.’

I shook my head, and gazed again about me at the ruin. ‘But why all this effort to destroy his name?’

‘Who can say? He was, after all, the Heretic King -- and heresies, by their nature, endanger established powers.’

‘You think, then, it was the priests of Amen who caused this to be done?’

Petrie picked up a fragment of the sarcophagus. ‘Doubtless,’ he answered, inspecting it closely. ‘He had closed down their temple, and threatened their power. They certainly had reason to execrate his memory.’ He paused, then crossed to a figure whose face had been obliterated. ‘And yet . . .’ he murmured, frowning. ‘And yet. . .’ He traced the hole which had been made in the plaster, and then a second. ‘The violence of the loathing is most certainly extraordinary. As though it expresses not just hatred, but almost a fear -- as though even his appearance could inspire them with terror. And not just Akh-en-Aten’s. For look . . .’ He pointed to a further painting on the wall. ‘See. Here are his children represented. They have all been defaced. And everywhere -- not only here, but throughout the length of Egypt -- we find the same thing repeated: an attempt to wipe out all memory of Akh-en-Aten and his line.’

‘Indeed?’ I gazed at him in surprise, i had not realised that. Surely his dynasty was the royal one?’

‘So it was.’ Petrie nodded to himself. ‘One which had borne a countless number of Pharaohs. And yet Akh-en-Aten’s two sons, so it seems, were the last.’

I struggled to remember what Newberry had told me of them before -- and especially of the King who had altered his name. ‘Tut-ankh-Amen?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ Petrie glanced at me. ‘I am surprised you know of him.’

‘I know of his name and nothing more.’

‘Then you know all there is to know. And of his predecessor, Smenkh-ka-Re, there is even less known. They reigned, they died - the rest is shadow. Such was the extent of the priests’ success. Before this century, and the first excavations here, no one even knew that such a king as Akh-en-Aten had ever reigned.’

‘I had not realised that the oblivion had been so complete.’

Petrie nodded. ‘Oh, yes. There is not a single mention of him in an extant Egyptian record. It seems that even his name was laid beneath a curse.’

‘Yes,’ I said softly. I thought of the legend of the restless King; and then I looked once again at the abandoned sarcophagus. ‘A terrible curse indeed.’

And certainly it was a relief, after our inspection of the chamber, to climb back to the doorway and catch a glimpse of the bright blue sky beyond. Petrie, I think - just like myself -- had been strangely disturbed by our visit to the tomb, for he brooded in silence as we walked back to the plain and seemed lost all that evening in a spirit of melancholy. Later, as we sat around the fire, he spoke of Akh-en-Aten, and the mysteries of his reign, in terms which reminded me almost of Newberry. ‘I imagined,’ he told me, ‘standing in the tomb, that the very air was infected with an ancient desolation. It is not my usual habit to acknowledge such a fancy, and yet -- in the darkness of that chamber -- how the shadows seemed to linger!’ He reached forward and prodded the fire, a trail of orange sparks rising and then fading into the night. ‘What secrets might that tomb not conceal,’ Petrie exclaimed suddenly, ‘to cause such an aura of evil and despair? For if any Pharaoh deserved a better memorial it was surely Akh-en-Aten. Not for him the ambitions of his conquering forefathers - their plundering, self-glorifying, pompous cruelties. Only the light, and the truth, and the life of the sun. And yet. . .’ -- Petrie paused, then frowned -- ‘I wonder . . .’ He rose to his feet; and gazed towards the distant silhouette of the cliffs. ‘How to explain what I felt in the tomb?’ He stood in silence a long while, then shrugged impatiently. ‘So many mysteries -- so few answers, it seems.’ His expression, I thought, appeared almost weary. ‘But such is ever the nature of our profession, I am afraid.’

Even so, it seemed that Petrie had still not wholly despaired of finding out more. Some days later he told me that he had gained permission for me to copy the reliefs from the walls, and so I found myself, for the second time, in Akh-en-Aten’s tomb. Petrie had not needed to tell me to keep my eyes open; yet although I had my own curiosity to satisfy as well as his own, I could discover nothing which struck me as especially strange. It was true that the ruin of the frescoes had not been as total as had at first been assumed: in one of the side-chambers especially, entire scenes could be made out, barely damaged at all. The most striking was also the most pathetic and affecting: the King and Queen were shown in mourning for a child, a little girl, laid out upon a bier. The King was clearly weeping and I was affected -- studying this portrait of love, this outgushing from the heart of a man long dead and gone -- with the strangest sense that he was not dead at all but behind me, bent low across his daughter, casting the funeral dust into the air. I spun round, startled -- there was no one there, of course. But at the same moment, even as I turned, my eye was caught by something else and, as I saw it in my torch-beam, I felt my heart seem to stop.