medallion means will I give you back the remainder.’
‘This is fair,’ said Astiza.
‘And it shows you have the wisdom of the ancients!’ Ashraf said. ‘Agreed! Allah, Jesus, and Horus be with you!’
I was pretty sure such inclusion was blasphemy in at least three religions, but never mind: he might do well as a Freemason. ‘Tell me about your brother.’
‘He is a very strange man, like you; you will like him. Enoch cares nothing for politics but everything for knowledge. He and I are nothing alike, because I am of this world and he is of another. But I love and respect him. He knows eight languages, including yours. He has more books than the sultan in Constantinople has wives.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘Oh yes.’
And so we came to Enoch’s house. Like all Cairo habitations the outside was plain, a three-story edifice with tiny, slitlike windows and a massive wooden door with a small iron grill. At first Ashraf’s hammering brought no answer. Had Enoch fled with the Mameluke beys? But finally a peephole behind the grill was opened, Ash shouted imprecations in Arabic, and the door cracked open. A gigantic black butler named Mustafa ushered us inside.
The relief from the heat was immediate. We passed through a small open atrium to a courtyard with murmuring fountain and shading orange trees. The home’s architecture seemed to create a gentle breeze. An ornate wooden stair climbed one side of the court to screened rooms above. Beyond was the main living room, floored in intricate Moorish tile and covered at one end with oriental carpets and cushions, where guests could lounge. At the opposite end was a screened balcony where women could listen to the conversation of the men below. The beamed ceiling was ornate, the arches pleasingly peaked, and the sculpted bookcases crammed with volumes. Draperies billowed in puffs of desert air. Talma mopped his face. ‘It’s what I dreamt.’
We didn’t stop here, however. Mustafa led us through a smaller courtyard beyond, bare except for an alabaster pedestal carved with mysterious signs. Above was a square of brilliantly blue sky at the top of towering white walls. The sun illuminated one side like snow and cast the opposite into shadow.
‘It’s a light well,’ Astiza murmured.
‘A what?’
‘Such wells at the pyramids were used for measuring time. At the summer solstice, the sun would be directly overhead, casting no shadow. That is how the priests could pinpoint the longest day of the year.’
‘Yes, that is right!’ Ashraf confirmed. ‘It told the seasons and predicted the rising of the Nile.’
‘Why did they need to know that?’
‘When the Nile rose, the farms flooded and labour was freed for other projects, like building pyramids,’ Astiza said. ‘The Nile’s cycle was the cycle of Egypt. The measurement of time was the beginning of civilisation. People had to be assigned to keep track of it, and became priests, and thought of all kinds of other useful things for people to do.’
Beyond was a large room as dim as the courtyard was bright. It was crowded with dusty statuary, broken stone vessels, and chunks of wall with colourful Egyptian painting. Red-skinned men and yellow-skinned women posed in the stiff yet graceful poses I’d seen on the tablet in the hold of L’Orient. There were jackal-headed gods, the cat goddess Bastet, stiffly serene pharaohs, black-polished falcons, and blocky wooden cases with life-sized paintings of humans on the outside. Talma had already described these elaborate coffins to me. They held mummies.
The scribe stopped before one in excitement. ‘Are these real?’ he exclaimed. ‘A source like this could cure all my illnesses…’
I pulled. ‘Come on before you choke to death.’
‘These are cases from which the mummies have been removed,’ Ashraf told him. ‘Thieves would discard the coffins, but Enoch has let it be known he will pay to collect them. He thinks their decoration is another key to the past.’
I saw that some were covered with hieroglyphics as well as drawings. ‘Why write on something that would be buried?’ I asked.
‘It may be to instruct the dead through the perils of the underworld, my brother says. For us the living, they are useful to store things in because most people are too superstitious to look inside. They fear a curse.’
A narrow stone staircase at the rear of the room led down to a large vaulted cellar lit by lamps. At Ashraf’s invitation, we descended to a large library. It was roofed with barrel vaults and floored with stone, dry and cool. Its wooden shelves were crammed floor to ceiling with books, journals, scrolls, and sheaves of parchment. Some bindings were sturdy leather, light glinting on gold lettering. Other tomes, often in strange languages, seemed held together by tendrils of old fabric, their smell as musty as the grave. At a central table, half the size of a barn door, sat the bent figure of a man.
‘Greetings, my brother,’ Ashraf said in English.
Enoch looked up from his writing. He was older than Ashraf, bald, with a fringe of long grey locks and a heavy beard, looking as if Newton’s gravity had tugged all his hair toward his sandals. Dressed in grey robes, he was hawk-nosed and bright-eyed and his skin was the colour of the parchment he’d been bent over. He carried an air of serenity few people achieve, his eyes betraying a hint of mischief.
‘So the French are occupying even my library?’ The tone was wry.
‘No, they come as friends, and the tall one is an American. His friend is a French scribe…’
‘Who is interested in my dehydrated companion,’ Enoch said with amusement. Talma was staring, transfixed, at a mummy posed upright in an open coffin in one corner. This casket, too, was covered with fine, indecipherable writing. The mummy was stripped of bandages, some of the old linen in a tangle at its feet, and incisions had been made in its chest cavity. There was nothing reassuring about the body, a dark brownish-grey looking starved from the drying, the eyes closed, the nose a snub, the mouth open in a rictus that showed small, white teeth. I found it disturbing.
Talma, however, was happy as sheep in clover. ‘Is this truly ancient?’ he breathed. ‘An attempt at everlasting life?’
‘Antoine, I think they failed,’ I observed dryly.
‘Not necessarily,’ Enoch said. ‘To the Egyptians, the preservation of the dead physical body was a requirement for everlasting life. According to accounts that have come down to us, the ancients believed the individual consisted of three parts: his physical body, his ba – which we might call character – and his ka, or life force. These last two combined are equivalent to our modern soul. Ba and ka had to find each other and unite in a perilous underworld as the sun, Ra, journeyed each night through it, in order to form an immortal akh that would live amid the gods. The mummy was their daytime home until this task was completed. Instead of separating the material and the spiritual, Egyptian religion combined them.’
‘ Ba, ka, and Ra? Sounds like a firm of solicitors.’ I was always uncomfortable with the spiritual.
Enoch ignored me. ‘I have decided the journey of this one should be completed by now. I’ve unwrapped and cut him to investigate ancient embalming techniques.’
‘There is talk these tissues could have medicinal qualities,’ Talma said.
‘Which distorts what Egyptians believed,’ Enoch replied. ‘The body was a home to be animated, not the essence of life itself. Just as you are more than your ailments, scribe. You know, your trade as scribe was that of the wise Thoth.’
‘I’m actually a journalist, come to record Egypt’s liberation,’ Talma said.
‘How artfully you put that.’ Enoch looked at Astiza. ‘And we have another guest, as well?’
‘She is a…’ Ashraf began.
‘Servant,’ Enoch finished. He looked at her curiously. ‘So you have come back.’
Blimey, did these two know each other as well?
‘The gods appear to have willed it.’ She cast her eyes down. ‘My master is dead, killed by Napoleon himself, and my new master is the American.’
‘An intriguing twist of fate.’
Ashraf moved forward to embrace his brother. ‘It is also by the grace of all the gods and the mercy of these three that I’ve seen you again, brother! I’d made my peace and prepared for paradise, but then I was captured!’
‘You’re now their slave?’
