‘Come, if you don’t want to die! It rains a torrent once a year, or perhaps once a decade. Like that diamond in coals, some water remains.’
I joined in. At first the exercise seemed pointless, the hot grit burning my hands. Yet gradually the sand grew gratefully cool and then, astonishingly, damp. Smelling water, I began throwing sand away like a terrier. At last we reached true moisture. Water oozed, so thick with sediment it was like coagulating blood.
‘I can’t drink mud!’ I reached to dig again.
Ashraf grabbed my arm and rocked us back on our heels. ‘The desert asks patience. This water may have come from a century ago. We can wait moments more.’
As I watched impatiently, sweet liquid began to pool in the depression we’d dug. The horses snorted and whinnied.
‘Not yet, my companions, not yet,’ Ash soothed.
It was the shallowest bowl I’d ever seen, and as welcome as a river. After an eternity we bent to kiss our puddle, like Muslims bowing to Mecca. As I lapped and swallowed the dirty leakage it gave me a shiver and a glow. What bags of water we are, so helpless if not constantly replenished! We slurped until we’d drained it back to mud, sat back, regarded each other, and laughed. Our drinking had made a circle of clean wetness around our lips, while the rest of our face was painted with dust. We looked like clowns. There was an impatient wait for our meagre well to refill and then we cupped some for the horses, guarding that they didn’t drink too much too soon. As dusk settled this became our job, carrying water in a saddlebag to the thirsty mounts, sipping ourselves, and slowly mopping the rest of the grit from our heads and hands. I began to feel faintly human again. The first stars popped out, and I realised I hadn’t heard any sounds of French pursuit for some time. Then the full panoply of the heavens blossomed, and the rocks glowed silver.
‘Welcome to the desert,’ Ashraf said.
‘I’m hungry.’
He grinned. ‘That means you’re alive.’
It grew cold but even if we’d had wood, we dared not light a fire. Instead we huddled and talked, giving each other small comfort by sharing our grief about Talma and Enoch, and small hope as we talked about vague futures: with Astiza for me, and with Egypt as a whole for Ash.
‘The Mamelukes are exploitive, it is true,’ he admitted. ‘We could learn things from your French savants, just as they learn from us. But Egypt must be ruled by the people who live here, Ethan, not pink-skinned Franks.’
‘Can’t there be a collaboration of both?’
‘I don’t think so. Would Paris want an Arab on its town council, even if the imam had the wisdom of Thoth? No. This is not human nature. Suppose a god came down from the sky with answers to all questions. Would we listen, or nail him to a cross?’
‘We all know the answer to that one. So each man to his place, Ash?’
‘And wisdom to its place. I think this is what Enoch was trying to do, to keep Egypt’s wisdom locked away where it belongs, as the ancients decided.’
‘Even if they could levitate rocks or make people live forever?’
‘Things lose value if they’re done too easily. If any nation or man could make a pyramid with magic, then it becomes no more remarkable than a hill. And live forever? Anyone with eyes can see that this goes against all nature. Imagine a world full of the old, a world with few children, a world in which there was no hope of advancement because every office was filled with patriarchs who had got there centuries ahead of you. This would not be a paradise, it would be a hell of caution and conservatism, of stale ideas and shopworn sayings, of old grudges and remembered slights. Do we fear death? Of course. But it is death that makes room for birth, and the cycle of life is as natural as the rise and fall of the Nile. Death is our last and greatest duty.’
We waited a day to make sure the French weren’t waiting for us. Then, assuming a lack of water had driven them back to Cairo, we started south, travelling at night to avoid the worst of the heat. We paralleled the Nile but stayed many miles to the east to avoid detection, even though it was a struggle to negotiate the serpentine hills. Our plan was to catch up with Desaix’s main column of troops, where Silano and Astiza rode. I would pursue the count as the French pursued the Mameluke insurgents up the river. Eventually I would rescue Astiza, and Ashraf would have revenge on whoever had killed poor Enoch. We would find the staff of Min, unscramble the way into the Great Pyramid, and find the long-lost Book of Thoth, protecting it from the occult Egyptian Rite. And then… would we secrete it, destroy it, or keep it for ourselves? I would cross that bridge when I came to it, as old Ben would say.
Along our way, we found nests of life in the desert after all. A Coptic monastery of brown domed buildings sprouted like mushrooms in a forest of rock, a garden of palms promising the presence of a well. The Mameluke habit of carrying their wealth into battle now displayed a practical purpose: Ashraf had retrieved the purse he’d thrown at me and had enough coins to purchase food. We drank our fill, bought larger water bags, and found more wells as we continued south, spaced like inns on an invisible highway. The dried fruit and unleavened bread was simple but sustaining, and my companion showed how to coat my cracked lips with mutton fat to keep them from blistering. I was beginning to become more comfortable in the desert. The sand became a bed, and my loose robes – washed of donkey stink – caught every cooling breeze. Where before I had seen desolation, now I began to see beauty: there were a thousand subtle colours in the sinuous rocks, a play of light and shadow against crumbled white limestone, and a magnificent emptiness that seemed to fill the soul. The simplicity and serenity reminded me of the pyramids.
Occasionally we would zigzag closer to the Nile, and Ashraf would descend to a village at night to barter as a Mameluke for food and water. I’d stay up in the barren hills, overlooking the serene green belt of farmland and blue river. Sometimes the wind would bring the sound of camel or donkey bray, the laughter of children, or the call to prayer. I would sit on the edge, an alien peeking in. Toward dawn he would rejoin me, we’d make a few miles, and then as the sun rose over the cliffs we’d shovel away sand at places he knew and creep into old caves cut into the bluffs.
‘These are tombs of the ancients,’ Ash would explain, as we risked a small fire to cook whatever he had bartered for, using purchased charcoal and washing our meal down with tea. ‘These caves were hollowed out thousands of years ago.’ They were half-filled with drifting sand, but still magnificent. Columns carved like bundles of papyrus held up the stone roof. Bright murals decorated the walls. Unlike the barren granite of the Great Pyramid, here was a representation of life in a place of death, painted in a hundred colours. Boys wrestled. Girls danced and played. Nets drew in swarms of fish. Old kings were enveloped in trees of life, each leaf representing a year. Animals roamed in imagined forests. Boats floated on painted rivers where hippos reared and crocodiles swam. Birds filled the air. There were no skulls or morbid ravens as in Europe or America, but instead paintings that evoked a lush, wild, happier Egypt than the one I was traversing now.
‘It looks like a paradise in those days,’ I said. ‘Green, uncrowded, rich, and predictable. You don’t sense a fear of invasion, or a dread of tyrants. It’s as Astiza said, better then than at any time afterward.’
‘In the best times the whole land was united upriver as far as the third or fourth cataract,’ Ashraf agreed. ‘Egyptian ships sailed from the Mediterranean to Aswan, and caravans brought riches from Nubia and lands like Punt and Sheba. Mountains yielded gold and gems. Black monarchs brought ivory and spices. Kings hunted lion in the desert fringe. And each year the Nile would rise to water and renew the valley with silt, just as it is doing now. It will peak about the time you said your calendar indicated, on October 21 ^ st. Each year the priests watched the stars and zodiac to keep track of the optimal times for sowing and reaping and measured the level of the Nile.’ He pointed to some of the pictures. ‘Here the people, even the noblest, bring offerings to the temple to ensure the cycle continues. There were beautiful temples up and down the Nile.’
‘And the priests took those offerings.’
‘Yes.’
‘For a flooding that occurred every year anyway.’
He smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s the profession for me. Predict that the seasons will turn, the sun will come up, and rake in the common people’s gratitude.’
‘Except it was not predictable. Some years there was no flood, and famine followed. You probably didn’t want to be a priest then.’
‘I’m betting they had some good excuse for the drought and asked people to double the tribute.’ I have an
