The Deceit

20

Ryan yawned. He was exhausted from the flights and car rides and nerve-shredding army checkpoints that had brought them here, right across Egypt, to the middle of the great reedy Nile Delta and the smoky modern city of Zagazig, with the ruins of Tell Bastet on its outskirts.

Helen’s frown was visible in the darkness.

‘How can you film down here?’ Ryan asked. ‘You can barely see the rat in front of your face.’

She laughed, briefly. ‘Sense of humour? That is good. I have a portable light here, in my bag. It will be good enough. I just need to set it up. This will take two minutes.’

Ryan sat back, in the piles of dust. Exactly what kind of dust it was, what comprised this dust, he had no idea, and did not especially care to speculate.

They were deep in the dark heart of the great cat necropolis, a labyrinth of tombs: surrounded by tiny three-thousand-year-old mud tunnels, each dotted with thousands of little niches in the walls. Almost every niche contained a mummified animal: a desiccated little corpse of a cat, wrapped diligently in special linens, and preserved with nitrates. Other niches probably contained jars of internal cat organs. A few most likely contained the mummies of less revered animals.

‘OK,’ said Helen, in the unsavoury darkness. ‘Nearly ready. One more second …’

‘Where is Albert?’

‘He is still with the guards, bribing them, making sure we have time and that no one interrupts us. We need to be quick though. Half an hour, I think. OK, start by telling us what you have discovered about the papyrus.’

‘Wait, you want to spend half an hour down here?’ Ryan stared around. The idea of lingering for more than a few minutes in this stifling maze of tunnels was grotesque. The air was acrid with death. Ryan wondered how many ancient diseases were preserved here. He thought of his wife and child, dead of malaria, an infection bred here, in the Delta.

‘Really, Helen. Can’t we film up above ground? Just do an intro?’

‘But here is better!’ Her smile was brief but sincere. ‘It is so atmospheric in a necropolis! A catacomb. Even the name is good. The catacombs of Bubastis. It will really work, trust me.’ She looked at him, smiled again. ‘Please?’

She’d said please. For the first time ever.

Ryan nodded and obeyed. He rubbed dirt from his face and turned to the dazzling light that Helen held aloft. Shadows danced beyond the cone of light, the shadows of little cat corpses, as he spoke.

‘We are now closer to unravelling the mystery of the Sokar Hoard. By comparing our pages with similar documents, in the archives of the Monastery of St Apollo, outside Akhmim, we now know a lot more about our papyrus. It appears to have been written in the late sixth century by a Coptic scholar from Akhmim named Macarius. Quite possibly, judging by the vocabulary we have translated, Macarius was a follower of Gnostic Christianity, certainly a scholar of religion. The papyrus seems to be an investigation into faith, in the form of a journey across Egypt, a very early travel book, if you like. These are not unknown in the ancient world. But most of this we have yet to translate. Yet we have already deciphered some of his sentences. For instance …’ Ryan coughed some of the endless dust from his mouth. The dust of dead cats. ‘For instance, in the very first passages, he says “I went to Alexandria, but there I found nothing, for there the great knowledge had been destroyed by the invaders. But it did not concern me as I had read all the books which came from Egypt. And so I went to …”’ Ryan paused, and turned his notebook to show the camera. ‘Here, Macarius uses hieroglyphics, as he often does when citing a place name. These hieroglyphics say Pr-3BST. As it happens, this is easily decipherable. Ironically, the demotic hieroglyphics are easier to translate than the obscure, archaic Coptic dialect. So. Pr-3BST is Per-Bast, the House of Bast. In other words, he means here, Bubastis, the city where the cat goddess Bast was famously revered.’

Ryan put down the notebook and gestured at the roof of the mud tunnel above him.

‘So here we are in the necropolis of cats, the city of the dead cats, underneath the ruins of great Bubastis. From the first days of the Early Kingdom to the Persian invasions of the fifth century BC, this famous capital — at one time the capital of all Egypt — was the centre of cat-worship. As a result, Egyptians and others brought cats here, by the cartload, to be mummified; some cats were specially bred just to be killed, ritually drowned, so they could then be mummified.

‘And it wasn’t just cats. Many species of animals were mummified throughout Egyptian history: dogs, rats, rams, fish, ibises, baboons and sacred crocodiles. And beetles. Scarab beetles.

‘The Egyptians were so obsessed with the afterlife they went so far as to mummify insects. The dust of Egypt is therefore littered with millions of these animal mummies: so many, in fact, they have since been used as fuel, or fertiliser, dug up by bulldozers and shipped abroad by the ton.’ Ryan now gestured at a little niche close to his shoulder. ‘But here in the Bubastic necropolis it is very definitely cats that predominate, as we can see. Here. If I just reach in …’

He slid his hands into the dark, dry, narrowing slot. He could feel the three-thousand-year-old cat, preserved within its gangrenous swaddling. The papery corpse was repellent to the touch. Desiccated yet still faintly organic, dry yet moist, paradoxical and revolting. He swallowed his disgust and pulled it out.

‘In my hands I have a classic example, probably a cat mummy dedicated by a poorer family or individual. The richer votaries would commission a coffin for the cat mummy, and Canopic jars for the organs. The poor would simply have their cat basically eviscerated and embalmed, like this one, as you can see.’

Ryan lifted the sad little corpse to the camera; the head was barely connected by the flaking spinal cord to the body, the fur was like dead ashes, the eyes were all rotted out, the greasy dark sockets gazing at him regretfully. Or accusingly. Disturbed from the sleep of death.

He was relieved when he was able to slide the tiny corpse back in its immemorial hole. And clap the noxious dust from his hands.

‘So why did Macarius come here? The text breaks off at this point, tantalizingly. The following passage is illegible. But as he was researching religion, he was surely researching the religiosity of Bubastis, which was intense and famous. At one point Bubastis was home to the greatest religious festival in Egypt, described by Herodotus. Apparently seven hundred thousand people would gather for the annual festival of Bast, travelling along the Nile to the Bubastis temples and oracles in great barges. And they came to party. Herodotus describes the excited women in the barges hurling off their clothes and mocking the peasants on the riverbank with their exposed genitals. And then the drinking and fornication would begin, a Dionysiac ritual, a vast bacchanal, days of dancing and coupling above the necropolis. It was the greatest orgy of the ancient world, perhaps the greatest orgy in human history.’

Ryan paused. He didn’t know why. Something was wrong, he was sure of it. The shadows of the cats danced around him. The dust was so thick. He cleared his throat and continued.

‘We can only imagine what Macarius thought about this vivid history. He may, like a good Christian, have been scandalized. On the other hand, some strains of Coptic Gnosticism already had a very unusual attitude to sexuality. A Greek scholar called Epiphanius journeyed to Egypt in 335 AD, and met a group of Gnostics whom he thought were ordinary Christians but he later called them Stratiotics, or Phibionites. He describes a group engaged in orgies, a cult that consumed semen and menstrual blood at the peak of their rites. Epiphanius even claims some Gnostics cooked human babies for Passover dinner.’

No. Something was wrong. There was a shadow — there — it was there, looming behind Helen: she couldn’t see it. He could hear it.

‘Helen!’

The black shape emerged into the cone of camera-light: it was an Arab man in a black cloak and a black beard. His face was wrought with anxiety.

‘Run!’ he said.

Ryan lifted a hand. And yelled in Arabic, ‘Why? What is happening? Who are you?’

The man pushed Helen in the back. ‘Run. There are men coming after us.’

Ryan snapped back, ‘Who? Who are they?’

But the man gabbled on, ‘We couldn’t stop them. I work in the gate. I ran for it. I was coming down here to warn you.’

His explanation was cut short by a blaze of noise and light at the far end of the tunnel. Their pursuers.

‘They have guns. They are going to kill us.’