The Deceit

28

They sat in the sad little garden behind the Luxor temple. The distant feluccas twinkled on the Nile like silver-winged insects come to feed on nectar; the river breeze carried scents of jasmine and donkey dung.

The city was awakening, the shop owners unshuttering their stalls of bogus antiquities and phoney papyri, the horse-carriages — caleches — waiting, brasses jangling, for tourists who would never show up.

Ryan felt a little empty himself, translucent with tiredness. They were all exhausted — Helen and himself, their two protectors Callum and Simon — all of them yawned and drooped — all apart from Albert Hanna.

He had fuelled himself, during their manic desert drive from Cairo, with copious amounts of Scotch. And still he was as ebullient as ever.

Picking up a stick, Albert gestured at a scowling Arab shopkeeper. ‘They’re really quite moody in the morning, the Mussulman. I’ve noticed this, but can’t explain it. Surely they should all be in a good mood, because they are so clear-headed. “Another morning without a hangover! Allahu Akhbar!”’ He grinned. ‘And yet I am in a better mood than them. And I got exceptionally drunk last night.’

‘Albert, they are all going bankrupt: their industry is dying.’

The Copt smoothed his goatee and ignored Helen’s remark. ‘This proves the superiority of the Christian West. You people get so much done, despite being alcoholics.’ He smirked at Ryan. ‘That said, one simply has to wonder what the West might have achieved without the crippling effects of gin. The British would probably have invaded the moon.’

Callum interrupted. ‘Guys. This isn’t good. No tourists at all. Not even a Jap with a cameraphone.’ He gestured at the square, and the empty caleches with the bored horses. ‘We’re way too conspicuous.’ He turned to Ryan, who was once more poring over the Macarius papyrus. ‘Any joy?’

‘No,’ Ryan confessed. He’d spent most of the arduous, checkpoint-avoiding desert drive from Cairo desperately trying to decipher the next part of the papyrus. They had hoped to go to Amarna, but it had proved too dangerous, sealed off from all visitors by the troubles; so they had come straight to Luxor, doubling their journey. Yet even this extra time had not been sufficient for him to crack this part of the text.

In his thoughts, Ryan could see Sassoon shaking his wise and teacherly head; he could see Rhiannon, disappointed. Had he given it all up for nothing?

Helen gently nudged his arm. Sympathetic and half-smiling. Her attitude to him seemed to have changed over the days: she was warmer. She smiled more, despite the anxiety and fear. ‘Tell us again, what exactly it does say.’

She was filming him, discreetly. Ryan was too exhausted to feel self-conscious. He gazed down at the papyrus. And spoke.

‘The beginning is clear enough. “I travelled for many days, along the river, arriving at the Temple of Amun at Diospolis.” But where is Diospolis? Well, the Greeks had a pretty logical system for renaming Egyptian cities: they simply said, this is the city where such-and-such a god was worshipped. Consequently, Diospolis means the city where Zeus — or Dios — was worshipped.’ Ryan stood — and Helen’s camera followed him. ‘But when the Greeks said Dios they meant the supreme god Amun-Ra, worshipped here at the great Temple of the Sun at Thebes. The city now known as Luxor.’

He stretched his arm and Helen panned the camera, taking in the mighty stone pylons and the enormous, lotus-headed pillars of the Luxor temple. The whole place was glowing in the hot morning sun. The colossus of Rameses stared at Ryan, indifferent and supreme, and hiding its enormous secret. Behind them the avenue of sphinxes stretched for miles along the Nile, all the way to Karnak. A parade of royal cats, with human faces. What was the Egyptian obsession with the cat? Did it fit in somehow?

Ryan focussed. Face towards the lens. ‘The question is obvious. What did our scholar Macarius find here? In his own words he says he went inside the temple, “and there I found the great secret … which I took with me up the river”. But after the word “secret”, Macarius reverts to obscure symbols, which I have transcribed here.’ Helen focussed the lens on a sheet of paper in Ryan’s other hand. Ryan had drawn the symbols double-sized, not that this had helped him interpret their meaning.

He showed them to the camera.

‘What language is this? What alphabet? The symbols are basic, simplistic, almost runic, the kind of symbols you would cut into stone. We cannot translate them. Whatever secret Macarius found here remains concealed.’ Ryan stopped talking. A policeman was staring at them from the square, beyond the temple forecourt.

Albert Hanna muttered, ‘That’s it, monsieur? You don’t know? You’ve given up?’

‘I just … can’t translate. Helen can’t work it out, you can’t work it out — we’re stuck.’

‘Let me, if you will, have one more attempt.’ Albert took the sheet of paper and traced the symbols with his finger. ‘Hmm …’ The goatee-stroking implied that he was thinking hard. But then, abruptly, he handed the paper back to Ryan. ‘Pff. As you say, they look faintly runic. But they aren’t Viking runes. I have seen the runes carved by the Varangian guards in the marble of Hagia Sophia, and these aren’t runes. Perhaps we should just move on to the Cataracts of Philae: we are starting to attract attention from les gendarmes.’ He nodded in the direction of the caleches, where three policemen were now staring at them.

‘We do not have permission to film,’ said Helen. ‘It would not matter normally because there would be so many tourists. But we are standing out now. They might want a bribe.’

‘Or they might have been asked to watch out for people like us,’ said Callum. ‘The Israelis have satellites. They could have followed us across the desert. Who knows? They are certainly baksheeshing half the fucking cops between Aswan and Alexandria. We’re wanted. Dead or alive. Mainly dead. This is not a joke. What’s more, we can’t help you against the cops. We can protect you from the Israelis, but if you get in trouble with the Egyptians, in Egypt, that’s different. We can’t fight the fucking army. If you go in the temple and the cops stop you, you’re on your own. If anything happens we’ll meet at the next place on the list. What is it?’

‘The Valley of the Nobles,’ said Ryan.

‘Yeah. There. At four p.m.? But this temple: that’s up to you. We’ll be just down the road. Somewhere very discreet.’

‘But we do not know where we need to go in the temple.’ Helen sighed. ‘We are stuck.’

‘No, you’re not.’

Everyone swivelled. The Canadian guard, Simon, who was normally taciturn to the point of muteness, was holding Ryan’s discarded sheet of paper, with the transcribed symbols.

‘It’s a route map.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s just a damn route map. It’s the way you would write down a route — if you wanted to write a route like a series of letters. In a line. This is how you’d do it.’

Ryan stared down at the paper.

‘Look.’ Simon tutted. ‘Here. Look. He’s saying go straight on then dog leg. Next go right then ahead. Right? Then do a U-turn. Get it? It’s a route into the temple. And the X marks the damn spot. Capisce?’

The solution was so simple and obvious it was somewhat crushing.

‘We are a collection of ignorami,’ said Hanna, but Helen was already dragging them in her wake to the gate of the temple. Callum and Simon remained behind, gesturing at their watches, as they slipped into the shadows.

For the moment, they really were on their own. No protection.

Ryan took the sheet of paper from Simon, as Helen paid the bored gateman for their entrance to the Luxor temple.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘We have to go through the pylons, past the granite obelisk.’ Helen filmed him as they hurried between the great, slanted stone pylons, ochre and magnificent in the desert sun. It was a temple of shadows and dazzle, darkness and sunburn; Arab men lurked in the shadier spots: depressed and hapless guides, bereft of business, staring at their filthy sandals.

‘Speed the plough,’ said Albert. ‘Those police are coming, and I think they’re coming for us.’

‘Past the colossi,’ said Ryan. ‘Then diagonally left across the peristyle court.’ He glanced at the paper in his hand. ‘No, wait, we go right through the peristyle court.’ The shadows of the pillars had confused him for a moment. ‘The door, here, then through again.’

Hieroglyphs adorned the walls: Anubis and Horus, Isis and Hathor, the cow-eared goddess; then a winged dove, like the Holy Spirit, hovering over the dead Osiris.

Ryan recalled the history. Maybe there was a clue in the history. This temple of Luxor was for many centuries the very centre of Egyptian faith. Once a year the divine image of the sun god Amun, with his consort Nut, the goddess of night, would journey in their sacred barques from Karnak temple to celebrate the yearly inundation of the Nile, the annual heartbeat of the Egyptian nation. Thus, the king and country were reborn. Every year, year after year, for three thousand years this had happened; except for that strange interregnum — the monotheism of Akhenaten …

‘Ryan!’

His reverie was broken. Helen was gesturing. ‘The police!’

Their time was almost up. Ryan ran into a dark side chamber, on the eastern side. ‘This is it. This must be it. X marks the spot.’ He gazed around frantically. The antechamber was dark, and smelled of rotting citrus fruit. Probably the workmen took their lunch breaks here. But what was he looking for?

The walls were blackened with soot and obscured by scaffolding: restoration work had obviously begun, and then been abandoned, following the troubles.

‘Ryan!’

He knew he had just a few seconds left. Whatever he was looking for was on this tall, pitted eastern wall, but it was covered with badly eroded friezes. Which one did Macarius see? What was the great secret?

Something caught his eye. It was up there, above head height. Horus? Horus and Isis? Thoth and Neph. Yes! Ryan climbed onto the scaffolding and looked closer—

‘Ryan! They’re coming!’

He knew the scene showed the birth of Amenhotep III, the Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, father of Akhenaten; it had to be, that was the date of this part of the Luxor temple. But why was this particular frieze so important? Many of the symbols were so eroded that he had to feel them to understand their meaning: he had to read the Braille of Deep Time, going back through the centuries, reaching into the darkness, retrieving a concealed truth from thirty centuries ago—

‘Stop!’

He was halfway through, more than halfway through. His hands reached for the final panel, a goddess with a baby—

‘Stop now. You are arrested. Everyone is arrested.’

The police had pushed into the antechamber. Ryan was physically hauled down from the scaffold by several rough and violent hands. He fought the urge to punch, because it was pointless; Helen and Hanna were already being handcuffed, and led out of the chamber.

Ryan was handcuffed too. The Egyptian policeman shoved him out into the sun of the courtyard, where the lofty, fat columns gazed down.

Ryan realized that one of two things could now happen. Either this was a regular arrest, for illegal filming, for trespass, for simply being one of the few tourists left for the police to shake down, in which case they faced a few hours of interviews, then bribes.

Or these cops had been paid by the Israelis, and they would now be taken somewhere quiet, to be silenced. Forever.