The Deceit

31

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF. What did they signify? And the birth scene at the Luxor temple … how did they fit in? Somehow these random concepts, these shattered words, must form a beautiful poem. Just put them in order.

In the shadowy hallway Helen crouched in the archaic dust, slotting batteries in her camera. Albert Hanna leaned against a tubby Egyptian pillar, one of many in this wide, airy and rather beautiful old tomb.

Callum came in from the blazing daylight outside. ‘You guys done?’

‘Nearly,’ Helen lied, looking up from her camera.

‘OK, get to it.’ The blond-haired Brit swept the room with his gaze. ‘We’re outside. The light is going, another hour maybe. We do not want to be here after dark. Got that?’

‘Jawohl!’ said Hanna, like an obedient Wehrmacht corporal.

Callum didn’t laugh. Or smile. He looked at Hanna, and sighed. Then he spoke:

‘You know, we’ve all got families, guys. We all want to go home. Please hurry the fuck up and find what you need to find.’

The speech was unexpected. For the first time Ryan felt a kind of empathy, maybe even pity for these men: their protectors. They were risking their lives to protect their wards; or protect the secret in the Sokar Hoard, if they found it. Ryan watched Callum as he strode determinedly into the sunshine, now slanting along the Valley of the Nobles. Ryan wondered how much these ‘soldiers’ were being paid by the voice at the end of those discreet phone calls. Paid to take these terrible risks. He presumed it was a lot.

Callum was also correct about the dwindling time available. Judging by the angle of light slanting into the tomb through the open door, the day was indeed expiring.

During his Egyptological career Ryan had been to this place several times. The Valley of the Nobles was a couple of miles down the West Bank of the Nile from the Valley of the Kings, where all the Pharaohs were buried. This particular cul-de-sac of dust and crumbling stone was notable for concealed tombs — like this one — constructed for the viziers and chancellors of ancient Egypt. There was also a workmen’s village at the end of the Valley, where the keen traveller could find the footings and walls of mud houses: the poignantly humble accommodation of the men who built the tombs.

The Valley of the Nobles was less famous than the Valley of the Kings, or the mighty Ramesseum, or the Stalinist grandeur of the Temple of Hatshepsut, which were all just a few miles distant, across the desert that adjoined the Nile valley, yet it still, usually, saw plenty of visitors. Albert had told them that he also used to conduct tours here: tours in which he would escort hundreds of people a day through these very halls.

Yet today there was literally no one in the Valley. The little wooden ticket booths were padlocked. The empty car parks were patrolled by a lonely rock pigeon. Even the relentless hucksters with their cheap sunglasses, and bogus Books of the Dead, and chunks of Middle Kingdom Coffin Text made in China, had actually thrown up their arms to Allah, and returned to their homes in the ramshackle villages along the Nile. To fish, and smoke shisha, and talk of poverty and despair.

And so the echoing valleys of the Theban Necropolis had returned to their proper and immemorial silence, the silence that had been stolen from them so many centuries ago.

Ryan listened to that silence; he leaned against a pillar in the tomb and closed his eyes. And the silence rang in his ears. Nothingness. Nothingness, and death. Yes, Death was here, in these rocks. These valleys of secretive tombs, just like the Great Pyramids of Giza, were the jailhouse of Death, a place where death could be imprisoned: while the soul escaped.

And how would you escape a jail? By turning a lock with the key of life.

The ankh.

Ryan kept his eyes closed. The ankhs in the Coptic museum, that looked so much like crosses, that were used as crosses, could it be?

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF.

‘I am ready now.’

He was snapped out of his reverie by Helen. She repeated, ‘Ryan, I am ready now.’

‘Sorry. Er, yes. I’m ready too.’

‘So we film,’ she said, gesturing to the place where she wanted him to stand. ‘There, ja. Just in front of those wall paintings. They are beautiful.’

Hanna watched them, rather slyly, like a half-sleeping pet. His eyes glittered in the twilight of the tomb. Ryan wondered, aloud, ‘You have enough light? To film?’

‘I have all the light I need.’ Helen smiled at him. Her smile had new meaning. Ryan smiled back.

‘How touching,’ said Hanna.

Helen and Ryan swapped a glance, then she pressed the button and began recording. ‘So tell us, tell the camera, about this tomb.’

Ryan coughed, summoned his thoughts, and spoke to the lens. ‘Immediately after his visit, and his revelation, at the Luxor temple, Macarius came here, to the Tomb of Ramose.’ Ryan gestured at the row of portly, lotus-capped pillars beside him, and the windowless walls beyond, covered with fine reliefs and hieroglyphs. ‘Ramose is a significant figure in Egyptian history, because he straddled two eras. First, he was vizier, the Master of the Secrets of the Palace — a sort of prime minister — to the great Pharaoh Amenhotep III, of the Eighteenth Dynasty. But he was also vizier to Amenhotep’s son, the controversial heretic Pharaoh …’ Ryan stroked two quote marks, with his fingers, around the word ‘heretic’.

‘This Pharaoh was first known as Amenhotep IV, but he changed his name to Akhenaten.’ Ryan paused, for effect, then went on. ‘Pharaoh Akhenaten is a deeply controversial figure in Egyptian history. Some say he was a tyrant, some a man of great enlightenment; many assert that he was the first monotheist in history. What we know for sure is that Akhenaten revolutionized Egyptian society, and that wrenching change is visible and tangible in this tomb.’

Ryan pointed at one wall to his left. ‘See the differing styles in these reliefs? This wall at the eastern side is adorned with exquisite and detailed depictions of Ramose’s funeral procession, but they are traditional: serenely stiff and formal, with weeping women in profile making offerings of fish and wine, and sledges carrying Ramose’s placenta, and an image of Amenhotep IV rigidly posed, next to the goddess Ma’at. Yet over here —’ Ryan walked a few paces across the tomb — ‘on this side of the door, the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV has become the Pharaoh Akhenaten, and the artistic style is quite, quite different: the Pharaoh is rendered much more naturalistically, alongside his wife Nefertiti, acknowledging the adoring crowds at the so-called Window of Appearances, in his new capital of Amarna, in Middle Egypt.’

Ryan turned back to the camera. ‘Akhenaten’s strange and turbulent reign has provoked many theories. He seems to have suppressed worship of the old gods, and demanded worship of the one god: the great god, Aten, the sun — that’s why he changed his own name to Akhenaten, which means “spirit of the sun”, or “glory of God”. In this painting —’ Ryan knelt low down, next to the wall, and Helen tilted her camera accordingly — ‘we can see the sun’s rays, depicted with little hands on the end, blessing Akhenaten, his wife and family: confirming that the one new God approved of the Pharaoh, and saw him as his vicar on earth, a kind of pope, the infallible mouthpiece of the Lord. But look at Akhenaten’s head and body, his pear-shaped torso, thin limbs and elongated skull, the way his costume sags below a protruding and rather feminine belly. Wherever it is found, in Heliopolis or Luxor or Amarna itself, Amarna art shows Akhenaten like this, with his strange head and feminine body. The peculiarities of his portraits have led scholars to wonder if Akhenaten was some kind of physical and mental freak.’

Ryan stood up and the camera followed him. ‘One idea is that he was diseased, or afflicted in some way. Others have claimed he was actually an alien; one serious theory says he might have been a kind of hermaphrodite, born without genitals; but if this was the case he fathered an awful lot of babies for a man with no penis. One of his six children, Tutankhaten, succeeded the throne when Akhenaten died. But young Tutankhaten renounced his father’s revolutionary faith, levelled the city of Amarna, returned to the old gods, and even tried to expunge his father’s reviled name from history.’ Ryan pointed upwards. ‘There, you can see the so-called cartouche, or seal, of Akhenaten has been erased: someone has climbed a ladder and taken a chisel and chipped away the name of the heretic Pharaoh. The son, Tutankhaten, also changed his own name: he became known as the boy king, Tutankhamun.’

He paused. Helen waved a hand, go on, go on …

Ryan was thinking about the scene at Luxor, the birth of Amenhotep. Was there a way it fitted with the Amarna story? He could hear noises outside, distracting him. Yet the mosaic was slowly being restored, its ancient beauty would soon be revealed; he was ravished by the possibilities.

‘Ryan, please, finish up.’

He stared at the camera.

‘So why did Macarius come here? As ever, he does not specify, but it is now clear his great puzzle was focussed on monotheism. We know he was obsessed with Moses, the Egyptian priest who gave monotheism to the Jews, and we know he was obsessed with Akhenaten, the world’s first monotheist: because he came here to the Tomb of Ramose, Akhenaten’s vizier, and also he went to Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital, and—’

WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP

Ryan stopped. The noise was now unmistakeable, and deafening.

WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP

A helicopter was landing right outside. Helen was already running to the rectangle of sunlight, the exit, but the wind from the copter rotor was billowing sand and dust into the hypostyle hallways of the tomb: it must have landed very close, dangerously close.

Hanna called out, ‘Helen, get back!’

The dust was followed by a cracking sound, instantly familiar and immediately strange. An Egyptian wedding? No, of course not: gunshots. And not in celebration.

Someone yelled outside in the light. Was it Callum? Or Simon? It was the scream of someone in pain, someone shot? Maybe someone dying. They were being attacked.

‘Helen!’ Ryan now yelled at her and she edged back.

The gunshots outside were crackling now; a ricochet rang from the rocks. Another scream shredded the air in the tomb, this time a scream of command: and the words were in Hebrew. It didn’t need translation.

‘They will kill us!’ Helen cried.

Ryan grabbed her hand and pulled her back into the deepest shadows. They were trapped, inside the tomb. They were going to die in the Tomb of Ramose: slain by Israeli agents, and robbed of the Macarius papyrus. The secret would be taken, the mystery would go unsolved. Ryan was scorched by his own anger and sadness.

Hanna had disappeared down the corridor, to the end of the tomb, the claustrophobic final chamber where the coffin would have been kept. What was he doing? What was the point?

Callum stood at the door, silhouetted by the light. He was firing wildly into the setting sun. Simon was nowhere to be seen: Ryan reckoned he must be dead already.

The gunfire was fierce: the Israelis must have come in numbers. Callum was forced back inside the tomb. He stood with his back against the wall by the door, occasionally twisting to duck and dive and shoot out at the oncoming killers, but Ryan could see from Callum’s face that he knew they were out of luck, out of options, trapped in here, trapped and doomed.

‘Come.’ It was Hanna, at the dark corridor entrance, beckoning. ‘Come here — come now!’

Ryan grabbed Helen’s hand and they followed, ducking low, because the stone corridor was so small, almost too small to squeeze through.

Hanna was in the final chamber, standing by a wooden trapdoor; darkness yawned beneath.

‘What the heck?’

‘It’s a tunnel, it leads everywhere, a network — we can escape!’

As Ryan helped Helen onto the top of the indented mud steps beneath the trapdoor, he heard the stomach-turning crack of gunfire ricocheting down the corridor. He gazed down in wonder.

Blood was spattered right across his chest.