The Deceit

45

They passed Edfu, and Luxor. Then Dendera. Nearing his hometown of Abydos.

Ryan and Helen acted like tourists, but strange tourists who never left the boat. They read guidebooks and made love. They filmed each other in the cabin, talking over the theory. Excited, yet very anxious. Helen’s phone had run out of juice — somewhere along the way they’d lost her recharger; they couldn’t research it properly. Yet they couldn’t leave the boat. But they needed to get out of Egypt. Maybe they could get a boat to Sinai from Hurghada, and cross into Israel? The Israelis might not be expecting that.

Better still, they could take a boat back to Luxor, and charter a hot-air balloon, and fly into Sudan. Yes. The tourist balloons were desperate for business. It was bizarre but it might work. The Sudanese had no love for the Egyptians. There was no passport control six hundred feet above Abu Simbel.

But if this was to have a chance of working Ryan needed all the cash in his little safe, a lifetime’s humble earnings. And he also reckoned that dawn would be the best time to retrieve that cash. Abydos woke late: he could sneak in and get it. And he’d have an hour or two to sit at his desk and work alone, and work out the theory.

Helen was sleeping in their cabin, a little hot and irritable, kicking at the sheets.

Ryan seized the moment: he was going to take the gamble, and go to his apartment. He knew it was a risk, but it was necessary: he needed all of his spare cash.

Kissing Helen on her unconscious lips, he resisted the urge to say, ‘I love you’ — but the urge itself was very telling. Maybe, finally, he was leaving Rhiannon behind.

Quickly, he walked the gangplank down to the pier. Abydos temple was ten kilometres away from the Nile. He would need a taxi.

As he had expected, the Nileside township still snoozed. Horses drooped. Fuul sellers scratched on benches, and dreamed about a better day ahead. Even the pharmacists selling cheap Diazepam were shut. In the rising, blinding sun Ryan waited as patiently as he could by the riverside. Taxi drivers never slept in Egypt. They were the Waking Ones. You could always get a cab.

But no cabs came. Ryan squinted at the river. A mother was washing her naked baby in the river water, scooping water in a metal dish and dribbling it over the baby’s head. He wondered how clean that water was, with all its attendant infections and parasites. He thought of Rhiannon. Dying of perinatal malaria: the parasite plasmodium falciparum, spread by the Anopheles mosquito, breeding in the torpid waters of the delta. The Nile had claimed her with one of its many parasites.

The words seized him. Parasites? Plasmodium?

A taxi pulled up. Ryan snapped, in Arabic, ‘Abydos please. Fast as you can.’

The driver raced. The donkeys stared. The necropolis of kings and cats hove into view.

‘Yes, here please, drop me here.’

Creeping through the morning shadows cast by the great temple of Seti I, Ryan keyed the door by the tea-house and climbed the stairs to his dusty, deserted apartment. The furniture stared at him reproachfully. Where have you been? Why did you leave us?

His thoughts accelerating, Ryan grabbed his money, then looked to his laptop: he had just enough time to do some research. But the room was too stuffy, a haze hung in the air. So he opened a window for a freshening breeze, then sat down at his desk. The robotic muezzin was singing the call to prayer from a mosque next door. As the first lyrics echoed across the city, and the empty Temple of Seti, he opened his laptop and typed:

Two words leapt out at him: Rabies and Toxoplasma. Rabies made a kind of sense — the frothing, the Zabaleen, the mad biting? But rabies needed dogs and dogs had not featured in their discoveries.

Toxoplasma was different. Feline toxoplasmosis.

The cats. As Ryan squinted and scribbled in his notebook, the muezzin sang out his beautiful words.

God is the Greatest, I testify that there is no God except God …

The revelations came quickly now.

All the way through their odyssey they had encountered cats. There was a vast cat cemetery here at Abydos, beyond the drowned tomb of Osiris. Cats were likewise adored at Akhmim. The Egyptians venerated and even feared cats throughout their millennia of history: Egyptian cats were the origin of all domestic cats. And Ryan could, of course, never forget that grotesque hour in the catacombs of Bubastis, holding the cat mummy in his hand.

What could feline toxoplasmosis do to humans?

Ash hadu alla ilaha illallah …

Ryan clicked. And stared. ‘Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease caused by the virus Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite infects most genera of warm-blooded animals, including humans; cats are the primary source of infection to human hosts. It is thought that maybe 50–90 percent of Europeans are carriers of the parasite; levels of infection in mankind are equally high in many other parts of the world; most victims will never become aware of their status as hosts, unless the infection becomes acute …’

Ash hadu alla ilaha illallah …

Parasites. Parasites. Just like the malaria that killed Rhiannon. He clicked another article:

More attractive? The parasite could make people more attractive?

I bear witness that there is no God except Allah. I bear witness that Muhammed is God’s Messenger …

The headlines were just bewildering now.

And another:

There were more articles like this — many more. And this was just one parasite: toxoplasma. What else was out there?

Ryan sat back. If religion was not a virus, but specifically a cerebral parasite, altering man’s behaviour, how would it work? It would have to be tiny, yet virulent, warping human minds like toxoplasmosis. And it would have to spread itself. How?

The call to prayer rolled on. As he stared out of his window, he knew he already had the answer.

The Oseirion was just beyond the great Seti temple. It had been filling with water over the centuries. Ryan had been trying to save it for years, save it from the Nile.

Ryan recalled the Macarius papyrus, and its constant references to baptism. And thought about that woman washing her baby in the river.

Baptism.

If the parasitic virus was born in water, then it would urge people to seek out water so as to continue its life cycle. Baptism would be a perfect way of achieving this, a superb adaptation. That meant that baptism was theoretically a behaviour induced by the parasite, so as to better spread itself. But could a parasite do this? Could a parasite make humans enact such specific and exact behaviourisms, such as to seek out water?

He clicked and searched. And one cold tear of sweat ran down his spine.

Hayya ‘alas-salah, Allahu Akbar … The Guinea Worm.

Ryan paused, and read that again.

The call to prayer had ended. The silence was absolute and monumental.

For another hour Ryan scanned the screen, adding horrible information to his notebook: Ebola, eukaryotic viruses, blood flukes, leishmania, trypanosomes. He even found a curious paper: ‘The Amarna Kings, Aneamias, and Parasitic Liver Disease’, by an obscure scholar, Thomas M Simms, who openly speculated that the strange behaviour and deformities of the monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten and his family were the result of an unknown waterborne parasite that bred in his artificial lake of Birket Habu. At St Tawdros. Where Helen had caught a fever and nearly died.

Ryan had found enough evidence. Going to his safe, he grabbed all his cash and stuffed it in a bag. Then he exited his apartment, sprinted down the stairs, and took a fast taxi back to the riverside.

He and Helen had done it. They had solved the Macarius puzzle in a way they could not have conceived. They had not only falsified Judaism and Christianity; they had not only proved that these faiths derived almost entirely from pagan Egyptian mythology: they had gone further. They now had evidence that monotheism — monotheistic religion, in its entirety — was nothing but an affliction, an actual disease, a pathology of the brain, a radical and epidemic mood alteration caused by a brain parasite.

The whole thing, the whole enormous glittering, imperious cavalcade that was monotheism — Judaism and Christianity and Islam — parading in its pomp through human history, was caused by a minuscule virus or microscopic cyst in the brain, maybe little bigger than a molecule. And it was waterborne, and spread by baptism, and in its acute stage it was accompanied by plague. No wonder Victor Sassoon had been driven to suicide.

The theory was terrifying, but it was beautiful; the answer was insane, yet the answer fitted so well. It was the truth. He had the truth.

Ryan walked along the pier, feeling the moment. But he had no time to relish this revelation. He had to tell Helen what he had discovered. So he sprinted the last few hundred metres, to the jetty, and the waiting Hypatia. He ran up the gangplank, but as he did, he stumbled, and fell.

What?

Hauling himself to his feet he reached for the rope. He couldn’t see it properly.

Ryan spun around. The river was covered with a weird muffling haze. But even as he peered at the mist the truth skewered him with terror. There wasn’t a haze. It was an illusion.

His eyes were lying; his eyes were failing. He was going blind.