The Messiah Secret

32

Bronson and Angela were in their car, outside the still smouldering house.

‘So what now?’ Bronson asked, starting the engine to get the air conditioning running. ‘We came here to find the paintings, and we failed. So now we’ve got no way of continuing our search.’

‘You’re right,’ Angela said, her tone resigned. ‘Even the reference to el-Moalla — which we didn’t know about before — isn’t much of a help to us because we don’t know what directions were specified in the parchment.’

She paused for a moment, considering, then brightened slightly. ‘There is one thing we might as well do while we’re here. According to Suleiman, Bartholomew believed Shishaq seized the Ark of the Covenant and then later in his reign ordered it to be concealed somewhere up the Nile in a secret valley. I still think he’s a good candidate for grabbing the Ark, but there are a couple of things wrong with the idea of him later hiding it way upstream near Luxor.

‘First, Shishaq’s capital was based at Tanis, quite close to Cairo, so why would he have hidden the Ark so far away from the area under his control? And, second, the Egyptians were compulsive record-keepers, and I would have expected there to be some documentary evidence to support this theory. If there is, I’ve never seen it, but I’m beginning to wonder if Bartholomew did find a reference somewhere, and that’s why he was so sure about it.’

She sat forward, enjoying the blast of cold air on her face. ‘I think we should do what we planned to do when we came out here. We should drive out to el-Hiba and possibly fly down to Karnak, depending on what we find at el-Hiba.’

‘And you are sure we have to go to these places in person?’ Bronson asked. ‘You can’t just look at pictures of the inscriptions on the internet or study translations of them in a book?’

‘The images I found on the web aren’t clear enough to decipher properly, and I don’t actually think anyone’s done a complete translation of the hieroglyphs at either site — I certainly haven’t been able to find one anywhere.’

‘Can you read hieroglyphs?’ Bronson asked doubtfully.

‘I can read them well enough to check something like this, I think, and I know a little bit about hieratic and demotic too.’

‘Which are?’

‘They’re technically not hieroglyphic scripts: they’re more like a kind of shorthand, and were always written from right to left. The problem with hieroglyphics is that each character is quite detailed — a bird, a leaf, a snake, that kind of thing — and takes a long time to draw correctly. Hieratic and demotic scripts developed so that scribes could produce texts fairly quickly on papyrus, and much more easily than using hieroglyphics. What we’ll find will be hieroglyphics — they were used for monumental inscriptions all the way through the Pharaonic period. But I’ve got a computer program that should help — it analyses and translates hieroglyphic characters.’

Bronson looked at his watch. ‘You want to go there now?’

‘Yes, we might as well,’ Angela said, fastening her seat belt. ‘We should be able to get there and back today.’

They headed north and picked up the Salah Salem road that ran south-west towards central Cairo. The traffic was flowing much more freely, and they were able to make good progress.

‘Where are the pyramids?’ Bronson asked, as they approached the centre of the city. ‘I’d like to see them while we’re here, and I thought they were quite close to Cairo.’

‘They are, but they’re over on the west bank of the Nile, probably about five or six miles in front of us. You might get the odd glimpse of them through the buildings when we start heading south. Right,’ she said, checking the map again, ‘stay on the east bank of the river, and keep going.’

‘Understood. Which side of the Nile do we need to be on eventually?’

‘I don’t think it matters. According to this map there are two main roads that follow the Nile south, one running along each bank, and there are several bridges where we can cross to the other side if we have to.’

The traffic was still congested, but most of the vehicles were heading towards the centre of Cairo, so Bronson was driving against the flow and, as soon as they reached the district of Tura, where the road turned due south, he was able to speed up a little as the traffic thinned out. The tall apartment buildings and office blocks were gradually replaced by lower, older and much more decrepit structures, and a couple of times they did catch just the briefest sight of the very tops of the pyramids in the distance, over to the west. On their right-hand side the Nile flowed steadily northwards, a wide, grey-brown mass of moving water, peopled with a variety of boats, including a couple of big Nile cruisers, scores of motorboats and dozens of lateen-rigged feluccas, the iconic sailing boats of old Egypt.

On the west side of the Nile, the built-up area seemed to have petered out, just a few isolated dwellings, but the road Bronson was following, which was right beside the bank of the river, had extensive urban developments extending to the east. He pointed out this oddity to Angela.

‘There’s a good reason for that,’ Angela said. ‘Over to our left there’s a large urbanization, but the land on the west side of the river has a lot of ancient sites. We’re just about level with a place called the Amba Armiyas Monastery, and just below that is Saqqara.’

‘That name rings a bell.’

‘As it should. It’s a huge ancient burial ground — I think it’s about five miles long by one mile wide — and it’s where you’ll find the oldest hewn-stone building complex ever discovered. That’s Djoser’s step pyramid, which dates from about two thousand six hundred BC, well over four thousand five hundred years old. Egyptologists believe that was the first stone pyramid of all time. They think it was built by erecting a large mastaba, a kind of flat-roofed rectangular tomb, on the bedrock, then building a slightly smaller one on top of it, and then another smaller one, and so on.’

‘It sounds like that would account for the steps,’ Bronson said.

‘True. But in fact stepped pyramids are found in several different parts of the world, where mastabas are completely unknown, so it could also have been a design that the ancient peoples liked the look of. The best known are the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia — that’s modern-day Iraq — and the pre-Columbian civilizations of South America.’

‘The Incas and the Aztecs?’

‘Yes, and the Maya and the Toltecs as well. They all had a go at building them. Anyway, as well as Djoser’s step pyramid, there are pyramids belonging to about fifteen or sixteen other Egyptian kings at Saqqara, in various states of disrepair. And, because the high officials of the court liked to be buried as close to their king as possible, there are shaft tombs and mastabas all over the place. And there’s also a thing called the Serapeum there. That was the burial site for mummified Apis bulls.’

‘The Egyptians mummified bulls?’ Bronson asked, surprised. ‘I thought it was only cats.’

Angela nodded. ‘They mummified a lot of animals, actually. Bulls and cows were the biggest, cats were probably the most popular, and they also mummified birds, especially hawks and ibis.’

The road they were on was called the Kornaish El Nile, which they guessed meant ‘Corniche of the Nile’, and as they passed the built-up area on their left, the road moved slightly away from the bank of the river before swinging back towards it. As they cleared the urbanization, they passed a bridge over the Nile.

‘That’s the first crossing point of the river we’ve seen since we left Cairo itself,’ Bronson said.

‘Yes. According to this map, that’s the El Marazeek Bridge,’ Angela replied. ‘But there are plenty of other bridges further south. Just keep going on this road.’

Within a couple of miles, the river had swung away from them, over to the west, and the road was taking them slightly to the east, so they lost sight of the Nile altogether. The traffic had thinned considerably, though there were still about a dozen cars in sight in front of them, and at least that number behind, and a fairly steady stream of vehicles heading towards them. The open road and less frantic driving conditions meant Bronson could relax a little. He glanced over at Angela, who appeared lost in thought; he guessed she was thinking about their search and the dangers surrounding them. He knew he’d have to be extra vigilant if they were going to stay safe.

On the right-hand side of the road he saw a sign displaying the universally recognized symbol of a wasp-waisted bottle and a word beside it in Arabic script, which he guessed meant ‘Coke’.

‘I could do with a drink after all we’ve been through this morning,’ he said, ‘and it looks like there’s a cafe or a bar somewhere ahead. Shall we stop?’

About half a mile further on Bronson pulled up outside a bar that was little more than an old and dusty shack. But they heard the sound of a generator running somewhere behind the structure, so at least the drinks should be cool. This, he thought, was a priority. If he was going to spend the day being a chauffer and bodyguard, he was going to make sure he wasn’t thirsty.