The Messiah Secret

36

‘We’re here,’ Angela said, folding up the map and putting it back in the glovebox. ‘That’s el-Hiba up there on the hill.’

In front of them, a vast area of ruined mud-brick walls and other structures extended from the River Nile on their right all the way up the hillside, the bright afternoon sunlight turning it golden. The road climbed steadily up to the village, and had clearly been driven straight through one section of the ruined buildings.

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Bronson said, disappointed.

‘It isn’t much, now,’ Angela replied, ‘but in its heyday it was a busy, populous place. Several thousand people lived here, but now it’s probably only a handful. Let’s find somewhere to park the car, and then we’ll have a look round.’

The village wasn’t quite as deserted as it appeared. There were a few locals wandering about, their white clothes grubby from the dust that swirled everywhere each time a vehicle passed through the settlement. Some were sitting beside the road outside a small cafe, smoking hookah pipes or drinking thick black coffee from tiny glasses. Finding somewhere to park their car wasn’t difficult. Bronson pulled over on some waste ground.

‘I expected it to be a lot bigger, and a whole lot busier, than this,’ he muttered, as he locked the car.

‘It’s not on the most popular tourist itineraries,’ Angela said. ‘In fact, I don’t think it’s on any tourist itineraries, so apart from the locals the only people likely to be here are wandering archaeologists, and I don’t even see any of them. I read somewhere that an American team came over here five or six years ago to excavate this site, but I’ve heard nothing about it since. This is one of the few major — by that I mean historically important — places in Egypt that hasn’t already been picked clean by the archaeologists.’

‘They were excavating Shoshenq’s temple, I suppose?’

‘Probably not just the temple. This place was a fortress, and also a necropolis. There are thousands of tombs here somewhere that date back almost four millennia. I assume the team would have looked at the whole site, rather than just a bit of it.’

‘So nobody’s ever really studied the place before them?’ Bronson asked.

‘Not really, though there have been one or two spectacular finds reported here. The earliest known example of demotic script was found here, on a piece of papyrus. That dates from about six hundred and sixty BC. But because el-Hiba is so old, and has had so many influences — Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and so on — any dig here would have to be a long and wide-ranging excavation.’

They walked on, heading for an open area at the very top of the settlement that they guessed would give them a decent view of the whole site.

‘Spectacular,’ Bronson said, as they stopped and looked around.

Below them, the ruins of the reddish-brown mud-brick walls descended in tumbled waves and terraces towards the surrounding plain and the eastern bank of the slowly flowing River Nile.

‘Quite a place,’ Angela agreed. ‘The high ground would have given the defenders a significant advantage in any conflict, and being so close to the river meant that they were protected from attack on that side. Right, now let’s find the temple.’

At the far end of el-Hiba, JJ Donovan stood beside a part of the old city walls and watched his targets through a small pair of binoculars.

About a hundred yards away, Bronson and Angela had their backs to him and appeared to be looking at something. Then they suddenly turned directly towards him, and for a brief, unsettling instant, it seemed to him as if they were staring right at him, their magnified faces clearly visible through the lenses of the binoculars.

Then he saw Angela gesture, and they turned back and started walking slowly down the hill away from him.

The walls were massive. Not just feet thick, but yards thick, the old mud-bricks still largely intact. ‘These must be the old city defences,’ Angela said. ‘They’re not in a bad state of repair, bearing in mind how old they are. They date from the Twenty-First Dynasty — that’s about one thousand BC — so they’ve been standing here for three millennia.’

Bronson glanced around. The village nestled in palm trees — this close to the Nile, the soil was obviously reasonably fertile — and more palms studded the settlement itself. But the main road was busy, cars and trucks roaring past them at regular intervals, and they had to be careful to keep well clear of the road itself.

‘We’ve no guidebook or anything,’ Angela said, ‘so we’ll just have to walk around until we find what’s left of the Temple that Shoshenq built. All I know is that it’s somewhere inside the old walls, which is why I thought we’d start looking from here.’

Slowly they started to retrace their steps, looking closely at all the structures as they passed them. A couple of times Angela thought she’d spotted it, but each time she was mistaken. Then she looked ahead and muttered something under her breath.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What?’ Bronson looked where she was pointing.

‘I think these Egyptian idiots have driven the bloody road straight through the temple. Look, you can see the same kind of stone walls on both sides of it over there.’

It wasn’t anything like as clear as that to Bronson. ‘You might be right,’ he said, ‘but perhaps the engineers had no option. There might have been nowhere else here they could have built the road.’

‘So they demolished half of an irreplaceable temple just to lay down a strip of tarmac? There’s always an alternative in this kind of situation, Chris. This is just archaeological vandalism, caused by nothing more than sheer laziness. They could have routed the road around the hill, down in the valley. It would only have added a few tens of yards to the length, and it might even have been easier to do.’

‘Yes, but when this road was built the government may not have realized this was an important site. I thought that most of the excavations over here had been undertaken by foreign archaeologists anyway. Essentially, Egypt’s been dug up by the British and the French and the Americans, not by the Egyptians themselves. They probably just saw a bunch of old stones and thought they’d do nicely as a hardcore base for the road. I don’t suppose it’s the first time something like that has happened.’

Angela nodded slowly. ‘That’s a remarkably accurate assessment, actually, and you’re quite right — it’s been very common. A lot of people don’t know that when St Peter’s Basilica was being built in Rome, many of the stones they used for it were taken from the Coliseum, which is one reason why it’s in the state it is now. It was only a lot later that the Italians seemed to realize that the Coliseum was an internationally important archaeological site — at least as important as St Peter’s, maybe even more important — and started taking steps to give it the protection it deserved.’

Bronson put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s take a look at what’s left of the temple.’

They walked up the slope towards the structure that remained standing beside the road. The walls were very low and the majority were little more than tumbled piles of masonry. Angela crouched down beside one of them and pointed at the carving of a foot and lower leg. The rest of the carving had vanished when the wall fell to pieces — or perhaps was demolished — but there were just a few hieroglyphic characters visible over to one side.

‘Anything useful here?’ Bronson asked, bending down beside her.

‘Not a lot. The carving could have been of Shoshenq, or even of the god Amun, but of course there’s no way of telling now.’ She bent lower and looked more closely at the hieroglyphic characters, where a curved incision was visible at the edge of a vertical line of characters. ‘That looks like the upper edge of a cartouche, so this inscription probably relates to a pharaoh.’

‘A cartouche — that’s the kind of border they drew around an important name, yes?’

‘Yes. The names of pharaohs were always enclosed within a cartouche. In fact, these three symbols above it confirm that the inscription is talking about a pharaoh.’

Bronson looked at the characters she was pointing at. He could see what looked like a walking stick symbol with two curved lines sprouting from either side of its bottom end, a half-moon shape and a wavy line.

‘That’s a word, is it?’ he asked. ‘What does the walking stick thing mean?’

Angela nodded. ‘It’s actually a sedge plant, and it’s used as a determinative. The letters spell “n”, “s” and “w”, and that means “nesu”, or “king”. About the only word which could follow that would be the name of the pharaoh himself and, as this temple was built by Shoshenq in honour of the god Amun, the cartouche almost certainly contained his name.’

Bronson looked beyond the ruined wall at the space beyond it, studded with stones, mud-bricks and bits of masonry. ‘It looks as if this was quite a big building,’ he said.

Angela pulled out a small notebook and flicked rapidly through the pages. ‘Yes, it was. According to the few records that exist, this originally consisted of a brick enclosure and inside that was a temple house nearly twenty yards wide and thirty yards long. Don’t forget, Amun was a really important creator god, who was believed to live inside everything. He could appear as a goose or a ram with curved horns — which showed he had a function as a fertility god — or more commonly as a ram-headed man and sometimes as a man with two tall plumes on his head. Later on he merged with the cult of Re or Ra to form Amun-Re, the sun-god. He was really important to the ancient Egyptians.’

Bronson looked back at the ruined wall. ‘Is there anything here that tells us if Shishaq or Shoshenq did actually seize the Ark of the Covenant?’

‘I can’t be sure. I’ll photograph what there is and translate it later.’

There were a number of surviving pieces of inscription on various bits of wall and even on a few of the fallen stones, and Angela took pictures of every one she could find, checking each image on the screen of her camera to make sure it was clear and legible before moving on to the next.

Finally, she slipped the digital camera back into her handbag and took a last look around the site.

‘Is that it?’ Bronson asked.

‘Yes. It’s a real shame. I was hoping there’d be a few complete walls with intact inscriptions still standing. I certainly didn’t expect the temple to be in as bad a condition as it is.’

‘Did you see anything helpful?’

‘Not really,’ Angela replied. ‘I’ve spotted a couple of cartouches, both with Shoshenq’s name in them, and a few mentions of Amun, but not much else. But obviously I’ve still got to check the pictures I’ve taken.’

‘Amun’s name consists of those three symbols — the feather or leaf or whatever it is and the other two drawings?’

‘That’s the leaf of a reed plant, a draughts-board and a ripple of water, yes.’ Angela sighed, and Chris could see that she was tired. ‘I’ll take a look at the pictures on our way back to Heliopolis, but I’m not hopeful I’ll find anything useful. I had planned to do the work out here, but there’s so little material on the site that I don’t see any point in trying to do that now. And at least our room is air conditioned.’

Bronson nodded and turned away from the ruins of the temple towards the road. As he did so, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure wearing a white shirt and light-coloured trousers ducking swiftly out of sight behind a wall on the opposite side of the road.

He felt a warning stab of surprise. Unlike the citizens of Cairo, the residents of el-Hiba clearly didn’t see that many foreign tourists, and he and Angela had been objects of interest ever since they’d arrived there. But most of the people they’d seen had simply stared at them with frank and not unfriendly curiosity. Maybe that man — and Bronson was reasonably certain the figure had been male — was just shy. The only odd thing was that it looked as if he’d been holding a pair of binoculars or perhaps a camera in his hand. Certainly he’d been clutching a small black object. And his Western-style dress was unusual in a place where most people seemed to be wearing the more traditional Egyptian dishdasha or jellabah.

‘What is it?’ Angela asked.

‘I think there’s a man over there watching us.’

‘I don’t see anything.’

‘I know what I saw. You stay here. I’ll go and check.’

But Angela grabbed his arm with both hands to stop him. ‘No, Chris. Let’s just get away from here, right now. It might be that priest again.’

Bronson nodded reluctantly, and looked back up the road to where the car was parked. ‘You start running,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

Angela took to her heels, heading back the way they’d come.

Bronson stared across the road for a few seconds more, then followed her.

Two minutes later, Bronson spun the steering wheel of the hire car and powered down the street and away from el-Hiba, the car trailing a cloud of dust as he headed for the open road and Cairo.