The Eye of Ra Read online

  The Eye of Ra

  Michael Asher

  © Michael Asher 1999

  Michael Asher has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1999 by HarperCollins

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PRELUDE: VALLEY OF THE KINGS, EGYPT

  PART I: LONDON & CAIRO 1995

  1 LONDON

  2 CAIRO

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  PART II: THE WESTERN DESERT OF EGYPT 1995

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  PART III: NEAR KOMOMBO, UPPER EGYPT 1995

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Extract from Shoot to Kill by Michael Asher

  PRELUDE

  VALLEY OF THE KINGS, EGYPT

  Long after it was over, a friend sent me a cutting he’d found while rummaging through newly released files at Reuters. It appeared to be part of a report by Walter Morrison, who’d been sent to Luxor in 1923 as correspondent on the Tutankhamen story. At that time exclusive rights on the opening of the burial-chamber had been given to The Times, but Morrison, a seasoned hack, was so determined that Reuters should get the scoop that he actually bought a Model-T Ford and hired a felucca and a team of donkeys to carry the news to the nearest telegraph station. The problem that remained was how to get into the tomb. Rumour has it that he bribed an Egyptian pasha and posed as a guest. It appears, anyway, that he was among the spectators when Howard Carter opened the chamber. Whether the following was intended as the beginning of a book or a follow-up article will never be known, for Morrison was found dead in unexplained circumstances in his London club in the summer of 1923. Incidentally, the fragment bore no resemblance to the report actually published on the day under his byline:

  Valley of the Kings, Egypt. 16th February, 1923

  It was stifling in the tomb, and the air was made fouler by the crush of onlookers and the heat of the two giant arc-lamps brought in to illuminate the final act of penetration. Howard Carter, stripped down to his neatly laundered shirt, rolled up his sleeves, and hefted the sledge-hammer, testing its weight against the palm of his left hand. Lord Carnarvon looked on imperturbably, betraying no sign of the discomfort he must have felt dressed in the tweed uniform of the British aristocracy. Carter gave the hammer an experimental swing, and almost at once trickles of sweat beaded his brow. He could easily have got one of his team of guftis to do the manual work, but this was the crowning moment of years of excavation in the Nile Valley, and no doubt he was justified in feeling that the honour belonged to him alone. There was an expectant hush in the tomb. Someone coughed uneasily. I had to repress the disturbing sense that we were all intruders here in the grave of a lost king. Carter glanced at Carnarvon. This was the moment they had waited for. His Lordship nodded, and Carter swung the hammer in earnest, punching a hole in the wall which had guarded its secrets for almost three and a half thousand years.

  It was four months since Carter’s foreman, Rais Ahmad, had run to his house at Luxor with the news that his guftis had unearthed three stone steps under the debris of an ancient workman’s hut in the Valley of the Kings. Carter rushed to the necropolis, examined the steps, and ordered the guftis to dig down into what he thought was the beginning of an underground passage. The workmen shovelled frantically and in ninety minutes uncovered ten steps. After another ninety they came to a sealed door, on which Carter found two seals: the Jackal-god Anubis — ancient Egyptian symbol of the dead — and a cartouche containing the Eye of Ra, the seal of the guardians of the royal necropolis. To his astonishment, the seals seemed undisturbed and for the first time he dared hope that he had discovered an intact pharaonic tomb — a unique window into the heart of the ancient Egyptian world. The workmen named the place ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ after Carter’s gold-coloured canary, which they believed had brought him luck. Carter could have appeased his curiosity there and then by tearing down the door. But after thirty years of hope and disillusion, he was not the man to rush things. Instead he had his labourers fill up the passage, and posted a guard on the site. Then he returned calmly to Luxor and despatched a telegram to his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, in England: ‘Wonderful discovery in the Valley at last,’ he wrote. ‘A tomb with undamaged seals. Everything covered in until your arrival. Congratulations.’

  It was not until Carnarvon arrived at the beginning of November that Carter found the seal of Tutankhamen hidden under a pile of debris, and realised that he’d found the tomb of one of the two major lost pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty. On the first day his workmen broke through the sealed door and cut into it a passage twenty feet long, filled with rubble and shards of terracotta and alabaster vessels. At the end of the passage was a second door, closed with twin seals. On 25th November, Carter put an iron spike through the door and passed his candle inside. Peering into the darkness, he caught a glimpse of strange objects: animals, statues, caskets, chariots and pressed flowers.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Carnarvon asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Carter replied, ‘Wonderful things!’

  The tomb of Tutankhamen turned out to be the most sensational discovery in archaeological history — its treasures exceeded its finders’ wildest dreams. For the first ten weeks Carter and his team worked on the objects they found in the antechamber, artefacts of astounding beauty and craftsmanship — drawing, measuring, photographing and removing them piece by piece. The University of Chicago hieroglypher James Henry Breasted translated the wall seals, and confirmed that this was indeed the tomb of the lost pharaoh Tutankhamen. All that remained was the discovery of the mummy itself. They found a secret door in the antechamber wall guarded by two life-size wooden statues, and guessed that the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen lay beyond. All was prepared for the final triumph — the unsealing of the burial-chamber, set for 16th February.

  Carter swung the sledge-hammer again and again, the blows reverberating around the walls of the small chamber. Within ten minutes his shirt was soaked with perspiration, and he had knocked out the remaining plaster, opening a slit wide enough for him to squeeze through. He shone his torch into the breach and the spectators gasped as the beam flashed back from what appeared to be a solid wall of gold. He hesitated for a moment. He was about to step into the grave of a king who had been dead for thirty-five centuries, the first human being to cross that threshold since pharaonic times. If the idea of sacrilege crossed his mind, he suppressed it well; he’d been preparing for this moment for three decades, after all, and it was too late to stop now. He plunged through the gap, out of sight. He was gone five minutes, then ten, fifteen, twenty. Lord Carnarvon stood stock still: a single track of sweat decorated his for
ehead. The onlookers fidgeted impatiently. Suddenly Carter’s face appeared in the glare of the spotlights, smeared with dust and deadly pale.

  ‘What did you see?’ Carnarvon demanded, his voice thick with excitement.

  Carter seemed to be shaking uncontrollably. ‘My God!’ he was muttering in a faint voice, almost to himself. ‘Lord Carnarvon, I think you’d better come and look at this...’

  By the time I saw this fragment, of course, I already knew about Morrison, and how he’d sneaked into the tomb uninvited. I often wonder whether, if I’d come across it before I received Julian Cranwell’s call for help, it would have made any difference. Perhaps I might have guessed what lay in store for me — then again, perhaps not...

  PART I

  LONDON & CAIRO

  1995

  1 LONDON

  A rainy march night on the Clapham omnibus. Streets passing out of focus, a smear of white and orange lights through fogged window panes. I cleared myself a little wet patch on the window, stared out into the undifferentiated urban night, and swore under my breath. I was on my way home from my talk on ‘The Origins & Construction of the Giza Pyramids’ to the Society of Antiquarians, and the evening hadn’t exactly been a successful one. In fact it had been a disaster. The moment I stood at the lectern I knew they’d gathered for a human sacrifice — mine.

  All the most distinguished and most vitriolic Egyptologists in Britain, and many from elsewhere, had been present. Of course, they knew I’d been sacked from my post with the Egyptian Antiquities Service two years earlier for my supposedly ‘irrational’ opinions on the origin of Egyptian civilisation. Word gets around. To the high priesthood of science ‘irrational’ means what medieval Christians meant by ‘heretical’ — that you have views different from the currently accepted canon. They can excommunicate you, too, just as they did with Heyerdahl and Velikovsky. The irony is that I’ve always prided myself on being a logical thinker, and here I was, typecast as an inhabitant of the lunatic fringe. To tell the truth, I’m not a great speaker at the best of times. I can expound my views clearly enough in private, but crowds give me the jitters. That night, the baleful stares and the cold silence would have been enough to unnerve even an expert pedagogue. As I stood up, surveying the rows of venerable heads, I half expected them to heckle me before I’d even started speaking. That had happened to me more than once in the previous two years. To give the Antiquarians their due, they’d heard me out for the first half-hour. It was only when I suggested that the Great Pyramid hadn’t been built by Pharaoh Khufu of the 4th Dynasty, but by an unknown race of immigrants, centuries earlier, that the murmuring began. A man with a face so florid it looked like it’d been steeped all night in brandy, a walrus moustache and unkempt silver hair, stood up and cleared his throat ominously. It was Giles Garstang, professor of Egyptology at Cambridge University, author of a notable book on the dating sequence of ancient Egypt. The Lord High Executioner, I thought.

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting, Mr Ross,’ Garstang opened pleasantly, as if he wanted to clear up a trifling, minor point that puzzled him. His voice had the same brandy-marinated quality as his face. ‘If my memory is correct, and of course it’s not what it used to be.’ He turned and smiled at the audience — jolly, erudite chuckles from both sides. ‘If I remember rightly, a series of semi-hieratic symbols, actually quarry marks, referring to the Pharaoh Khufu were found painted on certain stone blocks inside several of the chambers of the Great Pyramid, by Colonel Howard Vyse, in 1837. They are, I believe, and do correct me if I’m wrong, the only epigraphic records ever found inside the structure.’ His amiable expression hardened, and I saw his eyes fix on the tiny silver earring I was wearing on the upper fold of my right ear. I shouldn’t have worn it tonight, of course, but it had a special significance for me that Garstang couldn’t have guessed. ‘Now, to me, Mr Ross,’ he went on, ‘and I’m sure to most Fellows of the Society, that suggests strongly that Khufu — a Pharaoh of the 4th Dynasty — was associated with the building of the Great Pyramid...’ Murmurs of well-educated assent from the audience, growing steadily in volume. ‘Certainly,’ Garstang went on, ‘there is no record of the “unknown race” which you suggest built the pyramid thousands of years before Khufu — when, I might add, the ancient Egyptians were still running about the desert naked hunting wild auroch.’ More snickers from the audience. ‘My questions are simple: Who was this mystery race? Why is there no record of it? And most important of all, where did it come from?’

  ‘Out of Chingford!’ A bass voice rang out from the back.

  ‘No! No!’ some other bright spark tittered, ‘Elephant and Castle!’

  Guffaws of laughter from the assembly. I struggled to make myself heard over the uproar. ‘They probably came from an older civilisation,’ I said, ‘one that was lost because of some physical disaster.’

  ‘You mean like Atlantis?’ Garstang enquired, narrowing his eyes to slits of disbelief.

  The roars and hoots increased in volume. ‘Get that half-wit off the stage!’ somebody shouted. Garstang was struggling to look solemn. I clutched the microphone with my left hand. A knot was tightening in my stomach and I fought to keep my temper under control. I waved the laser-pointer at Garstang. ‘Howard Vyse was an impostor and a fraud,’ I bawled, ‘who painted the marks himself and enjoyed international acclaim for it!’

  More cries, this time suspiciously like boos. ‘Wyse was an officer in the Guards, dammit!’ Garstang snapped.

  I wrenched off my glasses. ‘I don’t give a toss if he was a Beefeater,’ I shouted back. ‘He lied. You know how I know he painted those marks himself? Because he used hieratic — a script that wasn’t even invented in Khufu’s day — and what’s more, he made a spelling mistake!’

  This was too much. I knew it. People started to stand up. For a moment I thought they were going to pelt me with rotten fruit. ‘Bloody lunatic!’ someone yelled.

  ‘Disgrace!’ someone else jeered. ‘Shouldn’t allow charlatans in the Society.’

  They began to file out.

  My cheeks were burning. They hadn’t even let me finish my argument. Suddenly I couldn’t hold my temper any longer. ‘Why bother to study Egyptology!’ I found myself bellowing after the retreating backs. ‘You have nothing more to learn. You know it all already!’ I let go of the microphone, flung the laser-pointer in a chair, gathered my notes and walked out amid the caustic comments with as much dignity as I could muster.

  I was still shaking when I got on the bus. My views had been mocked before, of course, but never by so distinguished a gathering. I swore to myself again at the ignominy of it. The academic establishment claims to deal in ‘proven scientific fact’, but actually they accept only the facts that suit their view of the world. The ‘fact’ is that there is nothing in the Great Pyramid to tie it to the Pharaoh Khufu in the 4th Dynasty. The hieratic symbols or ‘quarry marks’ Howard Vyse claimed to have found in 1837 are certainly forgeries, for not only are they in hieratic, a developed form of script not known in Khufu’s day, but they were also copied from the only book on the subject available to Vyse-Gardiner-Wilkinson. Or is it a coincidence that the symbol for Khufu in the book is misspelled in exactly the same way it’s misspelled in Vyse’s ‘discoveries’? Actually, there isn’t a shred of evidence to prove that the pyramids weren’t standing on the plateau at Giza thousands of years before the reign of Khufu, millennia before ancient Egyptian civilisation is supposed to have existed. Neither is there any real evidence to suggest who built them. The Sphinx, which stands on the same plateau, shows signs of deep erosion by water, yet we know there haven’t been heavy rains in that area since about 10,000 BC. The people who built the Sphinx were certainly capable of building the pyramids, too. The thing that really irritated me was that they hadn’t even allowed me to get to the real core of my argument: the actual building of the pyramids. The concept currently popular was that the builders dragged the great monoliths up a series of temporary ramps made of earth and stones. Some
simple calculations show this is impossible. To reach the top of the Great Pyramid, a ramp would have required 17.5 million cubic yards of material — seven times more than the amount of material needed to build the pyramid itself. It would have taken a workforce of at least half a million men longer than Khufu’s entire reign to construct and dismantle such a ramp. If this vast army of labour, with all its logistics and supply problems, food, water, shelter, administration, ever concentrated on the Giza plateau there is no archaeological trace of it, neither is there any remnant of the millions of cubic yards of debris which were supposedly used. The ramp theory was a myth. All right, I admit that I didn’t know for certain how the pyramids were constructed, but I reckoned they were a lot older than suspected, and were probably built with an advanced technology which sub-sequent ages lost. It’s a habit of mine — probably a habit of all poor speakers — to formulate a devastating argument when it’s too late. You know what Schopenhauer said about the truth? That it will first be ridiculed, then violently opposed, and finally accepted as self-evident. My truth was obviously still in the ridicule stage.

  I walked the last hundred metres from the bus-stop, turning my collar up to the drizzle. My house is part of a Victorian terrace overlooking the common, with a patch of garden at the back and enough room for my Honda Gold Wing. Some people think I’m mad to run a 1000cc motor-bike — the same people who raise an eyebrow when they notice my earring. I’m a researcher for the British Museum’s Ancient Near East Department, and I suppose, to most people, these things don’t really go with the job. You expect a BM researcher to be a cobwebby old don with elbow-patches on his tweed jacket and corduroy trousers, not an earring and full racing leathers. We all think in such stereotypes, that’s one of our major problems. We’ve been trained from birth in the technique of dividing nature into discrete compartments, each with its own characteristics. I’m as bad as the next man — or I was, until I started to realise that there are no compartments really, the universe is all one piece. Anyhow, as far as motor-cycles are concerned, I grew up in the seventies with Easy Rider and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I’ve always had a special place in my heart for fast bikes. It’s speed I enjoy. Speed transcends — at ninety miles an hour you seem to be hurled into an alternative dimension, beyond your physical body. I love opening up the throttle on a fast road, but I don’t use the bike for trotting round to the supermarket, or even going to work unless I happen to be late. That would be disrespectful to such a piece of precision engineering.