Rare Earth

  Rare Earth

  Michael Asher

  © Michael Asher 2001

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

  First published in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.

  To Mariantonietta, Burton and Jade

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Extract from Shoot to Kill by Michael Asher

  Chapter One

  A GUNSHOT CRACKED OUT LIKE A lightning bolt, and Truman sat up sharply, blinking, groping in limbo to retrieve his personality, letting his dream diaper into fragments like a shattered mirror. There were two more shots in quick succession, then another and another. He grabbed his hat and rushed out into the blinding desert light, past the. dining marquee, the water-bowser, the gaggle of ducks, the dog’s leg of labourers’ tents. The puff of blue smoke that hung over the huddle of shadows on the sands told him he had not dreamed the five gunshots. It was his system that every find was saluted by a salvo of bullets — the number depended on its importance, and five meant a discovery of the first quality — perhaps a Ptolemaic burial, perhaps even the big one — the tomb of the Oracle, the Hidden One herself.

  He held on to his hat and dashed across the dunes, leaving little explosions of dust like cotton wool where his desert boots touched the surface. In the distance Miflah Barud, the foreman, was running towards him, a curious little hunchback figure with his pistol still in his hand.

  ‘What is it?’ Truman yelled at him.

  ‘A corpse, ya duktoor!’

  ‘Is it Ptolemaic?’

  Miflah snorted, shaking his bearish head. ‘Not Ptolemaic, duktoor,’ he said. ‘This one been dead ‘bout three weeks.’

  Truman stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded.

  The hunchback beckoned, and Truman followed his shambling figure on to the dunes, brushing past the labourers who were huddled up together, shouting frenziedly and pointing at something on the ground. In their midst he found Mike Eliot, his American graduate-student, crouching and scooping handfuls of sand away from the raddled body of a big man, lying profile down like some large recumbent animal. The man was clearly homo modernis — unless the blue Levis he wore were the ancient Greek version — but his skin was the yellow-brown of dried parchment, so tight on the bones it seemed almost to have been pasted on. The cadaver was untouched by insects or scavengers — not even vultures ventured into the emptiness this far from the Nile. Truman had found predynastic corpses buried on the edge of the Nile Valley no more decomposed than this man — and some of them had lain there for eight thousand years.

  The cadaver had a wild mop of dark hair and an equally shaggy beard, and its enormous frame was pinned under the weight of a tubular-steel back-pack that looked far too heavy for any human to carry. Eliot brought a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, bent over awkwardly on his stiff leg and slit the carry-straps of the pack with the largest blade. He shifted it, gasping at its weight.

  ‘Holy shit!’ he said. ‘Feels like lead!’

  Truman sank to his knees and examined the dead man’s face. The skin was wattled taut like an old leather draw-bag, the mouth an obscene purple gash, and the one eye Truman could see was tight shut. The other — the right — was covered with a sinister-looking black patch. The labourers fidgeted and gasped when they saw the eye-patch, and some began making the sign for protection against the evil eye.

  ‘Hell’s Bells!’ Truman said. ‘We’ve been digging here for three months. How come we didn’t find him before?’

  ‘He must have been here when we started on this phase two weeks ago,’ Eliot said. ‘But he was completely covered. That storm last night must have uncovered bits of him. The boys said they saw a hand sticking out of the sand.’

  Miflah the Hunchback hunkered down next to Truman.

  ‘Al-’atsh,’ he said. ‘This man died of thirst. See the way his face is screwed up like an old water-skin? I’ve seen faces like that a dozen times on men lost in the desert.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Truman said. ‘Poor bastard. I mean, if he’d pushed on another few kilometres he would have reached Siwa.’

  He turned the corpse over gingerly. The body was light and stiff as a post. The coagulates in muscle fibre that made the human frame rigid after death had kicked in, and the moisture had simply evaporated like a vapour.

  ‘I don’t know where he came from,’ Truman said, scanning the ceaselessly boiling flow of the erg. ‘But this guy must have had rocks the size of Gibraltar to cross the Sand Sea on foot. There’s nothing out there for hundreds of miles — not a tree, not a blade of grass, not even a bloody fly.’

  ‘A Jinn,’ one of the men growled. ‘Don’t you know the Sand Sea is the land of Shaitan?’

  Truman and Eliot exchanged stifled grins.

  ‘So what do we do now, anyway, Doc?’ Eliot asked. ‘Take him with us?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Truman said. ‘If we take him to Siwa, the police will only bury him there. It’s a waste of time. We’ll just shove him right back in the sand, mark the spot, and report the death to the police-post in Siwa. If they want to investigate they can come and dig him up, but you can bet your last cent they won’t bother. What we can do is return his belongings to the next of kin — if we can find out who they are.’

  ‘There’re no documents on him,’ Eliot said. ‘I’ve checked.’

  Truman eyed the huge back-pack curiously. The obvious thing to do was to open it, but somehow he felt reluctant. Miflah probed the pack with his callused fingers and tested its weight.

  ‘Allah!’ he muttered. ‘What’s in there? Solid gold?’

  The workmen were staring at the pack in half-terrified fascination now, and Truman took Eliot’s penknife from him, slit the top straps and lifted
the flap. Inside was a scuffed and torn map, a small GPS unit, and a veteran leather pouch. The rest of the space was filled with packets of dust in plastic sample-bags, each one sealed with a metal clip and labelled with a number. Truman couldn’t help snickering.

  ‘So much for your gold!’ he said, lifting one of the packets out and holding it up for display. ‘There must be fifty of these things in here. This guy died carrying a sackful of dirt.’

  Miflah touched his bent nose with a stubby finger. ‘Sometimes even dirt is valuable,’ he said.

  Truman put the packet back thoughtfully. He took out the leather wallet, opened it and found inside a British passport with an Egyptian entry stamp dated two months before. The passport showed a wild-looking man with a cheerful face and a tangled beard: it belonged to a Benjamin John Harris born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1950. It also contained an international driving permit in the same name, a wad of around $1000 and the business card of an Augustus Maynard, CEO of Kortex Mining Co. Ltd, with an address in Hanover Square, London.

  ‘Well now we know who he is,’ Truman said. ‘And what he was doing out there.’

  ‘I should have guessed it,’ Eliot said. ‘The guy was prospecting for minerals, and those bags are mining samples.’

  ‘Right,’ Truman said. ‘But I never heard of anyone prospecting in the Great Sand Sea.’

  ‘Those guys don’t go on foot. Where’s his wheels?’

  ‘Probably be found in fifty years’ time,’ Truman said, ‘nose down in a dune.’

  ‘Yeah, but what if there’s more of them out there, Doc? I mean, prospectors work in teams, and somebody could be alive.’

  Truman scratched his broken nose. ‘Not likely, Mike. Not if this one’s been here three weeks already. And why would he lug this damn great pack out with him if there were others sitting on the vehicle? Anyway, there’s not much we can do. We’ve got no four-wheel drive jeeps with us. All we can do is report it to the police right away. It’s their baby now.’ Truman put the documents away and tucked the wallet, map and GPS unit under his arm.

  ‘These go to the address on the card,’ he said. ‘We can bury the samples with him. He won’t be needing them anymore.’

  Eliot looked troubled. ‘Seems a pity, Doc,’ he said. ‘I mean the guy humped them out of the desert. He could have ditched them any time, but he kept on humping them till he dropped dead. Like Miflah said, they had to be pretty valuable to him. Cost him his sorry ass.’

  Truman frowned. ‘Jesus, Mike,’ he said. ‘That pack must weigh a hundred kilos and we’re pushed for space. We’re going to end up dumping some of our own kit, and I’m not checking in at Cairo International with a hundred kilos of dirt in my suitcase — not at eight dollars a kilo for excess baggage. I’m strapped enough as it is.’

  Eliot shrugged. ‘You won’t have to, Doc,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a whole container going back to the UK. You can just slap the stuff in there.’

  Truman weighed it up for a moment. ‘I don’t want to get involved in any red tape,’ he said. ‘I’ve got enough on my hands with Whealan closing us down and the committee hauling me over the coals. I had a colleague die on me on a dig once, and you wouldn’t believe the hassle involved. It’s going to cost us all tomorrow just reporting this to the police, for a start.’

  ‘I’ll have the samples put in the container,’ Eliot said. ‘I’ll even do the paperwork with the cops. Seems like the least we can do for the poor bastard.’

  Truman sighed. ‘OK, I’ll leave it to you, Mike.’

  He turned to the hunchback. ‘Miflah,’ he said. ‘Have the pack put in my tent. After that you can bury the body, and stick some kind of mark up.’

  Miflah gave him a mock salute. It was fitting, Truman thought, that Harris’s corpse would lie here forever, as a monument to the end of his archaeological career.

  Truman and Eliot hung around until the labourers had reburied the corpse, then watched them shuffling back to camp with their shovels over their shoulders, humming a solemn melody like refugees from a Snow White remake. Truman listened to the drum of the wind, bass profundo harmonics so similar to the men’s voices that it seemed as if the earth itself was alive and chanting a hypnotic mantra. You could hear it in the endless riddling of the sands, the wave-motion of light and shade, the rhythm of savage colours pulsing across the spectrum — out here in the desert the planet’s song was virgin, but in the city it was drowned under a cacophony of noise and traffic fumes. He saw the sun painting curried rills of gold across seams of dust-cloud and swallowed hard. Beautiful wasn’t the word for it, he thought. Out here you could feel the earth was part of yourself.

  ‘I feel famished,’ Eliot said. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘For something completely novel,’ Truman chortled, ‘roast duck. There are half a dozen left, but they’ve been mighty quiet these past few nights.’

  Eliot guffawed. This season they’d imported a couple of hundred ducks from Siwa as fresh meat, shutting them up in an old tent at night. At first the birds had made an appalling racket, but the cook had solved the problem by choosing two or three of the noisiest ones every day to be killed and served for dinner. Either the ducks had cottoned on to what was happening or the cook had simply eliminated the vociferous ones, because for the past few weeks the duck tent had been curiously silent.

  ‘Come on,’ Truman said. ‘We can put the last of the whisky to bed afterwards.’

  The sun had turned red ochre and was taking its leave in firework bursts of colour slashing like searchlights through the glowering sky. The quartz-flats below them had become a shimmering molten gore. As they walked across the skirts of the dunes towards the camp, Miflah came shuffling towards them, a parcel of dark on the smouldering blood-colours of the desert. He was now dressed in a full-length army trench-coat and a woollen scarf arranged into an elaborate head-dress.

  ‘Excuse me, duktoor,’ he said urgently, ‘I must talk with you.’

  He looked serious, and Truman hoped desperately he wasn’t going to come out with some nostalgic farewell speech. He nodded at Eliot. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

  Miflah looked unusually flustered as he waited for Eliot to move out of earshot.

  ‘What is it?’ Truman asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  The little man was panting as if he’d been running. He brought out a piece of dirty cotton from under his coat and unfolded it. Inside was a folded piece of paper.

  ‘It was in the dead person’s pocket, duktoor,’ Miflah said.

  The paper showed a sketch done in pencil of what appeared to be a rock aiguille — almost like an ancient Egyptian obelisk, but created by erosion rather than man-made. The rock was covered in scratchings and carvings and the artist had gone to great pains to copy them. Prominent among them was the head of a ram — a domesticated ram with whorled horns, bearing the ancient Egyptian sun-disk, the oldest and most sacred of symbols. For a moment Truman stared at the sketch spellbound, feeling as if a new ratchet had just tumbled into place somewhere with an audible ‘snick’.

  Then Miflah touched his arm gently.

  ‘I heard of that sign,’ the hunchback growled. ‘It is the camel-brand of a tribe called the Saghrana, who live far away from everyone in the deepest stretches of the Mufarida. A place they call the Funeral Plains.’ He shivered. ‘The old folk tell stories about them. That they are bloodsuckers who can leave their bodies and fly away like bats.’ Truman was looking at the little man with his head to one side, only half taking in the words. Miflah scowled.

  ‘What is it, duktoor?’ he said. ‘You think this is all, how you say ... mumbo-jumbo — eh?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that,’ Truman said distractedly. ‘It’s just that this symbol — the ram’s head and the sun-disk — well it might be the brand of a nomad tribe, Miflah, but it also represents the Oracle of Ammon — the so-called “Hidden One”. I know, because five years ago at Aghurmi I found an identical image in a cartouche on the Santariya Column.’
>
  Chapter Two

  TRUMAN ALIGHTED FROM THE TAXI IN Regent Street and was engulfed by crowds of Christmas shoppers. A flurry of Union Jacks snapped in a vicious cold breeze above the mock-Tudor facade of Liberty and outside Hamleys toyshop there stood a giant teddy-bear in Beefeater uniform with frost on its nose. Last night’s snowfall was a memory — a scum of grey slush along the gutters — and cars and double-deckers were moving cautiously, their tyres crackling on salt-grit. Truman dodged between vehicles and hurried down Hanover Street. He lingered for a moment under a Queen Anne facade by the revolving door of the Jones, Laing, La Salle building, mingling with a wedge of clean-cut young associates in navy blue Crombies heading out to the pub for a cheery Christmas pint. The holiday was three days away, and everyone seemed to be high on the usual festive camaraderie. It only nauseated Truman and made him feel more of an outsider. Since he’d got back from Siwa two weeks ago he found he’d developed an aversion to crowds. How did we end up like this? he wondered. How, after 3 million years of evolution, have we come to a point where we lock ourselves up at close quarters with millions of people we don’t know and don’t feel we belong to?

  The Hanover Square address was a courtesy title, he discovered. Actually, the Kortex office lay down St George’s Street nearby, next to a wine shop — a Regency porch of bevelled blocks, an oak door with its statutory Christmas wreath, a bell-pull, and a big brass plate engraved with the title Kortex Mining Company Ltd. Truman halted there for a moment, smoothing wisps of wayward black hair out of his eyes. He glanced down the street, glimpsing the neo-classical exterior of St George’s Church with its array of pillars, pedestrians trudging along wet footpaths in anoraks and greatcoats. He loosened the upturned collar of his faded ankle-length overcoat, sighed and leaned heavily on the side of the portico, wondering whether to go in after all.

  *

  A week after arriving back in Oxford, Truman had found himself sitting in front of the entire Ashmoleum committee, in an austere hall in the museum. He’d looked along the row of expectant faces and detected not a mote of sympathy there — they reminded him of jackals closing in for the kill. The Chairman, Sir John Oldfield, prided himself on being a bluff Yorkshireman who had walked with nobs without losing the common touch. His manner had been deceptively blithe.