The Eye of Ra Page 11

  The pyramids loomed massively out of the dusk. At the Mena House Oberoi the lights were already up and there was a flurry of activity as cars and lamplit gharries came and went at the gates. We drove past the hotel up to the gates of the Necropolis, where a knot of Bedouin camel-men were gathered, waiting for the sunset prayer. Doc pulled up just as the last embers of the sun dissolved into a whorl of cloud across the desert, and I stepped out of the car to watch the Arabs line up behind their imam for the prayer. Each man had simply laid his woven prayer-mat before him in the sand, and they bowed in unison, reciting the familiar formulas, kneeling and touching the earth with the forehead and the bridge of the nose. I felt an unexpected itch to join them. It wasn’t that I was a fanatical Muslim — even the Hawazim were really only Muslims in name — it was more of an aesthetic thing. I knew the words by heart from childhood, and I’d always loved the tranquil simplicity of the sunset prayer. It was simply the ritual which appealed to me. The Arabs repeated the sequence, and as I watched, I realised that the imam, the prayer-leader, was Sulayman, the Hazmi tracker whom Hammoudi had assaulted. In a few moments the prayer was over. The Arabs were sitting on their mats, turning their heads right and left and shaking hands with those each side in the ritual gesture of brotherhood. I walked over to the old man and shook hands. ‘Peace be on you,’ I said.

  ‘And on you be peace. I was thinking about you and your friend today, Omar.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I was wondering whether he was a kind of shaman, an amnir, a man who’d made a pact with the Jinns in return for magical powers. Did he have magical powers, Omar?’

  Amnir. I tweaked an image of the word over in my mind. The Hawazim, my mother’s people, were led by men who supposedly had a gift for precognition, who were adept at navigating the tribe through the deserts of time. I’d scoffed at the idea as a child, but when I thought of Julian’s uncanny intuition, I had to admit that he’d possessed a similar gift.

  ‘He saw things that other men didn’t see,’ I said. ‘If that’s magic, then yes, he did. But even so, that doesn’t explain his death does it?’

  ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

  ‘You saw the body as well as I did.’

  ‘Jinns can disguise a man’s face. Are you certain it was your friend?’

  I was starting to feel uneasy again. The talk of Jinns brought back frightening memories from childhood that I’d kept safely under lock and key for years, and Sulayman’s suspicions seemed to be coming perilously close to my own. It was true that features of the corpse had been wildly distorted, and since the time I’d seen Julian dead, he’d been spotted alive by a hunchback and had actually spoken to Doc on the phone. His body wasn’t in the morgue, and as far as I could tell, it never had been.

  ‘Look, Uncle,’ I said, ‘I want to get on to the plateau.’

  ‘But it’s night. The place is closed and it’s full of guards.’

  ‘But you know a way round the guards, don’t you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then show me.’

  ‘If we get stopped you know what it will mean?’

  ‘Prison?’

  ‘Naah.’ The old man began to bleat with laughter. ‘It will mean coughing up at least fifty pounds. I hope you’ve got money. These Tourist Police don’t come cheap.’

  Doc wanted to see the action. She insisted on coming with me, and it took me a long time to persuade her to stay in the car — we might need a fast getaway, I said. Finally she agreed to remain parked at the entrance, while I went off with Sulayman. We made our way along a narrow track passing under the embankment on the northern periphery of the plateau, and eventually the security lights at the gate were far behind, leaving us in darkness. The old man paced on rapidly with the raking stride of one brought up in the desert. I scurried after him, surveying the sky, noting the constellations: the Plough, Draco, Orion — and there was Sirius burning brightly, aligned with the three-star cluster of Orion’s belt. Behind us lay the surreal blaze of Cairo, and in front a softer glow of gold creeping along the edge of the desert. I knew that moonrise was only seconds away. Suddenly, the huge, bloated ball of the moon shot up from beneath the horizon, flooding the world with light. It rose rapidly as I watched, deflating and growing whiter as it climbed. The old man turned and clambered up the embankment. I followed him. From the top I saw the great arrowheads of the pyramids etched in darkly by the flux of moonlight. Sulayman caught my arm. ‘This is as far as I go,’ he said in a whisper.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is a place of the Dead. It’s full of spirits. Stay away from it, Omar, that’s my advice.’

  ‘I can’t. I told you why.’

  ‘All right. Just follow the track. It’ll take you straight to the Great Pyramid. But be careful. Go in the safekeeping of the Divine Spirit.’

  I clasped his thin, hard hand, then set off up the track without looking back. Somehow his talk of Jinns had affected me. I’d been working in tombs and burial grounds half my adult life and hadn’t thought anything of it, but now, almost for the first time since childhood, I began to sense dark and inexplicable forces moving around me. There were, I knew, aspects of my early years in the desert that lay cloaked and hidden inside, and tonight I had an unnameable sense of something glimpsed long ago in a dream but not quite seen, a feeling lurking on the very precipice of terror. The silence was eerie. The crunch of my own feet, then, surely, someone else’s footfalls following my own. I halted and listened. Nothing. I continued. There were the footfalls again. I stopped once more. There was an ominous low whistling — the wind, perhaps. Then I distinctly heard voices. Suddenly, I realised I was in the place where I’d seen Julian’s dead body. There was a fragment of white tape, fluttering from a stick. I glanced at my watch: seven twenty-eight. The alleged Julian Cranwell had told Doc I’d know the place. This had to be it. I stood still and listened. I caught footfalls again, and whispering voices. Deep in the shadows, far away, I glimpsed the momentary play of flashlights — Tourist Police guards, I thought, doing their rounds. For a few moments there was utter silence, then a voice, very near, whispered ‘Ross...’

  Even though I’d been expecting Julian, I jumped violently, shocked by the familiarity of the voice. Nasal syllables. A touch of north country. Behind me, twenty metres away, a tall, bulky figure, the size and shape of Julian Cranwell, had emerged from the shadows. ‘Julian?’ I said.

  ‘You should have come alone, Ross.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘No.’ He pointed. I glanced back to see two flashlight beams coming directly towards us. There was a scuff of feet and I looked back again to see the bulky figure leaping off into the shadows. ‘Julian,’ I called, desperately, ‘Julian, come back, for God’s sake.’ I began to run. Julian was making for the maze of small tombs on the western side of the pyramid, running wildly, faster than I’d ever seen him run in his previous life. In a moment he was lost among the tombs. ‘Julian. Julian,’ I called. Suddenly I heard rapid footsteps behind me. The beam of a powerful torch hit me full in the face. ‘Stop or I’ll shoot,’ a voice bellowed in Arabic. Three uniformed men carrying shotguns emerged from the night in front of me. Blinded, I cast about for a way of escape, but almost at once a thick arm from behind seized me around the neck so violently that my glasses were flung off. I was dragged roughly to my knees. A pulse of sheer indignation swept through me. I turned my head instinctively to the crook of the elbow, pulled on it until it gave, then snapped back and threw one of the most vicious punches I’d thrown since I boxed at university. My fist connected with soft tissue and there was a shiver of bone and an anguished scream of ‘Allah!’ Other arms were on me now, and as I struggled, a cold hard object was forced against the side of my head. ‘Don’t move,’ someone growled, ‘or I’ll blow your flicking brains out.’ I was forced down into the sand until my eyes, nostrils and mouth were full of it, and I choked for breath. My arms were pinioned behind me and handcuffs clamped clumsily on my wrists. A hand wrenched
my hair, jerking my head backwards out of the sand and I half turned to look into the face of Captain Hammoudi, holding the muzzle of his .44 Magnum Ruger revolver flush against my temple. There is something very sobering about having a loaded gun pressed to your head and knowing that only the slightest wiggle of a forefinger divides you from oblivion. ‘Well, look at what fell from the stars,’ Hammoudi said, grinning. ‘Mr Omar James Ross. I think it’s time for those questions, now, don’t you?’

  15

  The police station they took me to stood on the banks of the Nile at Bulaq, a crumbling place of gypsum and cinderblock with warped double-doors opening into a courtyard. The yard was full of sloppily dressed black-jackets who grinned at me truculently as I was hustled in. They hurried me down corridors with dark Rorschach smears on the walls that might have been dried blood, past nameless offices with half-opened doors where men smoked and babbled aimlessly. A door opened and I was shoved into a windowless room with an uneven floor and walls that were visibly disintegrating. An old table and three upright chairs stood under a single low-watt light-bulb. They sat me down hard on one of the chairs, unlocked my cuffs and then cuffed me to it. The door slammed and I was alone. I looked around the room as the bulb swung slowly, sending a cradle of light rocking from side to side. It was airless and desolate and smelt of urine. I noticed what looked like claw-marks on the wall opposite me as if some fear-crazed, hopeless soul had tried to scrape his way through the stone. For a moment there was silence, and then someone in the next room screamed. It was a naked cry of such pain and anguish that I shuddered. There was another scream, even more intense than the first, and then a broken voice sobbing and begging for mercy. There is nothing like hearing another human scream to set the pulse racing. I guess it must be something in the collective unconscious acquired over millions of years of huddling in dark places hoping the predator would go for your neighbour and not yourself. When the door opened and Captain Hammoudi marched in minutes later, I have to admit I was well and truly terrified.

  Hammoudi was accompanied by a younger plain-clothes man, a broad-shouldered, heavy-jowled peasant with a look of generic aggressiveness, whose nose was covered with a clumsily taped bandage, seeping blood. His eyes held mine glassily for a moment, and I realised it was the officer whose nose I’d punched. As they sat down, Hammoudi slapped a blue folder on the table. He lit a cigarette. The sobbing from the other room came again, and Hammoudi listened attentively. The bandaged officer smiled with apparent enjoyment. ‘They’ve got a terrorist in there,’ Hammoudi said, ‘a Muslim Brother. Attached to the electrodes. Swore he wouldn’t give away the names of his cell...now he’s begging to be allowed to. Nothing like pain to break down loyalties. Sergeant Mustafa here wanted to give you the same treatment. I said no, we’re not savages after all, and Mr Ross is only too happy to help us. I hope I’m right, Ross, because Sergeant Mustafa is very persuasive.’

  ‘Why am I being held?’ I demanded.

  Hammoudi rocked back on his chair and blew smoke at me. ‘I don’t think you quite understand the situation, Ross,’ he said. ‘You are under arrest. I ask the questions, and you answer politely and to the point. If I decide to let you go, you walk, if I decide to hold you, you rot, and if I decide to hand you over to Sergeant Mustafa here, you’ll join our friend next door.’

  Mustafa fixed his glassy eyes on me as if willing me to say something provocative.

  ‘Sergeant Mustafa is an expert at making people talk,’ Hammoudi went on. ‘He enjoys it. Sees it like a contest. Or an art. He’s been known to cut thumbs and fingers off with a razor, one at a time. Even if they talk he continues to cut — always likes to complete a job once he’s started.’

  ‘I’m a British citizen,’ I said, ‘and I have a right to a lawyer and the presence of the British Consul.’

  Hammoudi chortled nastily. Mustafa grinned. ‘Very convenient to pick and choose your passport, isn’t it?’ he smiled. Then the smile faded abruptly. ‘Just where the hell do you think you are? Rights are a luxury of the West. You have no rights here.’

  ‘Could you at least unlock the handcuffs. I’m not likely to run away.’

  Hammoudi considered the request for a moment, then nodded to Mustafa. The sergeant sauntered over to me resentfully and unlocked the cuffs. The steel had left painful red weals on my wrists which I rubbed slowly.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’

  Hammoudi opened the file and began to read. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you are Omar James Ross, born in a tent near Kharja, Egypt, 1960, son of Dr Calvin Ross, eminent British anthropologist, and Maryam bint Salim of the Hawazim. Must have been an odd match, that — the English scholar and the illiterate Bedouin woman. I’m astonished your father ever got permission to roam around the Western Desert during the Nasserite period, so soon after the English dropped paratroops on the Suez Canal.’

  ‘My father made it clear to President Nasser that he sympathised in principle with Arab Nationalism,’ I said. ‘He thought the whole Suez fiasco a blunder and a national disgrace for the British.’

  ‘How noble,’ Hammoudi sneered. ‘But then he was a rich man, wasn’t he. He could afford to believe what he wanted. Inherited money from your grandfather, who was a...soapmaker...am I right?’

  ‘Starlight Soap,’ I said.

  ‘Aha, washes the world clean. Washes away the sins of the dirty colonialists who made money out of people like me and mine. That business still in the family?’

  ‘No. My grandfather sold it years ago, before I was born. My father never had an interest in making soap. He had a feel for the desert and its people. He loved the Hawazim because they were the tribe most marginalised, and downtrodden.’

  ‘So there he was doing research on the Bedouin in the Western Desert when he met and fell passionately in love with the beautiful Maryam. Converted to Islam — damned fool. Only a year later you popped into the world. You spent your first seven years with them, and then your father sent you to the International School in Cairo. You spent your holidays with your people at Kharja. When you were nine, your father went back to England, taking you with him. He never returned to Egypt, despite his sympathy with Arab Nationalism. What happened?’

  ‘My mother disappeared.’

  ‘You mean the beautiful Maryam ran off with someone else? Got fed up with the stiff Afrangi?’

  ‘Never. Maryam disappeared on a journey in the desert in 1969. They said she’d been caught in a sandstorm, but her body was never found.’

  ‘It certainly wasn’t reported to the Mukhabaraat at Kharja.’

  ‘Is that surprising? The Hawazim don’t trust the Mukhabaraat. They never report anything.’

  ‘The Hawazim are a bunch of savages who can’t stand hard work. If I had my way I’d have them rounded up and set to drudge away in the fields, like my father and my father’s father had to. That would soon change their attitude.’

  ‘It’s been tried.’

  ‘Not hard enough. Anyway, you went to school in England. Four schools in five years...sounds like you couldn’t settle...’

  I was going to ask where on earth they had dug up all this information on me, but I stopped myself. Hammoudi was asking the questions. Whatever the case, they’d gone to some effort to get the stuff, an ominous indication that their interest in me was more than superficial.

  ‘You were expelled from one school for beating another boy with a cricket bat,’ Hammoudi went on, chuckling as if his theory had been proved correct, ‘so, as we say in Asyut, farkh al-batt ‘awwam — “the duck’s offspring floats”. Your father died of cancer in 1990. You went to St Antony’s College, Oxford, to study Archaeology and Anthropology, but you left after your first year. Why? Did you beat up your professors with a cricket bat?’

  ‘I had some disagreements.’

  ‘Ha ha! Disagreements. You transferred to the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where you did Ancient History and Archaeology. Good academic record, marred by subversive ac
tivities. You got into student politics. You have a police record — disorderly behaviour at a peace march; ooh and what’s this, oh dear, Mr Ross — caught smoking cannabis in a public place. Tut-tut. Disgraceful. You were fined both times, and the university nearly threw you out. You were saved by your sporting record. You were in the university shooting team — crack shot with both a pistol and a rifle — surprising for a four-eyes like you.’

  ‘My eyesight didn’t deteriorate until I was in my twenties. Actually, I first learned to handle a rifle when I was five.’

  ‘You also boxed for the University of London, very successfully it says here — hence Sergeant Mustafa’s broken nose, no doubt.’

  ‘It was a reflex action. I haven’t hit anyone since I boxed in my student days.’

  ‘I think you should apologise to Sergeant Mustafa for ruining his good looks. Sergeant Mustafa is very fond of the girls.’

  I glanced at Mustafa, and almost had to stifle a laugh. He was red in the face and his eyes were moist. The bandage had been applied so haphazardly that it was on the point of falling to pieces, and blood was still dripping from his nose. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Mustafa nodded, but his eyes never lost their malevolent glaze.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ Hammoudi went on. ‘Let’s see. You graduated in 1982, nothing spectacular, and in 1983 you were first employed by the Egyptian Antiquities Service here as an Egyptologist, initially as assistant to Dr Julian Cranwell. Digs at Luxor, Karnak, Bahriyya oasis and other places. In 1987 you went back to Britain to take your Ph.D., but you gave it up and were back with the Service within the year. You began working as director of your own small digs at Amarna, Aswan, Madinat Habu, etcetera...but your promotion was always blocked because of rows with the directorate.’ He looked up and fixed me with an inquisitive stare, the kind of stare I’d had to endure too many times. ‘Tell me, Ross,’ he said, ‘what are you? Are you one of us or one of them?’