The Eye of Ra Read online

  48

  For the rest of the day I swam like a diver in and out of limbo. Hammoudi went off and didn’t come back. The police guard sat outside now; I couldn’t see him but sometimes I could hear his deep-moulded soles tramping impatiently up and down a corridor. I didn’t rate my chances of escape. I’d have bet money the small windows beneath the shutters were barred, even if I could have mustered the strength to get out of bed, which I couldn’t. The nurse bustled in and out, bringing bed-pans, checking the drip, administering tranquilliser and vitamin B shots in the arm. Her name was Thalwa as-Safawi — I knew that much from the little plastic badge pinned on her chest — and her accent told me she was from the south. She had the broad-bottomed, thick-ankled figure, and the directness of a Sai ‘idiyya. She fussed, made cheery comments, clucked like a mother hen, but she wouldn’t talk. ‘Where am I?’ I asked a dozen times.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ she whispered urgently, ‘they’re listening.’

  Often I strained for sounds and caught only snatches of conversation outside — guards dropping comments as they changed over, nurses passing the time of day. The walls must be soundproofed, I thought, but I’d have expected to hear at least faint traffic sounds if I’d been in a city. There was nothing. Absolute silence. Either I was still in the desert, or somewhere on the moon. I floated half-conscious through the day, and in my lucid moments I thought about Elena, then about my uncle and cousins. Five days since I was picked up. Were they still riding across the Desolation? Hammoudi had mentioned the Guardians and I tried to recall the message they’d given me. Mankind was no longer alone. I’d been chosen to bring that message to my species, and I had no right to keep it secret. But Wingate must have wanted to tell the world about what he’d found at Zerzura, too — or why would he have brought the ushabtis? Something had stopped him. His escort had ended up in the quicksand of Abu Simm. The Guardians claimed to have benevolent intentions towards humans, but who were the Guardians, anyway? What were they? I’d never seen one, only an image of my mother. And what had her shadow meant when it told me Maryam had been unable to get back home? Everyone who’d come near to the secret had been eliminated, why not me too? Sometimes the dream-voices crept into my head again: ‘We’ve got to find out what he remembers before we do anything drastic. We might never get another one like him.’

  I had no idea whether my memory was playing tricks — whether these voices were real or imaginary. I thought back to the star-ship, Akhnaton’s body, the artificial oasis — the events and images were blurred, and I couldn’t tell for sure any longer where reality began or ended. Something told me there was no dividing line and never had been, no subject and object, no eye of consciousness in the void, no lux in tenebris.

  With ten thousand years’ worth of history in my head, I ought to have had a few answers, but instead I had only questions. Akhnaton had been overthrown by an organisation called the Eye of Ra, a secret sect made up partly from priests of the disbanded Ra brotherhood, which went back to the earliest times. Sha-Tehuti had told Doc that the Eye of Ra Society had been in existence under different guises since ‘time immemorial’. The question that kept on popping up in my head was whether Doe’s Eye of Ra and the one that got rid of Akhnaton were the same? Was it possible for a sect to retain integrity of purpose over five and a half millennia? The Christian church had only been in existence for two thousand years, Islam for only one and a half. But the Guardian had claimed that the Ra Priesthood had retained its goals intact for ten thousand years. Was it the Eye of Ra Society who murdered Carnarvon and the people associated with the opening of Tut’s tomb? Was it responsible for the death of Nikolai Kolpos?

  Let the Eye of Ra descend

  That it may slay the evil conspirators.

  Who were the ‘evil conspirators’? Kolpos? Me? Julian Cranwell? Conspiring against what? Ma ‘at?

  The twentieth-century guardian of Ma ‘at.

  I had nothing to do but think, and steadily a shape began to emerge. At last I was beginning to glimpse the outline of the great edifice hidden in the sand — only faintly, maybe, but to glimpse it nevertheless. I wished suddenly that I had Rabjohn here — I was certain he’d be able to help me. But where was Rabjohn? Had he been eliminated too?

  I dozed in snatches at night, but in the morning I felt a little better. The nurse gave me a vitamin shot and plumped my pillows so that I could sit up. When I asked for pen and paper, books, newspapers — anything at all to occupy me — she shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘against instructions.’ Apart from the nurse no one came near me all day, and I began to hope Hammoudi would return — at least he was someone to talk to. I stared at the whitewashed ceiling, listened to hollow footfalls outside, the occasional murmur of voices, the distant warble of music from a radio. I longed to get up and look out of the window, but I still felt weak, and I guessed they’d be in here before I even reached it.

  The following morning a different nurse, called Huda — a Cairene with a hard, sour face — stalked in and gave me a heavy-handed bed-bath. She sat me up and left without a word. A bit later a white-coated lab assistant with a crew-cut shuffled in lugging a steel safety-case, from which he unpacked an expensive cassette tape-deck with a multi-directional microphone.

  ‘What’s all this for?’ I asked him. He ignored me pointedly, as though I was invisible or already dead. Five minutes afterwards, he brought in four tubular steel chairs and arranged them carefully along the side of my bed.

  Visitors, I thought.

  They came half an hour later — Hammoudi and two uniformed officers — a major and a colonel — and a civilian in a lab-coat. The major was a heavy man, wearing a hand-tailored black uniform with campaign ribbons. His face was broad and gangsterish, ravaged by chicken-pox scars and by good living — an onion of a nose and a moustache like barbed wire. I guessed he was Hammoudi’s superior, Rasim. The colonel was an oldish man —nearing retirement age I’d have thought — with bronzed, wrinkled features and cropped silver hair. There was something almost Slavic about his high cheekbones — he might have been Albanian or Czech, but in contrast to Rasim whose face looked raffish and vulgar, he was dignified and withdrawn. It was the civilian who caught my attention most of all, though. He was small and slight, with a prickly salt-and-pepper beard intended to conceal the fact that his face was almost totally devoid of a chin. His hair was an unkempt wire-brush, and his eyes gleamed in the strip-lighting, peering over gold-framed half-moon glasses. I noticed with astonishment that under his lab-coat he was wearing the robe of a priest — no, I thought, a monk. I’d seen this figure before, leaning over me in my dreams. The colonel and the ‘monk’ removed their chairs from the military line and sat together at the back of the room. Rasim leaned forwards, while Hammoudi occupied himself with operating the tape-deck. It wasn’t difficult to guess who my interrogator would be.

  ‘Omar James Ross,’ the major said lifting his chin imperiously, ‘you’re accused of conspiracy against the government of Egypt, of inciting a rebellion by a tiny minority group of which you are a member, and which has already been responsible for the deaths of several police officers and others. You were arrested with your accomplice five days ago trying to escape across the border into Libya, having separated yourself from the rest of the conspirators. Where are they hiding?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you anyway.’

  ‘Why were you trying to escape to Libya?’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to escape to Libya. I have no interest in Libya. I was returning from an expedition to find Zerzura, the Lost Oasis that’s been mentioned since the time of the ancient Greeks. It was a successful expedition.’

  ‘I see.’ There was utter silence. The tape-deck blinked and creaked. I’d been expecting some kind of reaction, but these dead-pan expressions threw me. Hammoudi lit a cigarette and looked away.

  ‘No smoking, please,’ Rasim said. Hammoudi stubbed it out sullenly
.

  ‘How come you returned to Egypt?’

  ‘I came in answer to a call from a friend of mine, Dr Julian Cranwell. Three days after I arrived he was found dead at Giza. The police said it was a heart attack, but they didn’t know that Cranwell’d rung me a few days earlier saying that he was in danger and being pursued by the same people — he actually said “Devils” — who killed Lord Carnarvon, Orde Wingate and Tutankhamen. It seemed like the rambling of a nutcase, I know — Tutankhamen died about three and a half thousand years ago, Carnarvon in 1923, and Wingate in 1944. How could there be a link between them? I realised in the end that unless the people Cranwell meant were over three thousand years old, he had to be talking about some kind of organisation or institution. He was, and I now know what it is — it’s called The Eye of Ra.’

  I paused for breath. There were the same dead-pan looks. The tape-recorder creaked on.

  ‘If it’s a conspiracy you’re after, there it is,’ I went on. ‘The Eye of Ra has been responsible for the deaths of scores of people over the last century, not only of Carnarvon and twenty-odd others, but also of my grandfather and my best friends Julian Cranwell and Evelyn Barrington, her husband and son and a whole lot more.’

  ‘And how do you happen to know this?’

  I took a deep breath, removed my glasses, then put them back on without thinking.

  ‘A few days ago I got access to what you might call privileged knowledge and I’ve made some deductions from it. The information was that the so-called heretic pharaoh, Akhnaton — father of Tutankhamen — was deposed violently by a popular uprising orchestrated by the Eye of Ra organisation, which was formed mainly from unfrocked priests of the Ra brotherhood. The Eye murdered Smenkhare and later got rid of Tut. It made sure that the names of Akhnaton’s dynasty were excised from history and swore that it would continue to exist to protect earth against the likes of Akhnaton for ever.’

  ‘Privileged knowledge?’ Rasim scoffed. ‘Where did you find it?’

  I halted and took another deep breath. So many ways-in offered themselves. I decided to start at the real beginning.

  ‘I’m an Egyptologist,’ I said, ‘and all my working life I’ve had a theory that ancient Egyptian civilisation was inherited from an older, more advanced civilisation — you might call it Atlantis. To conventional scholars this labelled me barmy: I was assigned to the lunatic fringe. Dr Abbas Rifad, who so readily supplied you with a report stating that I’d been sacked from the Antiquities Service for illegal trafficking, actually used my “lunatic” theories as an excuse for sacking me. But neither of those was the real reason I was sacked...’

  ‘I don’t see the relevance of this.’

  ‘Please, give me a second and you will. I was really fired because I turned up a unique artefact that proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the ancient Egyptians — or some other culture they were in contact with — had a knowledge of astronomy that could only have come from advanced physics. The artefact in question showed a star called Sirius B — a star which as it happens can’t be seen with the naked eye — and dated back at least three thousand years, probably more. But Sirius B wasn’t discovered until the middle of the last century and not properly identified until quite recently.’

  ‘So what is the point?’

  ‘The point is that my theory of foreign origins was correct in one way but quite spurious in another. In fact, ancient Egyptian civilisation did come from far away, but not from anywhere on this planet.’

  ‘From where then?’

  ‘From space.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath from Hammoudi, who was looking at me with amazement. The monk and the colonel exchanged glances and seemed to be struggling to preserve their poker faces. ‘You mean outer space?’ Rasim enquired, squinting as if he simply hadn’t heard right.

  ‘Yes, in fact it came from a planet in the constellation Canis Major, a planet orbiting the white dwarf Sirius B — the one, if you remember, which was shown in the stela I found, despite being invisible to the naked eye. The artefact I found was a record of that origin, but one which had been deliberately hidden in a special cache.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question: what was your privileged information and where did it come from?’

  ‘All right. Five days ago — at least I think it was five days —I discovered something buried under the sands of the Western Desert: a star-ship built more than three and a half thousand years ago. It was this ship which brought an alien to earth from Sirius B.’

  There was an unrestrained snort from Hammoudi. Rasim glared at him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a lisping, almost camp voice from the rear, and I looked up to see the ‘monk’ in the lab-coat with his hand up like a school-kid in class. ‘Sirius is roughly 8 light yearsh from earth,’ he said. ‘That would mean a voyage of shenturies. How could any living thing survive that?’ He stared at me over his half-moon glasses with eyes that were interested and alert.

  ‘It’s 8.6 light years to be exact,’ I said, ‘and yes, it would have taken years, but the aliens developed an anti-matter drive that could convert ninety per cent of its fuel to energy and approach ten percent of light speed.’

  The ‘monk’ looked satisfied. There were expressions that might have been awe on everyone’s face but Hammoudi’s. His features registered disgust.

  ‘So what happened to this alien from Sirius?’ Rasim asked. ‘He became the pharaoh Akhnaton.’

  ‘Akhnaton?’

  ‘Yes, Tut’s father. His — or I should say it’s — body was on the ship. It wasn’t human, but an alien masquerading as a human. Had the ability to manipulate its own DNA code. It arrived during the reign of Amenophis III, killed the pharaoh and his crown prince and set up in his place as Amenophis IV and later Akhnaton. It revolutionised ancient Egyptian culture, but it was involved in some sort of breeding experiment with human beings, trying to develop a hybrid species. It didn’t work though — humans got the better of it. That was why the Eye of Ra was formed, that was why it murdered Tut — Akhnaton’s hybrid son. That was the secret it has worked for millennia to preserve.’

  Rasim shook his head pityingly. ‘I just don’t understand how you could know all this. Did the space-ship come complete with a history manual?’

  Hammoudi chuckled. The colonel and the monk looked on, expressionless.

  ‘In a way it did,’ I said. ‘The whole story was written in perfectly recognisable hieroglyphs and stelae inside the ship. But that wasn’t all; I was guided by a projection...’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was like a sort of ghost. A ghost of my mother — at least that’s how it appeared. She — it — explained everything. Then the ship itself gave me some sort of message — a fantastic review of ancient history — things I’d never even dreamed of. The essence of the message was that mankind is no longer alone. The species has come of age; it’s time for us to grow up.’

  The thing that surprised me most was how unshocked they seemed. True, Hammoudi seemed to be wavering between pity and repulsion, snorting under his breath, but the others seemed singularly nonplussed. Either they’d heard it all before, or they’d already made up their minds I was a psycho.

  ‘I’m beginning to lose the thread,’ Rasim said testily. ‘How does all this connect with your alleged conspiracy?’

  ‘The Eye might have begun with a noble ideal,’ I said, ‘but I think it came to value its secret more than human life itself. When Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923, they came across something there that let the cat out of the bag. Carnarvon was rubbed out for it together with a bunch of colleagues. Carter agreed to keep his trap shut. In 1933, Orde Wingate actually ferreted out the ship, but his party, my grandfather among them, was massacred. Wingate escaped with his headman, and hid the proof of his discovery, a set of Akhnaton ushabti figures, with my relatives. He never divulged what he’d found, but his personality became more and more skewed. He w
as blown up in Burma in 1944.’

  I paused. Their faces were riveted on me now, but whether in fascination or incredulity I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Nothing much happened until Space Shuttle Columbia buzzed the Western Desert by accident in 1981, with its SIRA system, a sort of radar-camera that could photograph hundreds of metres under the earth’s surface. The SIR film analyst, Lynne Regis, probably picked out the huge unidentified metal object under the sands, but she died in a mysterious accident before she could publish, and the film itself was trashed in a fire at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. The point is that the Eye will stop at nothing to preserve its secret: it’s killing its own species to protect us from an alien threat.’

  ‘Who are its members?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I do know they’re all around us. I was sacked from the EAS because I’d found something that threatened their secret and scared them. That means they’re in the government and they’ve got power. And they’ve had it for some time. Ibrahim Izzadin, the former DG of the Service, was pulped by a runaway car, just as he was about to investigate alleged misconduct in the Tutankhamen project. I suspect that was their doing, too.’

  ‘So your claim is that Cranwell and the dealer Kolpos were both murdered by this Eye of Ra organisation, is that right?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? But you’ve been so cocksure of everything else up to now! You’re sure you found a space-ship from Sirius, sure Akhnaton was an alien, sure there’s a massive conspiracy going on, yet when we come down to the mundane level of your friend’s death — the thing, you say, that brought you back to Egypt — you haven’t even decided whether he was a victim!’

  ‘I don’t know if Cranwell’s dead. That night I was arrested at Giza by the Captain here, I’d arranged to meet him.’

  Hammoudi snorted even more loudly. ‘That’s two ghosts so far,’ he chuckled. ‘Ghosts, voices and aliens! The full head-banger’s repertoire!’

  Rasim glared at him again and Hammoudi went silent reluctantly.