Napoleon's Pyramids (33 page)

“So will you,” I muttered. “So will you.”

O
ur horses gone, we took two of the slavers’ camels and gave the four others to the freed blacks. There were enough provisions to get the party started on the long trek back to their homeland, and we gave them the captured guns to hunt for game and fend off slavers who would no doubt try to recapture them. We showed them how to load and fire, a task they learned with alacrity. Then they clutched at our knees to give thanks so fervently that we finally had to pry them off. We’d rescued them, it was true, but they’d also rescued us. Ashraf sketched a path for them through the desert hills that would keep them away from the Nile until they were above the first cataract. Then we went our separate way.

It was my first time on a camel, a noisy, grumpy, and somewhat ugly beast with its own community of fleas and midges. Yet is was well-trained and reasonably docile, dressed in rich and colorful harness. At Ash’s direction I took my perch as it sat, then held on as it lurched upward. A few cries of “Hut, hut!” and it began moving, following the lead of Ash’s beast. There was a rocking rhythm it took some time to get used to, but it was not altogether unpleasant. It felt like a boat in a seaway. Certainly it would do until I found a horse again, and I needed to reach the French expeditionary force before Bin Sadr did. We followed the ridge crest to a point above a Nile ferry and then descended to cross to Desaix’s side of the river.

On the far bank we crossed the trampled wake of the army, rode through a banana grove, and at length struck desert again to the west and aimed for low hills, circling around to the army’s flank. It was late afternoon when we spied the column again, camping along the dark course of the Nile. Shadows of date palms combed the ground.

“If we go on now we can enter their lines before sunset,” I said.

“A good plan. I leave you to it, friend.”

“What?” I was startled.

“I have done what I needed to, freeing you from jail and getting you here, yes?”

“More than you needed to. I am in your debt.”

“As I am in yours giving me my freedom, trust, and companionship. It was wrong to blame you for the death of my brother. Evil comes, and who knows why? There are dual forces in the world, forever in tension. Good must fight bad, it is a constant. And so we will, but each in our own way, for now I must go to my people.”

“Your people?”

“Bin Sadr has too many men to take on alone. I am still Mameluke, Ethan Gage, and somewhere in the desert is the fugitive army of Murad Bey. My brother Enoch was alive until the French came, and I fear many more will die until this foreign presence is driven from my country.”

“But Ashraf, I’m part of that army!”

“No. You’re no more a Frank than a Mameluke. You are something strange and out of place, American, sent here for the gods’ purpose. I’m not certain what role you’ve been chosen to play, but I do feel that I’m to leave you to play it, and that Egypt’s future relies on your courage. So go to your woman and do what her gods ask you to do.”

“No! We aren’t just allies, we’ve become friends! Haven’t we? And I’ve lost too many friends already! I need your help, Ashraf. Avenge Enoch with me!”

“Revenge will come at the god’s chosen time. If not, Bin Sadr would have died today, because you seldom miss. I suspect he has a different fate, perhaps more terrible. Meanwhile, what you need is to get what this Count Silano has come here to find, and fulfill your destiny. Whatever happens on future battlefields can’t alter the bond we’ve made over these many days. Peace be upon you, friend, until you find what it is you’re looking for.”

And with that he and his camel disappeared toward the setting sun and I started, more alone than ever, to find Astiza.

I
knew that the notion of galloping into Desaix’s division of French soldiers, shouting for Silano, was unlikely to produce anything other than my own arrest. But what I lacked in power I made up for in possession: I had the medallion, and my rival did not. It would be far easier, I realized, to have Silano come to me.

It was near dusk when I approached a squad of camped sentries, my arms raised. Several ran out with muskets, having learned to view any approaching Egyptian with suspicion. Too many unwary Frenchmen had died in a war that was becoming crueler.

I gambled that news of my escape from Cairo had not reached these pickets. “Don’t shoot! I’m an American recruited to Berthollet’s company of scholars! I’ve been sent by Bonaparte to continue my investigation of the ancients!”

They looked at me suspiciously. “Why are you dressed like a native?”

“Without escort, do you think I’d still be alive if I were not?”

“You came alone from Cairo? Are you mad?”

“The boat I was riding hit a rock and has to be repaired. I was impatient to come ahead. I hope there are ruins here.”

“I recognize him,” one said. “The Franklin man.” He spat.

“Surely you appreciate the opportunity to study the magnificent past,” I said lightly.

“While Murad Bey taunts us, always a few miles ahead. We beat him. And then we beat him again. And then again. Each time he runs, and each time he comes back. And each time a few more of us will never return to France And now we wait at ruins while he escapes deeper into this cursed country, as out of reach as a mirage.”

“If you can even see the mirage,” joined another. “A thousand troops have sore eyes in this dust and sun, and a hundred are hobbling blind. It’s like a jest out of a play. Ready to fight? Yes, here is our rank of blind musketeers!”

“Blindness! That’s the least of it,” added a third. “We’ve shit twice our weight between here and Cairo. Sores don’t heal. Blisters become boils. There are even cases of plague. Who hasn’t lost half a dozen kilos of flesh on this march alone?”

“Or been so horny they’re ready to mate with rats and donkeys?”

All soldiers like to grumble, but clearly, disillusionment with Egypt was growing. “Perhaps Murad is on the brink of defeat,” I said.

“Then let’s defeat him.”

I patted my rifle. “My muzzle has been as warm as yours at times, friends.”

Now their interest brightened. “Is that the American longrifle? I hear it can kill a Red Indian at a thousand paces.”

“Not quite, but if you only have one shot, this is the gun you want. I recently hit a camel at four hundred.” No need to tell them what I’d been aiming at.

They crowded around. Men find unity in admiring good tools and it was, as I’ve said, a beautiful piece, a jewel amid the dross of their regulation muskets.

“Today my gun stays cold because I have a different task, no less important. I’m to confer with Count Alessandro Silano. Do you know where I could find him?”

“The temple, I suppose,” a sergeant said. “I think he wants to live there.”

“Temple?”

“Away from the river, beyond a village called Dendara. We’ve stopped so Denon can scribble more pictures, Malraux can measure more stone, and Silano can mutter more spells. What a circus of lunatics. At least
he
brought a woman.”

“A woman?” I tried not to betray any particular interest.

“Ah, that one,” a private agreed. “I sleep with her in my dreams.” He jerked his fist up and down and grinned.

I restrained the inclination to club him with my rifle. “Which way to this temple?”

“You intend to go dressed like a bandit?”

I straightened. “I look, I believe, like a sheikh.”

That drew a laugh. They pointed and offered escort, but I declined. “I need to confer with the count alone. If he’s not already at the ruins and you see him, give him this message. Tell him he can find what he’s looking for at midnight.”

Silano wouldn’t arrest me, I gambled. He’d want me to first find what we both were looking for, and then surrender it for Astiza.

T
he temple glowed under stars and moon, an immense pillared sanctuary with a flat stone roof. It and its subsidiary temples were enclosed by a mud-brick wall a square kilometer in circumference, eroded and half buried. The wall’s primary gateway jutted out of the sand as if half drowned, with clearance just high enough to walk under. It was carved with Egyptian gods, hieroglyphs, and a winged sun flanked by cobras. Beyond, the courtyard was filled with dunes like ocean swells. A waning moon gave pale illumination to sand as smooth as the skin of an Egyptian woman, sensuous and sculpted. Yes, there was a thigh, beyond it a hip, and then a buried obelisk like a nipple on a breast…

I’d been away from Astiza too long, hadn’t I?

The main building had a flat façade, with six immense pillars rearing from the sand to hold up the stone roof. Each column was topped by the eroded visage of a broad-faced goddess. Or rather four faces: on each pillar she looked in the four cardinal directions, her Egyptian headdress coming down behind cowlike ears. With her wide-lipped smile and huge, friendly eyes, Hathor had a bovine serenity. The headdress was colored with faded paint, I noted, evidence that the structure had once been brilliantly colored. The temple’s long abandonment was apparent from the dunes that rolled inside. Its front looked like a dock being consumed by a rising tide.

I looked about, but saw no one. I had my rifle, my tomahawk, and no certain plan except that this might be the temple that would house the staff of Min, that Silano might meet me here, and that I might spot him before he spied me.

I slogged up the dune and passed through the central entry. Because of the heaping sand, I wasn’t far from the ceiling as I passed inside. When I lit a candle I had taken from the soldiers, it revealed a roof painted blue and covered with yellow five-pointed stars. They looked like starfish or, I thought, the head, arms, and legs of men who had taken their place in the night sky. There was also a rank of vultures and winged suns decorated in reds, gold, and blues. We seldom look up and yet the entire ceiling was as intricately decorated as the Sistine Chapel. As I went deeper into the temple’s first and grandest hall the sand receded and I descended from the ceiling, beginning to get a sense of just how high the pillars really were. The interior felt like a grove of massive trees, painstakingly carved and painted with symbols. I wandered amid the eighteen gigantic columns in awe, each crowned with the placid faces of the goddess. The pillars banded as they rose. Here was a row of ankhs, the sacred key of life. Then stiff Egyptian figures, giving offerings to the gods. There were the indecipherable hieroglyphs, many enclosed in ovals the French had dubbed
cartouches,
or cartridges. There were carvings of birds, cobras, fronds, and striding animals.

At either end of this room the ceiling was even more elaborate, decorated with the signs of the zodiac. A huge nude woman, stretched like rubber, curled around them: a sky goddess, I guessed. Yet the sum was bewildering and overwhelming, a crust of gods and signs so thick that it was like walking inside an ancient newspaper. I was a deaf man at an opera.

I studied the sand for tracks. No sign of Silano.

At the rear of this great hall there was an entry to a second, smaller hall, equally high but more intimate. Rooms opened off it, each decorated on walls and ceiling but empty of furniture for millennia, their purpose unclear. Then a step up to another entry, and beyond it another, each room lower and smaller than the one before. Unlike a Christian cathedral, which broadened as one advanced, Egyptian temples seemed to shrink the farther one penetrated. The holier the enclosure, the more it was lightless and exclusive, rays of light reaching it only on rare days of the year.

Could that be the meaning of my October date?

So wondrous were the decorations that for a brief time I forgot my mission. I had flickering glimpses of snakes and lotus flowers, boats that floated in the sky, and fierce and terrible lions. There were baboons and hippos, crocodiles and long-necked birds. Men marched in gloriously decorated processions, carrying offerings. Women offered their breasts like life itself. Deities as regal and patient as emperors stood in sideways poses. It seemed crude and idolatrous, this mix of animals and animal-headed gods, and yet for the first time I recognized how much closer the Egyptians were to their gods than we are to ours. Ours are sky gods, distant, unworldly, while the Egyptians could see Thoth each time an ibis stepped across a pond. They could sense Horus with each flight of a falcon. They could report having talked to a burning bush, and their neighbors would accept the story calmly.

There was still no sign of Silano or Astiza. Had the soldiers led me astray—or was I walking into a trap? Once I thought I heard a footstep, but when I listened there was nothing. I found some stairs and mounted them, ascending in a twisting pattern like the climb of a hawk. Carved on the walls was an upward procession of men carrying offerings. There must have been ceremonies up here. I emerged on the temple’s roof, surrounded by a low parapet. Still not sure what I was looking for, I wandered amid small sanctuaries set on its terrace. In one, small pillars topped by Hathor made a gazebo-like enclosure reminiscent of a Paris park. In the northwest corner was a door leading to a small, two-roomed sanctum. The inner chamber had bas reliefs showing a pharaoh or god rising from the dead in more ways than one: his phallus was erect and triumphant. It reminded me of the tumescent god Min. Was this the legend of Isis and Osiris I’d been told when we sailed toward Egypt? A falcon floated above the being about to be resurrected. Again, my poor brain could detect no useful clue.

The outer room, however, gave me a tingle of excitement. On the ceiling, two nude women flanked a spectacular circular relief crammed with figures. After studying it for a while, I decided the carving must be a representation of the sacred sky. Upheld by four goddesses and eight representations of the hawk-headed Horus—did they represent the twelve months?—was a circular disc of the symbolic heavens, painted with faded colors of blue and yellow. I spied signs of the zodiac again, not too dissimilar from what had come down to us in modern times: the bull, the lion, the crab, the twin fish. At the circumference was a procession of thirty-six figures, both human and animal. Could these represent the Egyptian and French ten-day weeks?

I craned my neck, trying to make sense of it. At the northern axis of the temple was a figure of Horus, the hawk, who seemed to anchor all the rest. Toward the east was Taurus, the bull, signifying the age in which the pyramids had been built. To the south was a half-fish, half-goat creature, and near it a man pouring water from two jars—Aquarius! This was the sign of the future age, centuries hence, and the symbol for the vital rising of the Nile. Aquarius, like the water symbol on the medallion around my neck, and Aquarius, like the sign on the lost calendar of
L’Orient
that I’d guessed pointed to October 21.

The ceiling’s circle reminded me of a compass. Aquarius was oriented to the southwest.

I stepped outside, trying to get my bearings. A stone stairway led up to the parapet at the rear edge of the temple, so I climbed to look. To the southwest was another smaller temple, more decayed than the one I was in. Enoch had said there would be a small temple of Isis, and within it, perhaps, the mysterious staff of Min. Beyond it the dunes swept over the compound’s periphery wall, and distant hills glowed silver under cold stars.

I felt the medallion against my chest. Could I find its completion?

A second flight of stairs took me back to the ground floor. Its straightness was like the dive of a hawk that had spiraled upward on the other side. Now men with offerings were marching downward. Once again I was in the main temple, but a door to one side led again to the sands of the compound. I looked up. The main temple wall loomed above me, lion heads jutting like gargoyles.

My rifle ready, I walked to the rear, toward the smaller temple I’d seen. To my right, palms grew from the ruins of the sacred lake. I tried to imagine this place in ancient times, the dunes at bay, the causeways paved and shining, the gardens tended, and the lake shimmering as priests bathed. What an oasis it must have been! Now, ruins. At the temple’s rear I turned the corner and stopped short. Gigantic figures were carved on the wall, thirty feet high. A king and queen, I guessed from their headdress, were offering goods to a full-breasted goddess, perhaps Hathor or Isis. The queen was a slim and stylish woman with a towering crown, her arms bare, her legs long and slim. Her wig was braided, and a cobra like a golden tiara was poised above her forehead.

“Cleopatra,” I breathed. It had to be her, if Enoch was right! She was opposite her little temple of Isis, which sat about twenty meters to the south of the main building.

I glanced about. Still the compound seemed lifeless, except for me. I had the sense that it was poised, waiting. For what?

The Isis temple was built on a raised terrace, a drift of sand between it and the Cleopatra carving on the main building. Half the small temple was a walled sanctuary like the larger temple I’d just come from. The other half was open and ruined, a shadowy mass of pillars and beams, open to the sky. I climbed up broken blocks to the door of the walled section. “Silano?” My query echoed back at me.

Hesitantly, I stepped inside. It was very dark, the only light coming from the door and two high openings barely big enough to fit pigeons. The room was taller than it was long or wide, and claustrophobic, its smell acrid. I took another step.

Suddenly there was a whir of wings and I instinctively ducked. Warm wind thrashed at me, extinguishing my light. Bats flew by, squeaking, scraping my scalp with leathery wings. Then they funneled outside. I relit my candle with shaking hand.