We waited a day to make sure the French weren’t waiting for us. Then, assuming a lack of water had driven them back to Cairo, we started south, travelling at night to avoid the worst of the heat. We paralleled the Nile but stayed many miles to the east to avoid detection, even though it was a struggle to negotiate the serpentine hills. Our plan was to catch up with Desaix’s main column of troops, where Silano and Astiza rode. I would pursue the count as the French pursued the Mameluke insurgents up the river. Eventually I would rescue Astiza, and Ashraf would have revenge on whoever had killed poor Enoch. We would find the staff of Min, unscramble the way into the Great Pyramid, and find the long-lost Book of Thoth, protecting it from the occult Egyptian Rite. And then… would we secrete it, destroy it, or keep it for ourselves? I would cross that bridge when I came to it, as old Ben would say.
Along our way, we found nests of life in the desert after all. A Coptic monastery of brown domed buildings sprouted like mushrooms in a forest of rock, a garden of palms promising the presence of a well. The Mameluke habit of carrying their wealth into battle now displayed a practical purpose: Ashraf had retrieved the purse he’d thrown at me and had enough coins to purchase food. We drank our fill, bought larger water bags, and found more wells as we continued south, spaced like inns on an invisible highway. The dried fruit and unleavened bread was simple but sustaining, and my companion showed how to coat my cracked lips with mutton fat to keep them from blistering. I was beginning to become more comfortable in the desert. The sand became a bed, and my loose robes – washed of donkey stink – caught every cooling breeze. Where before I had seen desolation, now I began to see beauty: there were a thousand subtle colours in the sinuous rocks, a play of light and shadow against crumbled white limestone, and a magnificent emptiness that seemed to fill the soul. The simplicity and serenity reminded me of the pyramids.
Occasionally we would zigzag closer to the Nile, and Ashraf would descend to a village at night to barter as a Mameluke for food and water. I’d stay up in the barren hills, overlooking the serene green belt of farmland and blue river. Sometimes the wind would bring the sound of camel or donkey bray, the laughter of children, or the call to prayer. I would sit on the edge, an alien peeking in. Toward dawn he would rejoin me, we’d make a few miles, and then as the sun rose over the cliffs we’d shovel away sand at places he knew and creep into old caves cut into the bluffs.
‘These are tombs of the ancients,’ Ash would explain, as we risked a small fire to cook whatever he had bartered for, using purchased charcoal and washing our meal down with tea. ‘These caves were hollowed out thousands of years ago.’ They were half-filled with drifting sand, but still magnificent. Columns carved like bundles of papyrus held up the stone roof. Bright murals decorated the walls. Unlike the barren granite of the Great Pyramid, here was a representation of life in a place of death, painted in a hundred colours. Boys wrestled. Girls danced and played. Nets drew in swarms of fish. Old kings were enveloped in trees of life, each leaf representing a year. Animals roamed in imagined forests. Boats floated on painted rivers where hippos reared and crocodiles swam. Birds filled the air. There were no skulls or morbid ravens as in Europe or America, but instead paintings that evoked a lush, wild, happier Egypt than the one I was traversing now.
‘It looks like a paradise in those days,’ I said. ‘Green, uncrowded, rich, and predictable. You don’t sense a fear of invasion, or a dread of tyrants. It’s as Astiza said, better then than at any time afterward.’
‘In the best times the whole land was united upriver as far as the third or fourth cataract,’ Ashraf agreed. ‘Egyptian ships sailed from the Mediterranean to Aswan, and caravans brought riches from Nubia and lands like Punt and Sheba. Mountains yielded gold and gems. Black monarchs brought ivory and spices. Kings hunted lion in the desert fringe. And each year the Nile would rise to water and renew the valley with silt, just as it is doing now. It will peak about the time you said your calendar indicated, on October 21 ^ st. Each year the priests watched the stars and zodiac to keep track of the optimal times for sowing and reaping and measured the level of the Nile.’ He pointed to some of the pictures. ‘Here the people, even the noblest, bring offerings to the temple to ensure the cycle continues. There were beautiful temples up and down the Nile.’
‘And the priests took those offerings.’
‘Yes.’
‘For a flooding that occurred every year anyway.’
He smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s the profession for me. Predict that the seasons will turn, the sun will come up, and rake in the common people’s gratitude.’
‘Except it was not predictable. Some years there was no flood, and famine followed. You probably didn’t want to be a priest then.’
‘I’m betting they had some good excuse for the drought and asked people to double the tribute.’ I have an eye for easy work and could just imagine their tidy system. I looked around. ‘And what’s this writing?’ I asked of graffiti atop some pictures. ‘I don’t recognise the language. Is it Greek?’
‘Coptic,’ Ashraf said. ‘Legend has it that early Christians hid in these caves from the persecution of the Romans. We are the latest in a long chain of fugitives.’
Another wall took my eye. It seemed to be a tally of something, a series of hash marks in the old language none of us could read. Some seemed plain enough: one mark to designate 1, three for 3, and so on. There was something familiar about those marks and I mused about it as we lay on sand that had sifted through the entrance, half filling the cave. Then it came to me. I took out the medallion.
‘Ash, look at this. This little triangle of notches on my medallion – they look like the marks on that wall!’
He glanced from one to the other. ‘Indeed. What of it?’
What of it? This might change everything. If I was right, the bottom of the medallion was not meant to represent a pyramid, it represented numbers! I was carrying something that bore some kind of sum! The savants might be lunatics for mathematics, but my weeks enduring them was paying off – I’d seen a pattern I otherwise might have missed. True, I couldn’t make much sense of the numbers – they seemed a random grouping of 1s, 2s, and 3s.
But I was getting closer to the mystery.
After many days and miles, we came to the crest of a steep limestone bluff near Nag Hammadi, the Nile curling around its edge and green fields on the far shore. There, across the river, we saw our quarry. Desaix’s division of French soldiers, three thousand men and two guns, formed a column more than a mile long, marching slowly beside the Nile. From our vantage point they were insects on a timeless canvas, crawling blind on a sheen of oils. It was at this moment that I realised the impossibility of the task the French had set for themselves. I grasped finally the vast sprawl not just of Egypt, but of Africa beyond, an endless rolling vista that made the French division seem as insignificant as a flea on an elephant. How could this little puddle of men truly subdue this empire of desert, studded with ruins and swarming with horse-mounted tribesmen? It was as audacious as Cortez in Mexico, but Cortez had the heart of an empire to aim for, while poor Desaix had already captured the heart, and now was pursuing the thrashing but defiant arms, in a wilderness of sand. His difficulty was not conquering the enemy, but finding him.
My problem was not finding my enemy, who must be somewhere in that column of soldiers, but coming to grips with him now that I was a French outlaw. Astiza was down there too, I hoped, but how could I get a message to her? My only ally was a Mameluke; my only clothes my Arab robes. I didn’t even know where to start, now that we had the division in view. Should I swim the river and gallop in, demanding justice? Or try to assassinate Silano from behind a rock? And what proof did I have that he was really my enemy at all? If I succeeded, I’d be hanged.