CHAPTER TWENTY
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 realised, 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 learnt to view any approaching Egyptian with suspicion. Too many unwary Frenchmen had died in a war that was becoming crueller.
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 recognise 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.
The 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 kilometre 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, hieroglyphics, 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 facade, 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 coloured with faded paint, I noted, evidence that the structure had once been brilliantly coloured. 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 hieroglyphics, 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.