David Gibbins - Pharaoh

‘I will do that for you.’

‘And Charrière my blood brother…’

‘What is it?’

Mayne could barely whisper it. ‘When you get to our lake in the forest, watch out for strangers coming on the water. They will try to silence you too. Trust nobody.’

Charrière held him tightly. He suddenly felt terribly cold. He would need to drink and to eat, to shake off the chill. He would go to the wells of Jakdul. An oasis in the desert. Nobody would find him there.

He convulsed, and coughed blood. He saw his blood pool on sand, become the desert. Then all he could see was an enclosing constriction, a narrowing tunnel. He relaxed, knowing what it was. He was looking down the sights of his rifle, excluding all else, seeing only his target, utterly focused. It had always felt good.

Then he saw it: a flash of light, burning like the sun, searing down the walls of the tunnel like outstretched arms, reaching out to envelop him.

He knew what Gordon had seen.

Then nothing.

Jack sat in his study in the old family house at the IMU campus in Cornwall and stared at the portraits of his ancestors on the walls, feeling as listless as at any time in the forty-eight hours since he and Costas had been forcibly evicted from Sudan. A few hours ago he had received more bad news, that Hiebermeyer and his team had been escorted across the border into Egypt from their site at Semna, apparently also under orders from al’Ahmed. The only consolation was that the finds from the site, including the golden sceptre, had been taken secretly by Aysha’s cousin to the Khartoum museum, where they had been placed in the vault. One day it might be possible to return to the Sudan, but for the time being it was a closed shop. Jack looked at the two old envelopes he had taken from Seaquest II , the one from Lieutenant Tanner and the other from Corporal Jones, and wondered where the contents had gone. He had taken a jolt, but he was not going to give up on this trail. He needed time, maybe a few days away. He knew he should pick up the phone and call Maria. And he knew he needed sleep.

Rebecca knocked and came into the room, bringing him a cup of coffee. ‘You should drink this. And you need to get away for a day or two. Then you’ll see everything in perspective. As Uncle Costas says, everyone takes a few knocks down the road, and what’s a risk without bombing out from time to time. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. Anyway, everyone knows that working in the Sudan is a game of chance, with this kind of thing likely to happen whatever you do. And you did nothing wrong. You went to the site in good faith believing you had a permit, and you were trashed by one of the trickiest customers in the Middle East.’

‘I let Maurice and Aysha down. They should never have had to leave the site at Semna the way they did. It was virtually a one-hour evacuation.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Maurice called me because you’re not picking up when he calls. They’d already made the decision to leave. They’d had bandits show up at night, and Aysha’s cousin, the guy acting as their guard, had become really afraid. Aysha said that as soon as she realised that, she knew she had to get out. There was no way they were going to stay there with the baby. And anyway, the Egyptians are topping up Lake Nasser again, so the whole site’s going to be inundated in a couple of months.’

Jack picked up a small object from his desk, the greenstone scarab he had found inside the crocodile temple, and stared at the cartouche on the base. He wondered who had lost it there, and when. It had been with him since he had borrowed it from the Sudan, and now he felt he wanted to return it, not to a museum but back to the shimmering sand inside the temple where it could then spend another eternity.

‘You know the Muslim tribesmen of the Sudan pick up old scarabs and use them as good-luck charms,’ Rebecca said. ‘They wrap prayers around them and put them in little bags around their necks. That thing seems so close to Akhenaten, a scarab of his wife Nefertiti, but it might have been lost in there a lot more recently and have a completely different significance. It’s what you told me about artefacts that survive between different eras and cultures taking on new meanings.’

Jack put down the scarab and stared at it. ‘I also told you I didn’t believe in good-luck charms.’

‘You said you believed in yourself.’

Jack took a deep breath. ‘Okay. I’ll talk to Maurice. But I still feel I have to make it up to him somehow. Something big in Egypt.’

‘Dad, you found him a pharaoh’s golden sceptre. And not just any pharaoh, but his favourite, Akhenaten. That takes some beating.’

‘Maybe I can do something to help at the pyramid of Menkaure. After this I might take a rest from diving for a while. I could do some work on land.’

‘Dad, you didn’t say that. Get over it.’

‘That sounds like Costas talking. He doesn’t have to face the board of directors tomorrow.’

‘Actually, he does. He volunteered to go along to make sure the record was straight. Anyway, let’s face it, you run this place. You created the board of directors.’

‘When I created the board, I relinquished my control over IMU to them so that I would just be another employee. I’d seen too many institutions run like tinpot dictatorships.’

‘They’re hardly going to fire you, Dad. Come on. Anyway, I’m going back up to your great-great-grandad’s archive in the attic. One of those boxes is going to have that letter from Lieutenant Tanner, I’m sure of it. It might just give us the clue we need to whatever was in that other envelope. We don’t have to go back to Sudan to tie up that story. And get on the phone to Maurice, Dad. You’re his best friend. You owe it to him.’

Rebecca marched out, and Jack put his feet up on the corner of his desk, staring again at the portraits on the wall: the first Jack Howard, an Elizabethan sea dog who had made his fortune as a privateer plundering Spanish treasure ships, and then fought the Armada under Drake and Raleigh; beside him Captain Matthias Howard, who had traded in tobacco from his estates in Maryland and Virginia before turning his attentions to the east, where he had put his money into an East Indiaman and doubled the family fortune, allowing him to build the present house; and on the opposite side of the door Colonel John Howard, Royal Engineers, Jack’s great-great-grandfather, who had served with distinction in India before disappearing on a quest into Afghanistan, one that Jack and Costas had finally brought to resolution almost a hundred years later. They were all there in Jack’s mind, not just those three, but the many men and women in between who had given him his sense of identity, had made him feel that he was part of the tradition of exploration and adventure and risk-taking that was in his blood.

He knew he did not have to live up to any of them, only to the ideal he had set himself. And since Rebecca had arrived in his life it had not just been about him, but about her too, about how he could help her to feel that same urge that had always driven him forward, a relishing of the voyage of discovery as much as a yearning for the destination, for the prize that sometimes remained elusive. If there was anything he had learned from being an archaeologist, it was this: that too often the treasure at the end of the quest was an illusion, an ever-receding mirage, and the real discoveries were the ones made along the way, revelations of ancient and present lives, voyages of self-discovery and friendship.

Perhaps chasing Akhenaten’s quest had been like that. They had made fabulous discoveries. A whole chapter of Victorian history in the desert had opened up in a way that Jack had never anticipated. And he now understood better what made men tick who had gone off by themselves in search of revelation, men like Gordon, men like himself. He had a hunch that somewhere within those months in 1884 and 1885 was a man who still could not be found, a void at the centre of the story, yet who was somehow inextricably tied up with the fate of Gordon; it was a void that Jack had found himself trying to occupy, as he struggled to imagine what had really gone on. He stared at the portrait of Colonel Howard in his uniform, wishing yet again that he had been able to talk to him, but feeling closer now to understanding what it was that had motivated the explorers and archaeologists of that generation. For Jack these were discoveries of significance. Perhaps the story of Akhenaten’s quest, of his fabled lost city of light, could now be finished, a book to be shut.