David Gibbins - Pharaoh

And then on the last page of the diary they had seen a diagram of an archaeological discovery that Gordon had made somewhere along the Nile, a stone plaque that he had sent away in the Abbas , and Jack had realised that it must have been the one that he and Costas had so nearly recovered, and which must now be in the hands of al’Ahmed and his family. It was a precise illustration of parallel and intersecting lines that Jack recognised from the carving that they had found inside the sarcophagus of Menkaure. Gordon had labelled it with the same term that Captain Wichelo of the Beatrice had used to describe the plaque in the coffin: the City of Light.

The pieces were suddenly falling together. Listening to Rebecca read the journal, Jack had realised that the archaeology from thousands of years ago and the history from little more than a century ago were inextricably intertwined; if it had not been for the archaeology, he would not have embarked on the quest to find out more about Gordon in his family papers, and Rebecca would never have made the discovery. The journal had allowed him to see Gordon as if he himself had opened the door to that room in the palace at Khartoum in 1885, just as Major Mayne must have done; and he had seen neither a mystic nor a messiah, but a man to whom the desert had given a clarity of vision that made compassion for his fellow human beings the guiding force in his life, for those in Khartoum who had come to rely on him for daily survival. He wondered whether Akhenaten too had been misunderstood by history, whether it was not the location of his revelation in the desert that was the discovery they should be seeking but rather the place he had turned to next, where the clarity of vision he too had experienced might have led him to create something tangible, something of benefit to humankind, not in the desert to the south but in the heartland of the civilisation along the Nile from which he had sprung.

And now there was one final piece of the puzzle to find, a piece that might provide the detail needed to bring those images of Akhenaten’s city from abstraction to reality, to a place that might at last be within the possibility of archaeological discovery that had eluded Gordon and others on this trail for so long.

Rebecca woke and rubbed her eyes, looking blearily at the cottage. ‘We’re here. Look, there’s Great-Aunt Margaret.’ She opened the door and got out, and the neatly dressed old lady who had come down the path welcomed her with open arms. Jack followed, giving her a hug too.

‘It’s lovely to see Rebecca doing so well,’ she said. ‘She’s more amazing than all your adventures put together, you know.’

‘Well, she’s part of them now.’

Aunt Margaret led them through the beautifully tended garden towards the front door; Jack had to stoop to enter the cottage. At the bottom of the stairs she turned around and faced them. ‘Now, before we have tea and Rebecca tells me all her news, I know you’ll want to see what I found after you told me what to look for, Jack.’

‘You didn’t have to, Great-Aunt Margaret,’ Rebecca said. ‘We don’t want you hurting yourself.’

‘Oh, there’s a bit of the adventurer in me too, you know, Rebecca. I don’t know how much your dad has told you about me, but I’m not called Howard for nothing. When you told me you thought it might have been plastered or painted over, I took my basket of garden tools up there and set to. I haven’t had so much fun since I broke into the fifth High Llama of Llora’s tomb in the Karakorum Desert and got away with his sacred prayer roll, almost.’

Rebecca coughed politely. ‘You did what?’

Jack coughed a bit more loudly. ‘Aunt Margaret has, um, a certain history. She worked for MI6. She’s classified up to the hilt.’

‘Oh,’ Rebecca said. ‘You mean like Miss Moneypenny?’

‘No, I mean like “M”,’ Jack said. ‘She’s actually Dame Margaret Howard, though she never calls herself that.’

‘Such a silly title,’ Aunt Margaret said. ‘Use it outside Britain and they think it means you run a brothel.’ She hesitated at the foot of the stairs, and looked at Jack. ‘Before we go up, lest I forget, your friend Costas has been on the phone.’

‘Really? What about?’

‘Do you remember when he and I first met, more than ten years ago? It was at the inauguration of IMU.’

Jack paused. ‘I remember the two of you talking at great length about poetry, about the Arthurian legends. You’d just retired, and you were going to return to your undergraduate passion from Oxford days and write a book about the Holy Grail, about how the legend influenced generations of explorers on their own quests.’

Aunt Margaret reached over to a small table beside the front door and picked up a brown paper parcel tied with string. ‘When Costas called me this morning, he said that the desert had made him think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land , and then of the Holy Grail quest that was the inspiration behind the poem. He said that the place beside the Nile where you found the crocodile temple reminded him of the Fisher King, the wounded warrior who guarded the Grail, yet whose kingdom was turned to waste as he did so. And then when you were forced to leave the Sudan he thought of the fragmentation of the Grail quest, about how it had become an aimless journey with no beginning and no end, like the march to nowhere of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot . And then he remembered how there was one who through it all was destined to achieve the Grail and heal the wasteland.’

‘We studied the legend in school,’ Rebecca said. ‘You mean Sir Galahad.’

Aunt Margaret handed her the package. ‘Will you see that Costas gets this? It’s a Victorian edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur , rather tatty I’m afraid. It was owned by Colonel Howard; he loved this kind of stuff and apparently used to spend his evenings by the fire here reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels and Tennyson and anything in Old English and Norse literature on quests and adventure.’

‘Maybe it was an escape from the fear of those years in the lead-up to the First World War,’ Rebecca said, holding the book tight.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But I think many like him at that time saw their lives in those terms, and for them the lesson of the Grail story was that the quest was as important as the destination, a treasure that might remain always out of reach. Colonel Howard had one last quest to fulfil, one that had begun in his early years with a discovery in the jungle of southern India, and perhaps reading this fired him up to resume the journey that gave his life excitement and meaning.’

Jack cocked an eye at her. ‘This story is really for me, isn’t it?’

Aunt Margaret smiled. ‘I don’t need to be telling you it, do I?’ She jerked her head up the stairs. ‘I told Costas he really didn’t need to worry. You’ve made it here. You’re back on the quest again.’

Jack glanced at Rebecca. ‘With a little help from my daughter.’

Aunt Margaret gave him a steely look. ‘Oh no. You made it here because you wanted to. Jack Howard is not designed to wander about in the wasteland. You’re here because it’s in your genes. It’s in mine too, so I know it.’

Jack grinned. ‘All right. Point taken.’

‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Chop chop. Tea’s getting cold. We can’t be talking all day.’

She led them up the creaking stairs past the first floor and into the attic. Jack stooped low through the entrance, and followed her past boxes and crates to the massive cruck timbers that gave the cottage its name. ‘This is where Great-Grandfather used to work,’ she said. ‘When I arrived here after retiring, his desk was still there, but I’ve moved it down to my own study. It’s a little dusty up here.’ She pointed up to the apex of the crux, where fragments of plaster and chips of paint were spread all around. ‘There you go. It looks a bit like the image on the Khedive’s Star, don’t you think? Those pyramids. I’ve got the Star awarded to Great-Grandfather for service in Egypt.’