Sphinx (37 page)

After my phone call to Moustafa from London, I’d spoken to the Alexandrian Oil Company and then to the Ministry of Oil itself. The adjoining block, where the new pay zone appeared to extend, was earmarked for licensing to friendly foreign oil companies as part of Sadat’s new economic policy. But I’d agreed with the ministry that we’d use some of our existing equipment and personnel to take a look at the block - whatever we found could only help their negotiations. I decided not to mention the new development to Johannes quite yet. After all, nothing had been confirmed.

Moustafa and I had met in the tiny Port Said airport where we’d sat in the departure lounge - a glorified alcove furnished with an old vinyl lounge suite and a dusty photograph of Nasser in army uniform that hung over an empty counter upon which sat a fan spinning forlornly. We had analysed the Landsat image of the area that the Alexandrian Oil Company had on record. Taken from the NASA satellite in 1972, it covered most of the area east of the Suez Canal. The section we were interested in showed little geological potential - it appeared on the images as a light-coloured flat area not much higher than sea level. This meant that the ridge we were now searching for from the plane really was new, possibly related to the earthquake. We didn’t have the data yet to understand it; we needed to get down there to explore it.

‘There it is!’ Moustafa, two surveillance maps open on his lap, pointed out of the window.

I looked down. The jutting derricks of the Abu Rudeis oilfields looked as if they were made of Meccano, the discoloured sand around each one spread out like an ink stain. But the part of the landscape that Moustafa was indicating was a white scar of a ridge that ran for about twenty kilometres directly below. I tapped the pilot’s shoulder. The horizon tipped again as he flew the plane down for a closer look.

‘See here.’ Moustafa traced the formation on the map for me.

I noticed the map was labelled in Hebrew and, surprised, looked at him questioningly. He grinned.

‘Israeli - I got them on the black market, dated 1973. Probably military, but they are the best charts.’

The area with the ridge was marked as flat on the surveillance map, as it had been on our own satellite images. There was no sign of any external feature, of the edge of a basin or of buried carbonate platforms, the kind of geological conditions that promised a hidden reservoir of oil or gas. I looked out of the window again. Now that we were lower, the ridge was clearly visible - one side a smooth slope, the other side with an incline of about ten feet, giving a hint of the substructure beneath.

‘It looks like God has suddenly stamped his foot and the carpet has a wrinkle,’ Moustafa said.

‘Nicely put but not exactly scientific.’ I frowned at the scenery stretched out below.

Moustafa laughed.

I checked the map again; it was the second time we’d flown over the formation and I knew the reference points were accurate. Here it was on the page, flat as a pancake, but through the window the mound was undeniable.

‘Has there been instability here before?’ I asked, still puzzled. Moustafa pushed the second map towards me; this time the labelling was in Russian.

‘This map dates from the late 1950s but you can see it is just the same as the 1973 map. There is nothing in this valley except goats and rubble. Now it looks as if the pay zone we just encountered in the adjacent oilfield,’ his finger ran across the map toward Abu Rudeis, ‘might extend all the way to here.’ He grasped my wrist in sudden excitement. ‘Oliver, if this were so, this could be a huge discovery!’

My own oil sense had been ignited the moment we sighted the ridge - it looked like a textbook illustration of where to drill. And there was something about the slight discolouration in the rocks on the far slope that had made my heart rattle with adrenalin. But I’d hidden my enthusiasm. I trusted Moustafa, but before I’d commit to anything I needed to know exactly what we were dealing with, and who else Moustafa had discussed this with. And, of course, I wanted the data. But most of all, I wanted to walk the ridge.

‘Let’s go down,’ I said.

 

The plane landed on a flat area of scrub just before the slope rose to the crest of the ridge. The terrain was bleak and barren, with twisted bushes clustered around the occasional boulder. Moustafa and the pilot unloaded the gravity meter - an instrument that measured changes in the gravity field and would indicate whether there was a change in the structure of the crust, the possibility of source rock and, above it, reservoir rock. There was also a machine called a sniffer that detected minute traces of hydrocarbons. If any of these tests indicated a possible oilfield, then we would turn to seismology, using explosives to create shock waves that would reflect off the substructure and allow us to create two-dimensional, even three-dimensional, images of the oil-bearing strata beneath.

I walked to the top of the crest and stood there looking over the terrain. I took a deep breath and inhaled the faint scent of salt, and something else under it that I was beginning to believe might contain that elusive trace of oil. Thinking it could be coming off the established oilfields to the west, I turned in that direction, then realised the wind was blowing from Upper Egypt, entirely the other direction. I knelt and picked up a small rock that looked as if it had broken off a boulder. I sniffed it, then licked it - an old geologist’s trick - looking for that elusive faint musky taste that might indicate it was oil-bearing. It tasted promising.

I peered down the other, sharper side of the slope. An old Bedouin shepherd sat in the shade of the crest, watching a bunch of scrawny goats graze on the scattered clumps of desert grass. I shouted a greeting before going down to join him.

‘
Salaam alaikum
,’ I then said respectfully.

‘
Alaikum salaam
,’ he replied patting the flat boulder where he was sitting to indicate that I should join him. I bowed in greeting, then sat beside him. He offered me a piece of chewing tobacco, which I accepted and then slipped discreetly into my pocket.

‘How long have you worked this particular piece of land, my friend?’

‘Many years, many years.’ He waved vaguely towards the east. ‘But now I am confused. I was here four full moons ago and none of this was here.’

‘None of what?’

‘This.’ He patted the boulder we were sitting on, then pointed to the ridge behind us. ‘It has grown in the night like mushrooms.’

‘Mushrooms in the desert?’

He laughed, which became a hacking cough that finished with a stream of tobacco-stained spittle that bled into the sand.

‘There are many things I cannot explain - stars that are older than light, a woman’s change of heart, President Sadat’s dreams - yet I believe them because I see them with my own eyes. It may be sorcery but it is there - it is God’s will, and so I believe it.’ He smiled again, pulled out an evil-eye pendant that hung around his neck and pressed it to his forehead.

A dark lump lying on the ground caught my attention. I picked it up and sniffed it. It smelled pungent and rich; a lump of tarry oil, surface seepage probably brought up by the earthquake and already decaying in the air and sun. A pounding sense of excitement rose up in my throat. Concealing my emotion, I slipped the lump into my pocket.

I stood and tracked a stratum of darker sand that finished at a small crevasse. A dead bush sprouted from it. I kneeled and examined the base of the bush; all around it were bird-claw prints baked into what looked like mud. Birds of prey weren’t that unusual in the desert, but mud? It had been years since it had rained in this region.

‘Oliver!’

Moustafa’s voice startled me; he appeared on the crest, waving a piece of paper in his hand. ‘The geophysics look very good! We’re close, I know it!’

As I scrambled up the slope towards him, the Bedouin caught my arm.

‘This is God’s work. It is not to be ravaged without consequence, consequences that will affect us all. Don’t forget that you are a mere man, my friend. Allah is mightier.’

 

Back at the oilfield, I walked around the drilling rig that I’d helped set up months earlier. It had been moved one kilometre to the south-west and was drilling into the same reservoir we had penetrated with the original well, which now rested at over fifteen thousand barrels per day. Mud and oil roared up through the derrick and it seemed clear that the new well would be as productive as the discovery well.

Nearby, the shale shakers - great sieves - were steaming as the hot underground mud rippled out of the drill pipe like the entrails of some subterranean beast. The shale shakers sifted and shook out the mud from the cuttings, after which it showered down into the mud pits, filling the air with the raw smell of oil and pungent earth. I waved at the mud logger who stood over the pit full of drill cuttings, then I pulled Moustafa away from the roar of the generator.

‘This new potential field - it’s on land leased by IPEC?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And you haven’t spoken to Johannes about it?’

‘I work for you, Oliver, not Du Voor, you know that.’

I nodded, then, appalled by my sudden avarice, looked away to the horizon. A truck drove along it, hauling sections of well casing to be used in completing the current well. The sight reassured me. This was industry, commerce, the great cogs of progress. This was a terrain I knew and trusted.

I turned back to Moustafa. ‘Let’s run some seismic lines, see what they say before telling anyone. I think that might be wiser.’

‘I agree, my friend.’

Moustafa held out his hand, and we shook - a sealed pact.

But as I walked away, Enrico Silvio’s warning about the astrarium offering a kind of Faustian contract seemed to echo under the thudding of the oil well. No matter how much I tried to rationalise I couldn’t rid myself of the disturbing thought that perhaps the earthquake had in some way been a result of the discovery of the astrarium, the releasing of some kind of inexplicable force that reached across time and space. And I was finding it difficult to ignore the coincidence of Moustafa’s call about the discovery coming so soon after I had challenged the astrarium. If Moses really had used it to part the Red Sea, if it was somehow related to the tsunami that destroyed the Ptolemaic island of Antirhodos, off the coast of Alexandria, if the astrarium really had that kind of power - then what were the implications of setting the dial to my own birth date?

It was late afternoon by the time the silhouette of the camp appeared on the horizon. Already the temperature had started to drop as the desert cooled. As we drew closer the outline of a police car parked outside my hut came into view.

‘Oliver, are you in some kind of trouble?’ Moustafa asked.

‘Perhaps.’

The driver pulled up and we sat in the jeep for a minute.

‘Let me deal with the police,’ Moustafa murmured in English. ‘You know I have connections.’

I glanced at the driver, then, suddenly afraid, I reached down into my shoe and pulled out the locker key. I slipped it into Moustafa’s hand. There was no other choice. I had to trust him.

‘Take this, Moustafa. If they arrest me, go to the BA first-class lounge at Cairo. The locker is listed under the company name. There’s a rucksack inside.’

He nodded. ‘I will. You can rely on me.’

 

The camp quarters were simple - there was a single wrought-iron bed with a striped lumpy mattress, an electric kettle, a bar fridge, a ceiling fan and an old tea chest that functioned as both storage space and a table. I’d never lived more than a few days in such accommodation, but most of the crew weren’t so lucky; some spent weeks stationed out on the site. The hut they’d assigned me still contained the possessions of the previous occupant, an Italian-Catholic well-borer. I hadn’t bothered throwing them out. A tattered print of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven on a cloud hung on the wall over the bed. A bookcase made from a plank balancing on two rusty nails held an eclectic collection of worn paperbacks:
Future Shock
,
Roots
,
Fear of Flying
by Erica Jong,
Love Story
(in Italian),
Watership Down
and, I suddenly noticed to my distress,
My Name is Asher Lev
by Chaim Potok, a Jewish writer. The Egyptian military police wouldn’t like that.

As Moustafa and I entered the hut, two officers were ripping out the lining of the tea chest. My meagre items of clothing were strewn on the floor beside them. Another officer - obviously their superior - lounged on the bed, watching them. Seeing me, he got lazily to his feet with as much disrespect as he could muster.

‘You Mr Warnock, British citizen, yes?’

I stepped forward, blocking the view of the Potok novel. I was afraid they would assume I was Jewish, possibly even Mossad.

‘Is there some problem?’ I asked.