The Sleeper in the Sands (12 page)

I reached inside my pocket for a roll of bank-notes and handed a couple over.

The boy inspected them disdainfully. ‘You must know, sir, the information that you want, it is very dangerous.’

‘Why?’

‘A very bad mosque -- a very bad reputation.’

I counted out more bank-notes, and handed them across.

The lad slipped them into the pocket of his robe, then took my arm and led me in a conspiratorial manner towards the darkness of a side alley. ‘The mosque, sir, you want is that of al-Hakim. He was a Caliph, a great King, who ruled over all the Arab lands long, long ago. But he was evil, sir, and mad, and it is said he worshipped not Allah but Iblis, for he was a servant of darkness.’

‘How did the old man come by the stone?’

‘The mosque, sir, is abandoned -- so it was an easy matter for my uncle to remove the stonework where it crumbles.’

‘But why was he so terrified that he could not tell me that himself?’

The lad glanced sideways into the night shadows. As he turned back to me, he fingered a charm which hung around his neck. ‘To carve a sun, sir,’ he hissed, ‘and upon the walls of a mosque, it is a terrible crime. If anyone should know that my uncle had found it . . .’

‘But who would know? I thought you said that the mosque was abandoned?’

The lad shrugged. He appeared almost as nervous now, I thought, as his uncle had been. ‘I must go, sir,’ he said.

‘Wait,’ I called out, ‘wait! Where can I find this mosque of al-Hakim?’

The lad glanced back at me over his shoulder. ‘By the Bab al-Futuh,’ he cried, ‘the Northern Gate. And may Allah guard you, sir!’ Then he turned and was gone.

I stared after him a moment before glancing up at the sky. The stars were already prickling brightly and, remembering the fear which the mosque had inspired in both the old man and the young lad, I was almost tempted to postpone my visit there. But I had business the next day away from Cairo, and when I asked, I found it was not a great distance to the Bab al-Futuh. Accordingly, I left the souk and began to walk northwards, forcing my way through the still-crowded bazaars, and smiling ruefully to myself as I did so at the thought of how superstition could infect even my own, rational mind. But as I left the covered markets behind, so the crowds began to thin, and the darkness gradually to seem more close and intense. Certainly, the piles of refuse in the street were growing higher, but so also were the crumbling buildings on either side, so that when I looked up I could see only a narrow strip of stars, barely glimpsable through the balconies which projected from the walls. No lights shone from behind either windows or doors, nor - a strange thing in Cairo indeed! - could I hear any noise at all; yet I had the most powerful sense of being watched, as though there were hidden eyes behind every latticed front. Even as I thought that, I began to observe eyes painted on the walls, staring out from within the palms of open hands - the traditional Egyptian charm against an imagined curse.

As the street widened again, so the number of eyes upon the walls began steadily to increase. Peering ahead of me now, I could just make out the silhouette of a massive gateway -- the Bab al-Futuh, I assumed, where the mosque was said to stand. I stopped and looked about me. I could see nothing, however, save for a dilapidated wall with an archway to my right, so decayed and littered with rubble that I was astonished the authorities had not already pulled it down. Even in comparison with the rest of the street, it seemed a wasteland of particular desertion and shadow; yet although I sought to tear my gaze from it, I found myself strangely drawn by its aspect of ruin. Almost despite myself, I crossed to the archway and gazed through it to see what lay beyond. I could just make out a courtyard, its crumbling marble lit silver by the moon; but as I approached it, so the gleam began to fade and grow mottled by the withered tangles of weeds, as though the desolation were stifling the light. I continued to walk forward. Ahead of me now, I could see more debris: collapsed walls, abandoned boxes, piles of toppled stone. I could also see, to the left and right of me, two minarets stabbing upwards, perfectly silhouetted against the star-emblazoned sky. At the same moment, I felt a strange blackness settle on my heart; and I knew that I had surely found the mosque of al-Hakim.

Conquering my quite irrational sense of oppression, I began to walk towards a doorway beneath the nearest minaret. The stonework there appeared better preserved, and I was hopeful that I might discover something worthy of my study. Above the doorway, when I inspected it, I found a line of Arabic text, but so weathered had it become that I could barely make sense of it. ‘Al-Vakhel’, I read - that seemed to be a name -- and then faded stonework, and then ‘this place’, and then, on the other side of the archway, only the one word ‘darkness’. I frowned. It was impossible to read any more but certainly, whatever the text may originally have said, it did not seem to allude to a long-dead Pharaoh, and I shook my head to think I had ever hoped that it might have done. How, in God’s name, when Akh-en-Aten’s reign had been buried utterly in oblivion, would his name have been known to a Muslim Caliph? And how, even if by some extraordinary coincidence it had been known, would the evidence of such a heresy - carved upon the stonework of a mosque, no less -- ever have been preserved these many long centuries? And yet... I frowned. I remembered the carving of the Aten in the old man’s shop. I had seen it with my own eyes. And I had seen his terror as well, his abject fear; and that had certainly been real enough . . .

When I pushed at the door, it swung open easily. I peered into the darkness beyond it, and could just make out steps. Feeling my way carefully, I began to walk up them. I soon realised that they had been built in a spiral, and that I was climbing the centre of the minaret. My journey, though, was very slow, for the darkness remained pitch until suddenly I saw a thin beam of silver ahead of me, slanting across the stairway, and when I looked out through the slit of the window I realised that I had climbed higher than I had thought. I inspected the shell of the mosque laid out below me for a while, then continued with my ascent. Soon there came another window, and then another, and then, just beyond the fourth, there came a heavy door. Unlike the first one I had passed through, it appeared newly fitted and I could see, in the pale moonlight, how the stonework around it had been reinforced. I tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. I sought to force it, but without much hop e. At length I stepped back, frowning. What could possibly lie beyond it which had led it to being secured with so much evident care? I inspected the door again, and then the stonework more closely. As I did so, the angle of the moonlight must have changed, for I suddenly caught something I had not observed before; and at once my heart seemed to stop.

Above the highest part of the arch there was a carving of the Aten. But I could still barely make it out, and so I reached up to trace the lines with my finger. I could feel that the disk was full and that two worshippers knelt beneath it, reaching up to greet its rays.

I breathed in deeply and at the same moment -- very faint and far below -- I imagined I heard a noise like that of a door creaking open. I froze and stood motionless a while, straining my ears. But I could hear nothing more, and so I assumed it had been a trick played upon me by my nerves. I breathed in again, this time with relief, and turned back to inspect the carvings on the arch above the door.

I could see now that there were two lines of script on either side of the sun. ‘ “Have you thought upon Lilat”,’ I quoted aloud, as I copied down the first inscription, ‘ “the great one, the other? She is much to be feared. Truly, Lilat is great amongst gods”.’ So it had been written in the tomb of Akh-en-Aten, by the portrait of his Queen; and so again it had been written down here.

I turned to the second inscription. This too I had seen before, in the quarry I had explored with Newberry. I shuddered as, again, I began to copy it down, for this verse suddenly struck me as a warning aimed forcibly at myself. And even as I thought this I heard it spoken, rising from the steps behind me, spoken by a voice as silver as the moonlight and as cold as when it shines upon the sand dunes of the desert. ‘ “Leave for ever”,’ the voice whispered. ‘ “You are damned. You are accursed”.
Leave for ever.’

I turned round to see a man standing on the step below me, dressed in the robes of an Arab scholar, which flowed long and white like his beard and moustache. His shoulders were stooped and his face very lined; yet though in appearance he seemed fabulously old, there was nothing of weakness or frailty in his manner. Quite the opposite, for he gazed at me with such an unblinking and luminous stare that I could barely endure to continue meeting it; and indeed, so brightly did it glitter and so hollow and impassive did his thin face appear, that it seemed more a serpent’s than that of a man. And as I thought that, despite myself I shuddered; for I could not think how the old man had come to be standing behind me, when I had not even heard him climbing the steps.

‘What is your business here?’ I asked, attempting to disguise my unease beneath a show of brusqueness.

The old man smiled very palely. ‘I might more fittingly ask that question of you.’

‘I am . . .’ I paused, then sought to draw myself up more fully. ‘I am the Chief Inspector of Antiquities,’ I announced.

The old man’s stare seemed to flicker. ‘Does that give you jurisdiction over a Holy Place of God?’

‘This . . .’ - I pointed to the figure of the sun above the door -- ‘it is the image of a God once worshipped by a Pharaoh.’

‘Pharaoh?’ The old man took a step closer to me. ‘But it is said in the most Holy Koran that Pharaoh proclaimed there was no God but himself. So how can what you tell me possibly be the truth?’

‘That is what I wish to find out.’

The old man laughed very faintly. ‘But you have no right to find out anything at all.’

‘I have told you,’ I repeated. ‘I am the Chief Inspector of Antiquities!’

‘And yet, for all that, you do not belong here. Go! Go, sir -- and do not come back!’ The old man gestured suddenly with his arm, and indeed I almost did start to leave, for in his voice I had heard a note of terrible warning and almost of appeal. But I stood my ground, for I sensed that I might be near some revelation, some extraordinary secret, and it was my hope that the old man might unlock it after all. But he merely shook his head at me; and the look in his eyes was a chilling one. ‘What can you hope to know of Egypt?’ he whispered. ‘As fears lie buried in the nightmares of our sleep,’ I heard him murmur, ‘so secrets lie buried in the past of this our land. Do not disturb them, Mr Carter. Do not disturb them.
Be warned!’

The sudden and unexpected use of my name had quite served to freeze my tongue. I gazed wide-eyed into the old man’s own unblinking stare, deep into its strange reptilian glitter. Still I tried to speak, but it was as though my mind were no longer my own but rather the thing of the old man’s eyes. I imagined I saw within them -- strange as it must sound! -- a waste of sands, and treasures scattered, abandoned on the dunes. Here a half-shattered bust of stone lay, there a glittering of gold, and sometimes, exposed and then buried by the action of the wind once again, ancient, brittle parchments, suggestive of secrets which I could not make my own. Upon these stinging winds I was blown like dust myself, blown across the old man’s dream, which seemed to stretch before me like the very wilds of Egypt. A shadow was lengthening. It seemed to be rising from beyond the horizon. It fell cold upon me and then, as I gazed ahead, I could see the form of a temple much like Karnak, half-submerged beneath the sands, but still so monstrous that it towered high above me and its shadow, as I neared it, was growing colder all the time. Then at last I had passed the outermost line of capitals, and was being blown ever deeper into the dark, and yet the temple still seemed to stretch away like infinity. There was something ahead of me, though; something buried within the place’s deepest sanctuary; some awful presence, still veiled by the dark but drawing nearer, drawing nearer all the time, as though infinity might indeed be pierced after all; and the terror was like nothing I had ever known before. I longed to scream. I had imagined I was only a second away from it now. I would behold it; for it was as though the curtain which had veiled it were being raised before my eyes. I tensed and jerked back my head; then opened my eyes. The hallucination had vanished, and I was standing alone at the summit of the stairs. Of the old Arab scholar there was not a sign.

Of course, I reflected later, there need not have been anything supernatural or mysterious about my experience. I had been the victim of a skilful hypnotist, that was all. I had heard of such conjuring tricks before, and indeed sometimes seen their practice when sitting by the fire of a headman back in Thebes. Never, though, had I imagined that I might be susceptible to them myself -- for I have always considered myself to have a fairly solid grip on things -- and so, I do not mind confessing it, the experience had unsettled me to a fair degree. I chose not to linger in the mosque that night, for the door was still barred to me and I doubted I would be able to find out anything much more -- but nor will I deny that I was relieved to get back home. I lay a long while on my sofa, still feeling strangely haunted by the images I had seen, and grateful for the companionship of the birds I had brought with me from Thebes. As it ever did, the music of their song served to comfort me, and the sight of the beauty of their plumage and flight. Yet my mood of oppression was not altogether lifted, for I still felt with a novel sense of regret how lonely I had become, and began to dread what the pursuit of my ambitions might not bring. Even so, it was only after many hours that I was lulled upon the song of my birds at last to sleep.

I woke the next morning after a night of bad dreams. I had a great deal of pressing business ahead of me, yet I could not get thoughts of the mosque from my mind. I felt certain now that I was on the trail of something very strange indeed: a secret long buried but somehow still alive; a conspiracy, perhaps, which had spanned more than 3,000 years. Where it might lead to I could not begin to imagine - for indeed, even now, I could barely believe it might exist. Nor, in truth, was I any nearer to resolving the mystery, for the door of the minaret had remained locked in my face, and though the old man had hinted at secrets, he had told me nothing more. It struck me as being a cruel feature of my quest that the more I discovered, the more there still seemed to find -- that frustration seemed the fruit of every success.