Pharaoh (13 page)

Sarah started up the winch and Blake soon hit the ground, softly, nearly at the centre of the tomb, on the heap of detritus which had fallen during the drilling. The girl soon lowered the ladder and descended into the tomb with Blake.

‘This is incredible,’ she said, looking around.

Blake pointed the torch at the southern wall. ‘Look. Unfortunately, a cave-in has almost completely buried the sarcophagus. Must have been an earthquake. It’ll take days of work to get it free. Removing all that debris won’t be easy. What’s more, we’ll have to pile it up outside. The colour is so different from the surrounding soil that it will certainly attract attention, even from quite a distance.’

They approached the walls and examined them carefully. They had been chiselled in a limestone which was not very hard and rather crumbly, but there were no traces of decoration, besides the beginnings of a hieroglyphic inscription on the left-hand side of the sarcophagus.

Blake’s gaze shifted to the floor in front of the sarcophagus. ‘That’s strange,’ he said. ‘There are no canopic jars. Very, very strange. I’ve never seen that before.’

‘What are they?’ asked Sarah.

‘They were jars used to hold the internal organs of the dead person, after the embalmers had extracted them from the chest cavity. It’s as if the body of this person did not undergo the traditional embalming rites. And that’s very strange in itself, seeing as he’s obviously very high-ranking. Unless the jars are inside the sarcophagus.’

They walked over to the front of the landslide and examined it carefully. That was strange, too. If an earthquake had caused the pile-up, why were all the other objects in perfect order? Why hadn’t the chariot wheels leaning up against the wall fallen over and why was the armour still perfectly arranged?

He noticed a number of other anomalies: a haphazard air in the assortment of objects, which seemed to be from different time periods, a hurried look to the burial chamber, as if the walls had been adapted from a pre-existing natural cavity. The sarcophagus itself seemed to be carved into the rock. The stone-dressers had cut and removed the rock all around it until they had excavated a rectangular shape that was then hollowed out. But it was too early to say; all the debris would have to be removed before he could confirm his impressions.

He tried to climb up the pile of rubble but it slid forward, filling the room with a dense cloud of dust.

‘Damn!’ he cursed.

Sarah held out her hand to help him up. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he replied. ‘It’s nothing.’

He waited until the dust had settled a little and approached the landslide again. The further sliding of the rocks had uncovered a dark corner on the right wall above the sarcophagus that hinted at a bigger opening. Beyond he thought he could perhaps make out the start of a corridor. He tried to climb up again, much more cautiously this time, and nearly made it to the opening.

He couldn’t see anything, because the corridor curved almost immediately, but when he turned and used the torch to light up the rest of the wall, he noticed something at the foot of the heap, sticking out from the rest.

‘What is it?’ asked Sarah.

‘Could you shine the light on it, please?’ he asked her, and took the trowel from his pocket, scraping and cleaning all around the protruding mass. He uncovered a femur and then a skull, and in a few minutes’ time a tangled jumble of skeletons.

‘Who could they be?’ wondered Sarah.

‘I have no idea,’ replied Blake. ‘The bodies were burned and then covered with a few shovels full of earth.’

He was baffled and upset. This admittedly superficial inspection had raised enormous problems of interpretation. Would he ever be able to crack the mystery of who this person, buried like a Pharaoh in the middle of nowhere, was?

He took out his camera and photographed every visible detail of the tomb, then began to measure and sketch each piece, while Sarah did the surveying work and recorded the position of each object on the graph paper.

He didn’t stop working until heat and fatigue overwhelmed him. Nearly three hours had passed without his noticing. He suddenly felt very weak and deadly tired; looking at Sarah, he realized that she must be exhausted as well.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We’ve done enough for today.’

They climbed up the rope ladder and when they got to the surface Blake felt so light-headed he had to lean against the Jeep to keep from falling.

Sarah reached out a hand. ‘Blake, you are so stubborn. You’ve been down in that hole for hours without anything in your stomach and a ten-hour flight behind you, not to mention all the rest. Divorces are tiring, from what I hear.’

‘You’re right,’ said Blake. He went to sit in the shade of the Jeep and had something to eat. There was a slight, cooling breeze.

‘Well, what do you think?’

Blake drank a half-bottle of water before answering because he felt so dehydrated, then began, ‘Miss Forrestall—’

‘Listen, Blake, it seems pretty silly to continue with all these formalities, seeing as we’re going to be working side by side for quite a while. If you’re not still angry with me for that stupid thing I said last night, I’d like you to call me Sarah.’

‘OK, Sarah, fine with me. But don’t treat me that way again. You’re a beautiful girl and you seem to be very intelligent as well, but I’d like you to know that I can do fine without a woman for a couple of weeks, without having to beg anyone for anything.’

Sarah seemed to hesitate, but Blake smiled as if to play down what had happened and returned to the topic at hand. ‘I’d say the complex is extraordinarily interesting, much more so than I expected, but it’s going to be difficult to unravel all this evidence. There are enormous problems.’

‘There are?’

‘First of all, the fact that I don’t know where I am is creating practically insurmountable problems of interpretation.’

‘OK, besides that?’

‘The funeral objects are from different ages, the tomb is very different from any I’ve ever seen, and the burial seems to have been very hurried. People were killed inside before the tomb was sealed, and what’s more, the landslide that we saw was not caused by an earthquake, otherwise the armour would have fallen to the ground, along with the chariot wheels, which are just propped up against the wall.’

‘What time period do you think it’s from?’

Blake took an apple from the bag and bit into it.

‘It’s difficult to say with any precision, but what I’ve seen would lead me to place it in the New Kingdom, in the age of Ramses II or Merenptah, but I could be wrong. I noticed, for example, a plaque from Amenemhat IV on the headrest which is much, much older. It’s a real puzzle.’

‘No idea of who could be buried inside?’

‘Not yet. But I have to decipher the texts and get that landslide out of the way so I can open the sarcophagus. The characteristics of the mummy and the objects inside should give me the key for ascertaining his identity. I can only say that he seems to be a very high-ranking person, perhaps even a Pharaoh. Tell me where we are, Sarah, and it will be so much easier for me . . . We’re at Wadi Hammamat, right?’

Sarah shook her head. ‘William, I’m sorry, I can’t help you. Don’t ask me any more, please.’

‘Fine,’ said Blake, tossing aside the apple core. He lit up a cigarette and quietly watched the sun as it began to descend over the boundless desert plain. There was not a stone, not a single feature of the terrain that recalled anything familiar. It was all so strange and different; even the sun looked different in this setting, as absurd as it seemed.

He buried the cigarette butt in the sand and said, ‘Let’s get back to camp now. I’m really tired.’

It was nearly dusk when they arrived and Blake went to make a report to Maddox after a quick shower in his trailer. He explained his point of view and the doubts that had arisen during his exploration of the tomb.

Maddox seemed very interested and attentively followed every word of his report. When Blake had finished, Maddox accompanied him to the door.

‘Relax a little, Blake,’ he said. ‘You must be dead tired. Dinner is at six thirty in the Bedouin tent, if you’d like to join us. Last night we ate later because we were expecting you, but usually we eat early, American style.’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Blake, and then, before leaving, ‘I have to develop and print some photos.’

‘We have all the necessary equipment,’ replied Maddox, ‘because we often take aerial photos from the balloon and develop the film in our own darkroom. Sarah Forrestall will show you where it is.’

Blake thanked him and walked south towards the wadi to while away the time until dinner. He was too tired to work.

The air was a little cooler. The tamarisks and broom cast long shadows over the clean gravel on the bottom of the river bed. Blake watched the lizards scatter at his arrival and for a moment saw an ibex, standing with its great curved horns against the disc of the sun descending behind the hills. The animal seemed to consider him for an instant and then turned with a quick sidestep and vanished, as if into thin air.

He hiked for nearly an hour before turning back and that long walk calmed and relaxed him, dissolving the tension that always gripped the nape of his neck when he was absorbed in his research. The sun had nearly disappeared behind the line of hills, but its rays skimmed the peaks that rose up from the plain, sculpting and cloaking them in a clear, tawny light.

Just then, as he returned towards the camp, his gaze was attracted by a rise to his left which was about half a mile away. Its peak was lit up by the rays of the setting sun.

It looked exactly like a pyramid. The horizontal layers of its stratification accentuated the impression, creating a perfect illusion of a man-made structure. He thought of the other mountain dominating the camp; it looked like a crouching lion or a sphinx. What place was this, where nature and chance had combined to recreate the most emblematic and suggestive landscapes of ancient Egypt? He turned it over and over in his mind as the valley of Ras Udash sank slowly into the shadows of the night.

I
T TOOK
B
LAKE
a few days to photograph, describe and survey all the objects in the tomb, with Sarah’s help. He decided to leave each item in its original position and built a partition with wooden boards and plastic sheeting to isolate the sarcophagus and most of the rubble around it from the rest.

Ray Sullivan helped him to build a kind of vacuum cleaner to remove the dust, which would be especially useful when he began to remove the debris and to transfer it all up to the surface. To make the job easier, he built a framework over the opening and equipped it with a pulley so he could let down the Jeep’s winch cable with a big hanging bucket-like container that he’d had made at the camp to hold the rubble. When he was ready to start clearing it away, he went, as usual, to Maddox’s trailer shortly before dinner.

‘How are things going, Professor Blake?’

‘They’re going well, Mr Maddox. But there’s a problem I have to talk to you about.’

‘What’s the matter?’

Well, I’ve finished all the surveying work, but now I have to free the sarcophagus from the landslide that’s covering it. I’m calculating that it’ll be about twenty cubic metres of material – dust, pebbles and sand, mostly – and the only way to get it out is by hand. Now, I’m wondering how many people are aware of what we’re doing. You, Sullivan, Gordon, Miss Forrestall and me make five. We’ll need workers if we want to get it done in a reasonable amount of time, but that means other people will have to be involved in the find. I’d say that it’s up to you to decide.’

‘How many men do you need?’

‘Two for removing the rubble. No more, because there’s not enough room. One working the vacuum cleaner and another at the winch.’

‘I’ll give you three workers. Sullivan can take care of the winch.’

‘How many other people, at the camp, know about the tomb?’

‘No one, besides those you’ve just mentioned. I don’t think we have a choice as far as the three workers are concerned.’

‘I’d say not.’

‘How long will it take to remove this slide?’

‘If they work hard, we can get up to two or three cubic metres out a day, which means that in a little over a week we’d be ready to open the sarcophagus.’

‘Fine. We’ll start on this tomorrow. I’ll choose the workers personally. At seven tomorrow morning they’ll be waiting for you at the parking lot. Will you still need Miss Forrestall’s help?’

Blake hesitated for a minute, then said, ‘Yes. She’s been a great help.’

The only people present at dinner, perhaps not by chance, were those who knew about the tomb, and so they continued talking about it until they went to have their coffee in the Bedouin tent. Listening and watching them attentively, Blake realized that Sullivan, besides being an excellent technician, was Maddox’s right-hand man, maybe even his bodyguard. Gordon seemed to be the middleman between Maddox and the company administration, and Maddox himself seemed to think very highly of him, if not to fear him. There was no doubt that Sarah Forrestall was the most independent of the bunch, and that wasn’t easy to explain.