Hearing that, Malcolm had very nearly backed out. A dozen other men—why think he’d fare better? The only man who’d made it out alive was Burke himself, and look what had happened to him.
But he’d already bought the fucking hat. And he’d shaken hands on the deal. And what was the alternative, drinking himself to death slowly in a succession of West London pubs? Burke had been right: What did he have to lose?
Malcolm spent the second night between the roots of a giant acacia and woke with water on his face. It didn’t rain often in this part of the world, and you took advantage of it when it did. He stripped off his clothing, put his gun under his jacket to keep it dry, and stood with his head tilted back. It was a brief shower, not even enough to wash all the dust off him, but its touch invigorated him. The morning sun dried him rapidly and he climbed back into his clothes before he could burn. He ate the last of his dates and started downhill.
He could see the way off the mountain by noon and set foot on level ground before nightfall. The southern desert stretched out before him, flat and featureless. Near the coast there had been frequent patches of vegetation and signs of animal life; here there was nothing except for the occasional jird scuttling ratlike across the sand. And the sand itself—it wasn’t the rolling dunes you saw in Foreign Legion pictures, just a parched surface that had been bleached the color of bone and packed so hard it barely took footprints. He remembered a line from a poem they’d made him recite in grade schooclass="underline" Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. He’d had a mental image of the desert, he remembered, as a sort of giant beach. The reality, of course, drove such images out of your mind forever. You couldn’t imagine the size of it, the emptiness, till you were standing inside it.
He started walking, setting a roughly southwesterly course. Traveling by night would be less arduous than trying to cross to Mechili with the sun beating down. He had a full canteen and he’d packed his pouch with whatever bits of fruit he’d been able to find on the way down the final slope. He could do the seven miles before dawn if he pushed himself. He’d be tired when he got there, which was not the best condition in which to face whoever might be waiting for him at the temple, and worst of all, if the landscape didn’t change along the way, they’d be able to see him coming for the better part of a mile, but that was just all the more reason to approach at night. He pocketed the hat, shifted the strap of his bag so it cut into a different part of his back, and pushed forward.
At a certain point, the dusk gave way to total darkness. He had a tin of matches in his bag, but it wasn’t worth using them up for the few instants of light they’d provide. His eyes adjusted, though it hardly mattered: there was nothing to see by day, less still at night. There was a hot wind that blew past from time to time, stirring the sand around him. He listened to his footsteps landing rhythmically. There was nothing else to do.
Was this what it was like to be blind? He couldn’t imagine what Burke must have gone through, wandering the desert with the sun searing his unprotected eyes until at last they were burnt out like useless candle stumps. How he must have treasured the night! Until all he had was night.
It was strange, Malcolm thought, how the man burned to recover the least of what he’d lost—not his sight, not his hand, not the normal life he’d had, but that thing, that useless, useless thing he’d lost his sight pursuing. Oh, it was valuable, no doubt—priceless even—and Malcolm imagined that archaeologists and museum docents could jabber about it for a thousand years, but what good could it possibly do Burke? A three-thousand-year-old statue—was this worth a dozen men’s lives? Or even one man’s? There would be a certain satisfaction for Burke in recovering it, Malcolm supposed, in victoriously closing a chapter that had opened in bloody defeat. But in the clear light of day, what was that really worth?
In the clear light of day. Look at me, Malcolm thought, walking through the night at the arse end of nowhere, talking about the clear light of day. Who am I to take potshots at Burke for chasing some relic out of his past, when at least he has the good sense to do it from his armchair at home, with his fan blowing cool breezes on his brow? I’m the one on a trek through a desert I never thought I’d come back to. How’s that for useless?
Fifty thousand pounds. That’s not useless.
It is when you’re wandering in the desert, Malcolm reminded himself. Nothing more useless then.
He drank a bit of his water, recapped the canteen, and kept going.
Ettouati’s map had shown the temple as hidden inside the curve of a rocky outcropping, and in the half light preceding sunrise Malcolm caught sight of a craggy shape in the distance, listing at an angle like a ship run aground. He was perhaps forty meters off to one side, but that was just as welclass="underline" he’d be able to approach it from the side instead of straight on.
He crept up to the rocks slowly, revolver in hand, circled around the long way. He saw no one. There was an opening in the rocks where Ettouati had indicated, and he stepped in with his gun raised, but no one seemed to be inside either.
It was cool inside, and dark—stepping in from the desert was not unlike entering Burke’s room back home, only less damp, and with the whirring of the electric fan replaced by the skittering of rodent feet. Malcolm lit a match, saw the carvings on the walls jump in the flickers of orange light. Animal-headed men in rows, some kneeling, some upright—the Egyptian influence was clear. But there was also an unfamiliar quality. These weren’t ordinary hieroglyphs.
The images converged on the altar, which was larger than he’d thought it would be. You could fit a fairly large animal between the posts, and the drainage channels ran deep enough to catch quite a lot of blood without spilling over.
The match went out, and Malcolm decided not to light another. It wasn’t bright in here, but enough light leaked in from outside that he could see what he needed to. He ran his hand along the surface of the altar and its underside, bent low to look closely at the wall. The carvings continued all the way around the altar and were framed by a rectangular groove extending from the ground on either side and meeting across the top. Malcolm felt along this groove, tried to fit the tips of his fingers inside it. It looked almost like the outline of a doorway, but when he pushed against the wall, it felt like pushing against solid rock.
He ran his index fingers along the length of the channels on the altar and at the far end of each, near the wall, he felt a pea-sized hole. This surprised him—it put him in mind of drainage and implied that the altar itself was hollow. He leaned forward and blew into one of the holes. A puff of dust rose and slowly settled.
He looked around. There had to be more here. Lambert’s telegram had referred to a temple—an altar in a cave was not a temple. If there was a temple in this cave, it was somewhere deeper inside, but how were you supposed to get there from here? He tried to put himself in the place of the men who had built and used this altar. If there was another area, what would they have done to gain access to it?
What, indeed. Ettouati’s words came back to him. The Ammonites were a sacrificing people. They missed no opportunity to provide their gods with a tribute.