‘It’s a light well,’ Astiza murmured.
‘A what?’
‘Such wells at the pyramids were used for measuring time. At the summer solstice, the sun would be directly overhead, casting no shadow. That is how the priests could pinpoint the longest day of the year.’
‘Yes, that is right!’ Ashraf confirmed. ‘It told the seasons and predicted the rising of the Nile.’
‘Why did they need to know that?’
‘When the Nile rose, the farms flooded and labour was freed for other projects, like building pyramids,’ Astiza said. ‘The Nile’s cycle was the cycle of Egypt. The measurement of time was the beginning of civilisation. People had to be assigned to keep track of it, and became priests, and thought of all kinds of other useful things for people to do.’
Beyond was a large room as dim as the courtyard was bright. It was crowded with dusty statuary, broken stone vessels, and chunks of wall with colourful Egyptian painting. Red-skinned men and yellow-skinned women posed in the stiff yet graceful poses I’d seen on the tablet in the hold of L’Orient. There were jackal-headed gods, the cat goddess Bastet, stiffly serene pharaohs, black-polished falcons, and blocky wooden cases with life-sized paintings of humans on the outside. Talma had already described these elaborate coffins to me. They held mummies.
The scribe stopped before one in excitement. ‘Are these real?’ he exclaimed. ‘A source like this could cure all my illnesses…’
I pulled. ‘Come on before you choke to death.’
‘These are cases from which the mummies have been removed,’ Ashraf told him. ‘Thieves would discard the coffins, but Enoch has let it be known he will pay to collect them. He thinks their decoration is another key to the past.’
I saw that some were covered with hieroglyphics as well as drawings. ‘Why write on something that would be buried?’ I asked.
‘It may be to instruct the dead through the perils of the underworld, my brother says. For us the living, they are useful to store things in because most people are too superstitious to look inside. They fear a curse.’
A narrow stone staircase at the rear of the room led down to a large vaulted cellar lit by lamps. At Ashraf’s invitation, we descended to a large library. It was roofed with barrel vaults and floored with stone, dry and cool. Its wooden shelves were crammed floor to ceiling with books, journals, scrolls, and sheaves of parchment. Some bindings were sturdy leather, light glinting on gold lettering. Other tomes, often in strange languages, seemed held together by tendrils of old fabric, their smell as musty as the grave. At a central table, half the size of a barn door, sat the bent figure of a man.
‘Greetings, my brother,’ Ashraf said in English.
Enoch looked up from his writing. He was older than Ashraf, bald, with a fringe of long grey locks and a heavy beard, looking as if Newton’s gravity had tugged all his hair toward his sandals. Dressed in grey robes, he was hawk-nosed and bright-eyed and his skin was the colour of the parchment he’d been bent over. He carried an air of serenity few people achieve, his eyes betraying a hint of mischief.
‘So the French are occupying even my library?’ The tone was wry.
‘No, they come as friends, and the tall one is an American. His friend is a French scribe…’
‘Who is interested in my dehydrated companion,’ Enoch said with amusement. Talma was staring, transfixed, at a mummy posed upright in an open coffin in one corner. This casket, too, was covered with fine, indecipherable writing. The mummy was stripped of bandages, some of the old linen in a tangle at its feet, and incisions had been made in its chest cavity. There was nothing reassuring about the body, a dark brownish-grey looking starved from the drying, the eyes closed, the nose a snub, the mouth open in a rictus that showed small, white teeth. I found it disturbing.
Talma, however, was happy as sheep in clover. ‘Is this truly ancient?’ he breathed. ‘An attempt at everlasting life?’
‘Antoine, I think they failed,’ I observed dryly.
‘Not necessarily,’ Enoch said. ‘To the Egyptians, the preservation of the dead physical body was a requirement for everlasting life. According to accounts that have come down to us, the ancients believed the individual consisted of three parts: his physical body, his ba – which we might call character – and his ka, or life force. These last two combined are equivalent to our modern soul. Ba and ka had to find each other and unite in a perilous underworld as the sun, Ra, journeyed each night through it, in order to form an immortal akh that would live amid the gods. The mummy was their daytime home until this task was completed. Instead of separating the material and the spiritual, Egyptian religion combined them.’
‘ Ba, ka, and Ra? Sounds like a firm of solicitors.’ I was always uncomfortable with the spiritual.
Enoch ignored me. ‘I have decided the journey of this one should be completed by now. I’ve unwrapped and cut him to investigate ancient embalming techniques.’
‘There is talk these tissues could have medicinal qualities,’ Talma said.
‘Which distorts what Egyptians believed,’ Enoch replied. ‘The body was a home to be animated, not the essence of life itself. Just as you are more than your ailments, scribe. You know, your trade as scribe was that of the wise Thoth.’
‘I’m actually a journalist, come to record Egypt’s liberation,’ Talma said.
‘How artfully you put that.’ Enoch looked at Astiza. ‘And we have another guest, as well?’
‘She is a…’ Ashraf began.
‘Servant,’ Enoch finished. He looked at her curiously. ‘So you have come back.’
Blimey, did these two know each other as well?
‘The gods appear to have willed it.’ She cast her eyes down. ‘My master is dead, killed by Napoleon himself, and my new master is the American.’
‘An intriguing twist of fate.’
Ashraf moved forward to embrace his brother. ‘It is also by the grace of all the gods and the mercy of these three that I’ve seen you again, brother! I’d made my peace and prepared for paradise, but then I was captured!’
‘You’re now their slave?’
‘The American has already set me free. He’s hired me as his bodyguard and guide with the money he took from me. He wants to hire you as well. Soon I will have back all that I lost. Is this not fate as well?’
‘Hire me for what?’
‘He’s come to Egypt with an ancient artifact. I told him you might recognise it.’
‘Ashraf is the bravest warrior I’ve ever seen,’ I spoke up. ‘He hurtled a French infantry square and it took all of us to bring him down.’
‘Bah. I was captured by a woman pushing a wagon wheel.’
‘He has always been brave,’ said Enoch. ‘Too much so. And vulnerable to women, as well.’
‘I am a man of this world, not the next, my brother. But these people seek your knowledge. They have an ancient medallion and want to know its purpose. When I saw it I knew I must bring them to you. Who knows more of the past than wise Enoch?’
‘A medallion?’
‘The American obtained it in Paris but thinks it Egyptian,’ Astiza said. ‘Men have tried to kill him to obtain it. The bandit Bin Sadr desires it. French savants are curious about it. Bonaparte favours him because of it.’
‘Bin Sadr the Snake? We’d heard he rides with the invaders.’
‘He rides with whoever pays him enough,’ Ashraf scoffed.
‘And who truly pays him?’ Enoch asked Astiza.
Again, she looked down. ‘Another scholar.’ Did she know more than she’d told me?
‘He’s a spy for this Bonaparte,’ Ashraf theorised, ‘and an agent, perhaps, for whoever wants this medallion most.’
‘Then the American should be most careful.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And the American threatens the peace of whatever home he comes into.’
‘As usual, you are quick with the truth, my brother.’
‘And yet you bring him to me.’