The Toyota slowed down, mercifully, and Ibrahim swung the wheel and engaged the four-wheel drive as they began to wend their way along a bumpy track towards the Nile a kilometre or so to the west. Costas leaned forward from the back seat and tapped his shoulder. ‘I’ve been thinking of our dive. How much deeper do you think Lake Nasser made the Nile at this point?’
‘We call our end of it Lake Nubia,’ Ibrahim replied. ‘A small but mostly amicable dispute with Egypt.’
‘Okay. Lake Nubia. How deep?’
Ibrahim pulled the Toyota around a pothole and then took one hand off the wheel, fumbling in the glove compartment in front of Jack and pulling out a small folder, which he passed back to Costas. ‘Take a look at the first paper. It’s an offprint from the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of 1903. The author was a British geologist who studied the narrowest point of the Semna cataract at low water when the rocks on either side were exposed, at the place we’re going to now. He dropped a plumb line into the torrent and got twenty-three metres. He then looked at marks on the cliff made by the ancient Egyptians to show maximum high water when the Nile was in flood, and they were some twelve metres above the level of the river at maximum spate in the late nineteenth century, showing the amount of riverbed erosion that had occurred over three thousand years. All I know for sure is that those marks are now submerged, and the present level of the river caused by the Aswan dam is well above that, perhaps ten or fifteen metres.’
Costas whistled. ‘That makes at least fifty metres depth to the base of that channel, maybe sixty. It’s a good thing we brought our mixed-gas gear.’ He flipped the pages and unfolded a plan showing the cataract. ‘What about this pool below the channel?’
‘As far as I know, nobody’s ever sounded it. In pharaonic times and during the British expedition in 1884 it was a kind of a harbour, where the boats coming up from Egypt offloaded their goods for the trek across the desert. When I came here to do a recce for your visit, Maurice and I talked to some fishermen from the local village of Kumna. They confirmed the British army engineer reports that the pool is incredibly calm in the centre and on the west side, so the torrent must drop in an underwater current that sweeps around the east side, below where we’re heading now. They say that whereas the riverbed elsewhere through the cataract is scoured clear of sediment by the current, in the centre of the pool it’s covered by metres and metres of mud. Apparently the current does strange things, whirling around, and that animals that fall into the pool are sucked down into the mud, never to be seen again. They all know the story of the leviathan of the Old Testament, the terrifying river monster, and they think that this was its birthplace, the place that the ancient Egyptians believed was the dark pool that wells up from the underworld, from which evil sprang. The locals never swim or fish there. One old man told us that a giant immortal crocodile lurks deep in the mud, ravenous and unrequited ever since the ancient Egyptians stopped feeding it slaves.’
‘Oh no,’ Costas moaned, shutting the folder. ‘I’d forgotten. They have crocodiles in the Nile, don’t they? Jack, why didn’t you remind me?’
‘Crocodylus niloticus,’ Jack said. ‘It’s in the name. Pretty obvious.’
‘I don’t always think in Latin.’
‘Okay. We’re here.’ Ibrahim pulled the Toyota to a halt, leaving the engine running. ‘I’m going back to the road to wait for the helicopter. We chose a landing spot about a kilometre to the south so the dust from the downdraught doesn’t mess up the archaeological site. Once Maurice has shown you around, you could walk out to meet me.’
Jack felt the shaking in his bones beginning to subside. ‘Walking would be good,’ he said.
There was a bump against the back window, pushing the Toyota sideways. ‘Or take the camel,’ Ibrahim said.
‘What camel?’ Costas asked.
‘That one.’ He turned round and pointed to the window. Costas sprang sideways, staring at it. A large face was looming beside him, its huge hooded eyes staring, its jaw moving from side to side. ‘Are camels another favourite of yours?’
‘Childhood trauma,’ Costas said. ‘My parents took me on a trip to Jerusalem, and a camel giving tourist rides on the Mount of Olives spat on me.’
‘Actually, it’s not spit. It’s regurgitated food.’ Ibrahim craned his neck around, grinning at Costas. ‘Anyway, you’ve got a keffiyeh. It’ll take to you like a native.’
Costas and Jack opened their doors and got out. Ibrahim quickly drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving them beside the camel, which stood chewing its cud and staring into the middle distance as if nothing had happened. Jack breathed in, tasting the tang of the desert, and then shaded his eyes and looked towards the river, just visible beyond a ridge of sandstone about a hundred metres away. He could see a cluster of large tents and several parked vehicles a few hundred metres further away to the south, and guessed that the main area of excavations must lie between where they stood and the tents, behind another low ridge ahead. Maurice had warned him that the site might appear deserted; most of the team would be at the other excavation on the far side of the river, having cleaned up the trenches on this side in preparation for an inspection by the Sudanese antiquities people scheduled for later on today.
A figure suddenly appeared over the ridge, barrelling towards them. He was wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with desert goggles pushed up his brow, the tattered remains of an IMU T-shirt, ancient desert boots and a pair of outsized khaki shorts that Jack had given him years ago, a relic of the German Afrika Korps that he had found in a back-street market in Tunis. The shorts had a dangerous tendency to fly at half-mast, especially when Maurice was squatting down with a trowel, lost in enthusiasm. Jack looked hard, and heaved a sigh of relief. Maurice was wearing a garishly coloured pair of lederhosen braces, which were holding up the shorts. Aysha had sworn that she would only marry him if he did something about them, and Maurice had responded in flamboyant Austrian fashion. But Jack knew that the image of the reformed married man only went so far, and that very little else had changed.
He nudged Costas. ‘Don’t say anything.’
‘Why not? Somebody should. How can anyone take that seriously?’
Jack turned and gazed at him pointedly. Costas was wearing baggy shorts, an outsized Hawaiian flower shirt, aviator sunglasses and a precarious lopsided turban he had made up out of the keffiyeh scarf. ‘Have you looked at yourself recently?’
‘What?’ Costas pushed up his sunglasses and adjusted his turban. ‘Desert chic.’
‘Not. As Rebecca would say.’
‘She would never, ever diss Uncle Costas like that.’
Hiebermeyer bounded up, shaking hands with both of them and slapping Costas on the shoulder. He gently pulled the dangling end of the keffiyeh and the entire cloth unravelled and dropped around Costas’ neck. ‘Mein Gott,’ said Hiebermeyer, eyeing Costas critically. ‘You need to get yourself a stylist.’ He pursed his lips. ‘And Hawaiian is so out this year.’
‘What did you just say?’ Costas exclaimed, smoothing his shirt down and pulling off the cloth. ‘So out?’
‘Aysha’s sister runs an haute couture chain in Cairo. She keeps me abreast of the latest fashions. They’ve even employed me as a consultant, to develop a line of evening wear based on Nefertiti’s robes in the Akhenaten relief carvings we found at Amarna. It’s always good to diversify.’ He grinned at Costas, then turned and strode off through the wadi in the direction of the river. ‘Come on, you two. Too much to see, too little time. I’ve got the inspectors coming in a couple of hours.’