They followed quickly behind, barely keeping up.
‘And speaking of Akhenaten, Jack, that’s a fantastic discovery. Wunderbar. The sarcophagus of Menkaure. I can’t believe it, found after almost two hundred years. If you can raise it, I’m going to see whether I can have it put back in the pyramid. I was only there the other day. It’d be a logistical challenge, but it might be fun to see if I can get a team of Egyptian students to do it the authentic way, with ropes and logs. I’m into experimental archaeology like that at the moment. And that plaque. Marvellous. I showed the image to Aysha and emailed it to my team at the Institute in Alexandria. It looks like some version of the Aten symbol, but nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it. They’re doing a full database check against every known wall painting and carving to see if we can come up with a match. As a wedding present Lanowski gave me a program he’d developed based on fingerprint recognition technology used by the FBI in America. It’s revolutionised our study of Egyptian iconography. If we can’t find a match using that, it doesn’t exist.’
Costas stumbled up alongside him. ‘Lanowski gave you that as a wedding present?’
‘And this hat. A twelve-gallon hat from his home state. I always loved the cowboy stuff. He’s a good man. The best. Never appreciated him until he told me that Egyptology had been his passion before he turned to computer nanotechnology at the age of twelve. His new wife and Aysha get on like a house on fire. We’re planning a joint delayed honeymoon to the pyramids at Giza to test a new program he’s devised to study the alignments. It’s going to blow all that astrological nonsense out of the water.’
‘Hang on, Maurice. A joint delayed honeymoon? You and Lanowski? Something not quite right there.’
‘Everything right. It’s the dawn of a new era in Egyptology.’
Costas dropped back, shaking his head. Jack smiled to himself as they trundled forward. He loved being with Maurice when he was on a roll. He knew there would be a lot of discussion ahead about the shipwreck find, but now was clearly not the time.
They came to a halt on a ridge overlooking the river. Costas had recovered his elan, and slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. ‘Okay, Maurice. Give us the low-down.’
Hiebermeyer pointed to the river. ‘You have to imagine the Nile before the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960s caused the level of the water to rise, inundating all the features that made the Semna cataract so famous in history. Where we’re standing now would have been a cliff about forty metres above a wide pool at the base of the cataract. Above that the river was constricted within a narrow defile only about forty metres wide, bounded by large granite promontories that stuck out into the river on either side, almost damming it. During low water in the winter months the entire river was channelled through the constriction, pouring down from the rocky rapids to the south into the pool below us. You can get a great sense of its appearance and the drama of the place from sketches made by British officers when they were here in 1884.’
‘Come again?’ Costas said. ‘British officers?’
Jack turned to him. ‘During the expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. A British force camped here on their way upriver during the final weeks of December that year, as the level of the Nile was dropping.’
‘Okay. Got you. What I was reading in that book of yours on the plane.’
Hiebermeyer turned to the south, gesticulating grandly as he spoke. ‘To anyone coming here – the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British in 1884 – this place would have seemed like a gateway to another world, the last point you could reach before the cataracts ahead would force you to leave your boats and strike out across the desert. But the image of it as a portal to the riches of the south was only ever an illusion. Even today, standing here and looking south, it can seem a forbidding landscape, an endless expanse of desert with only jagged black basalt hills here and there to break the horizon. Imagine how it would have looked with the veil of spray rising above the cataract beyond that constriction and with a rolling tide of dust from the desert, and you can see why for a lot of people who came here, this place wasn’t a gateway but the last outpost of civilisation, the beginning of a no-man’s-land where many who ventured beyond never returned.’
‘So what’s the date of these ruins?’ Costas asked.
Hiebermeyer beamed at him. ‘Follow me.’ He bounded along the edge of the wadi to higher ground, where a rectilinear excavation had taken the overburden of sand and dust down to bedrock, revealing the lower courses of a small square structure in stone about three metres across. A tarpaulin lay over one edge, and Hiebermeyer leaned down and carefully removed it, his back to them. ‘Prepare to be amazed,’ he said.
Jack gasped at what had been revealed. It was a beautifully smoothed statue head of a pharaoh, life sized and broken at the neck. Above it, protruding from the wall, was a plinth with a pair of sculpted feet, in the same dark basaltic stone. The head was strikingly individualistic, with bulging eyes, sunken cheeks and a downturned mouth, the face of a hard man of war rather than the beatific image of youth so common among statues of the pharaohs. Jack stared at it, racking his brains, then remembered the report he had read from the first excavations that had taken place here back in the 1920s. ‘Sesostris III?’
Hiebermeyer raised his arms in mock despair. ‘Typical Jack Howard to choose the Greek name over the Egyptian one.’
Jack grinned at him. ‘You’ll never change me.’
‘One day, one day I’ll make you realise that ancient Egypt was the origin of Western civilisation, rather than that bunch of overwrought Greek muscle men in the Aegean and their mystical bards and philosophers, living up poles and in barrels.’
‘I thought excavating at Troy last year had won you over.’
‘Only because I proved that Troy had been ruled as an Egyptian vassal during the New Kingdom.’
‘If you hadn’t found those hieroglyphs of Akhenaten carved on the entrance passage into the underground chamber we discovered, you wouldn’t be here today. They specifically mentioned the Nubian desert and the fort at the cataract.’
‘I was coming here anyway,’ Hiebermeyer huffed. ‘Aysha had already agreed to conduct renewed excavations at Semna for the Sudanese government, who want to open up more sites along the Nile to attract tourists.’
‘Before we went to Troy, I distinctly remember Aysha saying that you had agreed to come here not to interfere with her site, but to look after the baby.’
Costas guffawed. ‘Dr Maurice Hiebermeyer, director of the Alexandria Institute of Archaeology, the world’s pre-eminent Egyptologist, forced to become a nursemaid. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.’
‘It was payback,’ Jack said, grinning. ‘For Maurice spending three months during her pregnancy sealed up inside the main chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza.’
‘You did what?’ Costas exclaimed.
Hiebermeyer looked defiant. ‘I’d been desperate to do it for years. It was a chance in a million, while the pyramid was closed to tourists for restoration work. For ages I’d wanted to see what the conditions would have been like for ancient artisans inside the tomb, to see whether it would have been too damp for wall painting. Experimental archaeology. Living in the past. I couldn’t turn it down.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Costas said.