He backed off a few steps to take in the whole image, sitting down on the sand. It was unquestionably carved by the ancient Egyptians, its shapes and hieroglyphic symbols familiar from others he had seen at Luxor and Amarna to the north. It showed a procession of skirt-clad Egyptian soldiers heading into battle; ahead of them was a naked enemy with spears and little round shields, running and lunging at the Egyptians. Tanner slid down beside him. ‘That’s what first amazed me when I came down here,’ he said. ‘I was at El Teb with Burnaby. Those look just like the Beya we were fighting.’
Mayne raised the lantern and peered closely. Tanner was right. The enemy had their hair in plumes and rat-tails, exactly as the Beya wore theirs, greased with animal fat. These were Corporal Jones’ fuzzy-wuzzies, fighting off intruders three thousand years ago just as they were now, and just as terrifying. The scene seemed suddenly immediate, as if past, present and future were caught together in one image. But there was more, and he moved a few steps to the right, slipping back and holding up the lamp to stop it from falling into the water. The next scene showed men with raised hatchets and swords, hacking at a jumble of bodies and at prisoners with arms raised in supplication. The victors were exacting their usual price; in the register below was a ghastly melange of severed heads and limbs and genitalia, the carvings half submerged by the edge of the water, as if they were floating in it.
But there was something wrong. This was not the usual picture of Egyptian conquest. It was not the Egyptians who were the victors; it was the enemy. The prisoners were receiving the same treatment they were shown inflicting on enemies in countless other wall reliefs in Egypt, depicting conquests real or glorified. And yet this had clearly been carved by Egyptian hands, by masons who had toiled here in this chthonic place under instruction from someone who wanted to celebrate defeat, not victory. What was going on? Mayne stared at the awful image in the lower register and remembered Jones’ account of General Hicks’ last stand two years before, of the Mahdi’s men ripping the genitalia off Egyptian prisoners before they fed them to the dogs. Seeing this image sent a chill through him, as if he were looking not at the ancient past but at history foretold, at the fate that lay ahead of them now.
And there was yet more. Tanner pointed further along, and Mayne raised the lantern. Filling the entire wall at the head of the army was the huge figure of their leader, striding forward. It had none of the usual appurtenances of kingship, but Mayne instantly recognised the bulbous belly and distended chin he had seen on wall carvings at Amarna. He remembered the scarab he had been given by Shaytan, hanging round his neck now, and where he had seen the inscription on the base before: it was the hieroglyphic cartouche of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh shown here wearing nothing but a robe and sandals. Akhenaten had led his army south and yet seemed divorced from his soldiers, turning away from the carnage of defeat and striking off alone, his eyes determinedly ahead. And in front of him, radiating from the corner of the chamber, was his most characteristic symbol of all, the Aten sun-disc, its rays extending outwards towards the pharaoh and seeming to embrace and draw him forward, each ray ending in a hand with palm outstretched.
Mayne stared at the image. He had seen the fragmentary remains of a wall carving like this somewhere else, two weeks earlier, near the wells of Jakdul, not in an underground chamber but scattered over a windswept ruin scarcely visible above the surface of the desert, its walls reduced to foundation courses and the spread of rubble buried in dust and sand. Shaytan had told him that eight years earlier he had guided Gordon Pasha himself to the place, when Gordon was touring the Sudan during his first period as governor general and had a burning passion to discover the antiquities of the place. He had been accompanied by a flamboyant American, Charles Garner Wright, an army officer and adventurer who still wore the uniform of the Confederate South, one of several Civil War veterans who had sought employment with the Khedive’s army; and by a German archaeologist who Mayne realised from Shaytan’s description was Dr Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, a man greatly admired by Gordon. The three men had spent days at the site, digging into the sand yet revealing little more than the fragments that were almost completely buried when Shaytan showed it to Mayne.
Tanner nudged him. ‘You haven’t seen the best. Look at the wall opposite the entrance.’
Mayne turned and raised the lantern, and then gasped. Leering out of the gloom high above was the head of a giant standing sculpture, or more accurately the snout. He could see that it was a figure striding forward, carrying a staff in one hand and the ankh symbol in the other, a statue in the round carved out of the living basalt. But it was the head that was extraordinary. It was not a man’s head, but the head of a crocodile, with eyes carved deeply on either side and jagged teeth encircling the mouth, the fourth incisor from the front on either side lodged in the upper jaw.
‘It’s Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god,’ Tanner said, his voice hushed. ‘The built-over recess behind it is cracked at the top, so you can see inside. It’s filled with mummies. Crocodile mummies, that is. I think this was a temple that adjoined the pool in the river, with a channel running into it. During the annual flood of the Nile it would have provided refuge for crocodiles from the rushing water of the cataract. I think crocodiles actually lived here.’
Mayne stared at the statue. He remembered the evening he had spent with Tanner and Jones picking through the ancient sources for mention of crocodiles, and what Plutarch had said about them: the Egyptians worship God symbolically in the crocodile, that being the only animal without a tongue, like the Divine Logos which stands not in need of speech. They had checked it themselves on a rotting carcass they had found downstream, and it was true: the Nile crocodile had no tongue, and a top jaw that could detach itself to accommodate prey far larger than itself, like a snake. The divine word that shall not be spoken. It struck him that the early Christians who reviled the Egyptians for making idols, and all those since who thought they worshipped animal deities, were wrong, and should return to the ancient authors to seek the truth. Sobek was not a god, but the divine presence manifesting itself through the crocodile. Just as the Mahdi and his followers saw Allah in the works of man, so the ancient Egyptians perceived the divine presence in all the facets of nature. In his mind’s eye, Mayne saw Akhenaten, the pharaoh who had experienced the revelation more strongly than any other, marching ever southward to free himself from the shackles of the priests and the old religion that had empowered those images, drawing from them and taking with him the divine presence. Perhaps he had built this temple on the very edge of the Egyptian world beside the crocodile pool as a last gesture to the old ways before leaving it all behind and plunging into the desert. It was out there that the archaeologists should be searching for him, not at Amarna or in the monuments to the north, yet Mayne knew it was a place where little evidence of his passing would ever be found: no ruins or statues or temples, except the distilled desolation of the desert and the brilliance of the sun.