Tanner turned to him, his face flushed in the lamplight and his voice edged with excitement. ‘I have a theory, Mayne. I think they were doing something here that they couldn’t do in Egypt, something that the priests would have banned, an ancient ritual from their prehistoric past. I think that’s why Akhenaten came here and had this place carved out far beyond the control of the priests, back in the land of his ancestors. I think this was a sacrificial chamber. And look at those images of dismembered bodies. I mean human sacrifice.’
Mayne stared at the wall, his mind reeling. Human sacrifice. Did that scene of violence show a real battle, or was it allegorical? He looked at the procession of soldiers again, and then at the image of the pharaoh. He realised that there was something missing: images of Egyptian military expeditions always showed priests. There were none here, and the image of Akhenaten lacked the usual priestly equipment of a pharaoh, the staff and the ankh symbol and the crown. Had he cast them off, and come to the desert already divested of the old religion? Or had he done so here, beyond the borders of Egypt, having reached a place sacred to his early ancestors where only the river and the desert held sway? Had the sacrificial victims been the priests?
Mayne remembered Corporal Jones and the leviathan, his description from the Book of Job: His neesings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. He strained to see the head of the crocodile, raising the lamp as high as he could. The eyes were made of crystal, a deep red, perhaps agate, but the nostrils were crystal as well, brilliant pellucid stones cut in facets that reflected a dazzling light even from the sputtering flame of the gas lamp. He looked back at the slit of light through the entrance, realising that the chamber was aligned east–west. Now, with the sun on the horizon, the light was shining high above the statue, close to the roof. But an hour ago, about the time he had been waiting for the sun to drop enough to see the sharpshooter, it would have shone directly into the eyes and nostrils of the crocodile, reflecting a brilliant, shimmering light, as if the crocodile itself were emitting a beam towards the sun. He thought of what this place might have been like three thousand years ago: down below, beneath the sand that now obscured it, a passageway through the rock to the river for the crocodiles, and up above, far above the reach of anyone sealed in the chamber, a slit just wide enough to let that flash of light through, a beam of red and green that those watching outside might have seen as the beginning of a new dawn, as the last ray of a godhead who had consumed the victims needed to release his energy in one flash towards the divine light of the Aten, allowing the chamber and the last exhalations of the old religion to be sealed up for ever.
‘Good Lord,’ murmured Ormerod after they had stood in silence for several minutes, hearing only the dripping of condensation from the walls, tiny splashes magnified in the chamber as it fell into the water. ‘Not a word of this to the men. They’re jittery enough about crocodiles as it is.’
Mayne heard a hollering outside; it was Charrière, calling his name from the river. Tanner and Ormerod began to make their way up the slope towards the entrance, but he lingered, staring at something he had seen in the wavering light of the lantern. It was a small slab of stone about eight inches square, partly detached from the wall; it had once been fixed into a depression below the image of Akhenaten, but the mortar around its edges had evidently crumbled in the dampness of the chamber. The decoration on its surface seemed continuous with the surrounding image, a series of radiating lines from the sun symbol, and in the top left corner an acute angle overlaying the lines that corresponded to the lower hem of Akhenaten’s robe. Yet with the slab detached from the wall, it also seemed as if it might form part of something else, one quarter of a larger square with lines that radiated out from a shape in the centre, formed from the acute angle. He picked it up, feeling the weight of the basalt. He remembered Shaytan’s account of Gordon and Schliemann and the American excavating the temple in the desert. They had been looking for a carving, something that might be like this. On a whim he decided to take it. Someone at headquarters might know its meaning, perhaps Kitchener, another engineer officer who had been close to Gordon and shared his archaeological interests.
As he pocketed the slab, he accidentally caught and broke the thong around his neck that held the scarab that Shaytan had given him. He cursed under his breath, scrabbling around where it had fallen into the water at the edge of the sand, knowing that he was probably only digging it in deeper. He heard the hollering again, and looked up to the sunlight streaming in from the entrance, seeing the silhouetted forms of the two men waiting for him. He would look for it when he returned. If he returned. He held the weight of the slab in his pocket, and struggled upright in the sand. He seemed to be taking one artefact at the expense of another, the one in his pocket of uncertain meaning and the other a sacred relic from a man he rated highly, a gift to protect him in the desert. It was as if something within was pulling him away from the bonds that tied men to each other; ever since his parents’ death he had been destined to live as an outsider. He had begun to understand better what had made him sit at night with his back to the fire while Shaytan was asleep and stare into the darkness of the desert, wishing he could walk out and let it enfold him, to disappear forever from the affairs of men.
He felt himself sink further into the sand. Below him the ground was saturated, and he realised that there was no certainty that the floor of the chamber continued at the same level, that it might be a deeper pit full of quicksand that could suck him down. He hauled one leg out, then the other, and began to make his way laboriously up the slope. He remembered what the Mohawks had said when he overheard them talking apprehensively about the river ahead, about the feeling of heaviness; perhaps that was what they had meant. He laboured on, making little progress, his heart pounding. It occurred to him that Tanner and Ormerod could dislodge the sand and it could slide down like an avalanche and engulf him, entombing him forever with the crocodile god. He remembered his mission to Wolseley; disappearing in a place like this was decidedly not the fate that he had envisaged.
He took one last look back, then released himself from the grip of the sand and scrambled up to the chamber entrance until he stood outside beside the other two, blinking in the waning sunlight. He walked over to his gear, opened up his saddlebag and pulled out the robe he had been wearing in the desert, then unsheathed the knife he kept on his belt and cut into one edge of the cloth. After replacing the knife, he tore off a strip, then took the stone slab out of his pocket and wrapped it in the material, tying it with a length of cord from his pocket and handing it to Tanner. ‘See that this gets to Corporal Jones, would you? He looks after my belongings. We’ll have a good look at it when I get back. And I’d like him reassigned to the Railway Company at Korti. You’ll be the senior remaining Royal Engineer with the river column after I’ve left, so he’s your responsibility. Can you see to that?’
Tanner took the package and tucked it into his tunic. ‘Right away. I’m heading up to the sangar now.’ He paused, gesturing back at the entrance to the chamber. ‘What do you think of it?’
Mayne nodded towards the river. ‘I think with what might be lurking in the pool, that’s one god you can’t afford to ignore.’
Tanner grinned, shaking his head. ‘If I survive this little jaunt, I might just try to wangle a number like the one Kitchener had in Palestine and come back here as an archaeological surveyor. If there’s more like this to be found, we might be on to the greatest treasure trove from antiquity.’