Hiebermeyer put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve reburied them exactly as they were, and we’re about to infill the trench. We’ve arranged that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who administer the Khartoum War Cemetery, will take charge of the site. They mainly deal with Second World War casualties from the desert campaign against the Italians and the Germans, but they also have charge of First World War casualties from the war against the Turks as well as any bodies discovered from the 1880s and 1890s. We know the names of these two soldiers from their personal effects, and the Sudanese authorities have allowed the Commission to build a monument at this spot.’
‘So that closes the chapter on that fateful day in December 1884,’ Jack murmured, looking pensively at the tarpaulin.
‘It closes that chapter, but it opens another one,’ replied Hiebermeyer, his eyes gleaming. ‘Just like in the sangar, when they dug down here the soldiers cut through something else, something ancient. They probably thought it was the remains of earlier human burials, but when Aysha and her team removed the surrounding sediment, they found something unexpected. Prepare to be amazed.’ He lifted a flap of canvas dividing off part of the tent beyond the trench, and they stared in astonishment. On a hospital gurney at one end was an intact mummy, the criss-crossed strips of linen clearly visible beneath the hardened resin on the surface. The head was in the form of a stylised mask, with eyes and other features picked out in paint, the colours faded to pastel shades of green and blue and grey. Only it was not the mask of a human being. The mummy was lying on its front, and the head tapered to a snout, jutting out and ringed with painted teeth. Jack whistled. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. A crocodile.
He gently put a hand on the resin, feeling the warmth where it had absorbed heat from the sun, a disconcerting sensation, as if the mummy were still alive. ‘Is it real? Inside, I mean?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘We took it to the Khartoum School of Medicine for a CT scan. It’s a fully mature adult male Crocodylus niloticus. There was a scarab in part of the wrapping that we unravelled dating to the reign of our friend Senusret III, about 1850 BC.’ Hiebermeyer moved to another hanging curtain. ‘Now, get a hold of this one.’ He pulled the canvas away, and they stared in even greater astonishment. A second gurney held another crocodile mummy, this one in fragments, with only the snout and head and the lower part of the tail intact. But the head was huge, at least twice the size of the first mummy. And instead of painted features, the mask was picked out with gold leaf and encrusted jewels, black stones like jet for the eyes and a beautiful translucent green stone for each of the nostrils. Jack leaned forward and gently touched one of the stones, seeing the reflected light turn his finger a watery green, a shade he had never seen before.
‘The nostril stones are peridot, from St John’s Island in the Red Sea,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘The Egyptians sailed there specially to mine it. In the sunlight they reflect an amazing beam of light, almost too dazzling to look at.’
‘It’s huge,’ Costas said in a hushed tone. ‘I mean the crocodile. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Despite the richness of the embellishments, it was pretty crudely mummified, and hasn’t survived so well, even taking into account the damage to the torso caused by the British soldiers digging through it,’ Hiebermeyer continued. ‘Our analysis of the wrappings shows that the smaller mummy was encased in linen and papyrus characteristic of the reeds grown along the banks of the Nile in upper Egypt, whereas this one is local desert grass mixed with Nile clay probably from the pool below, as well as scraps of papyrus documents that seem to have been discarded from the fort.’
‘This is where you found the Semna dispatch you read to us earlier?’ Jack said.
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘The smaller mummy was undoubtedly brought here from Egypt, whereas we’re sure this one is a crocodile that lived here and was mummified on the spot. And yes, it’s big. Huge. The largest known Nile crocs are those recorded in the nineteenth century by European hunters. Maybe there were leviathans among them, but this one now stands as the largest Nile crocodile ever recorded. I sent Lanowski the CT scan and his computerised reconstruction of the bones gives its length. Most fully grown male Nile crocs average about four to five metres. This one is almost nine metres, the size of a bus.’
‘Ibrahim was telling us about local stories of a leviathan in the river here,’ Jack said. ‘This seems to bear them out.’
‘Lanowski calculates the crush strength of the jaw at twenty-five kilonewtons, enough to split a cow in half,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘But like all crocs, the muscles that open the jaws are weak, and you’d be able to hold them shut if you wrestled it down. Lanowski says the IMU medicos will be particularly interested in the integumentary sense organs on a crocodile of this size, as they may reveal ways of sensing pressure that have applications to diving technology. But you’d have to catch one live.’
Costas stared at him. ‘Don’t even think about it. I’m not acting as fishing bait for one of Lanowski’s experiments. He wants a live crocodile, he can catch it himself.’
Jack gazed back at the trench. ‘What are they doing buried up here, so high above the river?’
‘That was my first question too,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘Nile crocs lay eggs in November and December, the time of year when the level of the river was already well down, and yet they instinctively nested above the summer high-water mark in order to prevent their nests being inundated as the river rose again when the eggs were due to hatch. It was the reason why the ancient Egyptians thought crocodiles could foretell the future. They’d choose a sandy spot where they could bury their eggs and stand guard. Where we are now is one of the few locations with any depth of sand close to the cataract, even though it would have meant a lumbering climb for them up the slope. It’s an exposed location, but open on all sides so difficult for anyone intent on stealing the eggs to sneak up unobserved. Given the size of the crocs that lived here, anyone chancing on them would have kept their distance. On open ground like this a croc can move faster than most people can run. In the water, one this big would be even faster, up to forty kilometres per hour in bursts.’
‘I’m glad you used the past tense,’ Costas murmured. ‘Lived, not live.’
‘Don’t be too sure. Absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence. At night our workmen who sleep in the open claim they sometimes hear deep breathing from the pool, a snorting sound.’
‘Oh great,’ Costas muttered. ‘This gets better by the moment.’
‘Do you think there are more mummies here?’ Jack asked.
Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘You can see the lower courses of a masonry enclosure beside the trench with the soldier burials. We think the two crocodile mummies were buried side by side as offerings, one a tamed crocodile carefully mummified in Egypt, the other an untamed leviathan from this place. Perhaps there was some meaning to the double buriaclass="underline" the one to demonstrate that the priests could subdue the creature, the other to show respect for the primordial beast, here at this place on the very edge of civilisation.’
‘You mention priests,’ Jack said, peering at Hiebermeyer intently. ‘At all the other places where crocodile mummies have been found, they’ve been discovered in large numbers, stashed in temples to the crocodile god Sobek. At Crocodilopolis, for example.’
Costas looked horrified. ‘At where?’
‘Crocodilopolis. Crocodile town. On the Nile near Memphis.’
‘They had a place called that?’