‘I let Maurice and Aysha down. They should never have had to leave the site at Semna the way they did. It was virtually a one-hour evacuation.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘Maurice called me because you’re not picking up when he calls. They’d already made the decision to leave. They’d had bandits show up at night, and Aysha’s cousin, the guy acting as their guard, had become really afraid. Aysha said that as soon as she realised that, she knew she had to get out. There was no way they were going to stay there with the baby. And anyway, the Egyptians are topping up Lake Nasser again, so the whole site’s going to be inundated in a couple of months.’
Jack picked up a small object from his desk, the greenstone scarab he had found inside the crocodile temple, and stared at the cartouche on the base. He wondered who had lost it there, and when. It had been with him since he had borrowed it from the Sudan, and now he felt he wanted to return it, not to a museum but back to the shimmering sand inside the temple where it could then spend another eternity.
‘You know the Muslim tribesmen of the Sudan pick up old scarabs and use them as good-luck charms,’ Rebecca said. ‘They wrap prayers around them and put them in little bags around their necks. That thing seems so close to Akhenaten, a scarab of his wife Nefertiti, but it might have been lost in there a lot more recently and have a completely different significance. It’s what you told me about artefacts that survive between different eras and cultures taking on new meanings.’
Jack put down the scarab and stared at it. ‘I also told you I didn’t believe in good-luck charms.’
‘You said you believed in yourself.’
Jack took a deep breath. ‘Okay. I’ll talk to Maurice. But I still feel I have to make it up to him somehow. Something big in Egypt.’
‘Dad, you found him a pharaoh’s golden sceptre. And not just any pharaoh, but his favourite, Akhenaten. That takes some beating.’
‘Maybe I can do something to help at the pyramid of Menkaure. After this I might take a rest from diving for a while. I could do some work on land.’
‘Dad, you didn’t say that. Get over it.’
‘That sounds like Costas talking. He doesn’t have to face the board of directors tomorrow.’
‘Actually, he does. He volunteered to go along to make sure the record was straight. Anyway, let’s face it, you run this place. You created the board of directors.’
‘When I created the board, I relinquished my control over IMU to them so that I would just be another employee. I’d seen too many institutions run like tinpot dictatorships.’
‘They’re hardly going to fire you, Dad. Come on. Anyway, I’m going back up to your great-great-grandad’s archive in the attic. One of those boxes is going to have that letter from Lieutenant Tanner, I’m sure of it. It might just give us the clue we need to whatever was in that other envelope. We don’t have to go back to Sudan to tie up that story. And get on the phone to Maurice, Dad. You’re his best friend. You owe it to him.’
Rebecca marched out, and Jack put his feet up on the corner of his desk, staring again at the portraits on the walclass="underline" the first Jack Howard, an Elizabethan sea dog who had made his fortune as a privateer plundering Spanish treasure ships, and then fought the Armada under Drake and Raleigh; beside him Captain Matthias Howard, who had traded in tobacco from his estates in Maryland and Virginia before turning his attentions to the east, where he had put his money into an East Indiaman and doubled the family fortune, allowing him to build the present house; and on the opposite side of the door Colonel John Howard, Royal Engineers, Jack’s great-great-grandfather, who had served with distinction in India before disappearing on a quest into Afghanistan, one that Jack and Costas had finally brought to resolution almost a hundred years later. They were all there in Jack’s mind, not just those three, but the many men and women in between who had given him his sense of identity, had made him feel that he was part of the tradition of exploration and adventure and risk-taking that was in his blood.
He knew he did not have to live up to any of them, only to the ideal he had set himself. And since Rebecca had arrived in his life it had not just been about him, but about her too, about how he could help her to feel that same urge that had always driven him forward, a relishing of the voyage of discovery as much as a yearning for the destination, for the prize that sometimes remained elusive. If there was anything he had learned from being an archaeologist, it was this: that too often the treasure at the end of the quest was an illusion, an ever-receding mirage, and the real discoveries were the ones made along the way, revelations of ancient and present lives, voyages of self-discovery and friendship.
Perhaps chasing Akhenaten’s quest had been like that. They had made fabulous discoveries. A whole chapter of Victorian history in the desert had opened up in a way that Jack had never anticipated. And he now understood better what made men tick who had gone off by themselves in search of revelation, men like Gordon, men like himself. He had a hunch that somewhere within those months in 1884 and 1885 was a man who still could not be found, a void at the centre of the story, yet who was somehow inextricably tied up with the fate of Gordon; it was a void that Jack had found himself trying to occupy, as he struggled to imagine what had really gone on. He stared at the portrait of Colonel Howard in his uniform, wishing yet again that he had been able to talk to him, but feeling closer now to understanding what it was that had motivated the explorers and archaeologists of that generation. For Jack these were discoveries of significance. Perhaps the story of Akhenaten’s quest, of his fabled lost city of light, could now be finished, a book to be shut.
He thought about what Rebecca had said, and about those things that had so excited him about his ancestors: exploration and adventure and risk-taking. He had taken a risk in going to the site of the Abbas, and it had not worked out. Risk-taking was all about accepting the possibility of failure. Perhaps he had been too lucky during his career, and needed to learn humility. Rebecca was about the future, and that was where he needed to put his mind now. He took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. Sitting in the middle of his desk was the press release from Sofia about the Beatrice, waiting to be read. He might not be able to tie up all the loose ends in the Sudan, but the discovery of the Beatrice was a fantastic result and he would do everything in his power to make sure that the project put IMU in the best possible light. He pushed back his chair, put his feet down and picked up the report, feeling better already. He remembered what Sofia had called their submersible, Nina, after Columbus’ ship, and how she had wanted IMU to go to the Americas: maybe she was right. It had been almost eight years since he had taken an IMU team to Canada and then to Mexico, on the trail of crusader gold. For several years now, while there was so much going on elsewhere, he had resisted pleas from their US representative to start a new project in America. That was where he would go next. He needed a fresh start, new horizons, like Columbus. He would talk about it tomorrow morning when he had the meeting with the IMU board of directors to explain the Abbas incident, so that he could end the grilling on a positive note. And he would get Hiebermeyer to call in to outline his plans for returning the sarcophagus of Menkaure to its rightful place inside the pyramid at Giza.
He thought of that word: pyramid. It triggered something, a very distant memory. He put down the report and picked up the brown envelope that Corporal Jones had sent to his great-great-grandfather, the envelope that he thought had contained some kind of artefact. He looked at it again, tracing his fingers over the careful handwriting of the address, and then glanced at the portrait of Colonel Howard. That was it. He remembered now. His pulse quickened, and he sat upright, thinking back forty years. It had been in this very room; he and his grandfather had been standing in front of that very portrait. His grandfather had been telling him how as a young boy he had been allowed once a week to go upstairs into the attic where his own grandfather had lived, to see his stamp collection. It had been during the few years of Colonel Howard’s retirement before his final quest into Afghanistan, and he had lived not here but in a cruck-framed half-timbered cottage in a remote village in Herefordshire, a secluded place where he could get on with his writing projects without distraction. His daughter and grandchildren had lived downstairs. But it was not the stamp collection that had so intrigued the little boy. It was an ancient artefact, a square stone with carvings all over it, sitting in a niche in the old timbers of the wall. His grandfather had remembered it so clearly all those years later because the big timbers of the cruck frame came together to form an inverted V shape in the attic, just like a pyramid. And that was what he had seen on the ancient stone: a pyramid. Colonel Howard had told the boy that he had been sent it from Egypt, and that it had once been in an ancient temple.