It is not known whether Colonel Vyse had the sarcophagus of Menkaure packed full of other artefacts, and the plaque of Akhenaten discovered by Jack and Costas is fictional. Akhenaten for me is the most intriguing of all the pharaohs of Egypt, for having ‘broken the mould’ – albeit only for his lifetime – in a culture that resisted change and intellectual development for so long. His conversion to the one God, the Aten, and his likely identification as the pharaoh of the Moses story in the Old Testament, have made him the subject of extensive speculation and controversy, not least by Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism (London, 1939). The unusual physiognomy suggested in Akhenaten’s images may have set him apart as a child and caused him to be derided, just as the future emperor Claudius was to be in Rome; it is intriguing to speculate whether this was a factor behind his rejection of the world of his upbringing. The relief carvings of him with his beautiful wife Nefertiti and their children are among the most human of all pharaonic portraits, suggesting that his revelation of the Aten swept away not only the old gods and priests but also the unhappiness that he might have experienced in his youth.
Very little is known about the early life of Akhenaten, and the idea that he made a secret expedition to the Nubian desert to seek revelation is fictional. However, this idea is appealing on several counts: in the desert he would have been able to leave behind the gods and priests of the old religion whose existence clearly troubled him, and he may also have been visiting a place he saw as his ancestral homeland. At Buhen and Amada, two forts established in upper Nubia centuries earlier during the Middle Kingdom, inscriptions show that in year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign an expedition was sent south into Nubia, for an unknown purpose (Amada Stela CG 41806). What is certain is that two temple towns were constructed beside the Nile in upper Nubia during his reign, at Kawa and Sesebi. Both were focused on temples to the Aten, and both contained tantalising hints of the significance to Akhenaten of the southern desert: at Sesebi the finds include a unique depiction of the Aten as ‘Lord of Nubia’, and the ancient name for Kawa, Gem(pa)-aten, means ‘the Aten is discovered’.
The possibility that the year 12 expedition may have been sent to find gold is highlighted by the discovery of evidence for gold processing at Sesebi, the basis for Hiebermeyer’s fictional discovery near Semna in Chapter 6. The Middle Kingdom forts at Semna are among the best-known Egyptian remains in Sudan, not least for their dramatic location above the Great Gate of the second cataract, now submerged as a result of the rise in the level of the Nile caused by the Aswan dam. A vivid first-hand account of Semna as it once appeared is provided by Colonel William Francis Yates in The Campaign of the Cataracts: being a Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884–5 (London, 1887): it was a ‘wild and lonely spot’, where ‘from the ruin-crowned cliff on the east bank … one sees only the serrated ridges and calcined peaks of a savage solitude’. Yates describes the archaeological remains: on the ‘wind-swept summits of steep impending cliffs… lie two ruined temples [sic]; the massive but crumbling walls of a fortress crowns the whole crest of the cliff on the east side’. My depiction of the geology and river topography is derived from fieldwork carried out in 1902 by Dr John Ball (Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 59.1, 1903), as well as during excavations at Semna carried out from the 1920s to the final project in the 1960s before the sites were inundated.
In my novel I have imagined a lowering of the level of the dammed water that has allowed some of the upper-plateau ruins to be revealed. The excavations to the 1960s showed that Semna had been the hub of a complex of river forts built in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BC, when the pharaoh Semnosret I and his successors attempted to expand into Nubia; the finds complemented the ‘Semna Despatches’, an archive found in Thebes in 1896, to which the papyrus dispatch in Chapter 6 is a fictional addition. The cult of Sobek, the crocodile god, is particularly associated with the pharaohs of those dynasties, and large crocodiles may have been more prevalent in the south where there had been less hunting – some perhaps even the size of the behemoth in A Frightful Incident, a print from an account of David Livingstone’s explorations that can be seen on my website. A good deal is known of the cult from the temples at Arsinoe – known to the Greeks as Crocodilopolis – and Kom Ombo, as well as from crocodile mummies, several of which have recently been subjected to CT scans at the Stanford School of Medicine in California. The submerged temple to Sobek in this novel is fictional, but is in a plausible location; Semna was a perilous point in the river where the risk of crocodile attack might have been high, so would have been a suitable place for acts of propitiation, even sacrifice. My idea of a submerged temple was inspired by the project in the 1960s to raise the Abu Simbel temple facade to its present location beside Lake Nasser, leaving the inner chambers deeply submerged within the cliff face where only divers can access them today.
The Gordon relief expedition
In the autumn of 1884, the world was gripped by one of the high dramas of the Victorian age, the plight of General Gordon in Khartoum and the progress of the expedition sent by the British to rescue him. Each week the Illustrated London News published beautifully detailed prints based on sketches sent by correspondents in the field, allowing readers to follow the expedition mile by mile as it struggled south through Sudan against the flow of the Nile. As a boy, I was given a bound annual volume of the Illustrated London News for that year by my grandfather, and I loved poring over those pictures: they seemed to show the ultimate imperial adventure. Readers saw the empire at its best: soldiers and sailors, Canadian voyageurs and west African boatmen, all banded together in harmonious resolve, for a cause that could not be more noble. And when the action shifted from the Nile to the desert, the illustrations showed thrilling scenes of battle, of bayonet against spear, of British resolve in the face of desperate savagery. By the time the stalwart few dispatched in the river steamers had fought their way up to Khartoum, the fact that they were too late was almost secondary. In that peculiarly British way, the failure itself became heroic, the more so after Gordon was elevated to saintly status for which martyrdom was almost a necessity. Generations of future soldiers could dream of fighting against the odds to rescue their own Gordons, yet worship the image of a man who had chosen to die honourably, revolver and sword in hand, grimly intent on taking as many of the enemy with him as he could, rather than make an easy escape and abandon the women and children he had sworn to protect.