“Howard seems to have kept to his word, though, and the man, a former sapper called Jones, began to tell him an incredible story of being trapped underground for months on end. But just as Carter was planning to return to hear more, he was whisked off to Amarna by Petrie, and it was only in 1904 with the downturn in his fortunes that he came back to look for the man.”
“Who by then was the mad mystic,” said Jack.
“Self-styled, with an appearance to match: bald with a skullcap, a huge gray beard, sun-blackened skin. He lived by selling gullible European ladies restorative balms that he claimed to have been given by Osiris himself during an underground journey to the afterlife. He was evidently quite a character, theatrical with a deep, booming voice, speaking a strangely accented English as well as Urdu and Arabic. Local children flocked to hear his tales. He’d become something of a celebrity.”
“Urdu is plausible for an ex-soldier who might have served in India, and he could have accented the English to disguise his true origins,” Jack said.
“Carter noted that the man he met in 1891 was lucid enough when he was in full flow, but he was physically weak and fearful of being caught,” said Jeremy. “He said he had been a corporal in the Royal Engineers and had been with the river expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884. But after a particularly savage battle, he had been knocked unconscious and lost track of time and place. After a long period of wandering and a terrifying encounter with a crocodile, he found himself in Cairo, where his extraordinary underground adventure took place. He had clung to Carter in desperation as he told the story, clearly tottering on the edge of sanity, babbling about the crocodile and mummies. It was the Royal Engineers cap badge that convinced Carter that there might be some element of truth in the story.”
“Royal Engineers,” Jack muttered, thinking hard. “How extraordinary. He must have gone up with the river expedition past the crocodile temple, the one that Costas and I discovered on the Nile. And the battle can only have been Kirkeban, the one major encounter with the Mahdi army for the river column. The expedition pretty well disintegrated after that, so it’s plausible that a man left for dead on the battlefield or lost in the river might have ended up that way.”
Jeremy positioned the computer screen so that Jack could see it. “I know all this because Howard summarized it in his diary entry for the day in 1904 when he rediscovered Jones. He wrote an account of what Jones told him next. I’ve scanned it so you can read it in its entirety.”
Jack stared at the screen. It showed a single notebook page of handwriting, neat and legible. He began to read:
13 October 1904. Visited the souk outside the synagogue today to seek Jones, about whom I wrote in my entry yesterday. I feel that with the passage of years I can use his name without fear of compromising his safety, as surely by now his desertion from the army would be beyond retribution, if indeed his story were to be believed. Having searched all the usual places and nearly giving him up for dead, a reasonable conclusion after all these years, I spied the man I described yesterday, and, after observing him discreetly, watching him dispense who-knows-what concoction to a gaggle of credulous Belgians, I approached him; he immediately recognized me and we renewed our acquaintance. I reminded him of his unfinished story, and after some egging he took me in hand and led me to the back corner of the courtyard where the rabbi allows him to sleep and brings him food and water.
Here is what he told me. One night some three years after the death of Gordon, he and an American, whom I surmised to be none other than the estimable Charles Chaillé-Long, former officer in Gordon’s service and now distinguished author and lawyer (about whose subsequent career I did not apprise Jones, not wishing to divert him from his story, or render him too amazed), along with a Frenchman, an inventor of a submarine diving apparatus, went to a place on the Nile where Jones knew from an ancient carving found in the desert that there lay an underground entrance, below a ruined fort some few miles south of the present city boundary. In dynamiting it open, they were sucked in from their boat, and Jones yet again suffered a knock to the head. He woke up some indeterminable time later, without Chaillé-Long or the Frenchmen, both of whom he gave up for dead, but with the remains of the boat washed all around him, in a kind of darkness suffused by a distant brilliant light.
At this point I had to hold Jones in my hands to keep him talking. His eyes widened and he spoke feverishly, in the grip of a barely suppressed terror. He talked of deep pools of water, and again of a blinding light. He said that he ate some kind of slimy fish, and, to my considerable consternation, the flesh of long-dead bodies, bodies that he described as if they were ancient mummies. After an inordinate amount of time and much hopeless terror, he came to a great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus. In that chamber he saw many great treasures, gold and amulets and crystal, and he then told me he had made a long-dead friend, who had pointed him the way out. I felt that Jones had strayed into fiction and delirium, and knew this must be the case when he showed me a ring he had taken from the hand of his supposed friend, clearly not Pharaonic or even ancient but a signet from the caliphate, a Fatimid ring of a type I have sold before (a particularly fine one, I have to say, of Al-Hakim I am certain, for which I considered offering him a generous price. But then I saw from the fervor in his eyes that this was not a ring he would be parted from, and indeed that this was a man beyond the draw of mammon). He told me that he had come up from this place under the west bank of Cairo, but that the tunnel had collapsed behind him and could never be found, as the spot had been filled in and floored over.
I thanked Jones for his story, but will not, I think, return to press him for more. I considered writing to Mr. Chaillé-Long, but I cannot afford to be made a laughingstock if the story should prove false, so I decided against it. My cachet is low enough in Egypt as it is. Of submarine diving apparatus I know precious little, but I might surmise that Jones had come across such an inventor in his career as a sapper, and thus he found a place for him in his story. Jones did also mention an officer of engineers, a Main or Mayne. A check of the Army List in my club library indeed reveals a Major Mayne in 1884. It’s a not uncommon surname, and perhaps, indeed, Mayne was a former officer of his, though the name had disappeared from the list by the following year. Perhaps he too was a victim of that benighted campaign, and, in any event, being in all likelihood long dead, is not a lead to pursue. Cairo to me sometimes seems a miasma of make-believe, of stories of tombs and treasures too numerous for all the ancient dynasties of Egypt many times over. And though I think there is something in Jones’ story, some kernel of truth, it is not one to which I will be returning unless I am stripped of all other possibilities, unless the Valley of the Kings is to be shut to me forever. Oh for just a small pharaoh’s tomb of my own…