He stared ahead, feeling faint. The gorilla skins on the Ark might take Ezekiel aback, but by now they would be imprinted with its shape; they would be all the proof that was needed that the Ark had been delivered. He took another heavy step forward, cracking the encrusted shore. There was something more powerful than fear of the gods that had kept him true to his word. Ezekiel’s gold had spoken. Hanno was a Phoenician first and foremost, with trade in his blood. Ezekiel’s gold and jewels would make him the wealthiest man in Carthage: able to afford the bounty he had promised his sister for giving up her infant for sacrifice, able to dedicate a new temple at the harbor entrance where he would hang the trophies of his voyage, able to make sure his brother Himilco would want for nothing if his own voyage to the Cassiterides had failed to reap a profit. And Ezekiel had also known something else — that the word of a Phoenician was his true word, his covenant, as binding as that between the Israelites and their god. Hanno would do everything in his power to see his cargo delivered, and to banish all thoughts of return until then.
For now, he needed to summon his remaining energy to cross this desolate wasteland, a place where even Ba’al Hammon seemed to have forsaken him. He staggered forward another few steps, his feet crunching through the salt rind, his ankles raw and bloody from pulling them out against the crust. He tried to remember details of their voyage to keep his mind from wandering. He remembered setting up the bronze plaque on the southern cape weeks before. When they had finished, they realized that the native people had emerged from the bush and were watching them, and Hanno had flung himself on the ground as if worshipping the plaque, hoping that the natives would see its sanctity and leave it intact. Their interpreter from the land of the gorillae told the people that to damage the plaque would be to bring certain death, just as Ezekiel had told Hanno about the Ark. The people, called Lembana by the interpreter, had seemed suitably awed, and had brought offerings of fresh fruit and meat that Hanno’s men had gratefully devoured, caring little that the offerings had been meant to satisfy this unknown new deity rather than their own desperate hunger and thirst.
At the cape his crew had begun to die from a mysterious ailment that had swept through them after they had stopped for water at the mouth of a river a week before. He had taken on two of the native men to bolster the remaining crew, and to help forage ashore. He knew there was every chance that he and his precious cargo might disappear without a trace, and he had decided to leave evidence of their passing. If they succeeded in delivering the Ark, the two Lembana would be released from their bond and told to make their own way back to the cape, taking the memory of what they had seen with them. On the plaque, beneath the message in Phoenician, he had used a chisel to punch in the crude shape of a hieroglyph that Ezekiel had showed him, one that would leave little doubt to any hunting him that they were on the right trail, that he had at least made it that far. To do this had not been to break the pact of secrecy with Ezekiel. The only ones ever likely to follow him would be those sent to recover the Ark, and the hieroglyph was one that only they would understand.
After many weeks of sailing they had veered northeast, around a great promontory that the local fishermen called the Horn, past desolate rocky islands and then northwest through a bay that narrowed to a strait before opening out again. Hanno knew they must have passed into the southern reaches of the Erythraean Sea, with the desert expanses of Arabia on their right and the southern border of Egypt not far ahead. By the time they had reached the beginning of the salt flats, only two of his crew remained alive, barely enough to steer the ship and brail the big square sail. Hanno had pressed on despite their dwindling rations, knowing that if he stopped to forage, he would almost certainly be unable to induce his men to return to the ship, to yet more misery and pain. Every day as they sailed further north he had anxiously observed the sun with his wooden backstaff, waiting for it to reach the highest point in the sky. And then at dawn on this day he had seen it, a ripple of light reflecting off the mountains just as Ezekiel had described it, a burning chariot racing across the western horizon: the Chariot of Fire.
He had steered the ship ashore, and prepared to abandon her. He knew that they had reached a point not far south of the land the Egyptians called Punt, near the entrance to the Erythraean Sea. He had been there years before, on an expedition down the Nile with Himilco to find the finest elephant ivory, and he knew that if they were lucky, he and the two surviving sailors might find a caravan route and strike out across the desert toward North Africa and their homeland. The two sailors and the Lembana had heaved the Ark off the ship, strapping the gorillae hides tightly around it and departing ahead of Hanno, who had stayed back to fill the sack with anything they could consume. Parched with thirst, the sailors had underestimated the challenge of crossing the salt rind in the scorching heat. Without the two Lembana, who had shifted the sailors out of the way and taken on the burden themselves, they would have made no more than a few hundred paces, not much farther than Hanno had reached now.
He caught a glimpse of something on the salt flats to the north, and stopped struggling forward, swaying to and fro, staring. It was something glistening, something flashing, a wavering in the haze. For a split second he thought he saw horses, perhaps camels. He closed his eyes, and then looked again, blinking hard. It was still there. His heart began to pound even faster than it was already, and he was jarred into action. Riders from the north might bring succor, might bring food and water, might be their salvation. But this was a brutal land, a land where men showed no mercy to interlopers, and more likely they would bring death. He stared back at the mountains, trying to judge the distance. He might be lucky. The riders might still be a long way off, the specter foreshortened by mirage. By marshalling all of his remaining energy he might just make the foothills in time. The others were nearly there already with their burden, barely visible against the mountain backdrop. They could conceal themselves among the ridges and canyons of the foothills, where pursuers would only be able to follow on foot and might quickly give up. Once there, he and his men might find game to hunt, and they would surely find water. They could still make it.
He had sailed farther around Africa from the Pillars of Hercules than any explorer had done before. He had been entrusted with a mission, a cargo to discharge, and as a Phoenician, he could never default on that trust. But he had another covenant, too. It was a covenant with his brother, a pact to return and gaze together once again over the great expanse of the ocean, to tell stories of what they had seen and where they had gone, to exult in their adventures. Himilco, he knew, might reach as far as Ultima Thule, a place where the sky itself was said to be frozen, rippling with blue like the sea ice; in return, he would expect no less of Hanno than the circumnavigation of Africa. They were traders, to be sure, but they were also explorers, driven by the quest to see what lay just beyond the horizon. Hanno would summon up every last drop of energy to push himself forward, to live for the day when he would see his brother again. His was a covenant with survival.
He began to hear a distant beating, like the drums on the walls of Carthage before a sacrifice. He was unsure whether it was coming from the riders or was the sound of the blood pounding in his own ears. Out of the haze from the direction of the riders a camel lurched past, its burden hunched forward, blood pulsing from a gaping wound that had stained his robe a vivid red. Hanno stared at him as he carried on south, watching the spray of salt dust each time the camel’s hooves pounded through the crust, then turned again to look at the man’s pursuers. One of them, with long dark hair, brandished a whip, and the others had blades that flashed in the sun, their robes billowing behind them like one continuous sheet of white rippling along the seashore. For a moment he was caught between two intersecting worlds: one that would surely see his lifeblood spilled here beside his ship, the other that might offer hope, that might mean a chance of survival.