The sixth shrine was dedicated to the god of writing, Thoth. He had the head of a sacred ibis and his stylus was in his hand. In the seventh shrine the sacred cow Hathor stood squarely on all four hooves, her piebald body spotted black and white, her face benignly human but with huge, trumpet-shaped ears. The eighth shrine was the largest and most splendid of all, for it belonged to Amon-Ra, father of all creation. He was the sun, an enormous golden disc from which the slanting golden rays emanated.
Nicholas paused here and looked back down the long gallery. Those eight sacred statues comprised a treasure that matched anything that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen. He felt in his heart that it was crass even to consider their monetary value. However, the simple truth was that even one of these extraordinary works of art would be sufficient to pay off all his debts many times over. But he thrust the thought aside and turned once more to face the commodious chamber at the far end of the gallery.
‘The burial chamber,’ Royan murmured with awe. ‘The tomb.’
As they walked towards it the shadows retreated before them, like the ghost of the long-dead pharaoh scurrying back to its final resting place. Now they could see into the tomb. Its walls were aflame with still more magnificent murals. Though they had gazed upon so many of these already, their eyes and their senses were not yet jaded or wearied by such profusion.
A single elongated figure rose up the far wall, and then stooped across the ceiling. It was the supple, sinuous body of the goddess Nut, giving birth to the sun. The golden rays poured forth from her open womb, suffusing the sarcophagus of the pharaoh and endowing the dead king with new life.
The royal sarcophagus stood in the centre of the chamber, a massive coffin hewn from a solid granite block. How many slaves must have laboured to bring this mass of stone along the subterranean passages, Nicholas wondered. He could imagine their sweating bodies gleaming in the lamplight, and hear the grating squeal of the wooden rollers under the immense weight of the coffin.
Then Nicholas looked down into the coffin, and felt the plunge of his spirits as he realized that the sarcophagus was empty. The massive granite lid had been lifted from its seat, and flung aside with such violence that it had cracked across its width and now lay in two pieces on the floor beside the coffin.
They moved forward slowly, the bitter taste of disappointment mingling with the dust upon their tongues, until they could look down into the open sarcophagus. It contained only the shattered fragments of the four canopic jars. These vessels had been carved from alabaster to contain the entrails, liver and other internal organs of the king. The broken lids were decorated with the heads of gods and fabulous creatures from beyond the grave.
‘Empty!’ whispered Royan. ‘The body of the king has gone.’
Over the following days, while they photographed the murals and packed the statues of the eight gods and goddesses from the funeral gallery, Royan and Nicholas discussed and argued the disappearance of the royal mummy from its sarcophagus.
‘The seals on the gate of the tomb were intact,’ Royan pointed out repeatedly.
‘There is probably an explanation for that,’ Nicholas told her. ‘Taita himself might have removed the treasure and the body. Many times in the writing of the seventh scroll he laments the waste of such treasure. He points out that it could have been much better spent in protecting and nurturing the nation and its people.’
‘No, it does not make sense,’ Royan argued, ‘to go to such lengths as to dam the river and tunnel under the pool, to build this elaborate tomb, and then to remove and destroy the king’s mummy. Taita was always a logical person. In his own way he revered the gods of Egypt. It shows in all his writings. He would never have flouted the religious traditions in which he believed so strongly. Something about this tomb does not ring true for me – the mysterious and almost offhanded disappearance of the body, even the paintings and the inscriptions upon the walls.’
‘I agree with you about the missing corpse, but what do you find illogical about the decorations?’ Nicholas wanted to know.
‘Well, the paintings first.’ She indicated the image of Isis with a wave of her hand. ‘They are lovely, and they are the work of a competent classical artist, but they are hackneyed and stylized in form and choice of colour. The figures are stiff and wooden – they do not move and dance. They lack that spark of genius that we were shown in the tomb of Queen Lostris where the original scrolls in their alabaster jars were hidden.’
Nicholas considered the murals thoughtfully. ‘I see what you mean. Even the murals in the tomb of Tanus at the monastery are in a different class from these.’
‘Exactly!’ she said forcefully. ‘Those were the paintings of Taita himself. These are not. They were done by one of his hacks.’
‘What else is there about the inscriptions that you don’t like?’
‘Have you ever heard of another tomb that did not have the text of the Book of the Dead inscribed upon its walls, or that did not depict the dead person’s journey through the seven pylons to reach the paradise beyond?’
Nicholas looked startled; he had never considered that fact. Without replying he left her and went back down the long gallery, ostensibly to supervise the packing of the sacred statues, but in reality to give himself more time to consider what she had said.
Before leaving England Nicholas had seen to it that all of the more vulnerable and breakable equipment that they had air-freighted into the gorge had been packed in sturdy metal ammunition crates. All these crates had waterproof rubber seals and strong lever fastenings. The original contents had been padded and protected with polystyrene packing. When they left Ethiopia the equipment would be abandoned, but the crates, together with the packing material, had been carefully preserved for transporting the treasures that they might find in the tomb.
While six of the sacred statues fitted neatly into the crates, the images of Hathor the cow and satanic Seth were too large. However, Nicholas discovered that these had been carved in separate parts. The heads were detachable, and the hoofed legs of Hathor were held into the body by wooden pins that were rotted to dust. Broken down into their separate parts, even these two larger statues could also be packed into the metal cases.
Nicholas watched Hansith packing Seth’s ferocious head of ebony and black resin into one of the crates. Then after a while he went back to where Royan was working on the inscriptions on the wall above the empty sarcophagus.
‘Very well. I agree. You are right about the lack of inscriptions from the Book of the Dead. It does seem strange. But what can we do about it, other than accepting it as a mystery which we can never unravel?’
‘Nicky, there is something more here. This is not everything. I feel it in every fibre of my being. We are missing something.’
‘Who am I, a mere male, to question the veracity of a woman’s instincts.’
‘Stop being superior,’ she snapped. ‘How long do I have to work over the inscriptions from the stele?’
‘A week or two at the most. I have to set up an RV with Jannie. We have to be there at Roseires airstrip when he comes in to pick us up. That’s one date we dare not break.’
‘Good Lord. I thought you would have arranged that long ago. How will you contact Jannie from here?’
‘Quite simple really.’ Nicholas smiled. ‘There is a public telephone at the post office in Debra Maryam. Tessay can move freely anywhere in the Gojam. She will go up the escarpment with an escort of monks and telephone Geoffrey Tennant at the British Embassy in Addis. I have already arranged it with Geoffrey. He will relay a message on to Jannie.’
‘Will Tessay do it for you?’
He nodded. ‘She has agreed to go up to Debra Maryam tomorrow. Jannie must have as much notice as possible to get himself prepared for the flight out from Malta. It’s going to need some fine timing for all of us to arrive at the airstrip simultaneously. It will be asking for trouble for one party to sit around waiting at Roseires fo
r the others to arrive.’
‘Dawn on the first of April,’ Nicholas gave Tessay the message. ‘Tell Jannie we will be there on April Fools’ Day! A nice easy one to remember.’
They watched Tessay set off along the trail with her escort of monks and Royan asked Mek Nimmur quietly, ‘Don’t you worry about her going off like this on her own?’
‘She is a very competent person, and she is well known and liked throughout the Gojam. She is as safe as any person can be in a dangerous land.’ Mek watched Tessay’s slim figure in shamma and jodhpur pants becoming smaller with distance. ‘I wish I could go with her, but—’ Mek shrugged.
Suddenly Royan exclaimed, ‘There is something that I forgot to ask her.’ She left Nicholas and Mek standing, and ran down the trail calling after the other woman. Her voice floated back to where Nicholas stood watching her.
‘Tessay! Wait! Come back!’
Tessay turned and waited for Royan to catch up with her. While the two women stood talking together, Nicholas lost interest and turned to study the distant silhouette of the escarpment. With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach he saw that the thunderheads on the mountain tops were denser and more ominous than they had been only days before. The rains were building up swiftly now. He wondered if they really had as long as they hoped before the dam was threatened and they were driven out of the gorge by the rising waters.
He looked back down the path just in time to see Royan pass something to Tessay, who nodded and pushed it into the pocket of her jodhpurs. Then at last the two women embraced warmly, and Tessay turned away. Royan stood in the middle of the trail, watching until a bend in the valley hid Tessay from her. Then she walked slowly back to where Nicholas waited.
‘What was all that about?’ he wanted to know, and she smiled mysteriously.
‘Girls’ secrets. There are some things that it’s best you brutish males don’t know about.’ But when Nicholas raised an eyebrow at her, she relented and told him, ‘Tessay will ask Geoffrey Tennant to send a message to Mummy, just to let her know that I am all right. I don’t want her to worry about me.’
As they climbed back down the scaffolding to where the fly camp had been set up on the rock ledge beside Taita’s pool, Nicholas thought how fortuitous it was that Royan had her mother’s phone number already written down to hand to Tessay, and he wondered at this sudden urge of Royan’s to report her whereabouts to her mother. ‘I wonder what she is really up to?’ he mused. ‘I will try and wheedle it out of Tessay when she returns.’
Royan would have preferred to camp in the tomb itself, so as to be in the midst of the inscriptions on which she was working, but Nicholas had insisted that they sleep in the open air, and the ledge was as close as they could get to their workplace. ‘The musty air in the tomb is very probably unhealthy,’ he told her. ‘Cave disease is a real danger in these old enclosed places. They say that is what killed some of Howard Carter’s people working in the tomb of Tutankhamen.’
‘The fungus spores that cause cave disease breed in bat dung,’ she pointed out. ‘There are no bats in Mamose’s tomb. Taita sealed it up too tightly.’
‘Humour me,’ he begged. ‘You cannot work in there for days on end. I want you at least to get out of the tomb for a few hours each day.’
She shrugged. ‘Only as a special favour to you,’ she agreed, but as they reached the foot of the scaffolding she gave her new sleeping quarters only a perfunctory glance and then headed for the coffer dam and the entrance to the approach tunnel.
They had converted the landing at the top of the staircase, outside the plaster-sealed entrance to the tomb, into their workshop. Royan spread her drawings and photographs and reference books on the rough table of hand-hewn planks that Hansith made for her. Sapper had placed one of the floodlamps above this crude desk so that she had good light to work by. Against one wall of the landing they had stacked the ammunition crates which contained the eight sacred statues. Nicholas had insisted on storing all their discoveries where he could safeguard them adequately. Mek’s armed men still kept a twenty-four-hour guard on the causeway over the sink-hole.
While Nicholas completed his photographic record of the walls of the long gallery and the empty burial chamber, Royan sat at her table and pored over her papers for hours at a time, scribbling notes and calculations from them into her notebooks. Now and then she would jump up from her desk and dart through the hatch in the white plaster doorway into the long gallery to study a detail on the decorated walls.
Whenever this happened, Nicholas straightened up from his camera tripod and watched her with a fond and indulgent expression. So intent was she that she seemed completely oblivious of him and everybody else about her. Nicholas had never seen her in this mood, and the depth of her powers of concentration impressed him.
When she had worked for fifteen hours without a break he went out on to the landing to rescue her and to lead her, protesting, back down the tunnel to the pool where there was a hot meal waiting for them. After she had eaten he led her to her hut and insisted that she lie down on her inflatable mattress.
‘You are going to sleep now, Royan,’ he ordered.
He woke to hear her creeping stealthily out of the hut next door to his, back along the ledge to the entrance to the tomb. He checked his watch and grunted with disbelief when he realized that they had slept for only three and a half hours. He shaved quickly and bolted back a slab of toasted injera bread and a cup of tea before following her into the tomb.
He found her standing in the long gallery before the empty niche in the shrine where the statuette of Osiris had stood. She was so preoccupied that she did not hear him come up behind her, and she started violently when he touched her arm.
‘You startled me,’ she scolded him.
‘What are you staring at?’ he asked. ‘What have you discovered?’
‘Nothing,’ she denied swiftly, and then after a moment, ‘I don’t know. It’s just an idea.’
‘Come on! What are you up to?’
‘It’s easier for me to show you.’ She led him back to her table on the stone landing, and rearranged her notebooks carefully before she spoke again.
‘What I have been doing these last few days is going through the material on the stele of Tanus’s tomb, picking out all the quotations that I recognize from the classical books of mystery, the Book of Breathings, the Book of the Pylons and the Book of Thoth, and setting those on one side.’ She showed him fifteen pages in her neat small script. ‘All this is ancient material, none of it original compositions by Taita. I have discarded it for the time being.’
She set the first notebook aside and picked up the next. ‘All this is from the fourth face of the stele. It’s nothing that I recognize, but seems to be only long lists of numbers and figures. Some sort of code, perhaps? I am not sure, but I do have some ideas on it that I will come to later.
‘Now this here,’ she showed him the next book, ‘this is all fresh material that I don’t remember reading in any of the ancient classics. Much of it, if not all of it, must be original Taita writings. If he has left any more clues for us, I believe they will be here, in these sections.’
He grinned, ‘Like that marvellous quotation describing the pink and private parts of the goddess. Is that what you are referring to?’
‘Trust you not to forget that.’ She flushed lightly and refused to look up from her notebook. ‘Look at this quotation from the head of the third face of the stele, the side Taita has headed “autumn”. It’s the very first one that caught my attention.’
Nicholas leaned forward and read the hieroglyphics aloud: ‘“The great god Osiris makes the opening coup with deference to the protocol of the four bulls. At the first pylon he bears full testimony to the immutable law of the board.”’ He looked up at her. ‘Yes, I remember that quotation. Taita is referring to bao, the game that the old devil loved so passionately.’
‘That’s right.’ Royan looked slightly embarrassed. ‘But do you also remem
ber that I told you about a dream that I had in which I saw Duraid again in one of the chambers of the tomb?’
‘I remember.’ He chuckled at her discomfort. ‘He said something to you about the protocol of the four bulls. Now we are going into the realm of divination by dreams, are we?’
She looked annoyed by his levity. ‘All I am suggesting is that my subconscious had been digesting the quotation and come up with an answer, which it put into the mouth of Duraid in the dream. Can’t you be serious just for one moment?’
‘Sorry.’ He was contrite. ‘Remind me what you heard Duraid say.’
‘In the dream he told me, “Remember the protocol of the four bulls – Start at the beginning.”’
‘I am no expert on the game of bao. What did he mean?’
‘The rules and subtleties of the game have been lost in the mists of antiquity. But as you know, we have found examples of the bao board amongst the grave goods in the tombs of the eleventh to the seventeenth dynasties, and we can only guess that it was an early form of chess.’ She began to sketch for him on one of the blank pages at the back of her notebook.
‘The wooden board was laid out like a chessboard, eight rows of cups wide and eight rows deep. Like this.’ She drew it in with quick, deft strokes of her ballpoint pen. ‘The pieces were coloured stones that moved in a prescribed fashion. I won’t go into all the details, but the protocol of the four bulls was an opening gambit in the game favoured by grand masters of Taita’s calibre. It consisted of making sacrifices to mass the highest-ranking stones in the first cup from where they could dominate the important central files of the board.’
‘I am not sure where we are going, but lead on. I am listening.’ Nicholas tried not to look too mystified.
‘The first cup of the board.’ She indicated it on her sketch, as though instructing a backward child. ‘The beginning. Duraid said, “Start at the beginning.” Taita said, “The great god Osiris makes the opening coup.”’
‘I still don’t follow you.’ Nicholas shook his head.