The Sleeper in the Sands Read online

  I mentioned this seeming paradox to Mr Newberry one day. He gazed at me narrowly, then asked me what I thought the explanation might be. I answered him, somewhat hesitantly, that it was perhaps a reflection upon the formalised nature of the art: that we soon grew to recognise the conventions which had governed it, while never ceasing to find them exotic. Newberry nodded slowly. ‘And yet the strangest Egyptian art,’ he replied, ‘certainly which I have seen, is also the art in which the conventions are most radically overthrown. Some have called the result life-like.’ He paused, then made a face. ‘I call it grotesque.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘Yes,’ said Newberry hurriedly. I wanted to ask him more; but he rose to his feet, and even as I opened my mouth he cut me short. ‘Grotesque,’ he repeated, then walked briskly away. I watched him leave, puzzled by his abruptness -- for I had always found him a most communicative man. I wondered what the art could be which had affected him in such a way, but in the days which followed I chose not to press him, and Newberry himself did not mention it again. But then, shortly before Christmas, when we were due for a break from our work upon the tombs, Newberry approached me in a confidential manner and asked me if I would care to make a short trip across the desert. Not yet having left the cultivated borders of the Nile, I replied that nothing would give me greater pleasure, and indeed I felt flattered, for I was only one of three assistants upon the site and Newberry had sworn me, in offering the invitation, not to repeat it to the other two. Still, though, it seemed I was not altogether trusted, for when I asked him what our destination was to be, Newberry would only tap the side of his nose. ‘You shall see,’ was all he would add.

  We left that same afternoon upon camels. I had never ridden upon such a beast before, and my body was very soon aching all over. Newberry must have observed my discomfort, for he laughed at me and told me I would soon be distracted from all thoughts of my bruises. Again, I pressed him to tell me by what, but he continued reticent. Instead, he urged his camel onwards and together, lumbering and swaying along the dusty track, we had soon left the palm groves of the Nile behind and passed into the desert. I was astonished by the suddenness of the transformation: one moment there had been cattle, and crops, and trees, the next nothing but a vast expanse of rock and sand. The dunes would sometimes be skimmed by a blast of hot wind, the dust lifted in a momentary veil, but otherwise all was deathly still. It was as though the very world had ended, and I at once understood, gazing out at the fiery sands, why for the Ancient Egyptians the colour of evil had been red.

  Certainly, the landscape through which we rode -- savage and barren, and littered with boulders -- might have seemed a fitting haunt for restless demons, and I felt something almost like relief when we suddenly joined the edge of a cliff and saw the ribbon of the Nile once again below us, fringed with the green of fields and trees. We continued to follow the edge of the cliff, until at length it curved away from the river and we saw before us, hollowed out to form a natural amphitheatre, the crescent of a sandy plain. There appeared nothing of great interest upon it, only scrub and the odd low pebble-strewn mound; but I could see, toiling in the centre of the plain, gangs of white-clad workmen and, just beyond them, a line of baked-mud huts. We began to descend the cliff towards them, and as we did so, unable to restrain my curiosity any further, I demanded to know from Newberry what it was we had come to see. He answered me by sweeping outwards with his arm. ‘This is known today as the plain of El-Amarna,’ he replied, ‘but its ancient name was Akh-et-Aten, and there once stood here, though for barely fifteen years, the capital city of a Pharaoh of Egypt.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I pointed towards the workmen. ‘Then that is what is being excavated here?’

  I saw a gleam of excitement in Newberry’s eyes as he nodded.

  ‘Who is leading it?’ I asked.

  ‘Mr Petrie,’ he replied.

  ‘Not Mr Flinders Petrie?’

  ‘The very same.’

  I heard this with considerable interest. Of course, I had known of that celebrated archaeologist even before my arrival in Egypt, for he had long been the dominant figure in his field. In Cairo, though, during the few days I had passed there, I had been fortunate enough to meet with him and to learn some of his opinions on Egyptology. He had struck me then as a man of considerable eccentricity, but also of remarkable discernment and vision, and so I welcomed the chance to see him at his work. As we approached the line of mud huts, Newberry called out his name and I saw -emerging from the doorway, his black beard vivid against the glare of the sands -- the figure I remembered so well from before.

  Yet he greeted us with no particular show of enthusiasm, making it perfectly plain that we had distracted him from his work, and asking us brusquely what our purpose was. Newberry answered that he had heard reports of a find. Petrie grunted noncommittally. ‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘since you have ridden all this way, you had best come and see it.’ First, though, he demanded that we descend from our mounts, for it was an eccentricity of his that he would never ride anywhere but always go on foot, and I, for one, was glad to leave my camel behind. We trudged together towards some distant mounds, Petrie muttering as we did so about the iniquities of the French. This was a favourite topic of his, it seemed, for the French, then as now, had a vice-like grip upon the country’s Service des Antiquites and were determined, so Petrie claimed, to thwart his projects at every turn. ‘Can you believe it,’ he muttered, ‘but they almost denied me the concession to dig here? Me -- Flinders Petrie! And even as it is, I cannot excavate anywhere but here, upon the plain.’ I noticed that Newberry grew pale at this and gazed around at the cliffs, almost as though he feared to see them crawling with Frenchmen. There was no one there, of course -- but I found myself wondering all the more what his interest in this strange site could be.

  I was soon to find out, and soon to discover what it was he hoped to find. Here, though, let me pause, for I have suddenly realised how it is grown very late, and there is work -- hard work! -- to be done in the morning. Let me resume, then -- if my labours have not been too exhausting! -- when I can, tomorrow night.

  So then - to continue - the plain of El-Amarna. As we drew near to our destination, Petrie began to break into a trot. ‘This was once the Great Palace,’ he proclaimed as he ran up the side of the mound, then back down again to seize me by my arm. ‘You, Carter,’ he said. ‘Are you not a painter?’ But he did not wait for an answer, and I found myself being tugged across a series of mounds, still at a trot, until we came to a halt at last before a walkway of planks. It had clearly been raised with meticulous care, and I remembered Petrie’s dictum, delivered to me in Cairo, that an archaeologist’s duty was not only to uncover but also to be the guardian of the past. ‘Come,’ he said, still tugging on my arm. I followed him on to the walkway. ‘There,’ he said, jabbing downwards with his forefinger. ‘If you are truly an artist, then tell me -- what do you make of that?’

  I gazed down in wonder, and not a little awe, at a pavement painted with the most exquisite designs. They had all been drawn from the beauties of nature: fish swam in lotus-filled pools, spotted cattle gambolled through fields, and cats lay stretched with eyes half-closed in the sun. Above such beasts, everywhere, seated on trees or rising up on the wing, were birds, and it was these which attracted my particular attention, for I found that I could identify almost every one. Swallows were there, and kingfishers, geese and ducks, ibises and hoopoes, all the varied birdlife which characterised the Nile. And with what freshness had they been represented, with what vivid accuracy! Certainly, in my limited experience of Egyptian art, I had seen nothing to compare with these paintings, neither for the pleasure they suggested in the world of living things nor for their exquisite naturalism of style. I turned in surprise to Newberry. ‘But these are not grotesque!’ I exclaimed. ‘These are very miracles of delicacy!’

  ‘Naturally,’ Petrie grunted. ‘It is the most important discovery, artistically, which I have ever made.�
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  Newberry nodded slowly. ‘Then it must suggest,’ he murmured, ‘that the Pharaoh who commissioned such a work, the Pharaoh who desired to live in such a place, was even more extraordinary a man than we had hitherto thought.

  For see -- no chariots, no armies, no violent scenes of war. Only -- yes . . .’ -- his eyes grew wide - ‘the richness of life.’

  Still rapt, he continued to gaze at the floor and even Petrie, surveying his find, seemed to lose some of his former gruffness. He suddenly smiled, with something almost like pride. ‘He was clearly a most extraordinary man.’

  I glanced at him. ‘Who was?’

  ‘Why, the Pharaoh.’

  ‘Which Pharaoh?’

  Petrie’s eyebrows bristled with evident surprise ‘Why, Newberry’ he exclaimed, ‘you mean you have not told your assistant of Akh-en-Aten?’

  ‘He is very new to Egypt,’ answered Newberry defensively. ‘You know full well that I do not tell just anyone of my hopes for this place.’

  ‘Your hopes?’ Petrie laughed dismissively. ‘You are wasting your time on that particular score.’

  ‘I cannot believe so.’

  ‘I tell you, the French have the concession to all the cliffs hereabouts. They will have got to the tomb.’

  There was an angry silence.

  ‘Got to what tomb?’ I dared to ask.

  Newberry glanced at me, hesitation still in his eyes.

  ‘Please,’ I protested. I turned back to gaze down at the floor. ‘If there is a mystery relating to this Akh-en-Aten, then I would dearly love to hear more about it.’ I gestured towards the exquisite paintings. ‘For anyone who could have delighted in the beauty of such animals and birds is surely worthy of further study’

  Petrie laughed suddenly, and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Well, you are a good-natured lad,’ he exclaimed, ‘and if you are concerned to know more about the Heretic King, then I shall tell you what I can, for so much at least is public property’

  ‘ “The Heretic King”?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ Petrie answered. ‘For it was not in his taste alone that Akh-en-Aten was a rebel.’ He clapped me on the shoulder again; then, with a sideways glance at Newberry, he began to steer me down the side of the mound and towards a further series of planks and tents. ‘We found it this morning,’ he said, as he lifted a flap and gestured towards a fragment of stone resting against the far side of the tent. ‘Sadly damaged, but not without interest all the same.’

  I approached it uncertainly, Newberry with an eagerness he did not bother to conceal. We gazed at it together in silence; and then, after an interval of several moments, Newberry glanced at me. ‘You see?’ he whispered. ‘Did I not tell you it was remarkably grotesque?’

  I did not reply, but continued to stare at the carving with astonishment. It represented a group of figures, clearly Egyptian but unlike anything I had ever seen before. There was a Pharaoh -- I could tell as much from the insignia of his rank -- but this one did not seem like a hero or a god. Instead he appeared strangely, almost cruelly deformed: his belly and thighs were rounded like a woman’s, his calves and arms preternaturally thin, while his skull was domed and his face very long, his lips very fleshy, and his eyes like almonds. Gazing upon this extraordinary figure, I felt the touch of something icy running down my spine, for it seemed more like the portrait of a eunuch than a man, and I could not deny that it was indeed repellent and -- yes -- grotesque. Yet its grotesqueness did not fully explain my response to it; for there seemed something more, something which was serving to counter my initial feelings of disgust. It took me a moment to realise what this was - and then I understood. For the Pharaoh was not the only figure represented on the tablet; he was surrounded by three girls, strange-skulled like himself, two by his feet, and one in his arms, whom the Pharaoh was kissing very gently on her brow. I thought of the tombs in which I had been working, and of the books I had studied; and of how I had seen nothing in Egyptian art, nothing at all, to compare with such a tender and domestic scene of love. ‘They are his daughters?’ I asked.

  Petrie nodded. ‘Affection for his family, it would appear, was held up as the Pharaoh’s great ideal of life. In the context of royal portraiture, that is something utterly extraordinary and new.’

  ‘And why is the style of art so very strange?’

  Petrie shrugged. ‘Who can know what the reason was? Something remarkable, certainly, to have overturned the ancient traditions of his people.’

  ‘There are clues,’ said Newberry hurriedly. ‘Scattered all about us.’ He glanced at Petrie. ‘Is that not so?’

  ‘Why’ -- Petrie swept with his hand -- ‘this whole vast site is a clue.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I gazed out through the tent at the sands and scrub of the plain beyond. ‘But I can see nothing.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Petrie nodded, then swept his hand again towards the barren plain. ‘You can see nothing - just as Akh-en-Aten himself would have seen nothing when he first arrived here to have his city built. Yet he already had a rich and splendid capital in Thebes, beautified by his forefathers over many years -- for Akh-en-Aten was the heir to Egypt’s greatest kings, and Thebes itself was at its very apogee of wealth. Why, then, did Akh-en-Aten choose to abandon it? Why come to this barren spot, more than two hundred miles from any city at all?’

  I gazed at him in bemusement, then shook my head. ‘I confess, I cannot imagine a reason.’

  Petrie narrowed his eyes. ‘You have not yet, I assume, had the chance to visit the site of Thebes?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then I trust that one day you will have the opportunity. For when you go there, you will discover that its crowning glory is the temple of Karnak, a place of stupefying, overwhelming size, a place still so vast, despite the ravages of time, that you will wonder by what power it was ever built. And yet indeed, the answer is quite simple -- it was built with the tribute paid to superstition. Karnak was the home to Amen-Ra, the King of Egypt’s great galaxy of gods -- and therefore the focus of all the country’s hopes and fears.’

  ‘And yet Akh-en-Aten . . .’

  ‘Abandoned it.’ A faint smile flickered beneath Petrie’s moustache as he knelt down almost tenderly beside the fragment of stone. ‘For did I not tell you,’ he asked, looking up again, ‘that he had been a rebel against more than just the conventions of art?’

  ‘What . . .’ I frowned -- ‘so he abandoned the worship of Amen-Ra as well?’

  ‘Proscribed him. Erased his name throughout the length of the land. That of Amen, and Osiris, and all the gods, all the ancient and myriad divinities - save only one . . .’ Petrie paused and turned again to gaze at the carving. ‘Save only one.’ He pointed to the top of the stone, where a fragment had broken away. There were still traces there of what appeared to be hands raised in blessing over the head of the King, the arms radiating downwards like the spokes of a wheel. ‘These represent the rays of the sun,’ said Petrie, pointing to what I had mistaken for arms. ‘The other half of the stone would have portrayed its disk.’

  I gazed at the fragment’s broken edge. ‘So that was Akh-en-Aten’s god?’

  Petrie nodded. ‘The sun -- the Aten - the life-giving Aten, in whose honour the Pharaoh even changed his name. For once, like his father, he had been Amen-hetep -- “Amen is content” -- but when he came here such a title would no longer do. “Akh-en-Aten”.’ Petrie gazed a moment more at the figure of the King, then lumbered back to his feet. ‘Which means, very simply -- “the Glory of the Sun”.’

  He stepped out from the tent. Newberry and I joined him, and we stood there together in silence for a while. Beyond the dust-humped mounds of El-Amarna and the silhouetted palm trees of the distant Nile, the sky was clouding into dusk, and I knew that all of us were gazing at the red disk of the sun. ‘ “Living in Truth”,’ murmured Petrie at length, ‘that was Akh-en-Aten’s motto - “Ankh em maat”. And truthful, I think, he could indeed claim to be, when he chose to enshrine the sun’s radiant ene
rgy. There is not a rag of superstition or of falsity to be found in such a worship, but rather a philosophy which our own modern science can confirm. For what is the sun indeed, if not the source of all life, power and force in our world?’

  Newberry shivered suddenly. ‘And yet still,’ he said, pointing, ‘you see how it sets.’

  Petrie glanced at him strangely. ‘Yes.’ He grunted. ‘Yet only so that it may rise once again.’

  Newberry did not answer, and we left soon afterwards, for the shadows were indeed beginning to lengthen. Petrie accompanied us to our camels, and as we walked Newberry extracted solemn promises from our host that he would keep nothing from us of what he might find. Yet still the precise object of Newberry’s ambitions was kept veiled from me, and I began to despair that it might ever be revealed. Once we had mounted our steeds, however, he did not retrace the path by which we had arrived but rather spurred his camel along the side of the cliffs, so that he remained upon the plain, following the edge of its curve. I assumed that this meant he had something more to show to me, and so I urged my camel after him and, once by his side, dared to ask him again what it was he hoped to find.

  Newberry shifted in his saddle to inspect the distant tents and mounds of the excavation. ‘Petrie is a great archaeologist,’ he said at last. ‘He has a flair for the minutiae of history. He can erect whole structures of understanding from the fragment of a pot. And yet . . .’ - he turned again to face me -- ‘there are those who hunt prizes much greater than pots.’