The Sleeper in the Sands Read online

  Yet for all the enthusiasm with which I accepted these lessons, I sometimes found myself missing Newberry - his faith in the extraordinary, the sense of passion he had brought to his quest. Petrie, I knew, mistrusted such emotions, and it was with something almost like relish that he informed me one morning, as I was panning mounds of dirt, that some French officials had been seen upon the cliffs. ‘I won’t let them come here,’ he proclaimed, extending his arms outwards to gesture at the plain, ‘for all this site has been allocated to me, and to me alone. But if the French want to come and have a poke amongst the cliffs, then, well. . .’ - he paused, and stroked his beard -- ‘I think we can guess what it is they hope to find.’

  I was not surprised that same afternoon when Newberry joined us, for his expression made it clear that he had also heard the news. He told us that he was planning to pay a visit on the French, and asked us if we would care to accompany him. The three of us duly set off into the desert, Newberry appearing much distracted, when suddenly he froze and his face grew pale. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. We looked -- and saw the prints of boots in the sand. Such a sight in the desert is a rare enough thing, and so we at once set off in pursuit of the trail. It led us for several miles over the sands, and then into a jagged and savage ravine. Down ahead of us we could see two figures, and as we slithered after them the mystery was solved. It was Blackden and Fraser -- both leading mules which were loaded down with spades.

  Newberry greeted the two men with barely suppressed fury. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ he exclaimed. When Blackden muttered an inaudible reply, Newberry seized him by his shirt. ‘What have you been doing?’

  Blackden suddenly laughed. ‘Why’ he answered coolly, ‘hunting for the tomb of Akh-en-Aten.’

  Newberry breathed in deeply. ‘And did you not realise,’ he hissed, ‘that I was hunting for the tomb myself?’

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ Blackden replied. ‘But one man may observe what another man overlooks. For instance’ -- he drew out from his pocket a sheaf of papers -- ‘we have completed a survey of the quarry in the desert. You missed some intriguing Middle Kingdom graffiti.’ He handed the papers across. ‘I have taken the liberty of publishing the details myself.’

  Newberry gazed at the papers in disbelief. ‘But . . . but I discovered the quarry,’ he stammered.

  ‘Not the graffiti though,’ Blackden replied. ‘Some of it is really very interesting indeed.’

  ‘Of course,’ Fraser added, ‘we perfectly understand that you were . . . preoccupied , . . with your search for Akh-en-Aten’s tomb. But that need not concern you any more. For we have just discovered’ -- he smiled maliciously -- ‘that the tomb has been found.’

  ‘Wha . . .’ Newberry mopped at his brow. ‘Where?’ he whispered. ‘Where?’

  Fraser pointed. ‘At the end of the wadi.’

  Newberry gazed at him in fury and disbelief. A spasm seemed to pass across his face, before he turned and hurried off.

  ‘There is no point in calling on them,’ Blackden called out. ‘We have just been there ourselves, and they are not allowing anyone to look at the tomb.’ But Newberry, if he had heard him, gave no sign of it but continued to storm his way up the valley. Neither Petrie nor I sought to follow him.

  I heard later that he had abandoned his work altogether and left for England, vowing that he would never return to Egypt. A few months previously, perhaps, I would have been astonished at such a display of intemperance, and not believed that the search for a tomb could grow so desperate and obsessive, nor that it could breed such heated rivalries. Now, though, already I could understand it, perhaps even almost share in it myself. Certainly, as Petrie expressed it one evening, the affair did not leave a pleasant taste in the mouth. ‘Learn your lesson,’ he advised me. ‘Do not focus your energies on a single goal, for then you run the risk of missing much else.’ I nodded: the point was well made. But then I reached inside my pocket and felt the paper with the inscription I had copied from the quarry. There was another lesson too, I thought, which one could draw from the affair: if you have picked up a trail, then keep it to yourself. In Egypt, closeness did not have to be a fault.

  Some days later, in early January, Petrie gained permission to visit the much-searched-for tomb. I accompanied him in a mood of considerable excitement, for I was still intrigued to know what wonders it might prove to contain. My imaginings, however, were to be sorely disappointed. The tomb itself seemed empty, and even the paintings on the wall had been vandalised. I gazed about me in puzzlement. Was this what Newberry had sought so desperately to find? I wondered again what he had been expecting to uncover. I could recall vague talk of a secret wisdom: a deadly secret, faintly remembered - transcribed into the folk tale of a restless King. I turned to the Frenchman who was showing Petrie round. ‘What of the mummy?’ I asked as I peered into the darkness. ‘Have you found any trace of Akh-en-Aten himself?’

  The Frenchman answered my question with the wryest of smiles, and beckoned us to follow him. We passed into the darkness, along an endless corridor and then, descending steeply, down a flight of stone steps; beyond lay a chamber, pillared around its edges, and as the Frenchman lifted his torch I gazed about me at the burial room.

  Everywhere there was evidence of the most violent destruction. Reliefs on the walls had been literally defaced, for wherever the heads or names of figures had been painted, the plaster on the stone had been gouged away. The floor was covered with rubble, and as we picked our way across it I recognised a shattered sarcophagus, its base barely distinguishable, for its sides, like the plaster, had been smashed into pieces. I bent down and picked up a fragment of the stone. Holding it to the light, I recognised it as granite. What an effort it must have cost to shatter this,’ I exclaimed. I looked about me again at the debris in the chamber. ‘It is as though someone wished to obliterate the very memory of the person who was laid here.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Petrie. ‘I do not think there can be much doubt on that score.’ He turned to the Frenchman. ‘Can you even be certain this was Akh-en-Aten’s tomb at all?’

  The Frenchman replied in his own language, which I did not understand, but I saw him pointing to a cartouche -- the traditional oval which framed the name of every Pharaoh -- still preserved above the door. Petrie inspected it closely, then turned back to me. ‘Well’ -- he shrugged -- ‘a single cartouche, and that is all which has endured. It must have been overlooked in the general destruction.’

  I shook my head, and gazed again about me at the ruin. ‘But why all this effort to destroy his name?’

  ‘Who can say? He was, after all, the Heretic King -- and heresies, by their nature, endanger established powers.’

  ‘You think, then, it was the priests of Amen who caused this to be done?’

  Petrie picked up a fragment of the sarcophagus. ‘Doubtless,’ he answered, inspecting it closely. ‘He had closed down their temple, and threatened their power. They certainly had reason to execrate his memory.’ He paused, then crossed to a figure whose face had been obliterated. ‘And yet . . .’ he murmured, frowning. ‘And yet. . .’ He traced the hole which had been made in the plaster, and then a second. ‘The violence of the loathing is most certainly extraordinary. As though it expresses not just hatred, but almost a fear -- as though even his appearance could inspire them with terror. And not just Akh-en-Aten’s. For look . . .’ He pointed to a further painting on the wall. ‘See. Here are his children represented. They have all been defaced. And everywhere -- not only here, but throughout the length of Egypt -- we find the same thing repeated: an attempt to wipe out all memory of Akh-en-Aten and his line.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I gazed at him in surprise, i had not realised that. Surely his dynasty was the royal one?’

  ‘So it was.’ Petrie nodded to himself. ‘One which had borne a countless number of Pharaohs. And yet Akh-en-Aten’s two sons, so it seems, were the last.’

  I struggled to remember what Newberry had told me of them before -- and especial
ly of the King who had altered his name. ‘Tut-ankh-Amen?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Petrie glanced at me. ‘I am surprised you know of him.’

  ‘I know of his name and nothing more.’

  ‘Then you know all there is to know. And of his predecessor, Smenkh-ka-Re, there is even less known. They reigned, they died - the rest is shadow. Such was the extent of the priests’ success. Before this century, and the first excavations here, no one even knew that such a king as Akh-en-Aten had ever reigned.’

  ‘I had not realised that the oblivion had been so complete.’

  Petrie nodded. ‘Oh, yes. There is not a single mention of him in an extant Egyptian record. It seems that even his name was laid beneath a curse.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said softly. I thought of the legend of the restless King; and then I looked once again at the abandoned sarcophagus. ‘A terrible curse indeed.’

  And certainly it was a relief, after our inspection of the chamber, to climb back to the doorway and catch a glimpse of the bright blue sky beyond. Petrie, I think - just like myself -- had been strangely disturbed by our visit to the tomb, for he brooded in silence as we walked back to the plain and seemed lost all that evening in a spirit of melancholy. Later, as we sat around the fire, he spoke of Akh-en-Aten, and the mysteries of his reign, in terms which reminded me almost of Newberry. ‘I imagined,’ he told me, ‘standing in the tomb, that the very air was infected with an ancient desolation. It is not my usual habit to acknowledge such a fancy, and yet -- in the darkness of that chamber -- how the shadows seemed to linger!’ He reached forward and prodded the fire, a trail of orange sparks rising and then fading into the night. ‘What secrets might that tomb not conceal,’ Petrie exclaimed suddenly, ‘to cause such an aura of evil and despair? For if any Pharaoh deserved a better memorial it was surely Akh-en-Aten. Not for him the ambitions of his conquering forefathers - their plundering, self-glorifying, pompous cruelties. Only the light, and the truth, and the life of the sun. And yet. . .’ -- Petrie paused, then frowned -- ‘I wonder . . .’ He rose to his feet; and gazed towards the distant silhouette of the cliffs. ‘How to explain what I felt in the tomb?’ He stood in silence a long while, then shrugged impatiently. ‘So many mysteries -- so few answers, it seems.’ His expression, I thought, appeared almost weary. ‘But such is ever the nature of our profession, I am afraid.’

  Even so, it seemed that Petrie had still not wholly despaired of finding out more. Some days later he told me that he had gained permission for me to copy the reliefs from the walls, and so I found myself, for the second time, in Akh-en-Aten’s tomb. Petrie had not needed to tell me to keep my eyes open; yet although I had my own curiosity to satisfy as well as his own, I could discover nothing which struck me as especially strange. It was true that the ruin of the frescoes had not been as total as had at first been assumed: in one of the side-chambers especially, entire scenes could be made out, barely damaged at all. The most striking was also the most pathetic and affecting: the King and Queen were shown in mourning for a child, a little girl, laid out upon a bier. The King was clearly weeping and I was affected -- studying this portrait of love, this outgushing from the heart of a man long dead and gone -- with the strangest sense that he was not dead at all but behind me, bent low across his daughter, casting the funeral dust into the air. I spun round, startled -- there was no one there, of course. But at the same moment, even as I turned, my eye was caught by something else and, as I saw it in my torch-beam, I felt my heart seem to stop.

  Painted in the corner, so far back in the shadows that I might easily have missed it, was the figure of a sun. But it was not in the style of the other frescoes: rather it had been painted roughly, as though in a great hurry, and had I not seen the same design before, I might never have recognised it. Yet as I stepped forward, I knew I was not mistaken: it was identical to the sun I had seen carved in the quarry, and below it were the same two squatting figures, and then a fine of Arabic script. Such resemblances, I knew, could not be mere coincidence; and it was with a shaking hand, and much excitement, that I reached for my pen to copy them out.

  Once I had finished, I laid my drawing board aside and would have turned away, save that as I started to do so my torch caught something more, a touch of colour, very faint, upon the wall. I strained to inspect it more closely until I could just make out, beneath the rough strokes of the painted sun, the figure of a woman. As I studied it, and realised what it was, so again I felt a sudden shock. The portrait was clearly of a piece with the other artwork on the walls, for it had been painted in the familiar style of Akh-en-Aten’s reign; but, whether as a consequence of its obscure position or for some other reason, it had survived the fanatic zeal which had destroyed so much else within the tomb. Certainly, I thought, gazing upon the face of the woman, there was a quality which might well have served to hold a desecrator’s hand, for so great was her beauty, and so unsettling its nature, that it almost froze me to gaze upon it. Her head, impossibly massive upon a slender neck, seemed like a monstrous orchid swaying upon its stem; her black-rimmed stare was exalted and cold; her lips, half-formed between a smile and a frown, appeared to hint at deathly and unfathomable depths. Only these lips had retained their former brightness, for despite the passage of millennia they were still a fresh and vivid red - the same colour, I realised suddenly, as the graffito of the sun.

  I had suspected at once whom the portrait portrayed. I bent down closer to search for a script, and found it, almost obliterated beneath a brush-stroke of red paint, by the side of the head. I had been learning the rudiments of hieroglyphics, and was able to trace, very haltingly, the syllables painted on the wall. Nef-er-ti-ti. I smiled to myself. So my supposition had been correct. ‘Nefer-titi’ -- ‘She-Who-Comes-In-Beauty’. Akh-en-Aten’s Queen.

  There were more hieroglyphics running in a line down the wall. I permitted myself a second smile. Petrie, I knew, would be exceedingly intrigued, for Nefer-titi, like her husband, was a figure of great mystery, and I too, ever since my first glimpse of her carved upon the cliff, had found myself haunted by the image of the Queen. She had come in beauty -- so much her name had proclaimed; but almost nothing else about Nefer-titi was known. Although it had been the infallible custom for a Pharaoh to take his own sister as Queen, Akh-en-Aten as ever had trampled on tradition. Who Nefer-titi really was, and where she had come from, were questions still unanswered. Certainly, she had not belonged to Egypt’s royal line. Petrie, I knew, had his own ideas -- but there was a sorry lack of proof. I reached once again for my drawing board. I could not read the hieroglyphs, but if I copied them, Petrie would be able to. Who knew what information they might not prove to contain?

  Who indeed? Even as I sit here almost thirty years later, in the afternoon warmth of the Theban sun, such a question must serve to chill me still. I am not, I think, by nature an over-imaginative man, and let me state, in mitigation of my youthful folly, that it taught me a lesson I have always remembered. It is all too easy for an archaeologist, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, to forget that a tomb is something more than a mere repository of historical details. It is also a place where the dead have been laid; and although, of course, I have no time for such fancies as ghosts, it is possible all the same for the dead to surprise those who would ignore them altogether.

  Certainly, I was taught so that day. For I imagined, in the darkness of the tomb as I gazed at the face of Nefer-titi, that I saw her smile start to broaden, and her eyes to gleam; and I felt such a horror that I was paralysed. I thought suddenly how I had never seen a look so terrible; and even as I imagined that she was coming alive, so also I knew she was not human at all but something alien, and monstrous, and terribly dangerous. Of course I recognised, even as I conceived this, that such a fantasy was nonsense, and I forced myself to turn and rub my eyes. When I gazed upon the portrait of the Queen once again, all was as before, save that in the light of the torch her lips seemed somehow fuller than before. Intrigued despite myself, I brought the torch clos
er; yet even in the full glare of its beam, my hallucination persisted. So startled was I by this delusion, that I - God, but I blush even to set this down -- I bent down lower, as though to kiss the lips with my own, and reached out with my finger to touch the portrait’s cheeks. As I did so, the whole frieze seemed to shimmer before my gaze, like a true ghost indeed - a veil of infinite shimmering points, risen from the wall and hung upon the air. Then it collapsed and the image was gone, crumbled into a powder of fine dust upon the floor. Where the portrait had been there was only naked rock.

  I never told Petrie. My sense of shame and guilt was too great. I sought instead, during the course of the following weeks, to make amends for my folly by uncovering something else -- some object of great beauty, perhaps, or historical worth; but alas, my efforts were to little purpose, and I found nothing to compare with the find I had destroyed. However, I did, towards the end of our excavations on the site, show Petrie my copies of the Arabic inscriptions. He was briefly intrigued by the image of the sun and its worshippers, but just as Newberry had done, he scoffed at the idea that an Arab might have copied the art of Akh-en-Aten’s reign. ‘Such a theory’ he told me, ‘although very original no doubt, has not the slightest foundation. Inspect the evidence more closely, Carter, and you will see how the idea must melt into air.’ Such a reproof was more painful than he could know, and so I pressed him no more. However, despite the brusqueness of Petrie’s rejection, I could not believe that the inscriptions were without significance at all -- and it amused me sometimes, in my more extravagant moments, to believe them a mystery of great significance indeed.

  Two late discoveries in particular encouraged me to persist with this view. The first was the translation of the two lines of Arabic, which I had initially feared to be without meaning at all. Petrie himself, although reasonably versed in the language, had been unable to make sense of the copies I had made, and when he approached one of the nearby village elders and showed the two lines of Arabic to him, the old man had frowned and shrugged his shoulders. Such a disappointment might have seemed decisive -- save that I had observed how, when the old man had first gazed upon the lines, he had appeared to start and his face had grown pale. The next day, while Petrie was away elsewhere upon the site, I approached his foreman, and asked him if he could translate the two lines for me. The foreman, who spoke tolerable English, agreed willingly enough; but the moment he inspected them, he too grew pale and began to shake his head. But he could not, as the village elder had done, deny to me that he recognised the lines, and so I was determined to know what their meaning might be.