Читать книгу The Deceit - Tom Knox - Страница 16

‘It is estimated there are maybe half a billion mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.’

This was one of Ryan Harper’s favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students’ attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?

‘I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.’

He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles – would they ever end? – had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.

This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.

At last, the keenest of the trio, a bright spark from Chicago, offered a response: ‘Half a billion? You’re joking, right?’

‘No.’ Ryan stood tall, and gestured across the beige and rubbly levels of the Abydos cemeteries. ‘Remember the eternity of Egyptian life …’

Just at that moment a blaring Arab pop song shrilled out from a café down by the main temple. Ryan sighed. The screeching music didn’t add to the mysterious atmosphere he was trying to evoke. And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed – the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first season’s digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls – the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could give you vertigo.

‘Mr Harper—’

‘Sorry?’

It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.

‘Explain the figures, maybe?’

‘Sure.’

‘’Cause I don’t see it. There’s, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: they’d be turning up in your lunch.’

Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. ‘In a sense, you just have to do the math. But let’s go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Let’s make a comparison. How long has America been around?’

He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: they’d spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: he’d probably said way too much.

Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that, as the sun set over the Rameses temple and the forts of Zebib, Ryan Harper could go back to his lonely bachelor apartment in the town and spend the rest of the evening smoking shisha outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.

Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.

‘Two hundred and fifty years.’

He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.

‘That’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?’

Neale shook his head. ‘But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so that’s like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?’

Lopez looked up from her smartphone. ‘Whoa! Racist much? You’re saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?’

At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. ‘OK. Guys. Let’s say America has been a political entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately –’ he paused, for effect – ‘ten times as long. Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200 BC.’

‘But half a billion mummies?’

‘I’m getting there! Remember, most ancient Egyptians would have sought some kind of mummification if they could, such was their obsession with making it to the afterlife. And of course mummification is not hard out here: the desert naturally mummifies bodies, it is so dry. That is probably, in fact, how the ritual began, in about 3200 BC, when the First Dynasty Egyptians realized that human corpses were curiously preserved by great aridity.’

Lopez was toying with her phone again. Or maybe she was checking his sums. He fought the desire to compare her feisty beauty to his wife’s, or even his dead daughter – would she have looked like this? He banished the thought and continued, ‘You don’t need a calculator to do the equations. Let’s say Egyptians died at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand a year, which is about right for a population of three million on average, with a life expectancy of twenty or so. Take a hundred and fifty thousand deaths a year and multiply it by more than three thousand years and you get … at least four hundred and fifty million dead. That is to say, half a billion mummies. Some estimates go even higher.’ He pointed at the western cliffs, behind which the sun was reluctantly declining. ‘Basically, when you walk on Egyptian soil, you are walking on the dust of the dead.’

Lopez looked up. ‘Eww.’

Harper laughed. ‘Yes. Maybe I won’t mention the way we have used human and animal mummies in the past: as fertiliser, medicine, machine oil, pigment and fuel.’

‘Medicine?’

‘OK, we’re done, guys.’ Harper liked to end the day with a question hanging in the air. Politely he dismissed the tiny study group, who seemed just a bit too keen to get back to their rented apartments and have a clandestine beer. But then he shrugged. So what? Good for them. They were young.

Ryan’s walk home was agreeable in the cooling twilight: this was his favourite hour of the day. Boys played football under ragged, sun-bleached posters of a long-deposed president. Little girls skipped happily next to their mothers, carrying wicker shopping baskets way too big for their tiny hands; their mothers were shrouded entirely in black niqabs.

And of course the old men with the white keffiyehs were smoking their shisha pipes outside the dusty tea-house. One or two raised a hand or an eyebrow in greeting, as Ryan keyed his latch. But then he saw an even more familiar face. It was Hassan, sitting outside on the terrace.

Ryan waved hello. ‘Hassan. Ahlan! I’ll be down in a minute.’

His apartment was welcomingly cool and dark. As he splashed water on his face, Ryan considered Hassan. Their revolving lives.

There was a time when Hassan Elgammal had been Ryan’s assistant: a keen young student aiding the rising young American Egyptologist. Now, fifteen years later, Hassan was in charge of all Egyptian antiquities in the Abydos region, and he was therefore, by a distance, Ryan’s superior.

Ryan didn’t much care about this inversion in their roles. Ambition had left him when his wife had died in childbirth. It had literally flown his soul, like the living spirit – the ka – that fled the corpse of an ancient Egyptian when they died. And when he had finally given up his Egyptological career altogether, and taken on the charity job, he had felt a sincere moral relief.

His employers – the Abydos Project – were dedicated to saving Egyptian antiquities, such as the Abydos temple complex, from flooding and decay. This meant that Ryan spent his days giving something back to Egyptians, rather than always taking stuff away, as Westerners had done for centuries. That was a good feeling.

And Ryan also enjoyed the sheer physical labour: he often spent entire days down there in the Oseirion with the Egyptian workers, rebuilding walls, shifting rubble, digging new drainage canals; toiling in the Egyptian sun, like a mindless slave building a pyramid. Then in the evening he quenched a mighty thirst with sweet hibiscus juice. And he slept soundly. And didn’t dream. And the days went by. And the years went by.

Towelling his hands dry, Ryan descended the stairs, opened the door, and took a seat besides Hassan. His friend’s affable face was grave, yet also excited. ‘They found him, Ryan.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A goatherd found the body yesterday. Your old tutor Sassoon. In the desert, north of Sohag.’

Ryan blinked. Emotion surged.

Hassan added, ‘And they say he was found with a bag. Of documents.’