THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 9

  “It’s not as much fun as alternative Egyptology,” she said. “My university is still busy on various protracted digs in Egypt.”

  “How is your major sponsor?”

  “Ibrahim Saad? Doing phenomenally well. Mr Saad grows any more successful he’ll take over the entire pharmaceutical industry.”

  Ibrahim Saad was an Egyptian born American who headed a massive pharmaceutical empire and funded major archaeological work in Egypt through his SACER Foundation, a man torn between scientific archaeology and alternative ideas. SACER, he reminded himself, stood for Society for Archaeology, Conservation and Esoteric Research.

  “It must be tough for such a pure academic as you to flirt with alternatives.”

  “Am I flirting?”

  “I am.”

  She smiled. Melinda was not beyond recognising Anson’s special insights as a phenomenologist, one who believed in engaging with the sacred and taking ancient religion seriously. But she was not about to climb into bed with a renegade.

  “Good luck in chasing after another controversial theory, Anson, but be careful.”

  He was returning to his favourite corner of the world, and once again he was going beyond the intangible world of theory and entering the real world of international intrigue and conflict.

  Chapter 11

  Gebel Barkal, Nubia

  ANSON SAT next to the driver, thrown around in the cabin of the Land Cruiser, as they approached an isolated butte rising in the shimmer of the desert.

  Here the great Nubian kingdom of Napata once flourished at a place where the River Nile, slithering like a snake on a scorched belly across the largest desert on earth, loses its way. Stunned by the smoking heat of the Nubian sun, it twists back on itself, flowing in the wrong direction for 270 kilometres - back towards the heart of Africa, before winding its way into Egypt.

  And here, too, the design of pyramids changes direction. Unlike those of Egypt, they were smaller, clustered together and tapered, with steep-sides inclined at seventy degrees, as if stretched in a heat haze, or as if viewed through the eyes of a Modigliani.

  “That’s the holy mountain of Gebel Barkal over there, near the town of Karima, where we’ll camp. It marks the most important religious complex in Nubia and the second most important to the Egyptians,” he said for the benefit of Gemma. “It was the southern home of the God Amun-re.” He pointed into the haze. “The Royal Necropolis of the ancient city of Napata, the Nubian capital before the Meroitic period, lies over there to the north. There are also large pyramid fields at El Kurru, a few kilometres southwards from the mountain, and at Nuri, on the other side of the Nile.”

  Gemma, in the back seat, commented:

  “I suppose with such an influential neighbour as Egypt, Nubia was bound to become a mirror society instead of a stand-alone civilisation.”

  The Nubian driver growled.

  “Let me tell you something. Nubia not only stood alone. One of our great Nubian kings, Taharka, formed an alliance with ancient Israel and defended Jerusalem from a siege by the Assyrians, driving them away. He is even mentioned by name in the Old Testament.”

  The driver was no mere driver. The shiny headed man, as dark as the image of a shade in an Egyptian tomb, was a former inspector of Nubian antiquities. Ali had a degree in Egyptology and was now a specialist tour operator and something of a renegade as well as a friend of Anson’s.

  Anson added: “The Nubian Taharka may have done more than save Israel’s bacon. He may have rescued the entire Jewish culture and religion. The Assyrians under Sennacherib were intent on destroying Jerusalem and deporting its people. Consider this. The Old Testament had yet to be written and they were still wrestling with the concept of Yawveh. Where would the Abrahamic faiths Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - be, if the Nubians hadn’t stood by Jerusalem? It was a turning point for the Western world and the Middle East.”

  “I’m no Afrocentrocist, by the way,” Ali said, softening. “I’m not claiming that Egypt was a black civilisation. It wasn’t, although there certainly were black elements and black pharaohs. No, we have our own civilisation to be proud of.”

  “Indeed the Nubians had a long and intricate relationship with Egypt,” Anson said, smiling. “From New Kingdom times they were admired for their loyalty and honesty and hired as the police force of Egypt and also as mercenaries because of their prowess with the bow. The Egyptians felt they could rely on the Nubians - right up to the point where they invaded and took over the country in the eighth century BC. These guys did a reverse takeover and ruled Egypt for almost a hundred years! They became the pharaohs of the twenty-fifth dynasty, with their capital at Gebel Barkal.”

  Ali laughed.

  “And Anson trusts me!”

  “We’re reaching one of the outer limits of Egypt’s influence in Africa,” Anson said, “apart from the Land of Punt and there’s consderable argument about where Punt may be.”

  “Queen Hatshepsut sent a famed expedition there, I recall,” she said. “Do you think it was in Somalia?”

  Ali shrugged.

  “Modern scholars prefer a closer destination such as southern Sudan or the Eritrean region of Ethiopia. But others believe that they passed around the horn of Africa and some believe they journeyed as far as coastal Tanzania and Zanzibar. Scholars prefer to discount such stories, including the one fragmentary story told by the Greek historian Herodotus, of a sea voyage that circumnavigated Africa, anticipating the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama by two thousand years. It occurred in the twenty-sixth dynasty reign of Necho II, presumably in pursuit of trade with eastern Africa.”

  “Intriguingly, the queen Hatshepsut sent a carved stone statue of herself to the distant land of Punt,” Anson said, “and I’ve often pictured it sitting somewhere, a milky stone queen of Egypt dreaming in the African bush, perhaps sparking legends of a white queen in darkest Africa. I read too much Rider Haggard as a child.”

  “Colonialist fantasy,” Ali said.

  “Rider Haggard?” Gemma said.

  “Don’t,” Anson said. “You make me feel ancient. Haggard wrote She and King Solomon’s Mines. He invented the lost race romance.”

  “I know who he is, of course, but I’ve never read him. You really do like the ancient past. Haggard is a turn of the century writer and not even the last century.”

  “I’m depressed that you’re so young you haven’t read him and that I’m so old that I have,” Anson said. “The novel She is full of Victorian assumptions, but it still gives me a jolt, like putting my fingers in a power socket.”

  “I’ll put it on my reading list. By the way, there’s one thing I don’t understand about coming straight to Gebel Barkal,” she said. “You said there’s a site under threat from the dam water further south, so why not go straight there?”

  “Our little expedition has been tailed ever since we left.”

  “Yes, I know we’re being followed. So coming here first is a diversionary tactic, a cover?” The prospect of intrigue enlivened her voice.

  “Tonight, under cover of darkness, we’ll sneak away from our campsite in our Land Cruiser with lights doused, or at least as far as we can proceed by moonlight in that fashion and drive on to another site. It may involve a bit of guerilla archaeology.”

  “You don’t disappoint.”

  It was good to have the holy mountain and its temple site finally in view, Anson thought.

  They had been bouncing and lurching across open desert wasteland, the emptiness broken only by distant ranges of bare, black hills, boulders, thorn bushes and the occasional, sketchy-looking acacia tree.

  Ancient Nubia, a land rich in gold, and one that built three times as many pyramids as Egypt, was the new ground zero of archaeology. Fifteen teams from the US, Europe and Sudan were sifting the sands for the secrets of the world's first advanced black civilisation. In its heyday it spanned more than one thousand miles of the River Nile, from today’s Sudan to Aswan in Egypt and at one time ruled the whole of Egypt
itself.

  When Egyptian Pharaoh Nectanebo II fled into exile after final defeat by the Persians, he came here, seeking protection at the court of Nubia’s King Nastesen, the last Nubian king to be buried in one of these tapered tomb pyramids. Did Nectanebo bring his treasure with him, including his most prized possession, the disc of Ra? Why did Nectanebo rob the national bank of Egypt? Perhaps he was hopeful of making a comeback one day and needed treasure to fund Greek mercenaries who could help him expel the Persians. He must have been hopeful. He’d defeated the forces of Artaxerxes on one previous occasion.

  What became of Nectanebo? History was silent.

  Anson looked up at Gebel Barkal growing in the Land Cruiser’s windscreen.

  The answer may lie there, he thought. That mound of rock, rising over three hundred feet above the surrounding desert, was as important to Egyptians as it was to Nubians, and it marked the site of a great temple which lay at its base, now in total ruin, the Temple of Amun-re at Gebel Barkal. It was the second longest temple ever constructed, after Karnak. This place was Amun-Re’s home away from home and so it would have been for Nectanebo. This was partly because an early conquering pharaoh, Thutmosis, declared it to be, but primarily because of its peculiar features. Anson’s eye followed a pinnacle tower standing proud of its southwestern cliff face. It didn’t take too much fancy to see the mountain as a crown, and the pinnacle in front as a uraeus, the serpent emblem worn on the king's forehead, reared to strike. The impression would strike an observer more forcibly if they were here in ancient times. Gold leaf covered its surface and so it blazed in the sunlight. It would have been visible for miles around, announcing its holy status.

  Did the last native Egyptian pharaoh lie buried somewhere in line of sight of this holy mountain? Egyptians had a horror of dying in a foreign land and no Egyptian pharaoh worth his natron would ever have allowed himself to be buried outside of Mother Egypt, except perhaps in this one spot, the second home of the god Amun-re.

  And what about the treasure he was supposed to have brought with him from Egypt, shiploads of gold, transferred with great effort around cataracts. It was unlikely that Nectanebo would have trusted the Nubian King Nastesen overmuch, in spite of the Nubian’s hospitality. Egyptians were wary of the Nubians and of their sorcery. And then there was always the concern that the Persians would come further south. Nectanebo would have taken no chances with his loot. He needed a bank, so he built one, perhaps planning to bankroll a comeback.

  Anson believed that Nectanebo secretly constructed a cache for his treasure, further afield, upstream, protected by yet another cataract and probably ingeniously hidden. He probably died before he ever got to spend his warchest and his most treasured possession, could have been hidden in the same place.

  Chapter 12

  WELL CLEAR of their campsite, Ali turned on his lights, using the low beam as they drove into the night, the desert lit by a crescent moon.

  “Even if Nectanebo did have a treasure cache, how do we know it wasn’t plundered thousands of years ago?” Gemma said from the back.

  “We don’t. Tomb robbers may have succeeded.”

  “They usually did,” Ali grumbled.“ Unfortunately treasure thieves are still at work today. Let’s hope they haven’t got here before us.”

  They spotted the glow of a muffled lamp or flashlight from far off as they approached the shore beyond the fourth cataract.

  “My friends,” Ali said.

  “But not ours,” Anson said to Gemma in a warning tone. “Manoosir tribesmen. They’re not happy about the dam or the foreigners who’ve come here to build it, Chinese engineers and German and French subcontractors.”

  “They’re not happy with anyone, including the government and archaeologists,” Ali said. “The rising Nile waters will create a lake one-hundred-and-eight miles long and a couple of miles wide when it reaches maximum pool, displacing more than fifty-thousand people who will have nowhere to go. The dam’s almost seventy metres high, and because there’s no kind of gorge here, just hills far apart, it’s nine kilometres long, the largest hydro project in Africa currently under construction. There’s been violence, burnings, shoot-outs and threats from the tribesmen.”

  “I can understand their anger at the government,” Gemma said. “But what have they got against the archaeologists?”

  Anson explained.

  “You have to understand, they feel they’re slap bang in the middle of an invasion, not just by dam builders and rising water, but by archaeologists from around the world. The area is incredibly rich in archaeology, and teams, including those from Britain, Hungary, Poland, Sudan and the United States, are swarming over the landscape in a race to save thousands of Nubia’s monuments, settlement ruins and cemeteries.”

  “Also, the government promised to build a local museum so they could keep any finds here in the community, but they are showing no signs of honouring that commitment, and now tribesmen fear their heritage is being dispersed,” Ali said.

  “So don’t expect them to be smiling.”

  “Not at you, anyway,” Ali said. “They like me, I think. I look after their interests.”

  They pulled up near a group of tribesmen dressed in ankle-length robes, and, true enough, they weren’t smiling. Anson counted eight of them. A few had rifles, the others hoes and picks.

  Ali got out. He entered into protracted negotiations under moonlight.

  “The Nubian people have had a rough deal over water,” Anson said as the cooling vehicle ticked away the moments in the night’s lowering temperatures, “going back to the building of the Aswan High Dam which threw a riverside people into the wilderness. It’s left a very bad feeling. I’m afraid water is a bit of a time bomb in this part of the world. Don’t be surprised if the next war in the region is fought not over politics, but over dams and the waters of the Nile.”

  “I won’t be surprised,” the Intelligence girl said. “We watch our friends and enemies closely. When we decolonised Africa, we made a sweet deal for Egypt with its precious Suez Canal. It was a hands-off deal to protect Egypt’s sources of water in Africa, with some slight concessions to Nubia. Without the Egyptian government’s okay, no irrigation or hydroelectric works can be established in African countries on the tributaries of the Nile or their lakes if such works will cause a drop in water level harmful to Egypt. But times are changing. African states of Lake Victoria and others along the River Nile Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Sudan - who are now doing it tough, want to throw that 1929 colonial document out of the window and use the water for their own agriculture. Egypt has few options to stop them.”

  “Except war.”

  “How did you come across this site?” she said.

  “I didn’t. The Manoosir tribesmen did. One of the earthquakes that periodically strike Egypt and the region must have shifted an enormous rock, revealing a chamber beneath. They entered but were not able to penetrate beyond the chamber, although they did discover texts and a cartouche, the oval ring that contains a king’s name.”

  “Nectanebo.”

  “One of the tribesmen with a bit of understanding about archaeology had the sense to sketch a copy of the cartouche, which he relayed to Ali, who immediately passed it on to me. Yes, it seems pretty certain that it’s Nectanebo II.”

  Ali seemed to be making headway with his militant tribesmen. He invited Anson and Gemma to get out of the car.

  “Out my friends. We go on foot from here. I’ll get us some flashligh

  Anson climbed out and stretched his legs.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Translate that into really friendly Manoosir, Ali.”

  He felt like taking a walk.

  Chapter 13

  A SURVEY by Chicago’s Oriental Institute estimated that there were two thousand five hundred archaeological sites in the area of Nubia that lay under threat from the Merowe Dam.

  They were wrong, Anson thought.

  There were two thousand five hundred and one.


  This band of Manoosir tribesman had found the other one.

  The procession stumbled by torchlight across a rocky terrain to arrive at a mountain of rock bulking on the ground, not far from the glimmering path of moonlight lying on the water of the growing lake.

  Anson could see why Nectanebo may have chosen the boulder to cover his stash.

  Even by moon and flashlight, with a little imagination it was possible to see the granite boulder as an ovoid, Botero-style avian. It reminded him of a statue in the Metropolitan Museum of New York that showed the huge protective falcon Horus sheltering the small figure of Nectanebo under its breast while the king carried a shrine in one hand and a cresent khepesh sword in the other.

  The sword of power and the precious shrine of treasure.

  He thought of that figure and of its twin symbolism now as they advanced to the base of the boulder.

  Would the cache of a magician king be like that? In one hand the lure of Egypt’s sacred treasure, in the other hand, the sword of punishment.

  What could they expect from a stronghold built by a wily magician king?

  “This stupendous block was the plug,” he said.

  Ali agreed. “Some plug.”

  Gemma was in awe.

  “How did Nectanebo move it? It’s impossible.”

  “With enough manpower the Egyptians seemed able to move anything. Besides, Nectanebo was a magician and moving this was his first magic trick in Nubia. We must remember that he was not alone. He’d have come here with a force. In fact there are signs that he may have had some kind of independent status in Nubia. I just wonder what his next magic trick will be.”

  The Manoosir tribesmen had covered over the entranceway to their discovery at the base of the rock with boulders and scree and now they set to work clearing the opening, wiry men who indulged in little chatter as they laboured.

  A cold breeze sprang up and it brought the breath of the lake to them.

  “Look at the moon,” Gemma said.