found the animal strangely reassuring, as if its plodding gait were taking him out of that world of mirages and anchoring him back in reality. Seeing the patches of solid bedrock under the sand reminded him of the ancient ruins that Shaytan had shown him, Nubian and Roman and Egyptian, some of them from the time when the pharaohs had ventured this far south and tried to tame the wilderness they believed had been the homeland from which their civilisation had sprung. The ruins had been vestigial, elusive – the tamped-down floors of desert corrals, crumbled watchtowers, temporary forts – and there had been no stratigraphy to them; with seeming whimsy the wind would blow sand away to reveal ruins that were three thousand years old, or so recent that Shaytan could remember those who had lived in them. As soon as people passed on, the desert seemed to swallow their history and reduce it to the same desiccated imprint, the fate that seemed to lie in store for their own endeavours just as it had for the expeditions of the pharaohs who had preceded them on this trek into the shadowlands of their own history.
Yet in those few elusive ruins Mayne had found a human presence stronger than he had ever done among the towering monuments of Giza or Luxor or Abu Simbel that he had visited on his voyage south through Egypt. The day before, he had seen strange pyramidal forms rising from the sand, sheer-sided outcrops of basalt from some ancient volcanic eruption that had resisted the wind and stood stark above the desert like the backbone of the earth itself. In a flash of insight he had understood the origin of the man-made pyramids of ancient Egypt, an interest spurred by his time spent visiting the archaeological sites of the Nile after his first posting to Cairo. Those people who had gone north, the ancestors of the first pharaohs, had taken with them this vision of their ancestral landscape and had attempted to re-create it in their burial monuments. He realised why he had found the wonders of ancient Egypt curiously unmoving, for all their grandeur and technical marvel. They were no more than imitations of nature, like the walled gardens of European aristocrats, constructed by a people who could only bear to inhabit a world that they controlled. To those who rebelled, those like the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, that world must have seemed artificial, claustrophobic, unbearable; Mayne could see why Akhenaten had come here in search of truth, rejecting the religion of the pharaohs and finding deeper meaning in the one God, the Aten.
He remembered something, and reached under the fold of his desert robe into his tunic pocket, taking out a small package. Shaytan had given him a hejab , a pouch containing an amulet on a leather necklace with verses of the Koran wrapped around it. He released the reins of the camel and untied the leather thong that kept the bag shut, dropping the amulet into the palm of his hand. The wrapping was diaphanous, insubstantial, and when he took it off, it seemed lighter than air. As he held it in his other palm, a wisp of wind suddenly took it from him. He snatched at it, but it was gone. For a moment he thought of dismounting and chasing it, but it was flying high above the desert, and it would be hopeless. He did not even know whether it truly had been verse from the Koran, or some more ancient wisdom of the Dongola transcribed into Arabic. But the amulet seemed more substantial, and he peered at it closely. He realised that it was an ancient carving in the shape of a scarab beetle, like ones he had seen for sale in the alleyway markets of Cairo, pillaged from ancient tombs. It was jet black, carved from hard volcanic stone, probably from some outcrop in the desert itself. Embedded in the wings were lines of gold wire and two tiny gemstones that he recognised as peridot, the beautiful green stone that the ancient Egyptians mined on St John’s Island in the Red Sea. The scarab must have been a prized
Yet in those few elusive ruins Mayne had found a human presence stronger than he had ever done among the towering monuments of Giza or Luxor or Abu Simbel that he had visited on his voyage south through Egypt. The day before, he had seen strange pyramidal forms rising from the sand, sheer-sided outcrops of basalt from some ancient volcanic eruption that had resisted the wind and stood stark above the desert like the backbone of the earth itself. In a flash of insight he had understood the origin of the man-made pyramids of ancient Egypt, an interest spurred by his time spent visiting the archaeological sites of the Nile after his first posting to Cairo. Those people who had gone north, the ancestors of the first pharaohs, had taken with them this vision of their ancestral landscape and had attempted to re-create it in their burial monuments. He realised why he had found the wonders of ancient Egypt curiously unmoving, for all their grandeur and technical marvel. They were no more than imitations of nature, like the walled gardens of European aristocrats, constructed by a people who could only bear to inhabit a world that they controlled. To those who rebelled, those like the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, that world must have seemed artificial, claustrophobic, unbearable; Mayne could see why Akhenaten had come here in search of truth, rejecting the religion of the pharaohs and finding deeper meaning in the one God, the Aten.
He remembered something, and reached under the fold of his desert robe into his tunic pocket, taking out a small package. Shaytan had given him a hejab , a pouch containing an amulet on a leather necklace with verses of the Koran wrapped around it. He released the reins of the camel and untied the leather thong that kept the bag shut, dropping the amulet into the palm of his hand. The wrapping was diaphanous, insubstantial, and when he took it off, it seemed lighter than air. As he held it in his other palm, a wisp of wind suddenly took it from him. He snatched at it, but it was gone. For a moment he thought of dismounting and chasing it, but it was flying high above the desert, and it would be hopeless. He did not even know whether it truly had been verse from the Koran, or some more ancient wisdom of the Dongola transcribed into Arabic. But the amulet seemed more substantial, and he peered at it closely. He realised that it was an ancient carving in the shape of a scarab beetle, like ones he had seen for sale in the alleyway markets of Cairo, pillaged from ancient tombs. It was jet black, carved from hard volcanic stone, probably from some outcrop in the desert itself. Embedded in the wings were lines of gold wire and two tiny gemstones that he recognised as peridot, the beautiful green stone that the ancient Egyptians mined on St John’s Island in the Red Sea. The scarab must have been a prized
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