Pharaoh (32 page)

Blake turned towards the side opening, where he had cleared away the debris.

‘I want to see what’s in there,’ he said, grabbing a small pick.

‘Come on. Let’s get out of here,’ Sarah insisted. ‘I don’t like this place. And you never finished telling me that story about the curse.’

‘There wasn’t enough time for explanations.’

‘I know. But anyway, it’s time to get away. Let’s close up this hole on top, set off the charges and head out for Yotvata. If that hunk of tin out there stays in one piece, we can probably expect to reach Eilat before the weather changes. The ATV’s top speed is seventy, which means an average of forty or fifty. Have you thought about that? Christ, you can always come back here when all this has blown over and dig down right to the centre of the earth if you want. But for now let’s go.’

‘Just half an hour,’ said Blake. ‘Just give me one half-hour and then we’ll go. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to come back here. I want to see what’s behind there. Shine the light here, please.’

Sarah pointed the neon light towards the opening and Blake started to work at the compacted mound as if he were demolishing a wall. After a while, the pick broke through.

‘I knew it!’ he said, his excitement rising. ‘There’s a cavity on the other side.’

He widened the opening and had Sarah pass the neon through to light up the space beyond the mound of debris.

‘What’s there?’ asked Sarah.

‘The rest of the slide, which is partly blocking a tunnel that goes up like a ramp.’

‘You only have a quarter of an hour,’ said Sarah. ‘You promised.’

Blake continued digging with the pick, throwing the rubble behind him until he had finally opened up a gap big enough for a person to get through.

‘Come on,’ he said, and started to go through to the other side.

Sarah followed him uncertainly, lighting the way with the neon. They had gone about twenty metres along the narrow passage when she stopped suddenly to listen.

‘What is it?’ asked Blake.

‘The helicopters . . . damn! They waited until it was light enough, then they followed the tracks of the ATV.’

‘Sarah, you can’t be sure of that. We’ve seen helicopters passing this way at other times.’

But the noise was getting louder and nearer. And soon they could hear the crackle of machine guns.

Sarah yelled, ‘Let’s get out of here, quick!’ She started to run back, but, at that very moment, an explosion shook the earth under their feet. A flash filled the tomb and the corridor with light, and immediately afterwards there was a dull crash as they were plunged into darkness.

‘They’ve hit the ATV and the explosives. We’re buried in here!’

‘Not yet,’ said Blake. ‘Quick! This way. Shine the light!’

They heard another explosion.

‘The gasoline tanks,’ said Sarah, crawling up the ramp. At that moment, they heard a sinister noise behind them, a sort of crunching and then sliding rocks.

‘Oh, God! The vibrations are making the tunnel cave in!’ shouted Sarah. ‘Hurry! Run! Run!’

The tunnel had got narrower and began to slope upwards slightly. Sarah and Blake scrambled up desperately, pouring with sweat, their hearts beating wildly as a growing sense of oppressive claustrophobia assailed them.

In the midst of their dash, clambering over the fall of rocks and sand and through a suffocating dust that the light barely penetrated, all of a sudden Blake came to a dead halt. He stared as if made of stone towards the left of the tunnel, where a kind of niche had unexpectedly appeared.

‘Come away!’ shouted Sarah. ‘What are you waiting for? Come on!’

But Blake seemed to be paralysed by what he was seeing, or what he thought he was seeing. Within the cloud of white dust, there was a dazzling confusion of golden wings under a stone vault and a veiled shimmering of treasure.

‘Oh, my . . . God!’

Sarah grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away just a second before the whole vault collapsed onto where his head had been and she kept pulling him until she thought her heart would burst.

They sank onto the floor of the gallery, exhausted.

Not a sound could be heard now, except for the occasional pebble that continued to fall from the walls. Bit by bit, the dust settled and they could see that a gentle draught was coaxing it upwards. ‘There’s an opening there,’ said Sarah. ‘We might be able to get out.’

Blake pulled himself to his feet first. His forehead was bleeding where the stones falling from the vault had grazed him. His hands were skinned and his face was grubby with a mixture of sweat and white dust. He was still brandishing the pick and seemed to be out of his mind.

‘I have to go back,’ he said, turning round. ’You don’t know what I saw there.’

Sarah grabbed him by both arms and pushed him against the wall.

‘For the love of God, Will. We have to save ourselves. If we don’t get out of here, we’ll die. For the love of God, let’s get out of here. We have to go!’

Blake seemed to come out of his dazed state and started walking upwards. He continued his backward glances until, finally, they both saw a stream of light. It was a thin sun ray filtering through a crack at what seemed to be the end of the tunnel.

Blake approached it and lifted the pick to widen the crack, but, at that very moment, he saw some dust fall and heard the muffled sound of voices. He signalled to Sarah not to move or make any sound and put his ear up to the crack. Now he could hear the noise of steps moving away and, further still, there was the beating of a helicopter’s rotor blades turning slowly.

‘They’ve landed,’ he whispered. ‘They’re patrolling the area, probably looking for us.’

‘Can you hear what language they’re speaking?’ asked Sarah.

‘No. They’re too far away and I can’t hear them because of the helicopter. We could try to get out so we can see.’

He opened the crack with the pick just enough to get his head and shoulders out and found himself in a small cave which was rank with the smell of urine. On the ground were fresh prints of military boots.

When Blake had got out he helped Sarah do the same.

‘Jeez!’ said the girl. ‘What the hell is this stench?’

‘It’s only ibex urine. They use caves like these for shelter at night and the sand on the floor is completely impregnated with their excrement. I’ve seen tons of these places in the Middle East. Let’s go and see what’s happening.’

But even as he spoke, he heard the helicopter engine speed up and heard the whir of the blades as they spun through the air. They slipped across the cave floor to the entrance and found themselves on the side of the hill at Ras Udash, above the site where they had worked for so many days and from which a dense column of black smoke was now rising. The helicopter was already far away.

‘What a disaster,’ said Blake, his eyes filling up.

The ATV had suffered a direct hit and bits of it were lying all over the place. The explosion had blasted a crater and the fallout had formed an enormous heap where the entrance to the tomb had been.

‘Two explosive charges and four tanks of gasoline. Quite a bang,’ said Sarah. Her eyes followed the helicopter, which was, by now, barely a speck in the grey sky. ‘Did you see any markings?’ she asked.

Blake shook his head. ‘I didn’t see anything. Have you seen the boot tracks?’

Sarah glanced at the footprints that had been left all around the entrance of the cave.

‘NATO combat boots. They’re the most common type of all and loads of armies use them. As far as I can tell, they could have been Egyptians, Americans, Saudis, Israelis . . . But the helicopter was Western-made. Not that that tells us very much.’

She opened her rucksack.

‘We’ve only got the stuff we were carrying with us. What’ve you got?’

Blake opened up his pack.

‘A water bottle, a few cereal bars, a couple of cans of meat, some crackers, a box of dates and one of dried figs.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Matches, string, needle and thread, Swiss Army knife, soap, suntan cream. The usual junk . . . and a topographical map and compass.’

He started down towards the deserted plain. The sky was beginning to lighten and a cold wind had sprung up from the north. It forced the column of smoke down to the ground, where it meandered at length between the rocks and stones of the hammada.

At a certain point, Sarah saw Blake turn towards something on his left and bend down to pick it up. She went over to him.

‘What is it?’

Blake turned round. In his hands he was holding a Bible whose pages had been charred by the explosion.

‘There’s nothing else left,’ he said, ‘nothing at all . . .’

‘If they’d been Christians, they would have picked it up, don’t you think? Maybe they were Arabs . . . Oh, it’s no use racking our brains. I’m afraid we aren’t going to find out anything anyway.’

They sat on the ground and drank sparingly from their water bottles.

Blake took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one while he continued to stare at the cloud of smoke that snaked across the expanse of desert. He seemed to be miles away.

‘The road to Yotvata seems to be the best to take,’ said Sarah. ‘If we ration the water and the food, we can do it. It’s about eighty miles.’

‘Yes,’ said Blake. ‘If we aren’t surprised by the storm tonight.’

‘There’s no saying it will hit this area.’

‘No, I guess not. But it might.’

‘Will?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why did you stop in the tunnel? You could have died.’

‘I saw—’

‘What?’

‘Angels’ wings . . . of gold.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘You’re exhausted. You were seeing things.’

‘Maybe I just wanted to believe I was seeing them.’

‘Seeing what, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Golden angels, kneeling . . . on the Ark. And there were other things too, vessels, incense burners.’

Taken aback, Sarah looked into his eyes. ‘My God, William Blake, are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Blake. ‘It all makes perfect sense now. I know why that sandal was in the tomb and perhaps whom it belonged to as well.’

He leafed through the charred Bible. ‘See? It’s here in a passage from the Book of the Maccabees.’

Sarah stared at him in amazement and she pulled her cotton jacket more tightly around her. It wasn’t equal to the biting wind that was blowing even more strongly from the north.

‘That sandal goes back more or less to the time when the Babylonians, under King Nebuchadnezzar, laid siege to Jerusalem. Somebody there must have realized that the pagans were about to break into the city, desecrate the Temple, steal the treasure and carry away the Ark of the Covenant. That person would have tried to take the treasure to safety, using a secret passage that only he knew about. His destination was a place in the Paran desert, where his people’s first sanctuary had been raised in a tent at the foot of Mount Sinai. His intention was to hide the Ark there, where it had come from originally. Perhaps he found that little cave by chance and thought that it would be a good hiding place. Or perhaps he knew there was a cave nearby where the ancient tent sanctuary had been and went there on purpose. He began to make his way through the tunnel and put his treasure in a niche in one of the walls—’

‘And then?’ asked Sarah, her head spinning with the enchantment of such a faraway past.

Blake was trying to light another cigarette, shielding the lighter from the insistent wind. When he finally succeeded, he blew out a great mouthful of bluish smoke and continued.

‘The man had carried out his duty and he was about to retrace his steps, but the tunnel that went down into the bowels of the earth seemed to have been waiting for his visit for many years and beckoned to him irresistibly. Instead of going up again, he started to descend.

‘He must have had some sort of light so he could see where he was going and, when he got to the tomb entrance, without realizing it, he unknowingly triggered the protection device and an enormous pile of rubble slid down into the tomb. That was when he lost his sandal. It was dragged down into the tomb by the unexpected rock slide and was the only object in that funerary world that came from another period.

‘He probably got dragged down as well, but the slide stopped because an infiltration of water had solidified some of the plaster. The entrance wasn’t completely blocked, and he could probably see the inside of the tomb and read the first part of the inscription. It’s likely that he knew Egyptian hieroglyphics.

‘If he guessed the truth, he must have had the shock of his life. He turned and fled without leaving a trace behind him.’

‘Who was the man?’ asked Sarah. ‘You said you knew who the sandal belonged to.’

Blake turned the last pages of the large, half-burnt book.

‘This volume has a very special appendix: the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. I’ve read it many times in the course of my research but, when I was reading one particular passage the other night, the penny dropped.’