The Winter Vault (2 page)

Earthworms a metre long churn the soil, white heather sways ten metres above a woman's head. Flowers more than three metres tall sweeten the sun, their scent merging with the fragrance of cloves off the sea from Zanzibar. Grass grows tall as a man, moss thick as the trunk of a tree. Bamboo clatters into the sky like an image on accelerated film – a pace of fifty centimetres a day.

This is the habitat of the mountain gorilla, an animal that with one arm can snap the head off a human but who fears water and will not cross the river.

The equatorial snow – this frozen moonlight, this salt, this mist – melts and gushes with the force of gravity over sixty-four thousand kilometres of jungle, swamp, and desert; it swells the Nile and stains its burning banks bright green. Snow that comes to flow through a landscape so hot that it wrings a man's dreams from his head, the mirage shimmering in the air; so hot that a man cannot gain a moment's respite from his own shadow or his own sweat; so hot that the sand dreams of becoming glass; so hot that men die of it. A landscape so arid that its annual rainfall barely fills four teaspoons.

The desert abandons anyone who lies down. From the moment a body is covered in sand, the wind, like memory, begins to exhume it. And so the Bedouin and other desert tribes dig deeper graves for their women, a discretion.

Perhaps this is another reason for the immensity of the desert tombs, the sheer weight and mass of rock hauled and piled – ingeniously piled, yet piled all the same – at the gravesites of the kings.

In the desert we remain still and the earth moves beneath us.

Each night the temperature fell to freezing and the labourers began their day around the fire. By early morning one paid a price for even the slightest exertion. No one was seen to sweat because any moisture evaporated instantly. Men dipped their heads into whatever shade could be found, squeezed into the shadows of wooden crates and trucks. They gazed with desire across the Nile at the umbra of dom and date palms, acacias, tamarisk, and sycamore. Their faces sought the north wind.

Each morning from the houseboat, Jean watched Avery disappear into the throng of men. All around him, faces the colour of wet earth; Avery, pale as the sand. Soon she would climb to the plateau where a garden had been started, irrigated by the same pipes that provided water for the camp's swimming pool, and begin her lessons on desert fruits from the wife of one of the Cairo engineers, a gracious source of information – from recipes to plant medicines and cosmetics – who wore an elegant white shirt-dress to the garden, with white sandals, her hair elaborately sculpted and pinned under a white straw hat. She directed Jean, who was happy to sink her knees and hands into the work.

All day the temple rock absorbed the sunlight; any gap between the blocks trapped the heat like a clay oven. Then, each evening, the stone slowly cooled. Visitors came to experience Abu Simbel at dawn. But Jean knew that the true miracle of the temple was only revealed at dusk when, for one brief twilit hour, the great colossi came to life, stone lips and limbs cooling exactly to the temperature of skin.

One day, three hundred thousand years ago, one of our hominid ancestors in Berekhat Ram leaned down to pick up a tuff of volcanic rock whose shape, by chance, resembled a woman. Then another stone was used to deepen the naturally formed line between “head” and “neck” and between “arm” and “torso.” This is the earliest example of stone made flesh.

In paleolithic Britain, a hunter chipped a handaxe out of flint, taking care not to damage a perfect fossil shell of a bivalve mollusc embedded in the stone. From the hunter fashioning the first tools (the first awareness that matter can be split to make a sharp edge) to the splitting of the atom – a minuscule amount of time in evolutionary terms, about two and a half million years. But perhaps time enough to consider the importance of preserving the beautiful mollusc in the stone.

The history of nations, Avery knew, was not only a history of land but a history of water. Flowing with the Nile over the border of Egypt into the Sudan, Nubia was a country without boundaries, currency, or government, yet an ancient country nonetheless. To the west and to the east, the Sahara. To the south, from the town of Wadi Halfa, the desolate desert of Atmur. For centuries, armies travelled by river for Nubia's gold, its incense and ebony. They came and built their fortresses and tombs, their mosques and churches on the lush thighs of the Nile. When stone is scarce, it is the clearest sign of conquest, just as a tree is a sign of water. The first Christians lived in the Pharaohs' ruins and built their churches in the Pharaohs' temples. Then, in the eighth century, Islam travelled upriver to Nubia, and mosques appeared where the churches had been. Yet conquest was never easy, even by river. The infamous Second, Third, and Fourth Cataracts – and cataracts within cataracts – the Kagbar, Dal, Tangur, Semna, and Batn el Hajar, “the belly of stones” – discouraged trespassers. From Dara to Aswan, caravans of a hundred camels crossed the sand, creaking and jangling with heavy sacks of rubber from the forests of Bahr el Ghazal, with ivory, ostrich feathers, and wild game. They passed through the dry valleys and hills, stopping at last at the oasis of Salima before reaching the Nile south of Wadi Halfa, then following the west bank of the river north into Egypt. Some believe the Nubians are originally from Somaliland, or that they crossed the Red Sea from Asia, by way of the port of Kosseir. Over the centuries, Arabic and Turkish occupiers married Nubian women, and tribes of twenty-eight different lineages lived together in scattered villages along the Nile.

Since the band of naturally fertile, silt-rich soil along the riverbank was only a few metres wide, for thousands of years Nubians have worked their
eskalays
. The
eskalay
, Avery had told Jean, holding his lamp close to an illustration in his journal that lay open beside him on their bed on the river, is the great machine of the desert. Its motor is a yoke of bulls. Countless generations of cattle have plodded tight circles in the sand to draw the river, waterbowl by waterbowl, into fields of chickpea and barley.

Farming land was so limited that shares were passed down, single
feddans
divided and subdivided through generations so many times that, when compensation was to be allocated because of the dam, exasperated clerks found themselves dealing with shares as small as half a square metre. The divisions were so minute and the deeds of ownership so complicated – every single official landowner having died many centuries before – that any hope of straightforward compensation was abandoned. Instead, the Nubian way had to be respected – co-ownership in a communal economy.

In Nubia, families distribute the fruit of the palm among themselves, with shared responsibility for the care of the tree. Cows are the property of a collective of four, each owning a leg, and these shares can be sold and traded. An animal can be rented. The one who feeds and shelters the cow has a right to its milk and calves. Each owner has to provide food and shelter when the animal works his
eskalay
. Division but not divisiveness, for that would literally kill the enterprise.

Before the building of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s, a small dam was constructed, and its height was raised twice – ten, then twenty years later, the villages of lower Nubia, the fertile islands, and the date forests were drowned. Each time, the villagers moved to higher ground to rebuild. And so began the labour migration of Nubian men to Cairo, Khartoum, London. The women, with their long, loosely woven black
gargaras
trailing the sand, erasing their footprints, took over the harvesting and marketing of the crops. They pollinated the date palms, cared for their family's property, and tended the livestock. Men returned from the city to be married, to attend funerals, to claim their share of the harvest. And some returned in 1964 to join their families when, with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement and steel, and millions of rivets, a lake was built in the desert. Nubia in its entirety – one hundred and twenty thousand villagers, their homes, land, and meticulously tended ancient groves, and many hundreds of archaeological sites – vanished. Even a river can drown; vanished too, under the waters of Lake Nasser, was the Nubians' river, their Nile, which had flowed through every ritual of their daily life, had guided their philosophical thought, and had blessed the birth of every Nubian child for more than five thousand years.

In the weeks before the forced emigration, men who returned from labour exile walked through their villages to homes they had not seen in twenty, forty, fifty years. A woman, suddenly young and then just as suddenly old again, looked at the face of a husband barely seen since she was a girl, and children, now middle-aged, looked upon fathers for the first time. For more than three hundred kilometres, the river absorbed such cries and silences, the shock not of death but of life, as men, living ghosts, returned to look upon their birthplace for the last time.

The workers at Abu Simbel fell into small colonies: the Italian stonecutters – the
marmisti –
who could smell faults in the stone at twenty paces; the Egyptian and European engineers; the cooks and technicians; the Egyptian and Nubian labourers; and all the spouses and children. Avery walked through the site and saw a hundred problems and a hundred singular solutions. He saw the clever adaptations made by workers who could not wait three months for replacement parts to arrive from Europe. It gave him a deep pleasure, his father's pleasure, to notice the wire and spring borrowed from another machine, transplanted with the fraternity of an organ donor.

When Avery first saw the Bucyrus machines squatting in the desert at Abu Simbel – the pumps, refrigerators, and generators – it was almost an ache he felt, for these were the machines his father had loved best. William Escher had put great stock in Ruston-Bucyrus reliability – in their famous excavators and in their machines for compressing, ventilating, pumping, winching, heating, freezing, illuminating … He'd had a boy's love of heavy machinery and favoured Bucyrus above all because of their machines born of the Second World War: midget submarines, flameproof locomotives, mine sweepers, landing craft, patrol boats, the Mathilda 400 and Cavalier 220 tanks, the 600 Bren Gun Carriers, and the tunnelling machine commissioned by Winston Churchill and constructed to his personal specifications, a box with a six-foot steel plough in front and a conveyor system in back, designed to dig trenches at the rate of three miles an hour.