The Sleeper in the Sands by Tom Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

of salmon pink ran through gleaming white calcite; and we could see, piled against these cliffs, heaps of rubble and limestone chippings. Newberry dismounted from his camel and hurried across to them. He picked up a handful, inspected them for a moment, then flung them down again. ‘But this is a quarry!’ he exclaimed. The disappointment on his face was almost painful to behold. ‘Nothing but a quarry!’
    He strode across to the bedawin, and spoke angrily with them. I saw the bedawin point, and then Newberry reach into his pocket for more coins. He handed them across impatiently, as one of the bedawin dismounted and began to pass further into the ravine.
    I hurried after Newberry. ‘What did he say?’
    ‘He claims -- so far as I could make him out -- that the King made sacrifices here, when he succumbed to temptation and became a servant of Iblis.’ Newberry paused, his doubt and disappointment still evident on his face. ‘He claims there are inscriptions marking the site.’ ‘What about the tombs?’
    Newberry’s lips tightened, and he pointed to mine shafts dug into the cliffs. ‘Those are the so-called tombs.’ He shrugged in despair. ‘So God knows what the inscriptions will turn out to be.’
    I looked ahead at the bedawin. He had stopped by a fork in the ravine, and when we joined him he pointed into the shadows of one of the clefts. Newberry ordered him to lead on; but the bedawin shuddered and shook his head. He muttered a garbled prayer, then suddenly began to scamper back the way he had come. Newberry watched him go with undisguised contempt. ‘These people!’ he muttered, passing into the cleft.
    I followed him; and the moment I did so felt suddenly cold. We had been walking in shadow before, but the darkness now seemed icy and black, and I found myself shuddering just as the bedawin had done. I called out to Newberry to ask him if he felt it. He turned round impatiently. ‘Feel what?’ he barked. But I could not reply. My throat felt hoarse - parched with a baffling, unaccountable fear.
    As I joined Newberry at the end of the cleft, I asked him again if he could not sense something strange about the place. But he was too distracted even to have heard me, and pointed instead to the innermost wall of the cleft. ‘Well,’ he muttered despondently, ‘there it is.’ I gazed at where he was pointing. There was an inscription, clearly visible, chiselled out from the rock, and above it the disk of a sun with its rays curling downwards. Two figures could just be made out squatting underneath it; both were very worn, but seemed to represent a man and a woman.
    For a moment my heart had leapt, but then, as I studied the inscription itself, I frowned in disappointment and puzzlement. ‘Is it Arabic?’ I asked, for my knowledge of that language was as yet rudimentary. I reached up to trace the inscription with my finger, then glanced back at Newberry. ‘Can you read what it says?’
    He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid my knowledge of the lingo’s only good enough to know when the beggars want more backseesh out of me.’
    ‘Should we note it down, then?’
    Newberry frowned. ‘Why should we do that?’
    ‘Well’ - I pointed to the figure of the sun -- ‘it seems so similar to the portraits of the Aten.’
    ‘I suppose there is a superficial resemblance. But it is clearly of a piece with the Arabic inscription. That is hardly going to lead us to Akh-en-Aten’s tomb.’
    ‘But you said yourself. . .’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘How history in Egypt runs very deep.’
    ‘Not that deep, old man.’ Newberry gazed reproachfully up at the sun once again. ‘Why at the very earliest, it must date from almost two thousand years after Akh-en-Aten’s death. No use at all. No, no - this whole damn place is a busted flush.’ He kicked at a stone with sudden violence. ‘Come on, Carter. Let’s get out of here.’ He turned and walked briskly back down the ravine. I pulled out a piece of paper and quickly