The Messiah Secret полностью

‘It’s not on the most popular tourist itineraries,’ Angela said. ‘In fact, I don’t think it’s on any tourist itineraries, so apart from the locals the only people likely to be here are wandering archaeologists, and I don’t even see any of them. I read somewhere that an American team came over here five or six years ago to excavate this site, but I’ve heard nothing about it since. This is one of the few major – by that I mean historically important – places in Egypt that hasn’t already been picked clean by the archaeologists.’

‘They were excavating Shoshenq’s temple, I suppose?’

‘Probably not just the temple. This place was a fortress, and also a necropolis. There are thousands of tombs here somewhere that date back almost four millennia. I assume the team would have looked at the whole site, rather than just a bit of it.’

‘So nobody’s ever really studied the place before them?’ Bronson asked.

‘Not really, though there have been one or two spectacular finds reported here. The earliest known example of demotic script was found here, on a piece of papyrus. That dates from about six hundred and sixty BC. But because el-Hiba is so old, and has had so many influences – Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and so on – any dig here would have to be a long and wide-ranging excavation.’

They walked on, heading for an open area at the very top of the settlement that they guessed would give them a decent view of the whole site.

‘Spectacular,’ Bronson said, as they stopped and looked around.

Below them, the ruins of the reddish-brown mud-brick walls descended in tumbled waves and terraces towards the surrounding plain and the eastern bank of the slowly flowing River Nile.

‘Quite a place,’ Angela agreed. ‘The high ground would have given the defenders a significant advantage in any conflict, and being so close to the river meant that they were protected from attack on that side. Right, now let’s find the temple.’

At the far end of el-Hiba, JJ Donovan stood beside a part of the old city walls and watched his targets through a small pair of binoculars.

About a hundred yards away, Bronson and Angela had their backs to him and appeared to be looking at something. Then they suddenly turned directly towards him, and for a brief, unsettling instant, it seemed to him as if they were staring right at him, their magnified faces clearly visible through the lenses of the binoculars.

Then he saw Angela gesture, and they turned back and started walking slowly down the hill away from him.

The walls were massive. Not just feet thick, but yards thick, the old mud-bricks still largely intact. ‘These must be the old city defences,’ Angela said. ‘They’re not in a bad state of repair, bearing in mind how old they are. They date from the Twenty-First Dynasty – that’s about one thousand BC – so they’ve been standing here for three millennia.’

Bronson glanced around. The village nestled in palm trees – this close to the Nile, the soil was obviously reasonably fertile – and more palms studded the settlement itself. But the main road was busy, cars and trucks roaring past them at regular intervals, and they had to be careful to keep well clear of the road itself.

‘We’ve no guidebook or anything,’ Angela said, ‘so we’ll just have to walk around until we find what’s left of the Temple that Shoshenq built. All I know is that it’s somewhere inside the old walls, which is why I thought we’d start looking from here.’

Slowly they started to retrace their steps, looking closely at all the structures as they passed them. A couple of times Angela thought she’d spotted it, but each time she was mistaken. Then she looked ahead and muttered something under her breath.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What?’ Bronson looked where she was pointing.

‘I think these Egyptian idiots have driven the bloody road straight through the temple. Look, you can see the same kind of stone walls on both sides of it over there.’

It wasn’t anything like as clear as that to Bronson. ‘You might be right,’ he said, ‘but perhaps the engineers had no option. There might have been nowhere else here they could have built the road.’

‘So they demolished half of an irreplaceable temple just to lay down a strip of tarmac? There’s always an alternative in this kind of situation, Chris. This is just archaeological vandalism, caused by nothing more than sheer laziness. They could have routed the road around the hill, down in the valley. It would only have added a few tens of yards to the length, and it might even have been easier to do.’

‘Yes, but when this road was built the government may not have realized this was an important site. I thought that most of the excavations over here had been undertaken by foreign archaeologists anyway. Essentially, Egypt’s been dug up by the British and the French and the Americans, not by the Egyptians themselves. They probably just saw a bunch of old stones and thought they’d do nicely as a hardcore base for the road. I don’t suppose it’s the first time something like that has happened.’