The Seventh Scroll tes-2 Read online

  The Seventh Scroll

  ( The Egyptian Series - 2 )

  Wilbur Smith

  SEVENTH SCROLL

  By: Wilber Smith

  Synopsis:

  A fading papyrus, nearly four thousand years old. Within it lie the

  clues to a fabulous treasure from an almost forgotten time. ... a riddle

  that becomes a savage battle across the unforgiving terain of North

  Africa. When her husband is brutally murdered , Beautiful half-English,

  half-Egyptian Royan Al Simmu is forced to seek refuge in England. With

  eminent archaeologist Nicholas Quenton-Harper she can pick up the pieces

  of her shattered life and find the courage to return to Ethiopia. For

  Duraid. For the long dead slave Taita. And for the dreams of an ancient

  Pharaoh ... Because others will stop at nothing to claim the prize as

  their own.

  This edition published 1996 by Pan Books

  ISBN 0 330 34415 3

  Copyright ( Wilbur Smith 1995

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  Once more this book is for my wife Danielle.

  Despite all the happy loving years we have spent together I feel that we

  are only just beginning.

  There is so much more to come.

  The dusk crept in from the desert, and shaded the dunes with purple.

  Like a thick velvet cloak it muted all sounds, so that the evening was

  tranquil and hushed.

  From where they stood on the crest of the dune they looked out over the

  oasis and the complex of small villages that surrounded it. The

  buildings were white with flat roofs and the date palms stood higher

  than any of them except the Islamic mosque and the Coptic Christian

  church.

  These bastions of faith opposed each other across the lake.

  The waters of the lake were sparkling. A flight of duck slanted down on

  quick wings to land with a small splash of white close in against the

  reed banks.

  The man and the woman made a disparate couple. He was tall, though

  slightly bowed, his silvering hair catching the last of the sunlight.

  She was young, in her early thirties, slim, alert and vibrant. Her hair

  was thick and curling, restrained now by a thong at the nape of her

  neck.

  "Time to go down now. Alia will be waiting." He smiled down at her

  fondly. She was his second wife. When his first wife died he thought

  that she had taken the sunlight with her. He had not expected this last

  period of happiness in his life. Now he had her and his work. He was a

  man happy and contented.

  Suddenly she broke away from him, and pulled the thong from her hair.

  She shook it out, dense and dark, and she laughed. It was a pretty

  sound. Then she plunged down the steep slip-face of the dune, her long

  skirts billowing around her flying legs. They were shapely and brown.

  She kept her balance until halfway down, when gravity overwhelmed her

  and she tumbled.

  From the top he smiled down on her indulgently.

  Sometimes she was still a child. At others she was a grave and dignified

  woman. He was not certain which he preferred, but he loved her in both

  moods. She rolled to a halt at the bottom of the dune and sat up, still

  laughing, shaking the sand out of her hair. "Your turn!" she called up

  at him. He followed her down sedately, moving with the slight stiffness

  of advancing age, keeping his balance until he reached the bottom.

  He lifted her to her feet. He did not kiss her, although the temptation

  to do so was strong. It was not the Arab way to show public affection,

  even to a beloved wife.

  She "straightened her clothing and retied her hair before they set off

  towards the village. They skirted the reed beds of the oasis, crossing

  the rickety bridges over the irrigation canals. As they passed, the

  peasants returning from the fields greeted him with deep respect.

  "Salaam aleikum, Doktari! Peace be with you, doctor." They honoured all

  men of learning, but him especially for his kindness to them and their

  families over the years.

  Many of them had worked for his father before him. It mattered little

  that most of them were Moslem, while he was a Christian.

  When they reached the villa, Alia, the old housekeeper, greeted them

  with mumbles and scowls. "You are late. You are always late. Why do you

  not keep regular hours, like decent folk? We have a position to

  maintain."

  "Old mother, you are always right," he teased her gently. "What would we

  do without you to care for us?" He sent her away, still scowling to

  cover her love and concern for him.

  They ate the simple meat on the terrace together, dates and olives and

  unleavened bread and goat's milk cheese. It was dark when they finished,

  but the desert stars were bright as candles.

  "Royan, -my flower." He reached across the table and touched her hand.

  "It is time to begin work." He stood up from the table and led the way

  to his study that opened out on to the terrace.

  Royan Al Simma went directly to the tall steel safe against the far wall

  and tumbled the combination. The safe was out of place in this room,

  amongst the old books and scrolls, amongst the ancient statues and

  artefacts and grave goods that were the collection of his lifetime.

  When the heavy steel door swung open, Royan stood back for a moment. She

  always felt this prickle of awe whenever she first looked upon this

  relic of the ages, even after an interval of only a few short hours.

  "The seventh scroll," she whispered, and steeled herself to touch it. It

  was nearly four thousand years old, written by a genius out of time with

  history, a man who had been dust for all these millennia, but whom she

  had come to know and respect as she did her own husband. His words were

  eternal, and they spoke to her clearly from beyond the grave, from the

  fields of paradise, from the presence of the great trinity, Osiris and

  Isis and Horus, in whom he had believed so devoutly. As devoutly as she

  believed in another more recent Trinity.

  She carried the scroll to the long table at which Duraid, her husband,

  was already at work. He looked up as she laid it on the tabletop before

  him, and for a moment she saw the same mystical mood in his eyes that

  had affected her. He always wanted the scroll there on the table, even

  when there was no real call for it. He had the photographs and the

  microfilm to work with. It was as though he needed the unseen presence

  of the ancient author close to him as he studied the texts.

  Then he threw off the mood and was the dispassionate scientist once

  more. "Your eyes are better than mine, my flower," he said. "What do you

  make of this character?"

  She leaned over his shoulder and studied the hieroglyph on the

  photograph of the scroll that he pointed out to her. She puzzled over

  the character for a moment before she took the magnifying glass from

  Duraid's hand and peered through
it again.

  "It looks as though Taita has thrown in another cryptogram of his own

  creation just to bedevil us." She spoke of the ancient author as though

  he were a dear, but sometimes exasperating, friend who still lived and

  breathed, and played tricks upon them.

  "We'll just have to puzzle it out, then," Duraid declared with obvious

  relish. He loved the ancient game. It was his life's work.

  The two of them laboured on into the cool of the night. This was when

  they did their best work. Sometimes they spoke Arabic and sometimes

  English; for them the two languages were as one. Less often they used

  French, which was their third common language. They had both received

  their education at universities in England and the United States, so far

  from this very Egypt of theirs. Royan loved the expression "This very

  Egypt' that Taita used so often in the scrolls.

  She felt a peculiar affinity in so many ways with this ancient Egyptian.

  After all, she was his direct descendant.

  She was a Coptic Christian, not of the Arab line that had so recently

  conquered Egypt, less than fourteen centuries ago. The Arabs were

  newcomers in this very Egypt of hers, while her own blood line ran back

  to the time of the pharaohs and the great pyramids.

  At ten 'clock Royan made coffee for them, heating it on the charcoal

  stove that Alia had prepared for them before she went off to her own

  family in the villa . They drank the 9 sweet, strong brew from thin cups

  that were half-filled with the heavy grounds. While they sipped, they

  talked as old friends.

  .. For Royan that was their relationship, old friends. She had known

  Duraid ever since she had returned from England with her doctorate in

  archaeology and won her job with the Department of Antiquities, of which

  he was the director.

  She had been his assistant when he had opened the tomb in the Valley of

  the Nobles, the tomb of Queen Lostris, the tomb that dated from about

  1780 BC.

  She had shared his disappointment when they had discovered that the tomb

  had been robbed in ancient times and all its treasures plundered. All

  that remained were the marvelous murals that covered the walls and the

  ceilings of the tomb.

  It was Royan herself who had been working at the wall behind the plinth

  on which the sarcophagus had once stood, photographing the murals, when

  a section of the plaster had fallen away to reveal in their niche the

  ten alabaster jars. Each of the jars had contained a papyrus scroll.

  Every one of them had been written and placed there by Taita, the stave

  of the queen.

  Since then their lives, Duraid's and her own, seemed to have revolved

  around those scraps of papyrus. Although there was some damage and

  deterioration, in the main they had survived nearly four thousand years

  remarkably intact.

  What a fascinating story they contained, of a nation attacked by a

  superior enemy, armed with horse and chariot that were still alien to

  the Egyptians of that time. Crushed by the Hyksos hordes, the people of

  the Nile were forced to flee. Led by their queen, Lostris of the tomb,

  they followed the great river southwards almost to its source amongst

  the brutal mountains of the Ethiopian highlands.

  Here amongst those forbidding mountains, Lostris had entombed the

  mummified body of her husband, the Pharaoh Mamose, who had been slain in

  battle against the Hyksos.

  Long afterwards Queen Lostris had led her people back northwards to this

  very Egypt. Armed now with their own horses and chariots, forged into

  hard warriors in the African wilderness, they had come storming back

  down the cataracts of the great river to challenge once more the Hyksos

  invader, and in the end to triumph over him and wrest the double crown

  of upper and lower Egypt from his grasp.

  It was a story that appealed to every fibre of her being, and that had

  fascinated her as they had unravelled each hieroglyph that the old slave

  had penned on the papyrus'

  It had taken them all these years, working at night here in the villa on

  the oasis after their daily routine work at the museum in Cairo was

  done, but at last the ten scrolls had been deciphered - all except the

  seventh scroll. This was the one that was the enigma, the one which the

  author had cloaked in layers of esoteric shorthand and allusions so

  obscure that they were unfathomable at this remove of time. Some of the

  symbols he used had never figured before in all the thousands of texts

  that they had studied in their combined working lives. It was obvious to

  them both that Taita had not intended that the scrolls should be read by

  any eyes other than those of his beloved queen. These were his last gift

  for her to take with her beyond the grave.

  It had taken all their combined skills, all their imagination and

  ingenuity, but at last they were approaching the conclusion of the task.

  There were still many gaps in the translation and many areas where they

  were uncertain whether or not they had captured the true meaning, but

  they had laid out the bones of the manuscript in such order that they

  were able to discern the outline of the creature it represented.

  Now Duraid sipped his coffee and shook his head as he had done so often

  before. "It frightens me," he said. "The responsibility. What to do with

  this knowledge we have gleaned. If it should fall into the wrong hands

  He sipped and sighed before he spoke again. "Even if we take it to the

  right people, will they believe this material that is nearly four

  thousand years old?"

  "Why must we bring in others?" Royan asked with an edge of exasperation

  in her voice. "Why can we not do alone what has to be done?" At times

  like these the differences between them were most apparent. His was the

  caution of age, while hers was the impetuosity of youth.

  "You do not understand," he said. It always annoyed her when he said

  that, when he treated her as the Arabs treated their women in a totally

  masculine world. She had known the other world where women demanded and

  received the right to be treated as equals. She was a creature caught

  between those worlds, the Western world and the Arab world.

  Royan's mother was an English woman who had worked at the British

  Embassy in Cairo in the troubled times after World War II. She had met

  and married Royan's father, who had been a young Egyptian officer on the

  staff of Colonel Nasser. It was an unlikely union and had not persisted

  into Royan's adolescence.

  Her mother had insisted upon returning to England, to her home town of

  York, for Royan's birth. She wanted her child to have British

  citizenship. After her parents had separated, Royan, again at her

  mother's insistence, had been sent back to England for her schooling,

  but all her holidays had been spent with her father in Cairo. Her

  father's career had prospered exceedingly, and in the end he had

  attained ministerial rank in the Mubarak government. Through her love

  for him she came to look upon herself as more Egyptian than English.

  It was her father who had arran
ged her marriage to Duraid Al Simma. It

  was the last thing that he had done for her before his death. She had

  known he was dying at the time, and she had not found it in her heart to

  defy him. All her modern training made her want to resist the

  old-fashioned Coptic tradition of the arranged marriage, but her

  breeding and her family and her Church were against her. She had

  acquiesced.

  Her marriage to Duraid had not proved as insufferable as she had dreaded

  it might be. It might even have been entirely comfortable and satisfying

  if she had never been introduced to romantic love. However, there had

  been her liaison with David while she was up at university. He had swept

  her up in the hurly-burly, in the heady delirium, and, in the end, the

  heartache, when he had left her to marry a blonde English rose approved

  of by his parents.

  She respected and liked Duraid, but sometimes in the night she still

  burned for the feel of a body as firm and young as her own on top of

  hers.

  Duraid was still speaking and she had not been listening to him. She

  gave him her full attention once more. "I have spoken to the minister

  again, but I do not think he believes in me. I think that Nahoot has

  convinced him that I am a little mad." He smiled sadly. Nahoot Guddabi

  was his ambitious and well-connected deputy. "At any rate the minister

  says that there are no government funds available, and that I will have

  to seek outside finance.

  So, I have been over the list of possible sponsors again, and have

  narrowed it down to four. There is the Getty Museum of course, but I

  never like to work with a big impersonal institution. I prefer to have a

  single man to answer to.

  Decisions are always easier to reach."None of this was new to her, but

  she listened dutifully.

  "Then there is Herr von Schiller. He has the money and the interest in

  the subject, but I do not know him well enough to trust him entirely."

  He paused, and Royan had listened to these musings so often before that

  she could anticipate him.

  "What about the American? He is a famous collector," she forestalled

  him.

  "Peter Walsh is a difficult man to work with. His passion to accumulate

  makes him unscrupulous. He frightens me a little."

  "So who does that leave?" she asked.

  He did not reply, for they both knew the answer to her question.