time, Victor took the clattering hotel elevator down to the lobby, where he sat and gazed at the headscarved women drinking Lipton’s tea; then he looked at his watch, on and off, for two hours.
Then he went to his room and drank whisky. Labib had not shown up.
At midnight he got a cryptic text message:
Cannot get in. I will try again one more time. If I succeed I see you in hotel tomorrow 21:00 at your room. Labib.
Precisely twenty-one hours later, Victor heard a furtive knock at his hotel-room door.
Labib.
Labib was out there in the twenty-watt darkness of the landing, carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. Mutely, full of shame, the Copt handed it over.
Victor grabbed the bag. An urgent glance inside gave him confidence. The contents looked authentic. Victor strained to contain his agitation, and his jubilation.
Now it was his turn. From the inner pocket of his blazer he took a thick envelope.
Labib didn’t even bother to count the thousands of dollars therein. Instead, he just smiled, very regretfully; then turned and walked away down the landing.
Alone in his room Victor sat on the bed, trying to quell his excitement. But his hands were trembling as he opened the bag and gazed at the frail documents bound in even frailer goatskin.
The call to prayer echoed across Sohag, across darkened Akhmim, across the moonlit reaches of the Nile, as Victor Sassoon took out the crumbling papyrus sheets of a very ancient document, and began to read.
‘But where are we going, effendi?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I am not understanding?’
‘Please, just drive on.’
Walid shook his head, and lit a Cleopatra cigarette. The smoke filled the taxi as they drove through yet another dusty, sunlit Egyptian village, with metal shacks selling palm oil and soap powder, and minarets soaring into the dusty sky. Dark-skinned boys played naked in the canals.
The cough came again, a hacking, savage cough; Victor Sassoon saw Walid checking him, anxiously, in the rear-view mirror.
‘I sorry, effendi, I smoking, sorry, I stop.’
Walid threw his half-finished cigarette out of the taxi window, even as Victor made vague protestations: because it really didn’t matter, not any more. There were specks of blood in Victor’s handkerchief, tiny sprinkles of scarlet prettily arrayed. He quickly stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and clutched the shopping bag close to his aching chest.
Inside the bag were the Sokar documents. They were far more revelatory than he had expected; more explosively challenging, more conclusive. The first pages of Gnostic spells and curses were interesting, but the next codex in the most obscure dialect of Akhmimic Coptic was quite remarkable, and the Arab gloss, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, was astonishing. And what about the tiny concordance – that brief note in French, probably early or mid-nineteenth century – written by whom, and how, and why? It was perhaps the most killing evidence of all.
Who had hidden these documents? And who had compiled them? Seen the connection? Who had put them together? Some renegade monk? A Copt from the White Monastery? Why not then destroy them?
Sassoon’s first urge had certainly been to destroy the Hoard, to burn the books. But he just couldn’t. Burning books was the antithesis of everything his life had been about: burning books was what the Nazis did, the men who killed his mother and father, his entire family. So Victor had decided to preserve the books, and he was going to take them with him.
An hour passed. Walid smoked and then apologized for smoking. The scenery grew ever more bucolic, losing the last ugliness of urban Egypt, reprising its timeless rural beauty. A side channel of the Nile lay alongside the road, where egrets flapped and dived, dazzling white in the sun. Reeds of green and hazy gold surrounded mud houses; yoked donkeys stood patiently under African palms, drowsing in the heat.
Sassoon tapped on the glass. ‘Where are we?’
‘This next village –’ Walid pointed with a tobacco-stained finger – ‘this Nazlet, I think. End of road, into desert. Or we go on to Assyut.’
Nazlet Khater? Victor recalled a fragment of history. The earliest Egyptian skeletons were discovered here. In caves.
‘So we stop.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Here,’ Victor said. ‘This is where we must stop. I need to go and look at something.’
Walid turned and frowned. ‘Here? Is nothing here! Camel shit. Peasant people.’
‘It’s all right, Walid, I know what I am doing.’
The driver shrugged. ‘OK. I wait you here. How long?’
‘A few hours.’
Another stubborn shrug; Walid was clearly unhappy, but in a protective way. Perhaps it was because Walid was a Muslim, and Victor was, in a way, his guest; Walid’s faith demanded he look after him. Momentarily, Victor considered this paradox, the paradox of Islam – a faith capable of great violence, and yet tenderly hospitable and sweetly generous, and truly egalitarian, too. But all religions were paradoxical, more paradoxical than Victor had ever imagined.
As he walked away from the car he could sense his driver staring after him, at his old Jewish passenger, regretful and sympathetic and frustrated. Victor ignored this; flicking stones with his walking stick, he turned a corner by a scruffy little mosque and saw that the road really did end.
Two camels were tethered by a rusty lamppost at the broken edge of the pavement. The last of life. Beyond them was rock and plains and level sands and nothingness.
Victor kept on walking. The road immediately turned into desert rubble. The sun was hot. He had water and some food in his shopping bag along with the Sokar documents. He wondered how strange he must look: an old Englishman in a blazer, carrying a shopping bag, just walking out into the emptiness.
But there was no one here to see him. Victor walked and walked, with the last of his strength. He felt the sun weaken as he went, beginning to set behind the mountains of the western desert. As the true darkness ensued he sat on a boulder in the cooling shadows. An eagle wheeled in the twilight. The silence was enormous: hosannas of quiet surrounded him.
He slept in his clothes, under a ledge. The pain in his chest was so intense it was like a lover, clutching him too tight. He remembered being a student, sleeping in a tiny single bed with his first wife. Intensely uncomfortable and yet happy. Cambridge. Bicycles. His wife dying in the hospice. There was dust in his mouth. A memory of a young rose by a leaded window.
When
