The Deceit by Tom Knox

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 he woke the sun was already warm and he drank the very last of his water. He had no idea where he was: just somewhere in the desert. Dirty and dishevelled and dying. But that was where he wanted to be, somewhere no one could find his body: not immediately, anyway.
    Two or three more hours of shuffling across the sands brought him to an outcrop of orange-red rock, hot in the sun. Shadows of birds on the sand told him that vultures were circling above. He’d thought that only happened in movies. But it was true. The birds sensed carrion: a body. Food.
    But they were going to be disappointed. Victor crept around the rocks, then down the adjoining cliff, looking for a cave. His tongue was cracked with dehydration, his eyesight was failing. But at last he found a cave, and it was dark and long and cool.
    Victor got down on his aching knees and crept inside. At the very end, where it became too narrow to even crawl, he laid his head on a rock and stared into the infinite blackness of the darkness above and around. He was clutching the Sokar documents to his chest, and gazing into the darkness of deep time. Maybe one day someone would discover his corpse: another body mummified by the Egyptian desert; and with him the codices and the parchments in their plastic shopping bag.
    Maybe one day someone would, therefore, recover this astonishing truth,