The Messiah Secret - James Becker [74]
‘It isn’t much, now,’ Angela replied, ‘but in its heyday it was a busy, populous place. Several thousand people lived here, but now it’s probably only a handful. Let’s find somewhere to park the car, and then we’ll have a look round.’
The village wasn’t quite as deserted as it appeared. There were a few locals wandering about, their white clothes grubby from the dust that swirled everywhere each time a vehicle passed through the settlement. Some were sitting beside the road outside a small café, smoking hookah pipes or drinking thick black coffee from tiny glasses. Finding somewhere to park their car wasn’t difficult. Bronson pulled over on some waste ground.
‘I expected it to be a lot bigger, and a whole lot busier, than this,’ he muttered, as he locked the car.
‘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