<< Go Back

Aegypt

By L D. Alford

Order Now!

One
Storm clouds grew across the darkening sky. They squared off like
titans, rising tremendously over the burning sands. The air
pressure dropped suddenly, caressing yawning ears, and in the
storm’s wake, the nearly constant winds died. Silence charged the air
like static electricity. Not a sound broke the stillness until, with a harsh
crackle of blue fire, the clouds burst open and poured a solid torrent
over the acrid waste.
At first, the sands soaked up the downpour like a sponge. Then,
glutted, they cast off the water in ever-increasing amounts. The initial
runlets took a while to form, but soon, under the blasting deluge of the
heavy rain, they assumed the character of reverse deltas, inverse Niles
that funneled the water into dry streambeds and deeper canyons. The
dirty, heavy, grit-laden liquid fought its way through the bone-dry sand
until it was finally and completely absorbed.
Lieutenant Paul Bolang laughed mirthlessly; the surging water
would never make its way back to even the ancient lake Chott el
Fedjadj. Set in an endless inequitable cycle, the liquid rose daily, sucked
out of this hellish waste to be returned only a few times a year.
He cast the butt of his cigarette to the sand and spat a few grains of
loose tobacco after it. Already the sun was flooding him and the sodden
plain with blazing splatters of heat.
Paul cursed under his breath; not a drop of rain had touched him.
He slung his rifle more evenly over his shoulder and turned back
toward the line of march. The last traces of mist streamed from the
clouds, and he could taste the water with his lungs—refreshing. The
heat and the dryness would be back soon enough to overwhelm his
senses.
Paul signaled his men to remount. His horse, l’Orage, was skittish
and danced back a step as Paul hauled his aching frame into the saddle.
Her muscles rippled like silk under her black coat, and Paul touched
her gently to soothe her. l’Orage had been his steed for nearly three
years, almost half the time he had been in Tunisia.
He had bought her from a Berber’s market on the coast. She was
the most beautiful horse he had ever seen. Feral and full of fire, she was
uncontrollable in the hands of her merchant owners and stood
blindfolded and hobbled in the market horse pen. A demon in the guise
of a horse, she was black as charcoal without a trace of lighter
markings. Paul knew she was stolen the minute his eyes lit upon her.
He paid in cash—francs, and few of those, because of her temperament.
When he entered the pen to claim her, Berbers, Arabs, and
Tunisians lined the enclosure to watch the black fiend trample the
foolish Lieutenant. Paul walked quietly up to her, and when the
laughing merchant stripped off the blindfold and hobbles, Paul spoke a
single word. l’Orage calmed immediately and let him stroke her face.
Contemptuously, he led her on a light field-lead out of the marketsquare.
The marketplace had turned into a frenzy of babbling men,
women, and children. The native peoples sidled out of Paul’s way as if
he were himself a demon from the pit. At the edge of the market, to the
amazement of the spectators, Paul leapt upon l’Orage bareback and rode
off at a gallop. He laughed all the way back to the garrison.
l’Orage was a horse trained for war. She was an Arabian, bred and
drilled to the battlefield. She was trained to kill and to the tactics of
combat. She was a European’s horse. Paul could tell by her carriage and
by the saddle scars on her flanks. Only one type of European warrior
had found his way into the wilds of Tunisia: l’Orage had to be a
Frenchman’s horse. Paul guessed that, but his confirmation came when
he first stood before her, wondering himself if she would strike him
before he could speak. His single word was French, and with that single
word, he knew she answered to only one tongue—French. Not to the
Tunisian or Berber or Arabic her previous masters unsuccessfully tried,
only to French. In combat after combat, she proved herself to be, by far,
one of the finest horses in the Legion stables.
l’Orage was nervous; she smelled the blood that stained Paul’s
uniform as well as her own sweat-covered flanks—relics of the battle
they had fought not many hours ago.
Paul chuckled without humor. The reaper had descended like a
night demon. The sleeping bandits didn’t have a chance. Abdu Habad
and his men would not soon again attack the villages in this district.
After the slaughter of last night, it would take the bandit a good while
to rebuild his band. That is, if Habad were not also dead along with
more than half of his men.
Merde. If this job weren’t so horrible it would have its grim
pleasures. Slicing the heads off of men like Abdu Habad was a great
pleasure.
Automatically, the column of thirty Legionnaires formed behind
Paul. They were dressed like him: combat khakis almost the same color
as the sand, finished with the signature Legionnaire’s cap and its
trailing cloth. Their clothing was stained from combat and sweat. Their
hands were marked by powder burns and blood. Each man slung a true
rifle, ready, over his right shoulder. There were no carbines in Paul’s
command: the flat desert visibility allowed long accurate rifle shots, and
yet the weapons had to always be ready at hand because the dunes and
mountains provided good cover to the bandits for ambush.
Without a word from the Lieutenant, Sergeant le Boehm nodded,
and the flankers and pointmen immediately took their positions. The
Sergeant himself rode on Paul’s left only a few paces back. The men also
seemed to bunch toward their Lieutenant. Whether they did so for the
little security he could afford or to provide for his own protection, Paul
couldn’t tell—never could tell.
The hard rocky desert went on and on and was lost in the blurred
horizon. Even now, in mirages and bright lines, waves of heat rose
harshly upwards. Already the lingering signs of the rainstorm had
disappeared, and the ground cracked as the sun baked out what little
moisture remained.
The sun treated a man the same way—it tore the water out of him.
Paul had seen corpses uncovered by sandstorms. They were desiccated,
like leather, ghastly. Not long after death, their bodies burst from the
heat. The organs, cast like limp balloons, dried into fantastic shapes, and
the faces were so clear you could read the terror of their last thoughts.
A similar horror had followed Paul Bolang from the battlefields of
the Great War. Paul had seen much death since he’d entered the deserts
of Tunisia. It sprang like the seeds of reaped wheat from the desert
sands—the only thing that would grow…death and dying. Fortunately,
he lost no men during this raid—so far, thank God. They had taken
prizes: bandit’s gold, jewels, the products of villainy—and the fetish of
Abdu Habad. That would make an outstanding trophy for the officers’
mess. It was flecked with the blood of the bandit himself: the chief had
leapt up so suddenly when he felt Paul’s knife at his throat that the
stroke did not slice deeply nor cleanly. The man was probably dead; he
had left enough of his blood as he vaulted onto a horse and escaped
across the desert. Paul didn’t care. Abdu Habad had lost face, had run
away from the Legionnaire Lieutenant. He was not worthy, in the eyes
of his band of cutthroats, of even the respect of a woman.
Paul smiled. That was his simple plan: the bandits would be
shamed. His Legionaries patiently killed all men who fought or
remained in the camp and contemptuously allowed those who ran to
escape. The word of the attack and the cowardly actions of the bandit
chief would circulate from the lips of those who got away. In the eyes
of the desert people, they were less than men, and they would likely
never fight again. Their will was broken.
Paul smiled again. Another victory, another orchestrated defeat of
the enemy, another cast of the dice. Sacré bleu, he had won again. The
fire of battle still coursed like wine through his veins.
In the strengthening wind, a sweeping sigh came lightly to Paul’s
ears, and far ahead, the Chott Djerid, a sparkling, mica-filled plain
became visible. The dry, scree-filled lake mimicked its ancient form in
the guise of a dreamlike mirage, but all was salt and sand, rock and
mica, rising like a tide as far as the eye could see. The wind whistled
across it day and night with almost no relief.
Paul shaded his eyes against the stinging brilliance of the Chott
and intently scanned its far western edge. Even through his binoculars,
their destination, Fort Saint, was still invisible in the distant haze. As
they closed on the depression, the Oriental rose like a great plateau
from the western base of the Chott. Fort Saint and the villages of Nefta
and Tozeur spread across the tabletop of the plateau—all three
overlooking the Chott Djerid to the east and the Chott Melrhir to the
west.
At noon, Paul and his weary line of Legionnaires reached the road,
a dirt track that crisscrossed the steep side of the plateau all the way to
the summit. Beside them, the Chott rose to the rock of the plateau, then
spread out to the far eastern horizon. If the dead lake ever hoped to
reduce the sides of the plateau, those desires were broken long ago
when the water had gone. The ancient inroads of the small dry
landlocked sea were only preserved in caves, secret grottos, and saltscaled
stone.
Paul and his men commenced the long torturous climb. With only
the sounds of hooves against stone echoing out into the open drop
beside them to the south, they kept a smooth pace, never faltering even
as the sun descended past zenith, heralding the hottest part of the day.
His own hunger and fatigue reminded Paul of the needs of his men.
Halfway up, he raised his hand, and like a machine, the men trained to
action immediately dismounted and sought any shelter for themselves
and their horses. Paul lifted himself out of the saddle and slumped
down into the shade of a large overhang. He looked at his watch and
nodded to Sergeant le Boehm. The Sergeant conveyed Paul’s signal to
the rest of the troop, and the men settled to eat the canned rations they
each marked for their dinner. The Legionnaires were nearly invisible
except the flankers and pointmen conspicuous at their guard. They
stood carefully attentive and waited their turn in the shade and with
their food.
Paul opened potted meat and canned bread, both rancid with the
heat, but he ate them anyway, and washed down his meal with a can of
peaches and a mouthful of iodine-flavored water. Le Boehm changed
the guards, and after another thirty minutes, Paul signaled the Sergeant.
Le Boehm’s piercing whistle announced the march, and they took up
the arduous climb again.
The troop reached the top of the plateau just as the sun was casting
long shadows like fingers across the sand and stone. Flanked by the
villages of Nefta and Tozeur, Fort Saint loomed in black relief. The
sunlight streamed like an open oven, washing from the west around
them. Even as it dropped, the disk of the sun still fanned the land with
the strength of a furnace. It touched the edges of the buildings with red
and yellow fire.
The walls of Fort Saint, a great square of brooding brick and stone,
were cast in the design of a thousand years of continuous warfare. They
were crenulated, six meters thick, faced with two meters of
homogeneous granite. A tower rose above the thin plain on each of the
four corners of the fort, ten meters high, twice the height of the walls.
From the top of the towers, the guards could observe both the northern
and southern approaches to the plateau. They could look full into the
depths of both of the dead lakes—Djerid and Melrhir, both at the
bottom of unscalable rock cliffs. The fort sat at an angle so the towers
were aligned toward each compass point. Its main gate was situated
squarely in the center of the southeastern wall.
The Muslims had built Fort Saint when they had conquered
Tunisia during the original Jihads. The Fort was taken over by the
French in the middle of the 19th century, after Tunisia became one of
their colonies. It served the same purpose now as it did when it was
built: to protect the coastal cities from the desert tribes.
Around the fort, the windswept ground was textured with holes,
scree, and—sand. The sand lodged wherever it could find a crevasse or
projection to hold it, and piled along anything that was stationary. The
ground directly before Fort Saint was unusually flat, forming a large
rectangular area. From the towers, Paul earlier noted the exactness and
full dimensions of this area, and in his spare time, he measured it.
Paul found the sides, although the corners were hidden in blown
sand. Using his best approximation, they were nearly the same length.
The sides of the area lay aligned with the compass, the long sides to the
north and south, 50 meters in length by 40 meters in width. By the
ancient Egyptian scale, that was approximately 100 by 80 royal cubits.
Paul estimated the level of the area exceeded almost two
centimeters over the entire shape. The perfection of the alignment and
level and the measure of the area excited his archeological interest.
Before he’d become a soldier, Paul had studied archeology….
b
Paul spent his childhood in many countries and places. The dictates of
his family’s profession left him to spend his early years in the cities of
the colonies of France: Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and British
Palestine. He fought and played in the streets with the children of the
colonial nations. It was only natural that he learned their languages and
culture.
When Paul was twelve, his family finally returned to Paris. His
father went there to accept the promised position he’d sought as his
life-long ambition, and Paul was forced to learn a new culture and new
way of learning. He longed for his past freedom, but he embraced the
formal education his quick mind desired. In spite of his ready
acceptance and incorporation into his own French heritage, he found
himself aggravated with his peers; he viewed all things without the
cultural boundaries they enshrined. In his mind cultural grays turned
into absolute blacks and whites. He based his decisions on knowledge
rather than traditions. This, instead of separating his new friends from
him, seemed to attract them even more. He achieved a popularity and
leadership he accepted but did not desire.
Paris provided him much more than this experience of his own
French heritage. Although Paul spent some years in the lands of
antiquity, he had no exposure to the treasures of those places. In the
Louvre, for the first time, he came face to face, with the ancients. The
beautiful articles from the past intrigued and beguiled him. He spent
hours studying them. The mummies and artifacts of Egypt, especially,
cast a spell over him. Though technically too young for the classes, he
attended every lecture presented on this particular subject. There he
learned of the work of Jean Francois Champollion, who first deciphered
the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, and then he knew the
future life had prepared him to seize.
To Paul, it seemed only natural he should enter the Academie des
Sciences of the Institut de France to study Egyptology and Theology.
His father was a military courtier—a man of stern discipline and
unrelenting decorum. When Paul broached his plans over the family
table, his father stared with incredulity. “I and your grandfather and his
father have all served France as army officers. This service is not good
enough for you?” He didn’t give Paul time for a reply. “I have prepared
a position for you in the Military Academy. You are expected to fill this
position.”
Paul had not expected his father’s negative response. “Father, I
have spent my life in Paris aspiring to attend the Academie des
Sciences. The study of the ancients is already my life, and it will be my
profession—”
“But it is not the profession of the family Bolang. We have honor
and position to uphold. I cannot allow my only son to spit in my face to
fulfill his desires. What of my desires? What of the desires of your
family?”
Paul looked slowly around the formal table. The crystal, china, and
silver were lifeless and inhuman. The sudden stillness of each of the
members of his family turned them into caricatures as lifeless as these
inanimate objects. His father’s hands were balled into fists. His
unblinking eyes flashed their intense displeasure. His mother looked on
Paul with pity, as though he was throwing away the future generations
of the family Bolang. His sisters sat in stony and unmoving silence. No
one risked the displeasure of their father and no one willfully disobeyed
him.
But to Paul, the decision was easy. “The family Bolang will stand—
and progress and continue—no matter what profession I follow. I’m
sorry, but I cannot comply with your advice or your dictates, Father.”
Paul stood, bowed, and an amazed silence followed him as he
walked out of the dining room, out of the house, and into a scholarship
at the Academie des Sciences.
His father’s disappointment became an unassailable barrier
between them for years.
Meanwhile Paul’s gift for languages and his keen determination—
at least as strong as his father’s—brought him honor and professional
acclaim. By his sixth year of study, then a graduate student working
toward his Ph.D., Paul had made a good start in the direction of
continuing the work of translating Egyptian hieroglyphics and language
that Jean Francois Champollion had started.
The Great War changed all that.
The draft didn’t spare any able-bodied man, and Paul was
conscripted into the French Army to fight in the trenches along the
static battlelines. He was enlisted as a private. Paul approached his new,
forced, position in life both academically and stoically. The common
officers were fools. The men were like sheep led to a slaughter. Paul
waited his chance.
His unit spent only a few weeks training. Then, as yet unbloodied,
they were marched to the front. Streams of the wounded, dead, and
maimed were carried, hobbled, or rode from the front as his unit
marched toward the battlefield ahead of them.
Finally, his battalion received their orders, and they lined up in an
orderly row in a forward assault trench near the German forces. The
trench was a quarter filled with water, excrement, and mud. On one
side stood a forested hill and on the other a plain of barbed wire.
Their Lieutenant shook as he read his orders. Then, like a teacher
instructing slow-witted students, he explained them to the expectant
soldiers: “You must run in the face of the enemy fire and take the first
set of German trenches.” This seemed simple enough. With this man in
command, Paul knew, their assault was doomed to failure.
From far behind the lines, to signal the attack, the French artillery
fired a salvo into the German trenches. A ragged cheer encouraged the
men forward, and on all sides, French soldiers rushed out of the
trenches.
Only thirty meters into their charge, Paul’s Lieutenant was shot in
the head and fell dead at his feet. The men, surprised and awed by the
suddenness and immediacy of death, flattened themselves to the
ground. The hail of bullets and bursting shells was relentless. They all
clasped the furrowed and protective earth unmindful of the mission and
their orders.
Paul intuitively took the officer’s whistle and baton. Heedless of
the enemy fire, he stood up and called the men to regroup. ‘Up. Up, and
follow me.’ They stood reluctantly, sheepishly, and he led them at a run
to the lea of the hill. Here the trees gave them some shelter from the
flying shrapnel. Quickly, before they could protest, Paul organized
them into five squads of ten. Then he led them over the hill and
directed their attack against the German positions. From the hillside,
they descended like avenging angels on the German line. Under Paul’s
guidance, they overwhelmed two machine-gun nests and turned the
weapons on their owners. Paul’s capture of that part of the trench took
enough pressure off the other struggling French attacks that they could
complete the assault. All along the line, the French forces signaled
success.
Paul was exhilarated. He settled his men into their new defensive
positions. They held the German trench easily until they were ordered
to retreat. Paul was incredulous. They had given their blood for this bit
of land, and he refused to yield it up. Eventually, they faded back with
the rest of the line to their previous positions. And soon the Germans
took back the empty trenches.
When his part in the leadership of the battle became known, Paul
was promoted to Sergeant. Before long, he had progressed through the
ranks and in notoriety, until he was commissioned a Lieutenant in the
Army of France.
Leadership and authority seemed natural to Paul. Men felt no
reluctance to entrust their lives to him. On the deadly battlefields of the
Great War, Paul discovered a new love, a new profession. His family’s
profession: killing, warfare. The knowledge he gleaned from the study
of antiquity paid dividends in the business of war. The same battle
strategies that worked for Alexander, Napoleon, and Frederick also
worked for him.
Paul gained proficiency in war like a man born to slaughter. He
marched to the tunes of the martial airs and was obsessed with them.
When the war ended—the last war, the war to end all wars—he was
deflated and morose.
He marched into Paris with command orders and his family
greeted him at the elite Garrison de Paris. His father kissed both his
cheeks. “Paul, you brought honor back to our family.”
His mother touched his rank with astonishment and pride. She
hugged him while tears streamed down her cheeks. “I am just happy
you are back with us and alive, my son.”
But Paul was even more astonished to learn the orders gave him a
command in the Garrison de Paris itself.
His father said, “Your successes are well-known among my friends.
I easily convinced them to honor you with this command. The
foolishness of the past is forgotten and forgiven.”
Paul almost seamlessly reentered the daily formal life of his family.
He immersed himself into the training and duties of his command.
With enthusiasm, he renewed part-time study at the Academie des
Sciences, still hoping to earn his doctoral degree.
In the first few months after returning to Paris, Paul realized with
amazement that he was unhappy—unhappy with his peacetime
military command, unhappy with the university, and unhappy with
what he had become. And, he realized, he was addicted to slaughter. He
could not explain his feelings to his parents. He only knew what the
answer must be.
His father didn’t try to hold him back this time. “Paul, Paul?” was
all he could repeat—an agony of questions without any complete
answers from his peculiar son. His mother begged him to stay. His
friends said nothing. They were all either dead or graduates. He was not
missed at the Academy. The prejudice of liberal studies against the
military was too strong to accept even a war hero. None of these things
could hold him—could prevent him from fulfilling his new calling.
Paul sought out the Legion Etrangere, the French Foreign Legion,
and in that brotherhood found a bosom of relief. In the familiar
colonies of France, there was killing enough, there were rights to
wrong, and he could vent the peculiarities of his nature in the deaths of
evil men.
b
After seven years in Tunisia, now a Lieutenant in the French Foreign
Legion, and one year as the Vice Commandant of Fort Saint, Paul
rediscovered the mystery and power he divined long ago—the study of
Egyptology. He was not idle in the intervening years, simply unexcited.
He kept up his own studies in the field. He spent his salary on the
newest books and some archeological pieces from far-off Cairo.
His studies were not in vain. When, on that initial day, his Vice
Commandant orders tucked in his coat pocket, Paul had ridden l’Orage
to Fort Saint, the first thing he noticed was the almost perfectly flat
area in front of the fort. He was compelled to dismount and run his
hand along the unusually smooth surface.
For a long time after that, except to train the fort’s troops on it,
Paul was too busy with the affairs of Fort Saint to bother with the
rectangular area. But nearly six months of observation of the flat slab of
stone developed Paul’s curiosity. He finally took a shovel and cleared
off the least-covered, southwestern corner.
The sand was deep, but after an hour, Paul’s shovel finally clanged
against stone. After a few more minutes, he cleared the top of the
corner. Paul gently brushed the remaining sand from the stone, and his
grazing hand caught first in a smooth lip and then in an obvious deep
impression. He blew the remaining granules off the stone. In the wake
of his breath, a carving was revealed to him. Perfectly preserved in the
hard stone was the engraving of a hand with the index finger extended
and a square beneath it. Engraved deeply enough to last for ages, it
looked like an Egyptian glyph, but it was like no Egyptian hieroglyphic
Paul had ever seen before. It did not match any known form of glyph.
It was unusual in its execution, and at the top of the stone, thin cornices
were chiseled into the slab as if it once supported a cornerstone. The
thought seemed impossible: could this flat space once have supported
an Egyptian building?
Paul uncovered the opposite northwestern corner. Again, he found
the glyph of a hand with the index finger extended, above a square. He
spent an hour walking from one corner to the other. The hieroglyphics
were set opposed, which was common in Egyptian inscriptions, the
wrists toward the northern and southern walls, the fingers almost
facing one another; however, the marks angled slightly. They mirrored
an angle to the west. Paul found this unfathomable—how could the
precise measure of the walls give way to the mirrored imprecision of
the glyphs?
The idea of an Egyptian building here was incredible. If the find
could be authenticated, it would move the known influence of the
ancient Egyptians at least a thousand kilometers to the west. Such
knowledge would be revolutionary….

Order Now!

<< Go Back