Nag Hammadi, Qena, Egypt
At 2.42 p.m., Michael pulled the Mitsubishi Pajero off the Al Nagda in downtown Nag Hammadi, turning sharply onto El-sadat. Emily navigated from the passenger seat, a large map unfolded on her lap. Chris, who had slept for most of the long drive south from Cairo, had awoken thirty minutes before and seemed intent on regaling his partners with a running commentary on everything he saw out of his back-seat window. Though his skill set meant he would take the lead once they were in the desert itself, the drive down the Egyptian motorway he was content to leave to the others.
‘You want the left onto Al Hekma road,’ Emily said, ‘then two and a half blocks and right onto Masr Aswan Al Sree.’ Michael peered closely at the road signs as he drove. Street names in the small town were not well marked, and his familiarity with Arabic script was rough at best.
‘Just prompt me when to turn,’ he noted to Emily. ‘That might work better than relying on me to read the signage. These Egyptian street names are too much for me.’
She offered a small smile, her own familiarity with Arabic only slightly stronger than his. ‘The names might sound impressive to foreign ears, but sometimes their meaning is more basic than you’d expect. As near as I can tell, the name of the main road we’ll take translates as “Roads and Bridges Administration Road”.’
‘Rolls off the tongue in both languages,’ Chris shot at them from the back seat. His sense of sarcasm had not drained, even during the long drive.
‘We’ll take that until a crossover to the Giza-Luxor highway, which runs along the edge of the fertile, irrigated region by the Nile, and the beginning of the arid desert itself. It should take us about twenty minutes to get there.’
‘It’s about time,’ Chris muttered. ‘Real desert. We’ve been in Egypt all day, and I still haven’t seen a single sand dune. A real let-down, if I’m being totally honest.’
Emily tried to ignore his comment. Chris’s persistent humour was beginning to grate. She didn’t suspect him of insensitivity and she knew he took the matters to hand seriously, but the constant joviality was hard for her emotions to bear. If it was his way of bolstering her under the circumstances, it was not having the desired effect.
Emily set aside the survey chart and again unfolded her printout of the ancient map. The destination, the location of the ‘keystone’, was clear. The other texts on the panels, written in a more familiar Latin, were instructions for arriving at that goal. The modern chart that Emily held on her knees made the ancient guidance, intended for those travelling by foot and without the overview of the area that satellite mapping could provide, unnecessary. Yet she still marvelled at the handiwork and ancient detail.
‘North, then four hundred steps to a great stone,’ she translated aloud as they drove. ‘Past the bluff with three even peaks.’
‘Someone clearly took a lot of care to provide precise directions,’ Michael noted.
Emily’s attention was rapt in the phrases scribbled here and there along the route. In the final panel, at the bottom of the page, ran a solitary line.
REGULAE QUONDAM SPECTATAE
This Latin inscription, unlike all the others on the document, was not obviously connected to any segment of the map’s indicated journey.
Emily looked up at her husband, repeating the line out loud. ‘Regulae quondam spectatae.’
Michael squinted as he drove, his mind quickly providing a rough translation. ‘“The directions formerly seen”?’
‘That’s how I make it out as well.’ Emily’s eyes continued to scrutinize the text. ‘What do you think that might have meant?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he admitted. ‘It’s a little more cryptic than “turn right at the big rock”. Though thankfully, we shouldn’t need to worry too much about it.’ He reached across and rattled the modern survey map, still sat on Emily’s lap beneath the printed page. ‘I’m more interested in our current drive. You got as far as our crossing the Giza-Luxor road. What then?’
Emily brought her attention back to the present. ‘From there we switch on the four-wheel-drive and turn into the desert itself. Chris gets his dunes and we start navigating by the scrawls on a centuries-old set of directions.
‘And from that point on, the roads no longer have names.’
The drive through the stretches of the habitable green belt west of Nag Hammadi took almost precisely the twenty minutes Emily had predicted, and at the crossing with the Gaza-Luxor highway they were confronted with all the sand dunes Chris could have hoped for, though even he checked his humour as Michael switched the SUV into off-road mode and crossed the highway onto a sandy track Emily identified from her map. As they left green landscapes and paved roads behind them, the severity of the Egyptian desert suddenly became tangible and real, and the contrast stark. The highway drew a perfect border between landscapes a sane man unfamiliar with Egypt might think could only exist on separate continents: on one side lush pastures, green trees, and all the signs of industry, culture, society and life. Then, thirty feet to the left, a landscape of deadening brown, other-worldly curves and intersecting lines of sand, devoid of any indications of life or human presence.
For the first time in their journey, Chris was speechless. As the terrain of inner Egypt, unchanged through the millennia, filled his vision, he simply gawped at the overwhelming sight.
For forty minutes they drove, at an increasingly slow pace, as the sandy track turned to barely more than a path leading towards a series of golden bluffs twenty miles into the sand. Eventually, even the path disappeared and the trio found themselves driving over untrodden dunes and flats.
‘Up there,’ Emily finally said, looking up from her map and pointing towards the base of a bluff 200 metres ahead of them. ‘Stop us as close as you can to the base of that cliff.’ Michael nodded in affirmation and eased the Mitsubishi to the point where sand met the uneven rocks rising towards the base. Switching the tired SUV into park, he left the engine idling in order to keep the air conditioning fresh.
‘This is it, gentlemen,’ Emily announced, folding up her map. ‘As close as we’re going to get to our destination by car. From here on, we go by foot.’