We had set out from Luxor into the glare of the sun in October 1989. Now, just before our first nightfall, I saw stars blossom across the sky, and felt the first chill of the desert. Gone were the monuments and temples of the West Bank Necropolis, the splendor of the Valley of the Kings, the thousands of tourists who flocked to Luxor, so many more than when I had first traveled to Egypt in the early 1970s. Ahead of us were the rolling dunes and undulating sands of the dry wadi that we were following. I was traveling with my companions, the Bedouin we had taken as guides, and the three snorting camels laden with our packs. This was a trail the Bedouin knew well, passed down from their forefathers: a caravan route for the merchants of ancient Egypt to ferry their wares; a route along which African slaves had been driven by their Arab masters many centuries before. Every step I took I shared with those people plucked out of history. I could feel their ghosts and forgotten stories swirling around me as keenly as I felt the lacerations of the desert sand in the wind.
In two weeks, we would arrive at the turquoise waters of the Red Sea, to dive into the magnificent coral reefs and swim with the thousands of species of fish unique to that part of the world. Between now and then, however, there were two hundred miles of desert, and already the sand was caked to my face, riming my nostrils, scouring the back of my throat. Soon, I thought, I would look like Lawrence of Arabia—only not as good looking as Peter O’Toole in the film. In many ways, I had lived with the desert all my life. It is a part of Africa as vital to me as the bush in which I loved to lose myself and hunt. For the past decade, I had been inspired by it as a source of stories, the deserts of northern Africa as important to my novels as the bush of the south had been when I started my writing career. In this trek, I was going to reaffirm my love for this most inhospitable landscape. I had, I suppose, been building up to this pilgrimage my entire life.
•••
My father inspired my love of the hunt: he stood in my eyes for all the heroes of southern Africa; but it was my mother who made me consider the past and understand that Africa was a place of ancient civilizations, customs lost to the mists of time, and wild unknowable gods. She told me tales of the Pharaohs who once ruled northern Africa, of the cursed tombs they had left behind, and of the treasure hunters who still toiled in the desert to uncover the secrets of that damned land.
My mother’s fascination with Great Zimbabwe had led me to create Benjamin Kazin and The Sunbird, and it was her enchantment with Ancient Egypt that would open another door through which a eunuch slave named Taita would introduce himself to the world. Nothing had captured my mother’s imagination more fiercely than the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The nineteen-year-old Pharaoh had been discovered eleven years before I was born, when my mother herself was a young girl filled with dreams, and the memories of the discovery had stayed with her ever since. Lying in bed at night, she told me about Howard Carter and George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, descending into the darkness of the tomb, how the flickering lights of their flaming brands revealed by degrees the mummified remains of the boy king. “It was waiting in the deep caves, Wilbur. Not a stone had been moved. Not a figure out of place. Lying on his back with his golden death mask hiding his face, was King Tut himself . . .”
On November 26, 1922, Howard Carter had chiseled a small hole in the corner of the doorway of the tomb, and by the light of a candle could see that the many gold and ebony treasures were undisturbed. Lord Carnarvon asked, “Can you see anything?” and Carter replied with the now famous words: “Yes, wonderful things!”
It is difficult to imagine today, but the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb was a huge event. The tomb had been found almost intact, a scene untouched for millennia, and then the men who entered the tomb died in quick succession, giving rise to the belief that the tomb had been cursed. It was the perfect set-up for a media frenzy. Lord Carnarvon died six weeks after the tomb was opened; George Jay Gould, an American financier, developed a strange fever and died in France six months after entering the tomb; Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey of Egypt was shot dead by his French wife of six months in London’s Savoy Hotel shortly after he was photographed visiting the tomb; Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, a radiologist who X-rayed Tutankhamen’s mummy, died from a mysterious disease just over a year later; and Carnarvon’s two half brothers both passed away—one from blood poisoning, and the other from malarial pneumonia. Later, Carter’s personal secretary was found smothered in his bed; his father committed suicide by throwing himself from his seventh story apartment—and the most inexplicable story of all came when Carter’s messenger discovered a cobra, the symbol of the Egyptian monarchy, sitting in the bird cage in Carter’s house, having already devoured Carter’s canary. It was an entertaining confection, a grisly but addictive spectacle, just like the best stories. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, blamed “elementals” created by the boy king’s priests, while one newspaper printed a legend that would solidify the curse in the public consciousness for generations to come. Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king! it declared—leaving aside the fact that these words never appeared on the hieroglyphs found in the tomb. Like all good fabulists, the newspapers didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Tutankhamen’s curse had the nation gripped.
To a boy who had experienced the desert infrequently—the arid expanse of the Kalahari stretching into an infinite horizon when we went out on our annual safaris—the idea of desert kingdoms, of supernatural curses, and a boy king not much older than myself, contained the elements of thrilling fantasy. In stories like these, the desert became a place of magic and mysticism. I did not write a desert story of my own for many years, but the tales my mother recounted excited and inspired in me new narratives of wonder.
•••
It was not until I crossed the Namib as a student that I truly understood how merciless the desert can be. The Kalahari supports more life than most deserts, its plains green and fertile when the rains come, but the Namib is featureless to all except those who know it best, a place of scorched earth beneath an inferno of a sky.
In those early years, I had a child’s view of Egypt as a place of pharaohs and queens. It was only after When the Lion Feeds was accepted for publication, and I was en route to London to meet my publishers, that I was able to visit the country for the first time, when BOAC stopped off in Egypt.
Cairo in those days was a very different city to that which greets visitors today. There were few tourists wandering the streets or hordes laying siege to its monuments. The feluccas plying the waters of the Nile were sailed by local travelers and fishermen, not tourists eager to touch the water of this ancient river. I stood on the river bank all those years ago, looking upstream, and imagined the intrepid travelers who had followed the watercourse in ages past, seeking its fabled source—not just the Victorian explorers whose stories I had loved, but also the Roman legionaries and Greek soldiers. This was the birthplace of civilization and, over the decades to come, it would keep calling me back.
Alone, I wandered through the City of the Dead. It was a corner of Cairo where hundreds of tombs were occupied as dwellings for the poorest people of the city, a place where the living and the dead mingled, where the modern and the ancient worlds met. Later, I spent long hours in the Egyptian Museum with its unrivaled collection of pharaonic exhibits. These days it is a grand museum, home to one of the greatest treasure hoards in the world, but back then it was more of a repository, an echoing warehouse through which I was permitted to wander and let my imagination roam. Nothing was labeled, priceless items were piled haphazardly in obscure rooms, even Tutankhamen’s famous death mask was housed in a ramshackle glass cupboard of the kind you might find in a rundown jeweler’s store. In a corner, a guard had propped his rifle against the wall and was casually smoking a cigarette, seemingly unconcerned by the magnificent history all around him. As I made my way along the halls, I imagined myself as a pioneer—unearthing little-known and overlooked gems, walking a few paces behind Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon as they revealed to the world what had remained hidden for nearly four thousand years.
My first visit to Egypt was fleeting, but my return trips became longer and longer. I went back in 1974, while I was researching Eagle in the Sky, and thereafter, whenever the deserts called, I would jump on a plane and land in this extraordinary country. Part of my excitement was caused by the Nile itself, a mythical feature of Africa, a river which had bewitched many before me. The Nile had given sustenance to settlers since the dawn of time. Gradually, various tribes of hunter-gatherers came face to face with each other, forced to the verdant riverbanks by the encroaching desert, and there they peacefully commingled, building structured societies in order to survive.
I explored the ruins and ancient places, the kind you can only visit now under the watchful eyes of sentries and guards. On those early visits, I was allowed to clamber wherever I wanted. At Giza, where the Pyramids rose vertiginously into the sky, my guide helped me to the zenith of one of those fabulous constructions. At the pinnacle, heaving and out of breath, I gazed from horizon to horizon, absorbing a space so vast and empty, yet crowded with the intense bustle of the past. I ventured off the beaten track to see the old Coptic Christian monasteries deep in the desert—where all that was needed to see a glimpse of life inside was to open your wallet—and the magical Faiyum Oasis beyond Cairo, where for a brief moment the desert is green and alive, and the ducks are plentiful and waiting to be picked off.
On another trip I went north, to where the Nile meets the Mediterranean Sea. There, sixty miles west of Alexandria, lie the cemeteries of El Alamein, the last resting place of those soldiers who died in 1942 in one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War—when Montgomery’s Eighth Army defeated Nazi Germany’s Rommel. It was a personal pilgrimage to remember the Rhodesians and South Africans who, it is often forgotten, played their part in that victory. Afterward, I flew south to Aswan, site of the massive modern dam across the Nile. I picked up a cruiser for a ten-day trip downriver. It was one of my life’s great experiences, sailing backward through time as the river wended its way north, bound for Luxor and Karnak, with all their temples and museums.
It was on a subsequent trip that I sailed over the Valley of the Kings in a hot air balloon and saw the ancient world reaching out to meet the modern above. As I hung there, floating serenely, I could see al-Qurn high in the Theban hills, and the place where Tutankhamen himself was discovered, as well as the burial mounds of the Theban Necropolis stretching out all around. Perhaps my love for this landscape was something I had inherited from my mother, but I could see many and varied stories of Egypt spread out on the landscape beneath me.
One day in 1988 came a moment so perfect, so thrilling, that it would echo forever after in all my fiction, and bring to life a new character who would never let me go: Taita.
•••
Egypt, the Pyramids and Great Sphinx, the mighty Nile whose waters fed half the continent: this was an Africa unlike anything I had ever written about, and now I was holding a piece of it in my hands. In 1988, I stood in the heat of the desert on the West Bank of the River Nile. Guide lines and ropes had been stretched out by the archaeologists working the dig to which I had been invited. For weeks, they had been peeling back history just as a writer peels back the layers of his story—and now, where once had been arid scrub and sand, the evidence of a former civilization rose out of the sun-blasted crust in eerie outcrops of stone. Below, in the cavernous black hole of her tomb, lay the remains of a queen unrecorded by history. The academics believed she had died and been mummified as early as 1780 BC, at a time when the Hyskos people led an invasion from the Near East and settled the eastern river delta, but it felt like she was here with me now, whispering into my ear.
The queen had been buried with all the treasures of her lifetime. I had been writing about treasures like these from the time I wrote The Eye of the Tiger, but no fiction could compare with the truth of what was unearthed in these ancient tombs. Death masks of gold, circlets inlaid with precious gems, figurines captured in intricate detail depicting the age-old gods of the river. There was no precious artifact, however, that would affect me more than the one I held in my hands today. This was no gold, no scepter with sapphires pressed into its hilt, no death mask capturing the perfect likeness of the body it kept hidden underneath. These were papyri, pieces of pith of the papyrus plant, woven together to make ancient parchment—and, across them, were inscribed hieroglyphs beyond my understanding.
My hands trembled as I touched the scrolls for the first time. These fragile pieces of papyrus contained a message from almost four millennia ago. I traced the arcane symbols with my finger. Here was a connection between me and the past. I thought about the queen, lying undisturbed in her tomb while nations rose and fell in the world above her, wars were waged, men made inconceivable machines, conquered the planet, set sail for the moon. I considered the man who might have rhapsodized about her in these scrolls and in that moment, I knew that they had been waiting for me for four thousand years.
Later, once the scrolls had been translated by experts at the University of Cairo, I was able to read what this ancient figure had committed to paper. The scrolls were written as a personal tribute to the woman the author had loved, the great queen whose body had been brought back to the light. The scrolls revealed a lot about the writer as well—it was his opportunity to extol his own genius and power, to brag about what an extraordinary person he had been. The script was not conducive to conveying subtle emotions, but there was something here, something that would tug at me for years to come. The author, whoever he had been, was an endearing braggart, and he had other qualities. He was faithful, he was loving, he was full of compassion for animals and people. There were gaps in his narrative where an author might let his imagination run free; here was a character whose skin I eagerly wanted to inhabit.
It was in that moment that Taita was born.
River God was my twenty-fourth novel, written in the pure isolation of the Seychelles, gazing out over the azure waters of the Indian Ocean. It was the first novel I had written using a word processor after handwriting all my books before that, but it had been forming in my mind for decades before I committed a word to the page. It was a novel that brought together so many of my fascinations, influences and obsessions.
River God was published in 1993. It is an epic novel, one that whisked its readers nearly four thousand years into a past I had researched exhaustively over the preceding years. This was an act of writing that owed much to The Sunbird before it—but there was one vital difference: where, in The Sunbird, I had built the city of Ophet from my imagination, in River God, Egypt had to be cultivated from hard research.
The novel shocked my readers. For a decade, I had been writing high-octane novels set in present day Africa—the final parts of the Ballantyne sequence, and the second part of the Courtney saga—but River God was a change of pace, a step beyond the boundaries my readers had come to expect. Not all the responses were positive. One woman wrote to me and said: “I read the first few pages of River God and it wasn’t you and I put the book down because I couldn’t read it and I hope you’re going to write a decent book.” I wrote back and apologized for disappointing her and about three months later, she wrote to me and said, “I did it. I read it and it’s the best book you’ve written by far.” I think that, when people got over the initial shock, they accepted it.
I wanted to take my readers into brave new lands, but some of them were finding it difficult to equate Egypt with Africa. “Oh yes, but it’s different,” they’d say. “It’s Arabic.” That may be true for Europeans and Americans, but it is never so for Africans. To us, Egypt is as African as the Cape of Good Hope. I have always seen Africa as one single horse-headed continent. All of it shares a mystique, and it is bound together by great rivers, by wild animals—historically the habitat of the African lion, for example, extended from north to south—and by a savage spirit that is all pervasive. Africa has a wildness that the cultivated lands of the northern hemisphere will never understand, and the Nile embodies that mystery, that magic. It is the most extraordinary example of living history in the world. The evidence is around you if you ever take a boat upriver. It becomes a time machine. The farmers tilling the land and working the water wheels have been doing so since the surrounding monuments were built by the pharaohs. It is here that a man can be intimately connected to the past, perceive that time is greater than any individual. Here, you truly understand how fleeting a man’s life is, how small he is compared to the great turning world all around us.
If River God didn’t appeal to some readers, there were many more who enjoyed it. I couldn’t have predicted it, but it brought me four times as many readers as any of the Ballantyne and Courtney novels before it. They came for the living, breathing world I had conjured up from painstaking research and a writer’s best weapon—willpower—but they stayed for the novel’s hero. Taita is a man unlike any I had written before. I had sown the seeds for him in Benjamin Kazin, but Taita was the antithesis of all the Courtney and Ballantyne alpha males, all swash and buckle, around whom my writing had always been focused. Taita was emasculated, gelded by his master, Lord Intef, after being discovered sleeping with a young slave girl. As a eunuch, he knows the power of love, but can never fulfill it, and he has devoted his life instead to acquiring great wisdom and wide knowledge. He was a Renaissance hero. Readers from all over the world seemed to empathize with his plight. The power of unrequited love, the agony and the ecstasy, drew millions to Taita and kept them enthralled.
Taita may have emerged from the scrolls but, along the way, I had given him parts of myself as well—not my history, as I had done with the Courtneys and Ballantynes, but aspects of my personality and character. I had developed something of a soft spot for Taita, a brotherly affection perhaps, and I was as eager as my readers to know where his story would take him.
I followed River God with The Seventh Scroll, a different kind of novel which, nevertheless, continued the story of Taita’s life. Set in the modern day, The Seventh Scroll was indelibly linked to the history of River God. It was not what my readers had been expecting—but I was having too much fun. The lost worlds of Ancient Egypt had invigorated my writing as no other novel had done for decades. They renewed my confidence, allowed me to spread my wings once again.
In The Seventh Scroll, Taita, who had captivated me in River God, returned with all his tricks and ploys, to conceal and safeguard the burial of Pharaoh Mamose and his vast treasure. For the first time, I wrote myself into the novel for a giggle, and fictionalized the excitement I had felt when I held those unearthed forgotten scrolls, but in typical Smith fashion I concocted a love affair, a vainglorious collector, his Teutonic muse and PA, and a fight to the death in the gorges of the Nile. The current British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who reviewed it, said: “It would be hard to give away the plot of the latest yarn of pharaonic pillage because there is so much of it. In the opening thirty pages the heroine and her husband are stabbed, burnt, bombed, burgled, flayed and, take it from me, it works its way up from there.”
If there were misgivings, it was that the story effectively condoned the thieving of African artworks by European collectors. That wasn’t the intention, but nonetheless at least one book reviewer argued that, even if that had been the case, there was nothing wrong with it. As James Mitchell of the Star wrote: “I have heard one complain that the behaviour of Wilbur’s heroes in The Seventh Scroll is immoral in that they are looting the artworks which should belong to Ethiopia. Whether their aim is to get them for Sir Nicholas’s private hoard or Royan’s Egyptian museums, the fabulous treasures will be leaving their geographical hosts. The unspoken agenda was that even fiction should have a moral basis. With that I agree. Yet such criticism is naive. Ethiopia is in chaos at the present time when this novel is set. Any such artworks would in real life be sold off to the highest bidder . . . undoubtedly to be hidden away in some Texan vault. If this sounds rather like the usual justification for the British retention of the Parthenon Marbles removed by Lord Elgin and whose return is frequently demanded by Greek governments, then so be it.”
In the years that followed, my beloved Taita would not let me go. His stories kept crying out to be told. Warlock, my first novel of the new millennium, continued Taita’s odyssey as I journeyed away from the true history of River God to the world of mysticism and magic that the Egyptian series would eventually become. It was H. Rider Haggard again, making himself known in my writing. In Warlock, following the death of his beloved Queen Lostris, Taita retreats to the desert to mourn, and in that inhospitable land, he transforms himself into a warlock, adept at harnessing the powers of the occult for good purposes. With his newfound talents, he returns to serve Pharaoh Tamose and to bring up his son Prince Nefer. Soon, Tamose is betrayed and murdered by his right-hand man, who then sets himself up as regent of Egypt. It is Taita who must protect not just Nefer, but the whole of Egypt as well.
When I completed the novel, I decided to change direction again. I launched into The Quest with great vigor. It was different, it danced to an unusual beat, and it was perhaps self-indulgent to give Taita his manhood back in the end, but I had become very, very fond of Taita. The Quest is an adventure further into the realms of witchcraft and magic. It was quite well received: Publishers Weekly said: “Once again Smith deftly blends history, fantasy and mythology, but newcomers should be prepared for grisly deaths and mutilations.” Another critic mentioned that the novel had created a “chronicle of otherworldliness which crosses the line from the true historical novel to a work of fantasy and, in so doing, harnesses and recaptures myths out of the mysterious dark continent with which he is so familiar.”
I have always prided myself on my research, and while writing The Quest I decided to experience fasting, to put myself in the shoes of Taita, who of course had done much the same in his journey to become an adept. Fasting is a well-documented practice, particularly among seers and sages. It is part and parcel of most of the world’s great religions: with Islam making the month-long Ramadan fast one of the five pillars, while Judaism enjoins its believers to abstain for an entire day during Yom Kippur.
But, soon after The Quest was published, perhaps the greatest heroine I had ever known, my mother Elfreda, passed away.
My mother had been on her own for more than twenty years since my father died. In all that time, not a day went by when she didn’t think about and miss him. I had always thought my mother was invincible. I thought she would reach her centenary and live beyond it but, when she turned ninety-five, she looked at me and said, “Wilbur, I am very sick.”
“You’re not, Mom,” I replied. “You’re very strong.”
“My darling,” she said, “you don’t understand. Your dad wants me—he needs me with him . . .”
“Mom,” I said, “you know you’re going to get there and his first words will be, ‘You silly woman, where the hell have you been for the last twenty years? Now go and make me a cup of tea.’”
She smiled and said: “I’ll do anything to hear him say that again.”
Before she died she made me promise I would look after my sister, Adrienne. It was no hardship whatsoever; I have always loved my little sister.
My mother had been a staunch Anglican throughout her life. It was one of the only distinctions between her and my father. An agnostic through and through, Africa was my father’s only god. After she passed away, I stood in the crematorium with my wife Niso and Adrienne, and committed her body to the flames. Later that day, I returned to my study in Cape Town with her ashes sealed in a special box.
I placed her on my desk, surrounded by all the novels of my lifetime. It had been my mother who first showed me how books could be the doorways into magical worlds. It had been my mother who weaned me on stories, who inspired my fascination with Egypt, who had encouraged me to follow this seemingly impossible dream. Without her, there would have been no Courtneys, no Ballantynes—no Taita. And so, every day, as I picked up my pen and continued to write, she sat alongside me again. The woman who had first stoked my love for reading had not gone, there were still many stories to tell.
A couple of years later though, I felt she wanted her remains joined with Dad’s. He hadn’t wanted to be cremated. He said, “No cremation, thank you very much, that might hurt! I’m not taking any chances, just do me the old way.” He is buried at Somerset West, so we opened a small shaft in the grave and placed my mother’s ashes next to his coffin and put a little sign on the gravestone. The first thing we do when we come back to South Africa each year is go out to say hello to them and put some proteas on their resting place. It’s a very good feeling. Peaceful.