The Benben Expedition

The original occupies two folded sheets of cream writing paper. It was posted before the events recorded in Entry I and reached England after the writer did.

The bridge went at six minutes past four in the morning.

I know the time because Harrington’s watch stopped when the first cable struck him. It did not cut him, though the force of it spun him into the rock and left a red groove across his coat. When I pulled him upright, the cracked face of the watch showed 4:06. Behind us, half the bridge hung against the gorge wall. The other half had gone into the river with our food, the medical case and Professor Vale’s specimen box.

The bridge had been a poor affair before the storm. Two ropes, slats of wet cedar and a hand-line polished by generations of frightened palms. We had crossed it three days earlier because the northern path was under snow. Now the river had risen perhaps twelve feet and was carrying whole trees between its banks.

Carter stood on the far side.

He had crossed first with the lightest pack. Harrington and I had followed as far as the central span when the upstream anchor tore free. Carter reached for us. He was ten yards away and might as well have been in England.

“Go back!” I shouted.

He either did not hear or chose not to. Carter has always treated a sensible instruction as a topic for debate. He looped his rope around the remaining post and began lowering himself towards the broken span.

The second anchor moved.

There are moments when command is merely another word for choosing which friend may die. No handbook puts it so plainly. It will speak of priorities, acceptable risk and the good of the party. Those phrases are clean because the men who write them are seated at desks. On a mountain, a choice has a face.

“Cut it!” I called.

Carter stared at me.

“Cut your rope, man. The post is going.”

He understood then. He took out his knife, sawed once and dropped back upon the ledge as the post tore loose. The remains of the bridge fell between us. Harrington and I were thrown against the southern wall but our safety line held.

For some seconds the only sound was the river.

Carter rose. He lifted one hand. Then he turned towards the track by which we had come.

That was the last I saw of him for two days.

Our trouble had begun much earlier. We had entered the eastern range in search of a ruined observatory described by a surveyor in 1891. Vale believed its stone table preserved a local record of a comet. I had accepted the work because it seemed modest, because Eleanor had said I required a simple journey, and because I had committed the common error of believing an expedition simple merely because its purpose could be stated in one sentence.

We found the observatory. It was a shepherd’s shelter built upon older foundations, and the stone table was a quern. Vale was disappointed for nearly twenty minutes, after which he noticed tool marks below the newer masonry and became delighted again. Scholars are resilient creatures when supplied with ambiguity.

Then the weather closed.

Our guide, Temur, warned us that the southern crossing would flood. We turned north, lost a mule on the ice and spent a night beneath an overhang while snow sealed the higher path. The only route left was back across the gorge. By then the rain had begun.

After the bridge failed, Harrington and I had one rope, two revolvers, a canvas sheet, a tin of tea and three of Eleanor’s emergency oat biscuits. She had packed twelve. Harrington had eaten nine while awaiting what he called a more serious emergency.

“I feel this qualifies,” he said.

“You may feel it in silence.”

The southern track had slipped away in two places. We climbed above it, using roots where we could and cracks where we could not. Harrington’s left shoulder had stiffened, but he denied pain with such vigour that I knew it was considerable.

At noon we reached a shelf protected by juniper. I made tea in a cartridge tin and divided the first biscuit.

“Do you think Carter will find the eastern camp?” Harrington asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that?”

“At present, belief is less useful than saying it.”

He accepted this. It is one reason I travel with him.

We moved until dark. At the second landslip I went first and found no purchase beyond a narrow seam. The rain had turned the exposed clay to grease. Below us the river filled the gorge from wall to wall.

Harrington said, “We might wait.”

“For what?”

“A better idea.”

It was not cowardice. I have seen Harrington enter places that caused armed men to reconsider their professions. He was asking whether motion had become a substitute for thought.

I sat with my back against the rock.

The expedition leader is often the last man permitted to confess uncertainty. That is a foolish custom. Certainty may comfort a party, but false certainty kills it. I told Harrington I did not know how to cross. Saying it aloud removed a weight I had not realised I was carrying.

We waited.

After ten minutes the rain eased, and in the quieter air I heard bells. Not church bells; small animal bells, irregular and near. Temur appeared above us with two mountain ponies and an expression of profound disapproval.

He had crossed before the storm by a timber path known to every shepherd in the valley and to none of the survey maps.

“You went wrong,” he said.

“That had occurred to me.”

He lowered a rope.

We reached the eastern camp after midnight. Carter was there, asleep beside the stove with both boots still on. He had walked eighteen miles. Vale’s specimen box was gone, as were his notes, but the professor himself had survived with a broken finger and a vocabulary much enlarged by pain.

I slept for three hours.

When I woke, Carter handed me a mug and asked whether I regretted ordering him to cut the rope.

The honest answer was that I had regretted it from the moment I spoke. I had seen the accusation in his face and imagined explaining to his mother why I had left him. Yet had he remained tied to the post, the bridge would have carried him into the river.

“I regret that it was necessary,” I said.

He nodded. “That is not the same thing.”

“No.”

I have thought of that distinction ever since. There are choices one must make and choices one must afterwards endure. A man may be correct and still be wounded by what correctness required of him.

We left the mountains the following morning.

At the railhead, I posted my letter to Eleanor. It was gentle because I wished to spare her the gorge, the rope and the sight of Carter upon the far side. There was no falsehood in it. I had merely selected which truths belonged in her hands before I could place my own around them.

That evening a cable awaited me.

ASHCROFT FAILING. RETURN DIRECTLY. CAMBRIDGE REQUESTS DISCRETION. — ELEANOR

I read it twice.

The journey I had believed finished had not yet begun.

We travelled west in stages: lorry, branch train, another train whose heating had failed, and finally an aircraft that smelled of damp coats and aviation fuel.

Vale slept through most of it with his injured hand inside his jacket. Harrington attempted a crossword and complained that the compiler had confused obscurity with intelligence. Carter watched the clouds.

I watched the telegram.

Professor Nathaniel Ashcroft had been my friend for twenty-one years. We met over a disputed bronze figure which he declared Phoenician and I declared a clever Victorian fraud. He was correct about the bronze and insufferable about it for a decade. Our friendship survived because each of us recognised in the other a useful resistance to nonsense.

He had never been robust. His lungs had troubled him since youth, but “failing” was not a word Eleanor used carelessly.

At Croydon she waited behind the barrier in a dark coat, holding my spare scarf.

I had rehearsed several remarks during the flight. None survived seeing her.

She put the scarf around my neck.

“You look appalling.”

“And you look very well.”

“Do not attempt charm before breakfast.”

Then she embraced me, briefly and fiercely.

Eleanor does not perform emotion for an audience. That embrace told me more than any speech.

On the drive north she gave me the facts. Ashcroft had collapsed in his rooms four days earlier. A college porter found him beside an open dispatch case. He refused hospital until a second attack left him no choice. The doctors expected days, perhaps less.

“He has asked for you repeatedly,” she said.

“Why the discretion?”

“Because three other people have asked whether he spoke to you.”

“Names?”

“One from the university, one from a firm of solicitors in London, and one who would not give a name.”

“Did you recognise the voice?”

“No. Educated. Male. He knew when your flight landed.”

She said this without drama, which made it worse.

“And Cambridge?”

“The bursar's office sent a car. I declined it.”

“Of course you did.”

“It would have separated us from the luggage.”

There, in one sentence, was my Quartermaster. Mystery might wait; baggage would not be abandoned.

At home she had already laid out clean clothes, railway timetables, Ashcroft's recent correspondence and a plate of sandwiches. I washed while she telephoned the hospital. Twenty-three minutes after entering the house we left again.

“You have not asked about the expedition,” I said in the cab.

“You are here. The others are alive. Anything else may wait until this evening.”

“The bridge collapsed.”

Her hand tightened around mine.

“I gathered it was not entirely uneventful.”

“I ordered Carter to cut himself loose.”

She did not tell me I had done the right thing. She asked whether Carter understood.

“I think so.”

“And do you?”

I looked through the window. London passed in wet grey pieces.

“Not yet.”

She left the question there. This is another of her gifts. She knows that comfort offered too quickly may become a lid upon something that must first be examined.

At King's Cross she handed me a slim folder.

“Ashcroft's last six letters. The fifth is ordinary. The others are not.”

The first concerned cataloguing. The second requested an old survey of Heliopolis. The third asked whether I had ever seen a pyramidion with no inscription. The fourth consisted entirely of a quotation from a Pyramid Text, copied in Ashcroft's hand:

Below it he had written:

The fifth letter complained about a college dinner.

The sixth contained only four numbers, a rough drawing of a square divided by diagonals, and the words:

“What ruler?” I said.

She opened her handbag and produced a brass-edged twelve-inch rule.

“This arrived on Tuesday, wrapped in a page from an atlas.”

One face bore the ordinary divisions. The reverse had five shallow marks at irregular intervals. They were not factory-made. Under the first was a tiny bird; under the last, a cross with equal arms.

“You did not mention this in the telegram.”

“A telegram is a poor place for mysterious rulers.”

I could not dispute it.

We boarded the Cambridge train at two forty-five. Eleanor had reserved a compartment under her maiden name.

“Are we being followed?” I asked.

“The man in the brown hat has been behind us since the hospital telephone call.”

“Which man?”

“Precisely.”

I saw him only when the train began to move. He stood near the bookstall, neither waving nor reading, his face turned towards our carriage.

Eleanor took the ruler from me and returned it to her bag.

“Ashcroft's room was searched,” she said.

“By whom?”

“The porter said nothing was taken.”

“That was not my question.”

“No one knows.”

The green edge of London gave way to fields. I had wanted a bath, a meal and several days in which nobody asked me to decide anything of consequence. Instead I had an injured friend, a marked ruler and a dying scholar who believed an ancient symbol had been misunderstood.

I felt irritation before curiosity. I record that because later events might make my involvement appear inevitable. It was not. I could have refused. I wanted to refuse.

Eleanor read my face.

“You need not accept whatever he asks.”

“You believe he will ask something?”

“Nathaniel Ashcroft has spent forty years avoiding direct requests. If he has summoned you from a mountain, I doubt it is to return a library book.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then we go home.”

We.

That small word settled me more than any promise of safety could have done.

The letter was waiting at the hospital.

It bore the university arms, but not the signature of any officer whose name I knew. The paper was official, the wording cautious.

There was no project title, no department and no sum.

At the bottom appeared the name Dr Edmund Lyle, Special Collections Liaison, followed by an internal address that belonged to no college office listed in Eleanor's directory.

“Is it genuine?” I asked.

“The paper is,” she said.

“That is not the same thing.”

“No.”

Ashcroft was in a private room on the upper floor. Cambridge had placed a man outside it who claimed to be a secretary. He stood when we approached.

“Mr Quatermain may enter alone.”

Eleanor continued walking.

“Madam—”

She stopped close enough that he had to step back.

“Professor Ashcroft asked for Allan. Professor Ashcroft also placed his papers under my temporary care. If you wish to prevent me entering, kindly identify yourself, your office and the authority under which you are acting.”

The secretary looked at me for assistance.

I examined a painting of a cow.

He moved aside.

Ashcroft had become very small. Illness had drawn his skin tight across the bones of his face, but his eyes remained sharp. A breathing tube ran beneath his nose. His right hand lay upon a black notebook.

“You took your time,” he whispered.

“A bridge objected.”

“Did you win?”

“The argument remains unsettled.”

He smiled. Then a cough seized him. Eleanor poured water, adjusted his pillow and waited until he could breathe without fighting for it.

“Still quartermastering him?” Ashcroft asked.

“Someone must.”

He tapped the notebook.

“Door.”

I closed it.

“Curtain.”

Eleanor drew the curtain across the window in the door.

“Now listen. I have made a mistake.”

“That narrows nothing,” I said.

“I trusted a catalogue.”

For Ashcroft, this was confession enough.

He told us that seven months earlier a private collector had offered the university access to a group of papers purchased with the contents of a house in Valletta. Most were maritime accounts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One journal, attributed to a ship's surgeon named Elias Rook, included copied symbols from an older document. The symbols resembled solar inscriptions but appeared beside a Templar inventory mark.

Ashcroft assumed a later owner had joined unrelated papers.

Then the collector sent a stone fragment.

It was black, fine-grained and polished upon one face. The incised line upon it matched one of Rook's copied symbols. Laboratory examination identified the stone as basalt. The result proved little; basalt is not scarce. Microscopic residue in the incision included particles of gold and a blue copper mineral, possibly Egyptian blue.

“Still not proof,” Ashcroft said. “Not even close.”

“But enough to continue.”

“Enough to ask where the fragment had been.”

He opened the notebook. Inside was a drawing of a pyramidion viewed from above. Each triangular face contained part of a larger design. The lines did not form hieroglyphs.

“This is the Benben?” I asked.

“No. That is the first error. Benben may refer to the primeval mound, the place of emergence, the cult stone, or forms derived from it. Surviving pyramidia are not the lost object from Heliopolis merely because they are pointed.”

His breath shortened. Eleanor told him to rest.

“No time.”

“There is time enough to speak clearly,” she said. “There will be none if you exhaust yourself.”

He obeyed her. Most men eventually do.

After a minute he continued.

The Rook journal described “five black corners” carried from a ruined house near Cairo to Alexandria. The cargo passed to a Levantine vessel and vanished from the record. Ashcroft found references to three fragments in later collections. One was destroyed in a fire, one disappeared during the war, and the third was the collector's sample.

“Who is the collector?” I asked.

“I do not know.”

“You accepted an object without provenance from a man you cannot name?”

Shame crossed his face.

“The approach came through Lyle. Funds through the university. Permissions in order. I told myself anonymity did not invalidate the material.”

“Where is the fragment now?”

“Gone.”

His rooms had been searched. The fragment, Rook journal and photographic plates were taken. The thief left money, silver and several objects of greater market value.

“Which means he knew what he wanted,” Eleanor said.

Ashcroft gripped the notebook.

“I kept this elsewhere. Notes only. No names.”

“Why Allan?” she asked.

“Because he knows the difference between finding a thing and possessing it.”

I thought this an unearned compliment.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find the chain. Determine whether the fragments belong to one object. If they do, find where it was taken from.”

“And recover it?”

Ashcroft looked towards the closed curtain.

“That depends upon what it is.”

The room seemed colder.

“Who pays?” I asked.

“The benefactor.”

“Who is?”

“A locked door behind three other locked doors. Lyle says the donor wants the truth preserved, not displayed.”

“That sounds noble.”

“It sounded noble to me too.”

There was warning in the words.

He handed the black notebook to Eleanor, not to me.

“The ruler is a key. The atlas page identifies the scale. Do not trust the compass until you know what it points towards.”

“Nathaniel,” I said, “who is watching the room?”

“Not mine.”

The answer cost him. His eyes closed.

We remained until the nurse entered. Ashcroft woke once as we stood to leave.

“Quatermain.”

I bent near.

“If the evidence ends, stop. Do not make a bridge out of wanting.”

It was the last complete sentence he spoke to me.

Professor Nathaniel Ashcroft died at 3:12 the following morning.

Death reduces a mystery to paperwork for everyone except those who loved the dead.

By nine o'clock forms had been signed, personal effects listed and the room made ready for another patient. The secretary had vanished. No Dr Edmund Lyle answered at the address on the letter. The university switchboard acknowledged a man of that name but could not find an extension.

Eleanor telephoned Ashcroft's sister. I sat in the hotel lounge with the black notebook closed before me.

I had promised nothing. Ashcroft had not asked for a promise; perhaps he knew I would resist one. Yet the dead possess a means of converting unfinished requests into obligations.

Eleanor joined me.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Yes.”

“Then let us.”

“You think I should take this on.”

“I think you should decide after sleep, not because a dying friend placed his burden within reach.”

“Would that not be disloyal?”

“No. It would be honest.”

I wanted her to tell me what to do. This is difficult to admit. A man who has made decisions for others may grow tired of owning his own. Had she ordered me to decline, I could have called obedience prudence. Had she urged me to accept, I could have called it duty. She refused me that escape.

We returned home.

For two days I did nothing concerning the notebook. I repaired a loose hinge, wrote to Carter and visited Ashcroft's sister. At night I dreamed of the broken bridge. Carter stood across the gorge holding the black fragment. Each time I ordered him to cut the rope, he asked whether the object or the man mattered more.

On the third morning I opened Ashcroft's notes.

The first page contained a list headed CERTAINTIES:

1. The fragment exists.
2. It is worked basalt.
3. The incision once held pigment or inlay.
4. The Rook journal existed when photographed.
5. At least one copied mark appears both in the journal and upon the fragment.

Below it was a second list headed NOT CERTAINTIES:

1. The fragment is ancient Egyptian.
2. The fragment formed part of a pyramidion.
3. The Templars possessed it.
4. Rook was a pirate.
5. The object was the Benben.

This restored my respect for him.

Loose sheets documented the surviving physical comparisons. Ashcroft had examined published records of pyramidia in London and Cairo. One black-basalt apex bore solar discs and solar barques. A limestone example stood approximately sixty-five centimetres high and forty-nine deep. Others showed worshippers, Osiris, Hathor, jackals and funerary scenes. None matched the geometry of his fragment.

He had underlined a note:

The Heliopolitan material occupied thirty pages. In that creation tradition, the first mound emerged from the undifferentiated waters. Atum rose upon it. The Benben belonged to this language of beginning, sunlight and ordered creation. Later forms—pyramidia and obelisk tips—carried related solar meaning.

Then Ashcroft's handwriting changed.

The next sheet contained a medieval Latin inventory copied in Rook's journal. Ashcroft translated only three phrases with confidence:

“Babylon of Egypt” could refer to the old fortress area near Cairo, not the Mesopotamian city. The inventory date, if copied correctly, was 1308—during the destruction of the Templar order. The original document was not present. Rook claimed to have copied it in Cyprus in 1697.

Three centuries, two languages and a sailor of uncertain honesty stood between us and the alleged event.

No sensible historian would call that proof.

It was, however, a trail.

At midday Eleanor found me measuring the marks upon the brass rule.

“Have you decided?”

“I shall examine the papers in Valletta.”

“Only the papers?”

“Until evidence requires more.”

“Good.”

“You knew I would go.”

“I knew you would look.”

She placed a typed sheet beside me. It listed inoculations, visa requirements, Cairo contacts, maritime archive opening hours and the names of two scholars who had quarrelled publicly with Ashcroft.

“How long have you been preparing this?”

“Since before you landed.”

I looked at her.

“Quartermaster,” she said.

That afternoon Dr Lyle telephoned.

He offered condolences, confirmed the funding and requested a meeting in Cambridge. When I asked how to find his office, he named a room in an old university building used by several committees.

“Which committee employs you?” I asked.

“For the purposes of this project, Mr Quatermain, I act as liaison.”

“Between whom?”

“The university and the supporting trust.”

“Name the trust.”

There was a pause.

“The Mercator Foundation.”

Eleanor, listening on the extension, wrote the name down.

“Registered where?”

“I do not have that information.”

“Then obtain it before our meeting.”

His voice cooled. “The donor's anonymity is a condition of support.”

“Anonymity and non-existence are different conditions.”

We agreed to meet the following day.

Eleanor replaced the receiver.

“There are six Mercator foundations,” she said. “Education in Bristol, shipping relief in Rotterdam, a dissolved one in Malta, two American charities and a geographic society that denies being a foundation.”

“Which is ours?”

“None of them admits it.”

The night was indeed young.

Dr Edmund Lyle was younger than I expected and older than he wished to appear.

His suit was excellent. His cuffs were frayed. The room in which he received us contained a desk, three chairs and no personal possession. Even the pencils belonged to the university stationery office.

He showed credentials identifying him as a consultant to Special Collections. Eleanor examined them longer than politeness required.

“The Mercator Foundation?” I asked.

Lyle placed a thin file before us.

The foundation had been constituted in Vaduz. Its sole disclosed purpose was the support of research into the movement and preservation of culturally significant objects. Instructions reached Cambridge through a London solicitor. Money came from an account in Zurich. The university had performed the checks required by law.

“Who controls it?” Eleanor asked.

“A board.”

“Names?”

“Not disclosed to grant recipients.”

“To you?”

Lyle folded his hands.

“My responsibility is administration.”

“No,” I said. “Your responsibility is to persuade me that ignorance is respectable when arranged in a file.”

He met my eye. “I understand the concern.”

“Do you?”

“Professor Ashcroft raised the same objection after accepting the initial study.”

This was meant to wound. It succeeded.

Lyle then produced photographs of the Rook journal. The originals had been taken from Ashcroft's room, but a duplicate set remained in university storage. Why had Ashcroft not mentioned it? Lyle said the professor did not know the copies had been made.

“Who ordered them?” Eleanor asked.

“The benefactor.”

The photographs showed a leather volume damaged by water. The first pages were a conventional sea journal: winds, bearings, provisions, punishments and disease. Rook called himself surgeon aboard the Mercy Bell, though a later entry admitted that the lawful captain had “retired from command by general agreement” off Crete.

“A pirate,” I said.

“A private operator,” Lyle replied.

“A pirate with careful handwriting.”

In July 1697 the Mercy Bell anchored at Larnaca. Rook visited a monastery storehouse and bribed a lay brother to show him papers removed from a ruined commandery. He copied an inventory and drew five triangular pieces arranged as a square-based point.

The journal then became impossible.

Rook wrote that he had compared the inventory marks with a map owned by an Armenian merchant. The map showed the Mediterranean, Nile delta and Red Sea upon one plane, but distances changed according to the direction in which it was read. A line drawn with an ordinary compass failed. A “black compass” supplied by the merchant produced the route.

The next page stated:

Ashcroft had marked this passage heavily.

It was not a declaration of a flat earth. It was an instruction concerning projection.

Modern maps also lay a curved surface upon paper and pay for the convenience with distortion. Rook's language was old; the problem was not.

The journal claimed that five fragments could be set upon the projected route. Their edges, aligned with five ports, disclosed a sixth point inland.

“Where?” I asked.

Lyle turned the photograph.

The following leaf had been cut out.

“Convenient.”

“There is an impression on the next page,” he said.

Under raking light, Ashcroft had recovered portions of three words:

There was also a group of figures which might be coordinates, accounts or a date.

The brass ruler made them legible.

Eleanor laid it across the enlargement. The five irregular marks corresponded to five baselines in the figures. Read against ordinary inches they were meaningless. Read from each engraved mark, they gave letter positions.

Lyle watched us too closely.

“You knew the ruler would do that,” I said.

“I knew Ashcroft believed it was a cipher key.”

“Where is the atlas page?”

He did not have it.

Eleanor removed a folded sheet from her folder. The paper wrapped around the ruler had come from a nineteenth-century school atlas. One corner showed Lower Egypt. Along the margin someone had written ON.

On is a Biblical name for Heliopolis.

The trail led to Cairo, but not yet to a stone. First came Valletta. We needed the sale catalogue, the house records and any surviving provenance for Rook's journal.

I stated my terms.

The university would hold the funds, contract directly with our suppliers and provide written confirmation that no object would be removed from its country of origin without lawful permission. All field notes would be duplicated. One copy would remain with Eleanor. No instruction from the donor would override the safety of the party or the reporting of a crime.

Lyle listened.

“The foundation may not accept unrestricted publication.”

“I did not say publication. I said no concealed crime.”

“And if the foundation refuses?”

“Then it may hire someone with fewer questions.”

He left us for twenty minutes.

When he returned, he carried a typed addendum accepting every term.

This troubled me more than refusal would have done.

“Your donor wants us badly,” Eleanor said.

“Professor Ashcroft chose Mr Quatermain.”

“Professor Ashcroft is dead.”

Lyle's face changed for an instant. Not grief. Fear.

“Yes,” he said. “That is why there is urgency.”

He would not explain further.

We signed no agreement that day. Eleanor took the papers home to read.

As we crossed the court, she said, “He is not the benefactor's man.”

“What makes you say so?”

“He is afraid of them too.”