The Winter Vault Read Free Page A

thousands of tonnes of cement and steel, and millions of rivets, a lake was built in the desert. Nubia in its entirety – one hundred and twenty thousand villagers, their homes, land, and meticulously tended ancient groves, and many hundreds of archaeological sites – vanished. Even a river can drown; vanished too, under the waters of Lake Nasser, was the Nubians' river, their Nile, which had flowed through every ritual of their daily life, had guided their philosophical thought, and had blessed the birth of every Nubian child for more than five thousand years.
    In the weeks before the forced emigration, men who returned from labour exile walked through their villages to homes they had not seen in twenty, forty, fifty years. A woman, suddenly young and then just as suddenly old again, looked at the face of a husband barely seen since she was a girl, and children, now middle-aged, looked upon fathers for the first time. For more than three hundred kilometres, the river absorbed such cries and silences, the shock not of death but of life, as men, living ghosts, returned to look upon their birthplace for the last time.

    The workers at Abu Simbel fell into small colonies: the Italian stonecutters – the marmisti – who could smell faults in the stone at twenty paces; the Egyptian and European engineers; the cooks and technicians; the Egyptian and Nubian labourers; and all the spouses and children. Avery walked through the site and saw a hundred problems and a hundred singular solutions. He saw the clever adaptations made by workers who could not wait three months for replacement parts to arrive from Europe. It gave him a deep pleasure, his father's pleasure, to notice the wire and spring borrowed from another machine, transplanted with the fraternity of an organ donor.
    When Avery first saw the Bucyrus machines squatting in the desert at Abu Simbel – the pumps, refrigerators, and generators – it was almost an ache he felt, for these were the machines his father had loved best. William Escher had put great stock in Ruston-Bucyrus reliability – in their famous excavators and in their machines for compressing, ventilating, pumping, winching, heating, freezing, illuminating … He'd had a boy's love of heavy machinery and favoured Bucyrus above all because of their machines born of the Second World War: midget submarines, flameproof locomotives, mine sweepers, landing craft, patrol boats, the Mathilda 400 and Cavalier 220 tanks, the 600 Bren Gun Carriers, and the tunnelling machine commissioned by Winston Churchill and constructed to his personal specifications, a box with a six-foot steel plough in front and a conveyor system in back, designed to dig trenches at the rate of three miles an hour.
    – When my father worked for Sir Halcrow and Co., Avery told Jean, the company was building the great Scottish dams. And during the war they were consulted for the “bouncing bomb” missions, and tunnelled under London for the post office, and extended Whitehall for Churchill. My father was sent to North Wales to assess the Manod slate quarry to ensure it was sound enough to shelter paintings from the National Gallery. That's where he'd learned the sizes of Welsh slate: wide and narrow ladies, duchesses and small duchesses, empresses, marchionesses, and broad countesses. He loved the names of things: joists, trusses, sole plates, studs, footing, bearers, lintels, and spars.
    – They could be plant names, said Jean. The flowering lintel, the spar nettle, the black-eyed joist …
    – My father's first job, when he was fifteen, said Avery, was at Lamson Pneumatic Tubes. Ever since I can remember, we shared an affection for pneumatic tubes: ingenious, practical, inexplicably humorous. We loved the idea of an elegant, handwritten note, perhaps a love letter, stuffed into a cylinder and then shot through a tube of compressed air at thirty-five miles an hour or sucked up by a vacuum at the other end like liquid through a straw. My