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persuaded her not to have taken that dive? Maybe, maybe not, but I wasn’t that kind of man in those days. Then, with all the arrogance of a young gun who’d achieved a certain status and who believed Nature favoured the hard-working, I assumed our lives would go on for ever.
     
    The boat - a small fishing vessel aptly named Ra Five, with an old rusting cabin and a pile of mended fishing nets on board - chugged determinedly against the incoming tide, ploughing through the great webs of seaweed the storm had thrown up in the days before. Faakhir’s cousin Jamal, a short muscular man in his late fifties with the calloused and scarred hands of a working fisherman, guided us out towards the bobbing red buoy that marked the dive site. He was the owner of the boat and, as Isabella had again reassured me, part of the coastguard, and had therefore secured the official permission necessary for her to take the boat out and make the dive. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. Jamal’s constant smile was betrayed by a nervousness in his eyes and I suspected bribery had played its part. But I knew better than to ask.
    Hanging over the cabin controls was a miniature Michelin man, and a plastic hula-hoop girl with a painted green grass skirt hung alongside the eye of Horus as I steadied myself against the chipped wooden panelling.
    ‘Careful, you might fall overboard,’ Omar, the official Isabella had told me about the night before, joked. He was a plump man with a badly fixed broken nose and a thin white scar running vertically across one heavy eyelid down to his cheek. He wore a fluorescent pink life jacket strapped over his clothes and appeared to be taking little interest in the proceedings. After suffering two centuries of the illegal excavation and export of its ancient statues and artefacts, Egypt had finally established a policing system that required all archaeological sites to have at least one of their officers present. But even if Omar was really such an officer and not just moonlighting, I strongly suspected that Isabella had deliberately underplayed the significance of the astrarium.
    Faakhir stood in the doorway of the cabin. He had a clumsiness on land that completely belied his grace when in the water. When I’d first dived with him I had been astounded not only by the fluidity of his movements but also by his uncanny ability to locate objects on the seabed, even in the murky waters of Alexandria’s harbour. The fishing hut in Al Gomrok he’d grown up in had a number of small Ptolemaic objects placed casually next to a radio or an old family photograph. Objects his father and grandfather had either caught in their nets or hauled up from the seabed over the decades. Faakhir himself had seen submerged statues and pillars, many of which had become reefs over the aeons, attracting schools of fish: the reason why the fishermen fished there in the first place. But there were levels of Faakhir’s diving expertise that were unfathomable to Isabella and he was always strangely vague about where he’d trained.
    ‘The Mediterranean makes brothers of us all,’ he’d once said to me. ‘She is like a language - you either speak her or you don’t.’
     
    ‘Are you going to venture in, my friend?’ Faakhir asked me.
    I wasn’t too keen on diving, feeling slightly claustrophobic underwater. Also, I wanted to keep an eye on Omar. ‘Maybe later. I’m happy to watch for the time being.’
    ‘Oliver, wait until you see the shipwreck for yourself,’ he said dreamily. ‘The royal boat is a skeleton but you can still see its shape. To imagine, Cleopatra herself would have sailed in it!’
    Isabella appeared, an oxygen tank slung over her shoulder. ‘Ready, Faakhir?’
    Faakhir smiled. ‘I have studied the map so many times I could swim to the site blind.’
    ‘With the amount of sand that’s shifted in the last few nights you probably will be. You know the drill. Let’s cover the area evenly, side by side,