Napoleon's Pyramids

by William Dietrich

  ‘No.’ He climbed over the lip of the black sarcophagus and lay down, staring at the ceiling. We looked down at him and he smiled slightly. ‘It’s more comfortable than you might think. The stone is neither too cold nor hot. Nor am I too tall, are you surprised?’ He smiled at his little joke. ‘Not that I plan to remain here forever.’

  Jomard looked troubled. ‘There are accounts of panic …’

  ‘Never question my courage.’

  He bowed. ‘To the contrary, I salute you, my general.’

  So we dutifully filed out, each torch in turn disappearing through the low entryway until our commander was left alone in the dark. We worked our way down the Grand Gallery, letting ourselves down by the rope. A bat took flight and flapped down toward us, but an Arab waved a torch and the blind creature veered away from the heat, settling again on the ceiling. By the time we got down to the smaller shaft that led down to the pyramid entrance, I was soaked with sweat.

  ‘I’ll wait for him here,’ Jomard said. ‘The rest of you file outside.’

  I needed no encouragement. The day seemed lit with a thousand suns when we finally emerged on the outside of the pyramid’s sand-and-rubble slope, clouds of dust puffing off our now-filthy clothes. My throat was parched, my head aching. We found shade on the east side of the structure and sat to wait, sipping water. The party members who had remained outside had scattered over the ruins. Some were circuiting the other two pyramids. Some had erected little awnings and were having lunch. A few had climbed partway up the structure above us, and others competed to see how high up the pyramid’s side they could hurl a rock.

  I mopped my brow, acutely conscious that I seemed no closer to solving the medallion’s mystery. ‘All this great pile for three little rooms?’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense, does it?’ agreed Monge.

  ‘I feel like there’s something obvious we’re not seeing.’

  ‘I’m guessing we’re to see numbers, as Jomard said. It may be a puzzle meant to occupy humankind for centuries.’ The mathematician took out paper and began his own calculations.

  Bonaparte was absent for a full hour. Finally there was a shout and we went back to meet him. Like us he emerged dirty and blinking, skidding down the rubble to the sand below. But when we ran up I saw he was also unusually pale, his eyes having the unfocused, haunted look of a man emerging from a vivid dream.

  ‘What took you so long?’ Monge asked.

  ‘Was it long?’

  ‘An hour, at least.’

  ‘Really? Time disappeared.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I crossed my arms in the sarcophagus, like those mummies we’ve seen.’

  ‘Mon dieu, General.’

  ‘I heard and saw …’ He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Or did I?’ He swayed.

  The mathematician grasped his arm to hold him up. ‘Heard and saw what?’

  He blinked. ‘I had a picture of my life, or I think it was my life. I’m not even sure if it was the future or the past.’ He looked around, whether to be evasive or to tease us, I know not.

  ‘What kind of picture?’

  ‘I … it was very strange. I won’t speak of this, I think. I won’t …’ Then his eyes fell on me. ‘Where’s the medallion?’ he abruptly demanded.

  He took me by surprise. ‘It’s lost, remember?’

  ‘No. You’re mistaken.’ His grey eyes were intent.

  ‘It went down with L’Orient, General.’

  ‘No.’ He said it with such conviction that we looked at each other uneasily.

  ‘Would you have some water?’ Monge asked worriedly.

  Napoleon shook his head as if to clear it. ‘I will not go in there again.’

  ‘But, General, what did you see?’ the mathematician pressed.

  ‘We will not speak of this again.’

  All of us were uncomfortable. I realised how much the expedition relied on Bonaparte’s precision and energy, now that I’d seen him dazed. He was imperfect as a man and a leader, but so commanding, so dominant in purpose and intellect, that all of us had unconsciously surrendered to him. He was the expedition’s spark and its compass. Without him, none of this would be happening.

  The pyramid seemed to be looking down on us mockingly, the perfect peak.

  ‘I must rest,’ Napoleon said. ‘Wine, not water.’ He snapped his finger and an aide ran to fetch a flask. Then he turned to me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Had he lost all his senses? ‘What?’ I was confused by his confusion.

  ‘You came with a medallion and a promise to make sense of this. You’ve claimed to have lost the one and haven’t fulfilled the other. What is it I felt in there? Is it electricity?’

  ‘Possibly, General, but I have no instrument to tell. I’m as baffled as anyone.’

  ‘And I am baffled by you, a suspected murderer and an American, who comes on our expedition and seems to be of no use and yet is everywhere! I’m beginning to not trust you, Gage, and it is not comfortable being a man I don’t trust.’

  ‘General Bonaparte, I have been working to earn your trust, on the battlefield and here! It does no good to make wild guesses. Give me time to work on these theories. Jomard’s ideas are intriguing, but I’ve had no time to evaluate them.’

  ‘Then you will sit here in the sand until you do.’ He took the flask and drank.

  ‘What? No! I have studies in Cairo!’

  ‘You’re not to return to Cairo until you can come back and tell me something useful about this pyramid. Not old stories, but what it is for and how it can be harnessed. There’s power here, and I want to know how to tap it.’

  ‘I want nothing less! But how am I to do that?’

  ‘You are a savant, supposedly. Discover it. Use the medallion you pretend to have lost.’ Then he stalked away.

  Our little group watched him in stupefaction.

  ‘What the devil happened to him in there?’ Jomard said.

  ‘I think he hallucinated in the dark,’ Monge said. ‘Lord knows I wouldn’t stay in there alone. Our Corsican has guts.’

  ‘Why did he focus on me?’ His antagonism had shaken me.

  ‘Because you were at Abukir,’ the mathematician said. ‘I think the defeat is gnawing on him more than he will admit. Our strategic future is not good.’

  ‘And I’m to camp out here staring at this structure until it is?’

  ‘He’ll forget about you in a day or two.’

  ‘Not that his curiosity isn’t warranted,’ Jomard said. ‘I need to read the ancient sources again. The more I learn of this structure, the more fascinating it seems.’

  ‘And pointless,’ I grumbled.

  ‘Is it, Gage?’ asked Monge. ‘There’s far too much precision for pointlessness, I think. Not only too much labour, but too much thought. In doing more calculations just now, another correlation occurred to me. This pyramid is indeed a mathematical plaything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I will need to check my guess against Jomard’s figures, but if we extrapolate the pyramid’s slope to its original peak, a bit higher than it is now, and compare its height to the length of two of its sides, I believe we arrive at one of the most fundamental numbers in all mathematics: pi.’

  ‘Pi?’

  ‘The ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, Gage, is considered by many cultures to be sacred. It’s about twenty-two parts to seven, or 3.1415 … the number has never been completely computed. Still, every culture has tried to come as close as they can. The ancient Egyptians came up with 3.160. The pyramid’s ratio of height to two of its sides appears to come very close to that number.’

  ‘The pyramid stands for pi?’

  ‘It was built, perhaps, to conform to the Egyptian value of that number.’

  ‘But again, why?’

  ‘Once more we butt up against ancient mysteries. But it’s interesting, is it not, that your medallion included a diameter inside a circle? Too bad you lost it. Or did you?’<
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  Interesting? It was a revelation. For weeks I’d been journeying blindly. Now I felt like I knew definitely what the medallion was pointing to: the pyramid behind me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I reluctantly stayed as ordered to help Jomard and Monge make more measurements of the pyramids, sharing the tent they’d staked a short distance from the Sphinx. After having promised a quick return, I was uneasy being such a distance from Astiza and the medallion, especially with Silano in Cairo. But if I ignored Napoleon’s very public command I risked being arrested. Besides, I felt I was getting closer to the secret. Perhaps the medallion was a map to another passageway in the big heap of stone. Then there was October 21st, a date I’d plucked off the lost ancient calendar that might or might not have any accuracy or significance, and was still two months away. I didn’t know how any of this fit together, but maybe the savants would turn up another clue. So I sent a message to Enoch’s house, explaining my predicament and asking that he get word to Yusuf’s harem of my delay. At least I knew what I should be looking at, I added. I simply lacked clear understanding of what I should be looking for.

  My temporary exile from the city was not entirely bad. Enoch’s house was confining and Cairo noisy, while the empty silence of the desert was a respite. A company of soldiers bivouacked in the sand to protect us against roaming Bedouin and Mamelukes, and I told myself that staying here a couple nights might actually be the safest thing for Astiza and Enoch, since my absence should deflect attention from them. Silano had hopefully accepted my story that the medallion was at the bottom of Abukir Bay. I’d not forgotten poor Talma, but proof of his killer, and revenge, would have to wait. In short I pretended, as humans are wont to do, that the worst was for the best.

  As I’ve said, there are three large pyramids at Giza, and all three have small passageways and chambers that are empty. Kephren’s pyramid is still covered at its top by the kind of limestone casing that at one time gave all three structures a perfectly smooth, polished white surface. How they must have glistened, like prisms of salt! Using surveying instruments, we calculated that the Great Pyramid, when it came to a precise point, had a height of 480 feet, more than a hundred feet higher than the pinnacle of the cathedral of Amiens, the tallest in France. The Egyptians used only 203 tiers of masonry to reach this prodigious altitude. We measured the slope of its side at fifty-one degrees, precisely that needed to make height and half its circumference equal to both pi and Jomard’s Fibonacci sequence.

  Despite this eerie coincidence, the pyramids’ purpose still eluded me. As art they were sublime. For utility, they seemed nonsensical. Here were buildings so smooth when built that no one could stand on them, housing corridors awkward for humans to negotiate, leading to chambers that seemed never to have been occupied, and codifying mathematics that seemed obscure to all but a specialist.

  Monge said the whole business probably had something to do with religion. ‘Five thousand years from now, will people understand the motive behind Notre Dame?’

  ‘You’d better not let the priests hear you say that.’

  ‘Priests are obsolete; science is the new religion. To the ancient Egyptians, religion was their science, and magic an attempt to manipulate what couldn’t be understood. Mankind then advanced from a past in which every tribe and nation had its own groups of gods to one in which many nations worship one god. Still, there are many faiths, each calling the others heretics. Now we have science, based not on faith, but reason and experiment, and centred not on one nation, or pope, or king, but universal law. It doesn’t matter if you are Chinese or German, or speak Arabic or Spanish: science is the same. That’s why it will triumph, and why the Church instinctively feared Galileo. But this structure behind us was built by a particular people with particular beliefs, and we might never rediscover their reasoning because it was based on religious mysticism we can’t comprehend. It would help if we could someday decipher hieroglyphics.’

  I couldn’t disagree with this prediction – I was a Franklin man, after all – and yet I had to wonder why science, if so universal, hadn’t swept all before it already. Why were people still religious? Science was clever but cold, explanatory and yet silent on the biggest questions. It answered how but not why, and thus left people yearning. I suspected people of the future would understand Notre Dame, just as we understand a Roman temple. And, perhaps, worship and fear in much the same way. The revolutionaries in their rationalist fervour were missing something, I thought, and what was missing was heart, or soul. Did science have room for that, or hopes of an afterlife?

  I said none of this, however, simply replying, ‘What if it’s simpler than that, Doctor Monge? What if the pyramid is simply a tomb?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that and it presents a fascinating paradox, Gage. Suppose it was supposed to be, at least principally, a tomb. Its very size creates its own problem, does it not? The more elaborately you build a pyramid to safeguard a mummy, the more you call attention to the mummy’s location. It must have been a dilemma for pharaohs seeking to preserve their remains for all eternity.’

  ‘I’ve thought of another dilemma as well,’ I replied. ‘The pharaoh hopes to be undisturbed for eternity. Yet the perfect crime is one that no one realises has occurred. If you wanted to rob the tomb of your master, what better way than to do it just before it is sealed up, because once it is, no one can discover the theft! If this is a tomb, it relied on the faithfulness of those closing it. Who could the pharaoh trust?’

  ‘Unproven belief again!’ Monge laughed.

  Mentally, I reviewed what I knew about the medallion. A bisected circle: a symbol, perhaps, for pi. A map of the constellation containing the ancient polar star in its upper half. A symbol for water below. Hash marks arranged in a delta like a pyramid. Perhaps the water was the Nile, and the marks represented the Great Pyramid, but why not etch a simple triangle? Enoch had said that the emblem seemed incomplete, but where to find the rest? The shaft of Min, in some long-lost temple? It seemed a joke. I tried to think like Franklin, but I was not his match. He could toy with thunderbolts one day and found a new nation the next. Could the pyramids have attracted lightning and converted it into power? Was the entire pyramid some kind of Leyden jar? I hadn’t heard a roll of thunder or seen a drop of rain since we’d arrived in Egypt.

  Monge left to join Bonaparte for the official christening of the new Institute of Egypt. There the savants were at work on everything from devising ways to ferment alcohol or bake bread (with sunflower stalks, since Egypt lacked adequate wood) to cataloguing Egypt’s wildlife. Conte had set up a workshop to replace equipment, such as printing presses, that had been lost with the destruction of the fleet at Abukir. He was the kind of tinkerer who could make anything from anything. Jomard and I lingered in the pinks and gold of the desert, laboriously unreeling tapes, pitching aside rubble, and measuring angles with surveying staffs. Three days and nights we spent, watching the stars wheel around the tips of the pyramids and debating what the monuments might be for.

  By morning of the fourth day, bored with the meticulous work and inconclusive speculation, I wandered to a viewpoint overlooking Cairo across the river. There I saw a curious sight. Conte had apparently manufactured enough hydrogen to inflate a balloon. The coated silk bag looked to be about forty feet in diameter, its top half covered with a net from which ropes extended downward to hold a wicker basket. It hovered on its tether a hundred feet off the ground, drawing a small crowd. I studied it through Jomard’s telescope. All those watching appeared to be Europeans.

  So far the Arabs had displayed little wonder about Western technology. They seemed to regard us as a temporary intrusion of clever infidels, obsessed with mechanical tricks and careless with our souls. I’d earlier enlisted Conte’s help to make a cranked friction generator for a store of electricity in what Franklin had called a battery, and was invited by the savants to give a mild shock to some of Cairo’s mullahs. The Egyptians gamely joined hands, I jolted the fir
st with a charge from my Leyden jar, and they all jumped in turn as the current passed through them, provoking great consternation and laughter. But after their initial surprise they seemed more amused than awed. Electricity was cheap magic, good for nothing but parlour games.

  It was while watching the balloon that I noticed a long column of French soldiers issue from Cairo’s southern gate. Their regularity was a marked contrast to the mobs of merchants and camel drovers who clustered around the city’s entrances. The soldiers tramped in a line of blue and white, regimental banners limp in the hot air. On and on the ranks came, a glittering file undulating like a millipede, until it seemed a full division. Some of the force was mounted, and more horses pulled two small field guns.

  I called to Jomard and he joined me, focusing the spyglass. ‘It is General Desaix, off to chase the elusive Murad Bey,’ he said. ‘His troops are going to explore and conquer an upper Egypt that few Europeans have ever seen.’

  ‘So the war isn’t over.’

  He laughed. ‘We’re talking about Bonaparte! War will never be over for him.’ He continued to study the column, dust drifting ahead of the soldiers as if to announce their coming. I could imagine them good-naturedly cursing it, their mouths full of grit. ‘I think I see your old friend as well.’

  ‘Old friend?’

  ‘Here, look for yourself.’

  Near the column’s head was a man in turban and robes with half a dozen Bedouin riding as bodyguard. One of his henchmen held a parasol above his head. I could see the slim rapier bouncing on his hip and the fine black stallion he’d purchased in Cairo: Silano. Someone smaller rode by his side, swathed in robes. A personal servant, perhaps.

  ‘Good riddance.’

  ‘I envy him,’ Jomard said. ‘What discoveries they’ll make!’

  Had Silano given up his quest for the medallion? Or gone to look for its missing piece in Enoch’s southern temple? I picked out Bin Sadr as well. He was leading the Bedouin bodyguard, rocking easily on the back of a camel while holding his staff.