Napoleon's Pyramids

by William Dietrich

  Sitting beside the lake on a stone cradle, pretty as a schooner, was a narrow and graceful white boat with the high prow and stern of the type I’d seen in temple wall paintings. It was just big enough to float the two of us, and had a gilded oar to scull with. And why hadn’t it rotted? Because it was not built of wood at all, but rather of hollowed alabaster with ribs and thwarts of gold. The polished stone was translucent, its texture velvet.

  ‘Will rock float?’

  ‘A thin pot will,’ she said. Handling the craft carefully, the two of us dragged it down to the opaque water. Ripples fanned out across a lake as smooth as a mirror.

  ‘Do you think anything lives in this water?’ I asked uneasily.

  She climbed aboard. ‘I’ll tell you when we get to the other side.’

  I boarded, the boat delicate as glass, and pushed off with Bin Sadr’s staff. Then we glided toward the island, sculling and looking over the side for monsters.

  It was not far – the temple was even smaller than I would have guessed. We grounded and got out to gape at a pharaoh’s horde. There was a golden chariot with silver spears, polished furniture set with ebony and jade, cedar chests, jewelled armour, dog-headed gods, and jars of oil and spices. The hummock sparkled with precious gems like emeralds and rubies. There was turquoise, feldspar, jasper, cornelian, malachite, amber, coral, and lapis lazuli. There was a red granite sarcophagus, solid as a bunker, with a rock lid too heavy to lift without a dozen men. Was anyone inside? I’d little interest in finding out. The idea of grubbing into a pharaoh’s grave didn’t appeal to me. Helping myself to treasure did.

  Yet Astiza had eyes for none of this. She barely glanced at the spectacular jewellery, dazzling robes, canopic jars, or golden plate. Instead, as if in a trance, she walked up a path sheathed in silver toward the little temple, its pillars carved with baboon-headed Thoths. I followed.

  There was a marble table under the marble roof. On it was a red granite box, open on one side, and inside this a golden cube with golden doors. All this for a book or, more accurately, rolls of parchment? I pulled the small door handle. It opened as if oiled.

  I reached inside …

  And found nothing.

  I felt with my hand in all directions and touched only slick gold lining. I snorted. ‘So much for wisdom.’

  ‘It’s not there?’

  ‘The Egyptians had no more answers than we do. It’s all a myth, Astiza.’

  She was stunned. ‘Then why this temple? Why this box? Why those legends?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe the library was the easy part. It was the book they never got around to writing.’

  She looked around suspiciously. ‘No. It’s been stolen.’

  ‘I think it was never here.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. They would not have built that granite-and-gold vault for nothing. Somebody’s been here before. Somebody high-ranking, with the knowledge of how to enter this place and yet the rage and pride not to respect the pyramid.’

  ‘And not take all this gold?’

  ‘This prophet didn’t care for gold. He was interested in the next world, not this one. Beside, gold is dross compared to the power of this book.’

  ‘A book of magic.’

  ‘Of power, wisdom, grace, serenity. A book of death and rebirth. A book of happiness. A book that inspired Egypt to become the world’s greatest nation, and then inspired another people to influence the world.’

  ‘What other people? Who took it?’

  She pointed. ‘He left his identity behind.’

  There, propped in one corner of the marble temple, was a shepherd’s crook, or staff. It had the practically curved end to snare a sheep’s neck. Its wood seemed marvellously preserved, and unlike a normal crook it was remarkable in its polish and tasteful carving, with a winged angel at the curved end and the blunt head of a serpent at the other. Midway down were two golden cherubim with wings extended to each other, a bracket holding them to the staff. Yet it was still a modest object in the midst of a pharaoh’s horde.

  ‘What the devil is that?’

  ‘The rod of the most famous magician in history,’ Astiza said.

  ‘Magician?’

  ‘The prince of Egypt who became a liberator.’

  I stared at her. ‘You’re saying Moses was down here?’

  ‘Doesn’t that make sense?’

  ‘No. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Is it? A fugitive criminal, spoken to by God, comes out of the desert with the extraordinary demand to lead Hebrew slaves to freedom, and suddenly he has the power to work miracles – a skill he’s never shown before?’

  ‘Power given by God.’

  ‘Really? Or by the gods, under the guise of the one great God?’

  ‘He was fighting the Egyptian gods, the false idols.’

  ‘Ethan, it was men fighting with men.’

  She sounded like a bloody French revolutionary. Or Ben Franklin.

  ‘The saviour of his people did not just take the enslaved Hebrews and destroy Pharaoh’s army,’ Astiza went on. ‘He took the most powerful talisman in all the world, so mighty that migrant slaves had the power to conquer the Promised Land.’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘A repository of wisdom. Recipes of power. When the Jews reached their Promised Land their armies swept all before them. Moses found food, healed the sick, and struck down the blasphemers. He lived past a normal span. Something kept the Hebrews alive in a wilderness for forty years. It was this book.’

  Once more I tried to remember the old Bible stories. Moses had been a Hebrew slave baby rescued by a princess, raised as a prince, who killed a slave overseer in a fit of rage. He fled, came back decades later, and when Pharaoh refused to let his people go, Moses called down ten plagues upon Egypt. When Pharaoh lost his oldest son in the tenth and worst calamity, he gave up at last, releasing the Hebrew slaves from bondage. And that should have been the end of it except Pharaoh changed his mind yet again and chased Moses and the Hebrews with six hundred chariots. Why? Because he discovered that Moses had taken more than just the enslaved Hebrews. He had taken the core of Egypt’s power, its greatest secret, its most feared possession. He had taken it and …

  Parted the sea.

  Had they carried this book of power to Solomon’s temple, supposedly raised by the ancestors of my Freemasons?

  ‘This can’t be. How could he get in here and back out?’

  ‘He came to Pharaoh shortly before the Nile was at its height,’ Astiza said. ‘Don’t you see, Ethan? Moses had been an Egyptian prince. He knew sacred secrets. He knew how to get in here and back out, something no one else had dared. That year Egypt lost not just a nation of slaves, a pharaoh, and an army. It lost its heart, its soul, its wisdom. Its essence was taken by a nomadic tribe that after forty years transported it …’

  ‘To Israel.’ I sat on the empty pedestal, my mind reeling.

  ‘And Moses, thief as well as prophet, was never allowed by his own God to enter the Promised Land. Maybe he felt guilt at unleashing what was meant to remain hidden.’

  I stared at nothing. This book, or scroll, had been missing for three thousand years. And here were Silano and me, chasing an empty vault.

  ‘We’ve been looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘It may have become part of the Ark of the Covenant,’ she said excitedly, ‘like the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The same knowledge and power that had raised the pyramids passed to the Jews, who rose from an obscure people to tribes whose traditions became the source of three great religions! It may have helped bring down the walls of Jericho!’

  My mind was tumbling over itself. Heresy! ‘But why would the Egyptians bury such a book?’

  ‘Because knowledge always carries risk as well as reward. It can be used for evil as well as good. Our legends say the secrets of Egypt came from across the sea, from a people forgotten even when the pyramids were raised, and that Thoth realised such knowledge had to be safeguarded. People are creatures of em
otion, cleverer than they are wise. Maybe the Hebrews realised that too, since the book has disappeared. Perhaps they learnt that to use the Book of Thoth was dangerous folly.’

  I didn’t believe any of it, of course. This mixture of gods was patent blasphemy. And I’m a modern man, a man of science, an American sceptic in the Franklin mould. And yet was there some divine force that worked through all the wonders of the world? Was there a chapter to humankind’s story that our revolutionary age had forgotten?

  And then there came an echoing boom, a long roll of thunder, stirring the air with distant wind. The rocky cavern quivered and rumbled. An explosion.

  Silano had found his gunpowder.

  As the sound reverberated through the subterranean chamber, I got up off the pedestal. ‘You didn’t answer my other question. How did Moses get back out?’

  She smiled. ‘Maybe he never closed the door that we entered, and got out the way he came in. Or, more likely, there is more than one entrance. The medallion suggests there is more than one shaft – one west and one east – and he closed the western door behind him but exited the east. Certainly the good news is that we know he did. We found our way in, Ethan. We’ll find our way out, too. First step is to get off this island.’

  ‘Not until I help myself.’

  ‘We have no time for that!’

  ‘A pittance of this treasure, and we can buy all the time in the world.’

  I had no proper sack or backpack. How can I describe the king’s ransom I tried to wear? I draped enough necklaces on my chest to give myself a backache and jammed on bracelets enough for a Babylonian whore. I belted gold around my waist, fastened anklets above my feet, and even took off Moses’ cherubim and jammed them in my drawers. Yet I barely scratched the treasure trove that lay under the Great Pyramid. Astiza, in contrast, touched nothing.

  ‘Stealing from the dead is no different than stealing from the living,’ she warned.

  ‘Except that the dead don’t need it anymore,’ I reasoned, torn between sheepishness at my own Western greed and the entrepreneurial instincts to not let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip by. ‘When we’re outside we’ll need money to finish finding this book,’ I reasoned. ‘For heaven’s sake, at least put a ring or two on your fingers.’

  ‘It’s bad luck. People die when they rob from tombs.’

  ‘It’s simply compensation for all we’ve been through.’

  ‘Ethan, I’m worried there is a curse.’

  ‘Savants don’t believe in curses, and Americans believe in opportunity when it is staring you in the face. I’m not going to leave until you take something for yourself.’

  So she put a ring on with all the pleasure of a slave slipping on its manacle. I knew she would come around to my way of thinking once we were out of this catacomb. That ring alone, with a ruby the size of a cherry, was a life’s income. We jumped in the boat and quickly sculled to the main shore. Once on the ground we felt shudders in the grand structure above, and a continued creaking and groaning as an aftereffect of the explosion. I hoped that fool Silano hadn’t used so much gunpowder that he’d bring the ceiling down.

  ‘We have to assume Bin Sadr and his assassins are going to be coming in the same way we did, if that keg of gunpowder worked,’ I said. ‘But if the medallion showed a V with two shafts, the other path out must be the eastern shaft. With luck we can pop out that way, shut the eastern door, and be well on our way before the villains figure out where we’ve gone.’

  ‘They’ll be transfixed by the treasure too,’ Astiza predicted.

  ‘So much the better.’

  The disquieting grinding continued, accompanied by a hiss, like a cascade of falling sand. Had the explosion triggered some kind of ancient mechanism? The building felt alive, and disapproving. I could hear distant shouts as Silano’s henchmen descended toward us.

  Still holding Bin Sadr’s staff, I led Astiza to a portal on the eastern end of the lake. It had two tunnels, one going down and another up. We took the upper course. Sure enough, it soon led to an ascending shaft opposite the one we’d come down. This shaft rose at the same angle, aimed for the pyramid’s eastern face. Yet the higher we climbed, the louder the hiss and groan.

  ‘The air is feeling heavier,’ I said worriedly.

  Soon we saw why. The overhead voids I’d noticed in the western shaft were repeated here, and from the mouth of each one a granite plug was descending like a dark molar from a stone gum. They were steadily sliding down to seal the passage and any escape. A second was coming down behind the first, and a third beyond that. Sand, somewhere in the pyramid’s workings, must have worked as a counterweight to balance these stones in place. Now, with Silano’s disturbance, it had been triggered to leak away. No doubt the portals were closing on the tunnel we’d entered through, as well. We might be trapped down here with Bin Sadr’s gang.

  ‘Hurry! Maybe we can slip beneath before they shut!’ I started to wriggle forward.

  Astiza grabbed me. ‘No! You’ll be crushed!’

  Even as I struggled against her grasp I knew she was right. I might make it past the nearest, and even the one beyond that. But the third would surely crush me, or more likely trap me for all eternity between it and its brother behind.

  ‘There has to be another way,’ I said with more hope than conviction.

  ‘The medallion showed only two shafts.’ She dragged me backward with my necklaces like a dog on its collar. ‘I told you all this was bad luck.’

  ‘No. There’s that descending tunnel we haven’t followed. They wouldn’t just cork this off for all time.’

  We hurriedly descended back the way we came, coming out again to the underground lake with its island. As we neared we saw a glow of light and soon confirmed the worst. Several Arabs were on the isle of gold and silver, shouting with the same glee I’d felt, wrestling for the best pieces. Then they spotted our torches. ‘The American!’ Bin Sadr cried, his words echoing across the water. ‘The man who kills him gets a double share! Another double for giving me the woman!’

  Where was Silano?

  I couldn’t help but wave his staff at the bastard, like a cape at a bull.

  Bin Sadr and two of the men leapt into the little alabaster boat, almost capsizing it but also sending it skittering toward us with their momentum. The other three leapt into the cold water and began swimming.

  With no other choice, we ran down the descending tunnel. It too seemed to lead vaguely east, but deeper into the limestone bedrock. I dreaded a dead end, like the descending corridor we’d seen with Napoleon. Yet now another sound was growing, the deep, throaty roar of a running underground river.

  Maybe that was the way out!

  We came to a scene out of Dante. The tunnel ended on a stone landing that jutted into a new cave chamber, this one faintly lit by a lurid red glow. The source of the illumination was a pit so deep and foggy that I couldn’t make out its bottom, even though a glow like banked coals seemed to be coming from its depths. It was an unworldly light, dim yet pulsing, like a navel of Hades. Rock scree and sand sloped down the pit’s sides toward the light. Something mysterious was moving down there, ponderous and thick. A stone bridge, cracked, pockmarked, and without railings, arched across the pit. It was enameled blue and covered with yellow stars, like an upside-down temple roof. Slip from its course, and you’d never get back out.

  At the far end of this chamber the bridge ended on a broad set of wet, glistening, granite stairs. A spilling sheet of water ran down them and into the pit, possibly the source of the swirling steam. It was from the direction of the stairs that I heard the roar of a river. While impossible to see, I guessed there was an underground diversion of the Nile there, running in a channel across the far side of the chamber like an irrigation canal. The channel must be at the top of the wet stairway, higher than the platform on which we stood, and was so brimming with water that some was spilling over.

  ‘That’s our exit,’ I said. ‘All we have to do is get there first.’
I could hear the Arabs coming behind as I trotted out on the bridge.

  Suddenly a block bearing one of the inscribed stars gave way and my leg plunged down into the gap, almost toppling me off the archway and into the pit. Only with luck did I catch the edge of the bridge and regain my footing. The archway block made a bang when it hit, far below. I looked down into the reddish fog. What was writhing down there?

  ‘By the timber of Ticonderoga, I think there are snakes down there,’ I said shakily, pulling myself up and retreating. At the same time I could hear the shouts of the approaching Arabs.

  ‘It’s a test, Ethan, to punish those who enter without knowledge. There’s something wrong with this bridge.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Why would they paint the sky on the bridge deck? Because the world is upside down here, because … the medallion disc! Where is it?’

  After Astiza had retrieved it from its fall down the face of the pyramid, I’d tucked it into my robes. Souvenir, after all this trouble. Now I pulled it out and gave it to her.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the constellation Draco. It’s not just the north star, Ethan. It makes a pattern we have to follow.’ And before I could suggest we consider the matter, she hopped past me onto a particular stone in the archway. ‘Only touch the stars that are in the constellation!’

  ‘Wait! What if you’re wrong?’

  There was the boom of a musket and a bullet whined into the chamber, bouncing off the rock walls. Bin Sadr was coming at full charge.

  ‘What choice do we have?’

  I followed Astiza, using Bin Sadr’s staff for balance.

  We’d barely started when the Arabs came boiling out of the tunnel and stopped at the lip of the pit as we had, awed by the peculiar menace of this place. Then one of them rushed forward. ‘I’ve got the woman!’ But he’d gone only yards when another star block gave way and he fell in surprise, not as lucky as me. He struck the bridge with his torso, bounced, screamed, scrabbled at the lip of the arch with his fingers, and fell, striking the side of the pit and sliding down into the gloom in a tumble of rock. The Arabs moved to the lip of the ledge to look. Something down there moved, quickly this time, and the victim’s scream was cut off.