Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  Anything Jack tried now would almost certainly result in the International Maritime University being blacklisted in Egypt, his deportation, and the closure of all the remaining IMU projects in the country, as well as threatening Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, an affiliate of IMU. At this moment Maurice was working desperately to complete his excavation of the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum oasis, the culmination of a lifelong passion for Egyptology that might still produce astonishing finds. For him, every moment now counted just as it did for Jack, but Hiebermeyer’s entire soul and career were wrapped up in ancient Egypt, and Jack was not willing to risk his friend’s chance of bringing his excavation to some kind of completion. There was no leeway: This dive would be their last one on-site, with the chances of them ever returning overshadowed by the cloud that now hung over the entire Middle East, not just Egypt.

  Jack closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in slowly and deeply, knowing that each draw on his tank now represented a final countdown to the end of the dive. Over the past few months in Sudan and Egypt, he had pushed the envelope further than he ever had done before, and he had raised more than a few eyebrows among the IMU board of directors. Officially Jack was IMU’s archaeological director and Costas its submersibles expert. When Jack had set up IMU fifteen years before, he had relinquished control to an independent board because he had seen too many institutes wobble under the control of a founding director who had put too many eggs in one basket. IMU projects were now spread around the globe, encompassing oceanography and geology as well as archaeology, and IMU acted as an umbrella for affiliated institutes, including Hiebermeyer’s beside the ancient harbor of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. One of the board’s remits was to rein in any project that had become a political flash point, potentially threatening IMU’s reputation and wider activities in the region. Through no fault of his own, Jack had endured the Sudanese authorities terminating his diving in the Upper Nile and had then experienced the barely contained furor over their pyramid exploration, setting him up against the same extremist element that had infiltrated the regimes in both countries. For some days now, Jack had wondered whether it would be the new Egyptian antiquity authorities or the IMU board of directors that would cause his final departure from Egypt. Either way, he knew his time was running perilously short.

  Jack glanced at his wrist computer. There were still fifteen minutes of dive time left, precious moments in which he could push aside the modern world and focus all his being on the diving. For Jack, no amount of equipment preparation, of preparation of body and mind, of bringing a lifetime of experience to bear could guarantee his ability to see beyond the perimeter of his vision to what might lie ahead. Living for the moment was more than just an intoxication for him; it had become a tool of his trade, sharpening his senses and his acuity of observation, clearing his mind and allowing him to see more in a few moments on the seabed than he could do in hours on land. He stared down the slope and saw the seconds slipping away on his dive computer. He knew he was going to have to bring all that acuity to bear if they were to stand any chance of finding what all his instincts told him lay out there: a revelation that just might shake the foundations of history.

  CHAPTER 2

  Jack stared up at the hull of the dive boat some thirty meters overhead, watching as the captain gunned the engine to keep clear of the shore. Something nudged him.

  “Jack.” He heard the suck of another regulator, and turned to see Costas hovering behind him. It was still a double-take to see him in rented scuba gear rather than the usual E-suit, an all-environment dry suit with Kevlar exoskeleton and an integrated re-breather that Costas had developed more than ten years before at the International Maritime University engineering lab in Cornwall. He had been constantly refining it since then. Out here anything with an IMU logo was going to attract unwanted attention. Even the full-face masks with intercom were a lucky find in the backroom of the dive operator they had decided to hire. All they had brought of their own was Costas’ photo rig and the GoPro camera he had strapped to his forehead. Yet Jack relished going back to basics, to the kind of equipment he had pored over in dive magazines as a boy. Sucking on a battered rental regulator gave him the same thrill he had felt when he did it on his first open-water dive all those years ago.

  He steadied himself, injecting a small blast of air into his stabilizer jacket. “What is it?”

  “Found something.”

  Jack shook his head, staring back down the slope. The coral heads were shimmering with schools of fish, and in the distance he saw the flash of a whitetip reef shark. “Not yet. But I want to look at those outcrops down there. It means going a bit deeper, and I know we can’t risk extending our no-stop time with the boat having no recompression chamber. But even if we only have five minutes, that might be enough.”

  “No. I mean I found something.”

  Jack turned to him and caught his breath. Costas was kneeling on the sand holding an object in front of his camera. It was a rusty old rifle, the stock riddled with shipworms and the metal receiver caked with marine growth. Jack lifted it from him, staring at the distinctive magazine and bolt. “Lee-Enfield Mark III,” he said, turning it over, seeing the magazine cutoff and long-range volley sights. “First World War issue, early on, before 1916.”

  Costas held up a rusted charger clip containing five staggered cartridges with rimmed bases. “There’s more where this comes from, Jack. Strewn down the slope behind me. It looks like the remains of several crates.”

  “You sure?”

  “All the same. Lee-Enfield rifles and .303 ammunition.”

  Jack’s heart began to pound. Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Egyptian wife, Aysha, had been researching old archaeological reports in the Cairo Museum and had come across a diary written by an archaeologist friend of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had served alongside him as an intelligence officer during the First World War and had assisted with the Arab Revolt. Aysha had nearly put the diary aside when her eye was caught by a remarkable sketch, and she had read the accompanying entry. While loading arms from shore at a clandestine transit point in the Gulf of Suez, the dhow carrying the arms had capsized, and in the scrabble to recover what they could, the officer had pulled up something else from the shallows, something much older.

  Jack had been at the institute in Alexandria when Aysha had shown Hiebermeyer the sketch, and had seen his jaw drop. With its curved shape, the object could have been medieval, perhaps Saracen, but there was one particular feature that had convinced Hiebermeyer that it was ancient Egyptian, dating no later than the end of the New Kingdom in the late second millennium BC; if so, it was a prestige object owned by someone of wealth and high rank. Jack had pinpointed the stretch of coast to within a few kilometers and was pondering how such an object could have been lost there, so far from the heartland of Egypt, when Costas had looked up from the submersibles manual he had been studying in a corner of the room and had recited a passage from the Old Testament Book of Exodus. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gone electric. For a few moments all Jack’s frustration at their unresolved pyramid quest had gone out the window. Any lingering sense that this new quest was deflecting his attention from the bigger prize, from what lay beneath the pyramid, was overcome as soon as he dropped off the boat for the first dive. Over the past three days, since discovering the site where the officer had reported the artifact, and then finding more evidence of that astonishing biblical event, the possibility of what lay buried in the seabed below them had eclipsed all other thoughts.

  Jack stared ahead. The words that had been running through his head all through the dive surfaced again, and he spoke them slowly. “ ‘We bade Moses strike the sea with his staff, and the sea was cleft asunder, each part as high as a massive mountain. In between we made the others follow. We delivered Moses and all who were with him, and drowned the rest.’ ”

  Costas swam alongside him. “Come again, Jack?”


  “Do you remember in Alexandria quoting the Book of Exodus on pharaoh and the Egyptian chariots chasing the Israelites?”

  “Advantage of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing. I know a lot about submersibles, and a lot about the Bible.”

  “Well, my quote was from the Qur’ān, Al-Shu’Arā,’ The Poets.”

  “Huh,” Costas replied. “Same prophet, same God.”

  “And same pharaoh,” Jack replied. “That’s who ‘the others’ means in the quote. ‘Lord of the East and West, and all between.’ I don’t know about the parting of the sea, but we’re about to find out if the nub of the story is historical reality.”

  “You think that pharaoh’s our guy? The one we were chasing in the desert? Akhenaten?”

  Jack checked his contents gauge. He had only ten minutes of air left. He pointed ahead to the cluster of coral heads. “There’s only one way to find out. Let’s move.”

  —

  Jack powered ahead of Costas, finning hard as he dropped down to thirty-five meters depth, then forty. It was deeper than he had thought it would be, and they were going to have less time. The diffused light at this depth meant that the brilliant colors of the coral heads closer to shore had now been reduced to dark shades of blue, making it more difficult to distinguish any unusual features. With only a few minutes remaining, Jack’s thinking automatically switched to free-diving mode, as if he had taken a single breath of air on the surface and had to maximize every moment on the seabed. He reached a central point above the coral heads and sank to the sand. There was no question that the heads were unusual, almost as if they were lined in ranks extending down the slope, more densely concentrated than on the surrounding seabed. He began to look between them, finning quickly over the gaps, scrutinizing the sand for artifacts. Nothing.

  He glanced back at Costas, who was a few meters upslope and shining the torch on his strobe array at one of the coral heads as he floated slowly around it. “I’ve drawn a blank,” Jack said. “There could be material under the sand, but it could be meters deep. I’m going to ascend slowly just in case a wider view gets anything, and then we’ve got to go.”

  “Wrong, Jack.”

  “What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

  “I mean, wrong. It’s not buried. It was once buried, but now it’s all around us. Get over here.”

  Costas began taking photos, the strobes flashing as fast as they could recharge. Jack glanced at the warning light on his dive computer, and then finned over toward him. “I see coral,” he said. “An unusual amount at this depth, but that’s it.”

  Costas switched off the torch on his strobe array, and the brilliant colors that had been lit up in the artificial light were reduced to blue. He pointed to a complex growth of coral at the base of the head. “Now look.”

  Jack stared hard, dropping down in front of a jumble of coral that extended out in front of the head. It reminded him of marine growth on the decayed iron structure of modern wrecks, preserving shapes that would otherwise have disintegrated. He remembered the clandestine First World War shipment at this spot; they might be looking at other material that had fallen off the dhow and become encased in coral after a century underwater.

  He shifted slightly sideways, and then he saw it. “A wheel,” he exclaimed. “I can see the spokes of a wheel, and the curved line of the rim.”

  “Not just one wheel, Jack. There’s another one on the opposite side. And there’s a curved surface in between them, and a shape like a coral-encrusted pole sticking out front.”

  Costas dropped behind Jack, taking pictures of him in front of the head. Jack stared in astonishment. “My God.”

  There was no doubt about it. He was looking at the preserved form of a chariot encased in coral. “The wheel,” he said hoarsely. “The spacing of the spokes suggests a six-spoke wheel, typical of the New Kingdom. I think we just hit pay dirt.”

  “Bingo,” Costas said. “Congratulations, Jack.”

  “You spotted it.” Jack twisted around, staring. There were dozens of them, hundreds, a cascade of chariots down the slope. He turned back to the one in front of him. The flash of the strobe revealed an unusual color, a shimmer of pale gold emerging from the sand at the base of the head. “Good God,” he exclaimed.

  “What is it?”

  “Get close up and photograph it. There’s about a ten-centimeter-square section of gold there, maybe electrum.”

  “I can see a wing,” Costas muttered, the strobe flashing. “The end of a wing.”

  “It’s the falcon-god Horus,” Jack exclaimed. “Wait till Maurice sees that. The symbol of a pharaoh.”

  “It can’t get much better than this, Jack.”

  Jack pushed off, rose above the coral head, and scanned the others. “I’m trying to understand how this happened. How these chariots were preserved like this.”

  “I’ve got it. Think bodies at Pompeii, Jack. Bodies preserved as hollow casts in the volcanic ash as it solidified over them. Check out the base of that coral head: You can still see traces of the mud that once encased the chariots, now rock-hard. You remember this morning we were scanning the cliff from the dive boat, thinking how unstable it looked? I think those chariots came hurtling over the cliff and caused a massive landslide, enveloping them in earth and debris as they fell to the seafloor. The material in that cliff may contain a volcanic dust like the pozzolana of the Vesuvius area, something that caused the mud to solidify underwater.”

  “Got you,” Jack said. “Like hydraulic concrete.”

  “Exactly. The hardened masses were buried in sand, but as that shifted with the current over the centuries the masses were exposed, some of them resisting erosion long enough for coral to form and preserve them in the way we see them today. That one with the gold fronting happened to be eroded in such a way that the coral formed over those features just as the mud casing was about to wash away completely, so the features of the wheels and pole are preserved in the shape of the coral. The other masses we can see are probably shapeless lumps now, but raise them to the surface, fill them with plaster, break them open, and hey, presto, you’ve got a pharaoh’s chariot army reborn.”

  Jack remembered the lines of the Book of Exodus that Costas had quoted a few days before: and the Egyptians pursued, and were in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horsemen, his chariots and his horsemen…and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea…And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them. He felt a huge rush of excitement, and punched the water. His dive computer began beeping, indicating that he was now at his no-stop limit. “Time to go. We’ve done all we can here. A fantastic result.”

  “A few more pictures, Jack. Be with you in a moment.”

  Jack glanced at his contents gauge. He was well into the red, with only twenty bar remaining. He knew that if he breathed hard now, he would soon feel the resistance of an emptying tank. He needed to relax, to moderate his breathing but keep it at a normal rate in order to expel as much nitrogen as possible as he ascended. He finned off the seabed, his hand ready on the vent on his stabilizer jacket in order to expel air as it expanded, to keep his rate of ascent no faster than the speed of his exhaust bubbles. The one thing they could not afford was a decompression incident, with the nearest chamber hours away. He looked up, aiming at the metal bar suspended ten meters below the boat as a decompression safety stop. He saw the two hanging regulators from cylinders of pure oxygen on the boat that would help to flush the nitrogen further. With Costas now having exceeded the no-stop time for his depth, they had all the more need of the oxygen now.

  Jack looked down as he rose and saw the repeated flash from Costas’ strobes as he took as many photographs as he could, finning quickly between the outcrops and dropping deeper to get the best angles. Along with the video from the GoPro camera on his forehead, the images should give them all they needed for a press release that
would astonish the world. Jack was already running through the timing; the release could be only after Maurice had wound up his Faiyum excavation, as even with the euphoria of discovery and Egyptian archaeology once again at center stage, the new antiquities director would be bound to pick at the fact that he and Costas appeared to have carried out an archaeological project without his authorization. The fact that they left the site undisturbed and had been within their legal rights as recreational divers, with even the dive boat under surveillance from the Egyptian navy, would carry little weight. Jack knew that he would have to ensure that all IMU assets were out of Egypt before the storm broke.

  By then Hiebermeyer’s institute would probably have been forcibly closed anyway, and a fresh outburst from the antiquities director would have no effect on the prognosis for future excavation permits, which were already as bleak as they could be. Better by far that Jack give the board of directors what they needed to ensure that IMU’s departure from Egypt was accompanied by a major archaeological revelation, and not overshadowed by a political firestorm. It would be better still if Maurice was able to add to it with a last-minute discovery of his own from the mummy necropolis, something that Jack now hoped for fervently as he looked ahead to the next hours and days.