Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  Jack’s mind returned to the past, to the trail of discovery that he had come out here to follow. He thought of the pioneers of archaeology—amateurs, surveyors, soldiers, those who had traveled to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century seeking what he and Costas had just found, proof beyond reasonable doubt of the reality behind the Bible. Yet he had begun to feel that history had judged those men wrongly, had focused too much on their Christian zeal and their role as imperialists rather than their wider humanity. He thought of the group of officers he had been shadowing as he followed the trail of Akhenaten through the desert of Sudan to the pyramids at Giza, and he remembered what Costas had said: one prophet, one god. Perhaps for those men, the story of Akhenaten, of his conversion to the worship of the one god, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was about more than just biblical reality. These were men who in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan had come up against the terrifying rise of jihad, and who also knew the extremism that could be preached by followers of their own religion, not least among the zealots and missionaries they had seen in Africa. Perhaps their true zeal had been to reveal the single unifying truth behind both traditions. Perhaps their quest had been fuelled by the burning desire for discovery that drove Jack, but also by an extraordinary idealism. Then, as now, anything that could throw the spotlight on the similarities, on the common tradition, might push the world back to reason, might strengthen the common ground and force the extremists to the margins. Jack stared back down at the receding forms of the chariots on the seabed, and he felt another surge of adrenaline. He was back on track again, taking up where those men had left off. Archaeology had more to offer than just the thrill of discovery, far more, and the dark cloud over Egypt and the Middle East made it all the more imperative that he do everything in his power to see this one through. He would not let it go.

  Costas’ voice crackled through the intercom. “A wing and a prayer, Jack.” He came up alongside, showing where his contents gauge was nearly at the bottom of the red. “Are we done here now? I mean in Egypt? We can’t do better than this.”

  Jack said nothing, but seemed to stare through Costas as they came up level, their masks almost touching. “Uh-oh,” Costas said. “I’ve seen that look before.”

  Jack snapped out of his trance, looked up at the boat and then back at Costas, his eyes burning. “As soon as we’ve off-gassed and can fly, I’m going back to the institute in Alexandria.”

  Costas peered at him. “You want to get under the pyramid again, don’t you?”

  Jack stared at him. “Damn right I do.”

  “What’s changed here?”

  “It’s not because I think what we’ve found here will give us a glimmer of hope with the Egyptian authorities. If anything, the opposite. That’s why we’re keeping this discovery to ourselves until the time is right.”

  “It’s crazy,” Costas said. “Apart from anything else, the press attention this would get around the world might just remind them of the huge tourist revenue they’re in the process of losing by shutting down archaeology in the country.”

  “We’re talking about a regime whose ideologues might be about to wind the clock back to year zero. I think they couldn’t care less about tourist dollars.”

  “That thug in the Antiquities Department might finally blow a fuse and deport us. It’s only the more moderate elements in government that might stop him from doing that. Anyway, events could be moving too fast for us. We might be flying back into an extremist coup, in which case we may as well just keep on flying.”

  “That’s why time is of the essence. If we do still have time in Egypt, it might only be for days or even hours. Are you with me?”

  Costas took a final few photos of the scene below, the outcrops now just dark smudges in the shimmer of sand. Jack looked up at the decompression stop, less than ten meters above, and saw the bar vibrate as another fast jet roared overhead. Costas peered again at him. “I know what’s happened. Maurice predicted it. He said that any hope that a discovery out here might allow you to leave Egypt satisfied was misplaced. He said it would just rekindle your desire to get to the bottom of our original quest.”

  “Damn right it has,” Jack said.

  “And make you take risks. Really big risks that could jeopardize your future and even your life.”

  “Been there before.”

  “Not like this,” Costas replied. “Maurice’s own words. He knows these people. This time we’re not just dealing with some maverick warlord. The antiquities director may be our bad guy of the moment, but when that coup happens he’ll be ousted by someone who’ll make the Taliban thought police look tame. Cut off his head, and another one will appear. This time we’re up against an ideology, an extremist movement that the world has been fighting since the days of the Mahdi in Sudan, and so far it’s been a losing battle.”

  “All the more reason not to give up. You win the fight against ideology with ideas, not with hardware. That’s the lesson of history. If I can find a revelation from the past that adds ammunition to that battle, then it will be worth it.”

  “That’s a tall order, Jack. This could just be the highest mountain you’ll climb.”

  “You can walk away. I won’t hold it against you. I can go it alone.”

  “As if.”

  “Well?”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Jack said. “Submersibles. We’ll definitely need submersibles.”

  “You making that up?”

  “How else do we get into passages under pyramids too small to dive through?”

  Costas narrowed his eyes. “Remote operated vehicles, autonomous android excavators?”

  “You name it. Any gismo on the books. You just name it.”

  “Little Joey Three, my latest submersible micro-robot? I haven’t told you about him yet. Lanowski and I were perfecting him in the IMU engineering lab just before I came out here. Amazing bionics.”

  “Anything. It’s all yours.”

  Costas shook his head. “So much for the beach holiday.”

  Jack concentrated on his ascent. Costas had been right: a wing and a prayer. They had come here following a report of a find that had suddenly opened up another extraordinary possibility, another part of the trail they had been on for months now, from the ancient crocodile temple they had discovered on the Nile to the pyramids. It was a trail that shadowed one made over a hundred years before at the time of another conflict, the war against the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, a war that itself foreshadowed what was on the verge of happening in the Middle East today. Yet somehow Jack knew that the story of what had gone on in the nineteenth century had not yet been fully told, that somewhere in it there was another key to the quest ahead that needed to be found before they could take a new plunge into the unknown.

  Jack looked down and saw that a thin black shape had emerged from the encased chariot wheel in the coral head they had examined. It was wavering like a stalk of sea grass in a current. Other dark shapes appeared from the surrounding heads, and one detached itself and began to move sinuously toward shore. They were sea snakes, ones that had clearly been dormant within the heads but had been disturbed by the divers’ exhaust bubbles and movement. Jack remembered the captain’s story of a swarm of snakes thrashing on the surface, and he began to see more of them now, rising from the coral heads farther down the slope and following the first one toward the place where the other two had apparently sensed the inflow of freshwater from the shore. He felt uneasy, as if by coming to this place they had disturbed something that should have been left alone, a secret that should have died with a pharaoh and his Israelite slave more than three thousand years ago. He saw Costas concentrating on the boat above them as he ascended, and decided not to tell him. There had been enough snakes for one dive, and they needed to look ahead.

  Together they reached the metal bar of the decompression stop. Costas turned to him, hanging with one hand on the bar, putting his other hand
on Jack’s shoulder. “Before we deactivate the intercom, there’s something I want to pass on. Maurice mentioned it to me just before we left, but we decided not to tell you straightaway, as we thought it would just fuel your frustration about not being able to get back under the pyramid. Apparently, when Aysha was rummaging in the museum, she also found a news clipping from before the First World War about some mad old mystic in Cairo who appeared from nowhere, claiming he was a former British soldier who had been sucked from the Nile into an underworld of mummies and the living dead. Something like that, anyway. Maurice thinks it’s a typical story made up at the time for credulous tourists, but Aysha thinks it’s so far out that there must be something to it. I think it’s that husband-wife rivalry thing again, and as you know, Aysha usually wins. Anyway, she’s following it up. There may be another entrance into our pyramid underworld, that’s all.”

  Jack stared at him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He took one of the regulators hanging down from the dive boat, pressed the purge valve to see that the oxygen was on, and then took a final breath from his own regulator, sucking on empty. He pulled off the full-face mask, put the oxygen regulator in his mouth, and reached down to the front of his stabilizer jacket for his backup mask. He put it on and cleared it, and then watched Costas do the same. He breathed in deeply, feeling his entire body tingling, relishing the sudden lift that pure oxygen always gave him, as if it were cleansing his soul. He set the timer on his computer, beginning his countdown to surfacing and getting back on the trail they had left off under the pyramid.

  He could hardly wait.

  CHAPTER 3

  ON THE NILE SOUTH OF CAIRO, EGYPT, 1893

  The man in the dark cape struck a match and raised it to his cigar, cupping his hand to prevent the flame from being seen by anyone who might be passing along the riverbank. Around him the waters of the river were barely discernible, a swirling miasma veiled by a thin mist; the abandoned fort on the embankment was still invisible despite the captain of the boat jabbing his finger into the darkness and assuring them that it was a mere stone’s throw away. They had deliberately chosen a moonless night for their venture, and without a navigating lantern their voyage upriver had seemed a blind man’s gamble at best. But the captain had raised the huge triangular sail of the felucca and brought them unerringly past the city, using the northerly breeze to sail against the current and bring them to the narrow strip of cultivated floodplain beyond the southern outskirts that fronted the desert. They had left the putrid odor of the Cairo waterfront behind, and now the river smelled musty, like an old camel. The captain had bent the tiller while his boy ran along the spar and furled the sail. For what seemed an age now, they had drifted silently, letting the eddies push them slowly into the river shore.

  The man strained his eyes into the darkness, still seeing nothing, having no recourse other than to trust the skill and knowledge of the captain. He took a deep draw on his cigar, clenching it in his teeth while he exhaled the sweet smoke into the darkness, trying to calm his excitement. In daylight, if they were in the correct position, he would be able to see the pyramids of Giza just above the horizon to the west, and in front of him the ruined river fort that they had visited on foot the day before. Somewhere below, somewhere under the riverbank, lay the key to the greatest undiscovered prize in Egyptology, greater even than the lost city of Amarna or the tombs of the Valley of the Kings; something that would cap his years of adventure in Africa and allow him to return home in triumph across the Atlantic to the destiny that had seemed marked out for him, the highest offices in the land now surely within his grasp.

  Something bumped the boat, knocking him momentarily off balance. He peered over the bow, seeing a small swell on the surface of the river, doubtless marking some fetid unpleasantness beneath. With the annual Nile flood only now abating, they had encountered all manner of flotsam on their trip upstream, from the washed-away wooden structures of riverside shaduf irrigation pumps to the bloated carcasses of cows. Most remarkable had been a rotting fishing net tangled up with empty wooden cartridge boxes marked “Gordon Relief Expedition,” the detritus of a botched conflict eight years before that had taken all this time to wash its way down from the former war zone in the Sudan. The boxes had seemed archaeological, artifacts from another era, and yet Egypt, the world even, was still gripped in the aftershock of General Gordon’s death at the hands of the Mahdi army in Khartoum, and the ignominious British failure to retain Sudan. In Egypt the British were bent on revenge, and in Sudan, the Mahdi army on jihad, which threatened to sweep across North Africa and the Middle East as it had done more than a thousand years before, drawing the West into a conflict that would make the wars of the Crusades seem like child’s play.

  Seeing those cartridge cases had made him ponder his own role in the affair. He had been one of a group of American officers restless after the Civil War who had crossed the Atlantic seeking excitement in Africa, and had been employed by the Khedive of Egypt. From being a captain in the 11th Maryland Regiment of the Union army, a veteran of Gettysburg, and a personal acquaintance of General Grant, now President Grant, he had become a lieutenant colonel in the Khedive’s service, and then chief of staff to Gordon after the British general had been appointed governor of equatorial Sudan. With his exotic surname, Chaillé-Long, a legacy of his Huguenot French ancestry, and the manners of a southern gentleman, he had seemed a cut above the other American officers and had quickly found favor as a kind of honorary European. He had at first struck up a cordial relationship with Gordon; despite being born on a Maryland plantation, he had joined the Union army opposed to slavery, and had been more than willing to assist Gordon in his effort to eradicate the slave trade in the Sudan. Their relations became strained only when Chaillé-Long realized the futility of that enterprise and the impossibility of working under such a man as Gordon. They were broken entirely after the Khedive appointed Chaillé-Long to travel deep into Africa to conduct a treaty with the king of the Ugandans, on the way becoming a celebrated explorer whose name now stood alongside those of Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley.

  In 1877 he had returned to America in high esteem, newly decorated by the Khedive with the Order of the Medjidieh, acclaimed as the first American to stand on the shores of Lake Victoria. With Gordon still in charge, the Sudan had been closed to him, but he had seen the future in international law, and after a degree at Columbia had set up a practice in Alexandria in Egypt. In 1882 he had earned the approbation of the State Department by taking over the U.S. Consulate during the British naval bombardment of the city that preceded their military conquest of Egypt, the circumstance that led to direct British involvement in the Sudan and the debacle of the relief expedition in 1885.

  After that, Egypt too had seemed closed to him. And yet here he was again, drawn back not by the promise of military glory or exploration but by something else, by unfinished business from his time under Gordon in the 1870s. A few of them had become party to another enterprise, one that had begun with a small circle of British officers around Gordon obsessed with uncovering the truth of the Old Testament. Their quest to find out more had led them on a trail of discovery that had brought him to this place now on the eve of his final planned departure from Egypt. He was hoping to show something to the world arising from those years that was not tainted by the guilt and dishonor that pervaded the failure to rescue Gordon.

  The boat bumped again, more jarringly this time. There was a commotion from the hold opening in the center of the deck, and a voice with an English accent cursing. “God damn you. God damn your eyes.” Another man spoke, higher pitched, in French, remonstrating angrily, followed again by the first voice. “I didn’t mean you, Guerin. I meant the spanner, God damn it. The one I just dropped.”

  Chaillé-Long took out his cigar and peered into the hold. “Keep your voice down, Jones. We’re close enough to shore that we might be overheard.”

  Jones’ head and shoulders appeared out of the opening, and he spoke in
Arabic to the captain. After listening to the reply, he turned around, his bearded face scarcely visible in the darkness. “Don’t worry yourself, Colonel. The captain says there’s nobody along the shoreline. The fishermen don’t bother to come this far along the bank when it’s pitch dark, when there’s no moon. They’re terrified of slipping into the whirlpools that appear during the flood and being sucked down by the monsters they think lie beneath. Nile perch, no doubt, some of them of prodigious size, though who knows what else swims in this river. Even the captain and his boy are afraid. It’s only your gold that’s brought them here, and you’ll probably have to cough up more of it to make them stay. So I can curse and swear as much as I like.”

  “In my experience of English soldiery, Corporal Jones,” Chaillé-Long drawled, “that could keep us occupied to dawn and beyond.”

  “The valve of the diving cylinder is jammed,” Jones said, and he ducked down again. There was a sound of scrabbling in the bilges, and then he reappeared. “I’ve found the spanner, Allah be praised. But I’m going to have to strike the valve to open it, and that sound would wake up all Cairo. I’ll need to muffle it.” He paused, looking up. “Toss me your scarf, would you, old boy?”

  Chaillé-Long drew himself up and snorted. “I will not give you my scarf. It is the purest cashmere, direct from my fournisseur in Paris.”

  “I don’t care if it’s rat skin. I never took you for a dandy, Chaillé-Long, but now I’m wondering. How did an American get a name like that anyway?”

  “Not all Yankees are Irish, despite the prejudicial views of you English. My great-grandfather was French, from a landed family under the old regime. And before you call me a dandy, I will have you remember that I was a captain in the army of the North at the Battle of Gettysburg, and after that a colonel in the Khedive’s Sudanese army, chosen for the task by your revered General Gordon, no less.”