Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  The boy stopped, and then heaved the pole with all his might. Suddenly the boat lurched upright, its deck now level, and the pole angled back to horizontal. The hook had caught in a tendril that had pulled up from the main mass of the object, which was now detached from the boat and floating free. The boy stumbled forward and fell to his knees as he tried to free the pole. The captain shouted again in Arabic, and Jones saw the danger of the boy being pulled overboard. He leapt on him, still holding the detonator cord, pinned the boy’s legs against the deck, and grasped the pole. He tried to yank it backward and forward to release the hook, but to no avail. As he made one last desperate attempt, the object reared up and became visible in an eddy. It was pitching and rolling as the water swirled around it.

  Jones stared in horror, transfixed. The boy had gone white, and the captain had dropped to his knees wild eyed, sobbing, and beseeching Allah. A smell, suppressed by the river while it was underwater, now rose from the object as it rolled on the surface. The smell was of colossal, all-encompassing decay. Jones felt sick to his stomach; it was his worst nightmare come true. It was a crocodile. Or rather, it was the putrefied, long-dead carcass of a crocodile, its giant skeleton flecked with tendrils of white and gray, just enough organic matter to have kept it afloat on its final voyage from whatever pool it had inhabited somewhere far upriver.

  “God protect me.” Jones’ breathing quickened, and he grasped his hands around the detonator cord, trying to stop them from shaking. Chaillé-Long must not see. He flashed back to his state of mind beside the crocodile temple eight years ago. He must not sink into that madness again. He had convinced himself that his obsession with the Leviathan had been delirium brought on by his head wound, something he had snapped out of with the arrival of Kitchener and his camel troops. But suddenly that rationality disappeared, and he felt as if he were being drawn back there again. With all the fiendish contraptions he had devised, all that his engineering knowledge could spirit up, the dynamite, the trip-wire guns, had he truly killed the sacred crocodile of the pool, a crocodile whose long-dead carcass had now caught up with him? A fear began to grip him, a fear that he knew could become panic, spreading to all his other dark places, to the fear of confined spaces, of being trapped underground, a fear that he had last felt in the gloomy basement rooms of the Cairo Museum among the rows of decaying mummies. It was as if the demons of his own underworld were released again, clawing at him and beckoning him down into the portal that lay somewhere beneath them now, the entrance to a world of the dead that lay just below the riverbank.

  The detonator cord suddenly yanked him back to his senses. Chaillé-Long was lifting up the underwater lamp, its power virtually expended. Guerin had surfaced on the side of the boat opposite the carcass, his mask and hood stripped off. He was panting and wheezing. “Préparez le plongeur,” he gasped. “The charge is laid.” Jones lurched over and gripped the handle of the plunger, winding it hard to generate enough electricity to set off the charge. Something inside him, a voice from his army training long ago, told him that this was wrong, that he should prepare the plunger only an instant before setting it off. They still had to hear from Guerin about what he had found. But the winding focused him, and gave a reason for his shallow breathing. He left the plunger ready and crawled over to the side of the boat. Guerin was fumbling with something in his suit, but he looked up at the other two, his eyes feverish and bloodshot. “I found it. Half an hour of digging, and I exposed the lintel. It bears this inscription.” He heaved up a wooden slate with a hieroglyphic cartouche scratched on it. Jones took it, his hands shaking now with excitement. “My God,” he said hoarsely. “Look, Colonel. I was right. It’s the royal cartouche of Akhenaten.”

  Chaillé-Long raised himself up and stood above the two men, one thumb hitched in his fob pocket, the ivory grip of his pistol clear to see. “I do believe, gentlemen, we have come up trumps.”

  “There’s a stone door below the lintel, and it’s closed,” Guerin gasped, grimacing in evident pain. “And the charge is laid against it. But, mes amis, I should warn you…” He coughed violently, swallowed, and coughed again. “I should warn you,” he said, wheezing, “if the tunnel beyond is not flooded, there will be un vortex, and if we blow open the door, there may be something of, how do you say, a whirlpool.”

  Chaillé-Long looked disdainfully at the captain, who was sitting huddled with the boy beside the tiller, apparently still praying. “Well, I understand that people are used to whirlpools along this part of the river. A little disturbance might knock some sense into those two. And at any rate,” he said, picking up a distended pig’s bladder, which was normally used as a fishing float, “I for one am prepared for a swim if it comes to that.”

  The boat lurched again. Jones could not bring himself to look back over the other side. Guerin reached up with one hand and held the gunwale. “What was that?”

  Chaillé-Long shrugged. “Some more floating debris in the water, no doubt. Nothing to concern yourself about, my friend.”

  Jones knelt over the plunger, protecting the handle from any knocks, and looked at him. “There’s something more I should tell you. About what’s down there. I mean what’s really down there. What Akhenaten built under the pyramids.”

  “I know enough,” Chaillé-Long said imperiously, glancing again at his watch. “We have found what we came for.” The boat seemed to rise slightly and then slide out into the river current, tightening the detonator cord. “You must detonate that charge now, Jones.”

  Guerin looked up. “Do it, mon ami. I’m far enough away to be safe.”

  Jones shook his head. “You know nothing about explosives, Guerin. About underwater shock waves.”

  Guerin coughed. A great gob of blood came up, and he retched. He gasped over and over again, bringing up a bubbling red froth each time. “He’s had an embolism,” Jones exclaimed, peering up at Chaillé-Long. “The shock wave would surely kill him now. We need to get him on board.”

  “Depress the plunger, Jones. The boat is pulling the detonator cord and the charge away from the riverbank, and this is our last chance. Your last chance.” Chaillé-Long was behind him, his voice cold. Suddenly a huge lurch rocked the boat, and he was thrown sideways. As he spun around, he saw Chaillé-Long lose his balance, stagger backward and then fall forward, landing heavily on the plunger. The boat swung into the current, pulling the detonator cord and plunger into the water, leaving Guerin floating in a bloody froth toward the shore. Suddenly the river in front of him erupted in a boiling mushroom of water, sending ripples of shock through the boat and across the river. Seconds later it was followed by a dull boom, and then an extraordinary sound, quite unlike any underwater explosion Jones had ever heard, seemingly coming from far off under the riverbank. He remembered Guerin’s warning, and suddenly realized what it was: an echo coming from a hollow chamber, a dry passage running deep under the desert. Whatever lay beyond that portal was no simple chamber but a long passage, large enough to consume a giant torrent of water if the charge had succeeded in blowing open the stone entrance.

  For a moment all was calm. Guerin was floating in the water, unconscious or dead. Chaillé-Long lay sprawled on the deck, groaning and clutching his makeshift pig-bladder float. The captain and his boy were nowhere to be seen. And then, slowly at first but with increased violence, the water in front of him started to swirl around like a giant sinkhole, taking the boat with it. Jones could do nothing but kneel in horror at the gunwale, watching the center of the swirl as it plummeted deeper and deeper into the vortex, seeing the boat drop below the surface of the river. He saw Guerin’s body swirled out of sight, sucked down. And then for a fleeting moment he saw what Guerin had seen, a stone portal, a flashing image of pillars and a hieroglyphic inscription, and a dark passage beyond. Then he felt the boat splinter around him, and he himself was hurtling forward on a torrent of water, unable to breathe or hear, seeing only blackness beyond.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 6

&nb
sp; ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, PRESENT DAY

  Jack Howard walked along the old quayside of Alexandria harbor toward Qaitbey, the fifteenth-century fort built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse that now served as headquarters for Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology. The sun was beating on the rocks, the light shimmering off the waters of the harbor, and for a few moments Jack allowed himself to relish the summer air of the Mediterranean and forget that he was in a country on the brink of war. He cast his mind back ten years to the discovery of a scrap of papyrus in the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum that had led them to the truth behind the Atlantis legend. The Egyptian student who had made the discovery was now Hiebermeyer’s wife, and together they had created one of the premier centers in Egypt for the study of archaeology.

  Jack had a strong sense of déjà vu as he made his way across the worn stones toward the fort. He was going to hear the latest from the mummy necropolis, still an ongoing excavation producing extraordinary finds, and he in turn was going to match Maurice with an account of their latest underwater discoveries, hoping for that sparking of ideas and rush of excitement as things fell into place that had marked their collaboration over the years.

  But there was a dark side to this day. All Jack’s projects since Atlantis had been threaded together, interlinked by discoveries that had sent him around the world, from Egypt to Greece and Turkey, from India and Central Asia to ancient Herculaneum and across the Atlantic to the frigid waters of Greenland and the jungles of the Yucatan. The loose ends of one project had become the beginnings of another. Yet for the first time today, he had felt a looming sense of finality, that what had begun here a decade ago was about to offer up its last, that the extraordinary wellspring of ancient Egypt was about to close down forever. He felt edgy and nervous, and that heightened sense of awareness he experienced while diving was now with him all the time. If there were to be any more discoveries in Egypt, they were going to have to happen in the next days, even the next hours, in a window that was rapidly closing down on all of them.

  He stared over the bobbing boats in the harbor at the extraordinary form of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria. Just like its predecessor, the famous mouseion founded by the Macedonian king Ptolemy in 283 BC, the library seemed fated to suffer from religious extremism. Back then it had been Christianity, culminating in the antipagan purge by the Roman emperor Theodosius in AD 391, that led to the library’s destruction, whereas now it was extremism and the threat of regional war. The reconstructed library had been a noble enterprise at a time when many believed that the Internet and electronic publishing had eclipsed the need for physical repositories of knowledge. And yet the threat of destruction and of Internet sabotage meant that electronic means of data storage were just as vulnerable as the libraries of old. Each epoch seemed destined to build up a critical mass of knowledge, only for it to be largely destroyed and a few precious fragments to survive, buried by chance like the library that Jack had excavated at the Roman site of Herculaneum, or the shreds of papyrus reused as mummy wrappings that Hiebermeyer and his team had unearthed in the desert necropolis.

  Jack shaded his eyes against the sun as he thought about the Atlantis papyrus. The story of Atlantis had come down from the sixth-century-BC Athenian traveler Solon, who had visited the Egyptian temple of Sais, heard it from the High Priest, and had then written it down, only for his original papyrus to have been lost and then reused as mummy wrapping. The knowledge memorized by the High Priest had been passed down through generations from earliest times, an oral tradition whose days were numbered with the arrival in Egypt of the Greeks and their new religion. But what if at the height of ancient Egypt, during the New Kingdom of the later second millennium BC, a visionary pharaoh had decided to collate and transcribe all that ancient knowledge? What if there had been an earlier library somewhere in the heartland of ancient Egypt? Jack stared at the extraordinary discoid shape of the modern Bibliotheca, deliberately designed to look like a sun disk rising out of the horizon to the east. Who would that visionary pharaoh have been? Would it have been Akhenaten, the one who rejected the old religions, the pharaoh who worshipped the sun god, the Aten?

  Jack reached into his pocket and took out a military campaign medal from the Victorian period that he had bought from a market stall near the docks where the taxi had dropped him off. It was a Khedive’s Star, worn and battered, awarded to an Egyptian soldier who had fought under British command in the 1880s war against the Mahdi in Sudan. Jack thought again of those British officers in the desert, who were there not only for war, but whose exploration for ancient sites had so fascinated him. Had they been hunting not just for confirmation of Old Testament history but for something even greater than that, for a lost repository containing the greatest treasure that a civilization could offer, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the ancient Egyptians?

  He grasped the medal until the points of the star hurt his hand, and then thrust it back into his pocket. These thoughts had run through his mind endlessly since he and Costas and Hiebermeyer had been forced to leave Sudan almost two months previously, bringing with them enough evidence from the ancient temple carvings beside the Nile to suggest that Akhenaten’s City of Light lay somewhere near modern Cairo and that the pyramids were the key to its entry. He and Costas had been there, on the cusp of an incredible discovery, suspended beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure and seeing where the reflected sunlight shone against something far ahead, beyond a tunnel almost completely blocked by rockfall. Ever since they had been forced to leave the site, he had tried not to think of it, knowing that there was no chance of them returning with the tools they would need to break their way through. He had gone to the Gulf of Suez intent on moving on, and yet as long as he was in Egypt, as long as there was a glimmer of hope, the image of Akhenaten kept returning to him. Perhaps there was another entrance to the underground complex, closer to the Nile. He needed to look again at the plan that he believed was preserved in the radiating arms of the Aten sun symbol on the plaque from the wreck of the Beatrice, and at the known layout of the early dynastic canal system that linked the pyramids with the Nile. As long as there were still IMU feet on the ground in Egypt, he would pursue it. He would not give up.

  —

  Ten minutes later he mounted the worn stone steps at the entrance to Qaitbey Fort. He passed the red granite blocks from the toppled ancient lighthouse that had been incorporated into the fort when it was built in 1480. Inside, Hiebermeyer’s institute occupied a modern single-story stone structure set against one wall of the courtyard, with a library, a conservation lab, and research facilities for the Egyptian graduate students who were the mainstay of Hiebermeyer’s team. The institute was funded by a fellowship scheme managed by his wife, Aysha. On the opposite side of the courtyard were the foundations of the new museum, being funded by IMU’s main benefactor, Efram Jacobovich, to complement their existing museum in the ancient harbor at Carthage, in Tunisia. The Alexandrian museum would showcase shipwreck finds made by IMU teams off the north coast of Egypt and in the Nile. Like everything else here, like the fellowship scheme, the future of the museum project now hung by a thread, something that Jack knew he was going to have to discuss with Hiebermeyer once they had shared the excitement of their latest discoveries.

  Costas came hurrying up the steps behind him holding out a VHF radio. “Jack, there’s a message from Captain Macalister on Seaquest. He wants to talk to you as soon as possible.”

  Jack shook his head. “Not now. I’ve got to devote all my attention to Maurice. It’s going to be pretty intense in there. Every time I checked the news in the taxi from the airport, the situation in Cairo seemed to be deteriorating. This could be Maurice’s swan song at the institute. Tell Macalister I’ll contact him in an hour.”

  “Okay. I’ll deal with anything urgent.” Costas stopped to make the call, and Jack turned in to the courtyard. On the wall to the left was an IMU poster showing Seaquest, the research vessel that wa
s his pride and joy. The image was now as iconic from her many expeditions around the world as Captain Cousteau’s Calypso had been in his youth. For much of the summer the Seaquest had been in the West Mediterranean off Spain with an IMU team excavating the wreck of the Beatrice, the ship that had been taking the sarcophagus of the pharaoh Menkaure to the British Museum when she had foundered in 1824. It was the discovery of an extraordinary plaque within the sarcophagus, not of Menkaure but of Akhenaten, that had propelled Jack on his current quest. But right now he was more concerned with the whereabouts of Seaquest’s sister ship, Sea Venture, which had been carrying out geological research off the volcanic island of Santorini, north of Crete. Like Seaquest, she carried a Lynx helicopter, and she had been diverted south toward Egypt ready for an evacuation. Jack had been relieved to see the line of crates on the helipad beside the fort, but it had also made him unexpectedly well up with emotion. If that image brought home the reality of the situation to him, he could hardly imagine how it made Maurice feel. Not for the first time he was thankful for the presence of Aysha, a rock who had kept Maurice anchored through storms in the past and was going to be needed more than ever now.

  Costas came up behind him, and together they walked through an open doorway into Hiebermeyer’s main operations room. It was a familiar clutter of computer workstations, filing cabinets, books and papers, though the wall by the door was lined with plastic boxes where material had been packed for departure. Hiebermeyer himself was seated with his back to them behind an outsized monitor in the center of the room. Jack smiled as he saw the tattered khaki shorts and an Afrika Korps relic from the Second World War that he had given him years before at the outset of their careers. He was still wearing his leather work boots and was caked from head to foot in dust, having driven in from the desert that morning.