Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  “This isn’t through the institute. It’s Landsat, U.S. military. I’ve got a friend in the CIA who owes me a favor after I did the math in his PhD for him.”

  “You’re a useful man to have around, Jacob,” Jack said.

  “Glad you noticed.”

  “The new translation makes sense. A lot of sense. Anything else?”

  “Of course.” He dragged the mouse, and the image zoomed out. “Aysha told me about her discovery of the First World War diary that led you to that spot, the account of the crates of arms lost overboard, and that officer finding the ancient Egyptian sword. Well, she and I read through several previous entries in the diary last night. They showed that the British had developed a ruse in case they were spied on in the desert. Instead of driving the camels with the crates to a point on the cliff directly above the rendezvous point with the dhow, they off-loaded them several miles to the south and used a hidden track just below the cliff top known to local tribesmen to carry the crates out of view of the desert above. Captain Edmondson, the diarist, was also an archaeologist, and he mentioned how he thought the trackway was probably millennia old based on the number of rock slides and mud falls they had to negotiate on the way.”

  “And then they came down to that beach where I had lunch,” Costas said. “Just above the spot where we found the rifles and ammunition underwater, and then the chariots.”

  “Right. And just above that, the Landsat image shows a concavity in the line of the cliff where there’s a break in the path. I’m convinced that the concavity is evidence of the ancient cliff fall caused by the massed chariot charge, and I’m also convinced that Moses used that path to lead away the Israelites right under the noses of the Egyptians, leaving an empty encampment. The path continues for miles up the coast, so it would have been a viable escape route. What do you think, Jack? Bingo. Case closed.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack said, staring in fascination at the image. “I think you might just have earned your pay, Jacob.”

  “I’m not the first one to have these ideas. You ever heard of Hiwi al-Bakhi?”

  Jack was glued to the screen, but nodded. “His name means the Bactrian Heretic, a medieval Jewish dissenter from ancient Bactria, modern Afghanistan. He openly criticized the Hebrew Bible for lack of clarity and contradictions, and for representing God as inconsistent and capricious. His writing was another great discovery in the Cairo Geniza.”

  “Well, he also tried to debunk the supernatural. For him, the parting of the Red Sea was a matter of the water ebbing and flowing, something he’s probably seen in the huge tidal flows on the shores of the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t to know that the Gulf of Suez doesn’t have much tide, nor does it have tidal flats like those he might have seen off India, but I like his way of thinking.”

  “A rationalist like you, Jacob.”

  “There’s something else that’s very interesting about Hiwi, Jack. Dillen and I talked about it too. His sect was so intent on cleansing Jewish religion and starting afresh that they wanted to change the Sabbath from Sunday to Wednesday, the day in Genesis when the sun was created. The sun, Jack. Does that ring any bells? We thought of Akhenaten and Moses together in the desert, and the revelation of the one god, the Aten. Akhenaten too was seeking a cleansing of the old religions, a return to a purer notion of deity, a rejection of gods who had become too anthropomorphic and displayed the human traits that Hiwi lamented in the God of the Bible. Maybe we should expect these periodic attempts at cleansing in the history of religion, but maybe too we should be looking for continuity, for a memory preserved even in Hiwi’s time of that foundation event in the desert almost two thousand years before. Egypt has had its takeovers—the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslims—and cultural destruction like the loss of the Alexandria library, but it never suffered the utter devastation of so many other regions, the sweeping away of its culture and people. And for the Jewish people, their history is all about maintenance of the tradition, isn’t it? That’s the biggest lesson of the Cairo Geniza, that it’s about continuity, not change.”

  Jack nodded. “Even dissent like Hiwi’s became part of the Jewish intellectual tradition, one of debate rather than persecution, ensuring that inquiring minds were not stifled in the way they have been in so many other religions.”

  Costas looked at Lanoswki. “I’d no idea you were also something of a rabbi, Jacob. A real multitasker.”

  “ ‘Happy is the man who meditates on wisdom and occupies himself with understanding.’ That’s from Ben Ezra. My parents were Ukrainian Jews who were smuggled out of Europe just before the Second World War. All the rest of my family—my grandparents, my uncles and aunts—died in the Holocaust. Both my grandfathers had been rabbinical scholars, and my parents hoped that I’d follow the same route.”

  “Is that how you got interested in Egyptology?” Jack asked.

  Lanowski nodded. “I always wanted to know the specific identity of Pharaoh in the Bible. It annoyed me that he was unnamed, as if he’s the one and only pharaoh, but then I realized there was something special about him. Being part of your team in the quest for Akhenaten is fulfilling a childhood dream, Jack. I’m grateful to you.”

  “We’ve got a good way to go yet.”

  Lanowski turned to Costas. “And now about the theory of relativity. Funny you should mention that. As it happens, I do have a niggle with the space-time continuum model. It’s…well,” he chuckled, “wrong.” He suddenly looked deadly serious. “I mean, wrong.” He whipped his portable blackboard from beside the desk, picked up a piece of chalk, and scribbled a formula. “It’s like this.”

  Costas immediately took Lanowski’s hand and steered the board back down to the floor. “Not now, Jacob. That’s too big even for IMU. Save it for the Nobel Prize committee. Jack has got to go. He’s meeting Aysha and Maria in Cairo this evening. And I need to get back on the phone to Macalister on Seaquest.”

  Lanowski looked crestfallen, but then brightened up. “Anything comes up out there, you let me know.”

  “Come again?”

  “Boots on the ground. Jack and Costas stuff.” He pointed meaningfully at his gear. “You need help, I’m good to go.”

  Costas nodded slowly. “I can see that. Good to go.”

  Jack stared at him. “Thanks for the offer, Jacob. We’ll let you know. Meanwhile, get this written up so I can send it to the board along with Costas’ photos of the chariots for the press release. It’ll make a fantastic mix of hard data and speculation.”

  Lanowski looked dumbfounded. “Where’s the speculation, Jack? From where I see it, there’s only hard data.”

  Jack grinned, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Of course. Only hard data. Brilliant work, Jacob.”

  —

  Just over four hours later, Jack jumped out of the institute’s Land Rover and hurried after Aysha under the medieval wall into the ancient compound of Fustat. He was thankful to be in the old part of Cairo, away from the din and congestion of the modern city. The drive from Alexandria had been hampered by a seemingly endless succession of police roadblocks and checkpoints. It was already almost nine in the evening, just over three hours to curfew. The Institute of Archaeology logo in Arabic on the Land Rover had eased them through a few sticky checkpoints, but they knew that once the police had been ousted by the extremists, then any Western affiliation, in Arabic or otherwise, would become a liability. Earlier, while they had been in Alexandria, Aysha had not wanted to depress Hiebermeyer any further by dwelling on the political situation, but in the Land Rover she had told Jack that she believed a coup in Cairo was now a near certainty. The moderate Islamist regime that had replaced the pro-Western government a few months ago was never going to work, with policies that satisfied nobody. The decision of the new minister of culture and his antiquities director to shut down foreign excavations had not been enough for the extremists, but they had been too much for Western governments, which had begun to withdraw financial aid in protest. Increasingly the new regi
me was being seen as a prop that had been engineered all along by the extremists, a stepping-stone to their own imminent takeover. The regime was filled with petty tyrants such as the new antiquities director, who had jumped eagerly on the bandwagon without realizing that the extremists who had opened the door for them would also be their nemesis in the aftermath of a coup.

  As they drove into the city, Aysha had been concerned by the absence of gunfire or signs of demonstrations, routine features of Cairo life for months now. The extremist thugs who had battled the pro-democracy demonstrators had seemingly disappeared into the night, leaving the squares festooned with banners but strangely empty of protesters. It had seemed ominous, like a lull before a storm. Reports had come through on the radio of convoys of “specials,” pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, breaking through the border from Sudan virtually unopposed by the Egyptian police or army. The presence of extremist training camps to the south had been an open secret for some time, and now they were seen for what they were: staging posts for a terrorist invasion of Egypt, taking up where their forebears had been forced to leave off after Kitchener’s defeat of the Mahdi army at Omdurman in 1898. Those events of more than a century ago had come back to haunt the world. The slaughter at Omdurman, and Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb in revenge for the death of General Gordon, had been barely remembered in the West, eclipsed by the horrors of the twentieth century. Yet for the extremists they were still as fresh as if they had happened yesterday. The smell of the blood of Omdurman and the sight of the Mahdi’s paraded remains were embedded in their collective memory and were stoking the fires of hate. Jack and Costas had been on the edge of that tidal wave of extremism in Sudan a few months ago, and now Jack knew they had been lucky to get out when they did. If Aysha was right, that wave was coming at them again, a matter of days at most before Cairo was overrun, with the Egyptian army officer corps infiltrated by sympathizers and the extremist leaders calling for the mass desertion of conscript soldiers. She was convinced that this evening would be their last chance in Cairo, and they needed to make the most of the few hours that lay ahead of them now.

  Jack followed Aysha into a maze of narrow cobbled alleys and high stone walls, of men in fez caps and galabiya robes, reminiscent of the Old City of Jerusalem. He remembered that it was to Egypt as well as Spain that many of the Jews who escaped the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 had fled, and there had been other Jews in Alexandria involved in trade with India even before that.

  A bearded beggar sat at the entrance to the synagogue precinct, and Jack tossed him a few coins. Then he followed Aysha into the building itself, through the doorway and onto the gray marble floor of the main open space, which was mottled in pools of white where it was lit up by hanging lamps. Above him, on either side, upper-floor balconies ran the length of the building. They were faced with pillared colonnades of little arches painted in alternating white and red that would not have looked out of place in the courtyard of a Cairo mosque. Not for the first time, Jack reflected on the intermeshing of Judaeo-Christian and Muslim culture in the Near East, so at odds with the polarization created by politics and extremism.

  Aysha motioned for him to stay while she quickly ran up the stairs to the left-hand gallery. She disappeared behind a section at the far end that had been cordoned off with hanging shrouds lit up from within. He could hear low voices, hers and another he recognized as Maria’s, but he blocked them out for a moment and breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell of old stone and wood after the smog outside. He was relishing the tranquillity he always found in old churches and mosques and synagogues in the middle of bustling cities, a precious respite from the cloud of uncertainty that hung over Cairo.

  He was fascinated to be in the Ben Ezra synagogue at last, the source of the Cairo Geniza, the greatest collection of medieval documents to be discovered anywhere in recent times. In most synagogues the geniza chambers were cleared out periodically and their contents buried in cemeteries, whereas the geniza in the Ben Ezra synagogue appeared to contain everything that had been put into it from its inception in the ninth century. When the geniza was first studied, it proved to contain not only thousands of pages of sacred writings—biblical, Talmudic, rabbinical, even fragments of the Qur’ān—but also a trove of secular material, documents in Aramaic and Arabic as well as Hebrew that preserved an extraordinary picture of Jewish life in Egypt in the medieval period. When Jack had first pored over those documents as a student at Cambridge, he had seen the collection with an archaeologist’s eye, much as if he were looking at the evidence of an excavation. The geniza fragments seemed all the more valuable because, like Hiebermeyer’s papyrus mummy wrappings, they were writings that had not been selected by scholars or religious authorities for preservation, and they revealed details of day-to-day life that so rarely survived in written records before modern times.

  The hanging shroud on the upper floor parted, and Aysha stood at the balustrade of the balcony. “Okay, Jack. Maria’s nearly ready. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking how pleased I am that Solomon Schechter over a century ago arranged for the bulk of the archive to go to Cambridge University. I hate to think what the extremists would do to this place.”

  “If they were true Muslims, they’d leave it alone. Moses was one of our prophets too, and to Muslims the Jews are People of the Book, those to whom scripture has been divinely revealed. Did you know that the baby Moses was supposedly found at this spot, in the reeds in a tributary of the Nile that ran just behind this place?”

  Jack walked toward the stairs. “Nice story, but it was two thousand–odd years between the Exodus and the reemergence of the Jewish community in medieval Cairo. It’s hard to believe that anyone would have remembered the exact spot. Also there’s a lot of uncertainty about what was going on in the New Kingdom period where Fustat now lies, and whether there was a settlement or perhaps some kind of temple establishment. The site for the story is more likely somewhere north in the marshlands of the Nile Delta, good papyrus country.”

  Aysha stood with her hands on her hips. “What about that famous Jack Howard leap of faith? Maurice says that’s your biggest asset.”

  “Faith in my instinct, not in every old legend,” Jack said, mounting the stairs and grinning at her. “Anyway, I’m being Lanowski. Where’s the hard data?”

  “Well, here’s something fascinating for you. You remember the diary of Captain Edmondson, the archaeologist-turned–intelligence officer whose notes led you to the Gulf of Suez? A year before that botched arms shipment, he was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in Cairo, working in the same cipher office as his friend T. E. Lawrence, both of them bored out of their minds. Things perked up one day when high command detailed him to act as a discreet escort for a very important visitor who wanted to come incognito to visit the synagogue. Well, the VIP rumbled that Edmondson was following him, and when he reached the synagogue he let him catch up and invited him inside. The VIP was none other than Lord Kitchener, newly appointed secretary of state for war, visiting Egypt only months before he went down with the cruiser Hampshire in the North Sea. It turns out that there were half a dozen other men waiting in the synagogue, all of them getting on a bit in years. Kitchener told Edmondson that they were all in some way associated with General Gordon of Khartoum and came together every few years in the synagogue to celebrate his memory. One of the other men present was an American, Colonel Chaillé-Long.”

  Jack stopped on the stairs. “How extraordinary. Gordon’s former chief of staff, the explorer of Lake Victoria?”

  “By now an elderly man, and a famous author.”

  “Of lavishly embellished tales, as I recall. Something of a dandy.”

  “And Edmondson mentioned someone else. I’ve been itching to tell you, Jack, but I wanted to wait until we were here. It was a Royal Engineers colonel well known to you: John Howard.”

  Jack stopped in his tracks, staring at her. “My great-great-grandfather? Incred
ible.” He looked down, thinking hard. “He’d retired by then, but he traveled several times to the Holy Land. He was a friend of Kitchener’s and had known Gordon. They were all Royal Engineers together. It makes sense.” He stared back at the floor of the synagogue, suddenly seeing those men standing there in his mind’s eye. “Amazing.”

  “They came here to the synagogue because they believed in the Moses story. But, being engineers and practical men, they decided to find proof. Apparently, one night almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1890, they had gathered together here for the first time, intent on excavating beneath the synagogue: Chaillé-Long, the then Colonel Kitchener, Captain Howard, and a Colonel Wilson, who had died since.”

  “That would be Colonel Sir Charles Wilson,” Jack murmured. “Intelligence chief on the Gordon relief expedition, but before that a surveyor in Palestine who had discovered ancient structures beneath medieval Jerusalem. I prepped Rebecca on him before she went out there, as well as on Gordon and Kitchener. All of them were linked by their archaeological work in Palestine. In 1883 Gordon took a kind of sabbatical there, dispirited by his lack of progress in the Sudan and more interested in seeking proof of the Bible in the archaeology of Jerusalem.”

  Aysha nodded enthusiastically. “They brought surveying equipment and digging tools and went out into the synagogue precinct. They’d been led to the spot by another of the colorful characters in Egypt at the period, Riamo d’Hulst, a self-styled count and subject of Luxembourg who was probably a German deserter from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and something of a shape-shifter. In 1890 while the synagogue was being restored and refurbished, he took advantage of the construction work to dig around the precinct. Following his lead, the British officers discovered indisputable evidence of a silted-up river channel. That doesn’t prove the Moses story, of course, but they did also find the plinth of an ancient structure. According to Edmondson, it contained the worn remains of a hieroglyphic cartouche. Finding something of a Pharaonic date was enough to convince them that they were at the right spot. Edmondson himself might have been able to decipher the hieroglyphs with his archaeological background, but he wasn’t able to see the inscription because the stone block had been removed in secret to England for safekeeping by Lieutenant Howard.”