Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  “Correct. And now we’re getting to the nub of it. While he was in Cairo for those months in 1140 to 1141, he became good friends with the nagid, the Jewish community leader—a man named Samuel ben Hananiah—and with a wealthy merchant named Halfon ben Netanel. He also corresponded regularly with his intellectual friends back in Spain. He loved Egypt: ‘This is a wondrous land to see, and I would stay, but my locks are grey,’ he wrote. He was anxious to get to Jerusalem, but he wanted to lap up everything he could about Egypt while he was here. The caliph Al-Hakim comes into the story because the Jews in Spain had a particular fascination with the behavior of the Muslim potentates of the Near East at a time when Spanish Jews were looking anxiously over their own shoulders at their own Islamic overlords and wondering what the future might hold. Al-Hakim wasn’t exactly the flavor of the month. He was reviled among Jews and Christians alike for ordering the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1021 and, for good measure, the Ben Ezra synagogue here in Cairo as well. But they also saw him as a complex and intriguing man who might be the basis for a lesson in morality. Halevi loved a mystery, and he was especially interested in the questions over Al-Hakim’s death. This letter seems to be a draft of something he may never have actually sent off, written to his son-in-law, the scholar and historian Abraham Ibn Ezra in Toledo.”

  “Can you translate it?”

  She clicked the screen, calling up an enhanced photographic image of the text with English words overlaid. Jack leaned over her shoulder and followed as she read:

  To my son-in-law Abraham Ibn Ezra and my daughter Ribca, my heart belongs to you, you noble souls, who draw me to you with bonds of love. In my last letter I wrote to you of the Caliph Al-Hakim, and of how my friends the nagid and the merchant Halfon have revealed much that is new to me about his disappearance in the desert, a mystery above all others in this mysterious and beguiling land. I ask you to pass on this letter to my friends the astronomer Ibn Yunus and the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, as they may be able to sit down with the maps I sent and their measuring instruments and make sense of the story I have been told. Al-Hakim had taken to wandering into the desert alone on his donkey south of Cairo every night, having ordered his retainers and guards to stay at the city gate. Some say he was, in truth, a god; his disappearance was a reversion to his nonhuman form. Some also say that by persecuting Jews and Christians he was going against Islamic law; yet as caliph, he was not accountable to any law, but the law to him. That is surely enough to drive any man to insanity, or to the desert! Perhaps like the pharaoh who sought the Aten in the desert, who made his temple at Fustat, aligned towards the pyramids, he was shedding that impossible burden, and seeking simplicity. When he went to the desert he went not as caliph, but as a man.

  Maria looked up. “The literal translation of the epithet he uses for Al-Hakim is ‘sand-traveller,’ which itself is the literal translation of an ancient Egyptian term known only from hieroglyphs. It’s almost as if they were speaking the same language.”

  Jack shook his head in amazement. “Fascinating,” he exclaimed. “That meshes with my own revelation just now in the synagogue when I realized that I knew that a stone excavated in 1890 from the synagogue precinct contained the hieroglyphic cartouche of none other than Akhenaten. It begins to fit with a wider picture, that the site of medieval Fustat was once connected with the ancient complex of Heliopolis, where northeastern Cairo now stands. Heliopolis was the center for the worship of the sun god Ra, and a logical place for Akhenaten to build a great temple to the Aten. Maurice told me that blocks from that temple have been identified in the medieval walls of Cairo. That was my first thought when Aysha told me about the British officers discovering the stone with the cartouche here in 1890. But the account in that officer’s diary makes it sound as if it came from an in situ ancient structure, not a medieval one, so it fits with what Halevi suggests about a separate Pharaonic religious complex here, one aligned to the pyramids rather than to the old cult center at Heliopolis. Is there more, Maria?”

  “A few sentences, before the tear.” She carried on reading:

  Now ben Netanel tells me this. His great-grandfather as a boy secretly followed Al-Hakim out into the desert that final night, a dare among the boys of Fustat to see where the caliph was really going. He watched from behind a dune as Al-Hakim hobbled his donkey with a knife, stripped off his clothes and slashed them with the bloody blade, and then stood there naked, raising his arms to the sky. His murder was a ruse. He wanted the world to think that he had died. He had indeed undergone a transmogrification, not from caliph to god, but from caliph to man. He did not die, but he disappeared down a hole in the ground into the underworld, never to be seen again. This is no fable; this is truth.

  Jack waited in silence for a moment, coursing with excitement. “The underworld. Go on,” he urged.

  Maria sat back. “That’s it.”

  Jack closed his eyes. That’s it? “Are you sure?”

  Maria glanced at Aysha. “Well, there might be more. Yesterday evening after I got set up here, Aysha and I climbed into the chamber and managed to see through the hole with our torches. We were able to prize free this fragment, but we saw another sheet compacted against the stone beyond it that could be the torn lower half of the page. We don’t have any extraction tools that wouldn’t damage it, and would probably tear it into shreds. Everything has to be done here the old-fashioned way, with bare hands. And Aysha and I are, well, both a little short on length.”

  Jack stared at her. “You’re telling me you got me all the way here because I’ve got long arms?”

  “The longest in Cairo. Probably the longest in Egypt. And fingers used to feeling around in the murk. Diving down holes is your specialty, isn’t it?”

  Jack shook his head. “What you need is Little Joey. Costas’ miniature robot. His buddy. That’s the real reason he’s pining to get back to his engineering lab on Seaquest, not the problems of raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure.”

  “We thought of asking him along too, but we didn’t think that mouse droppings were really his thing.”

  “That’s probably wise. Underwater is fine, but holes in the ground full of decayed matter are not what he signed up for.”

  “Of course, there’s the inevitable curse, as well,” Aysha said. “The Geniza was said to be guarded by a serpent who bedded down in the manuscripts like a dragon with its treasure. Anyone who went in was doomed. Look what happened to Solomon Schechter.”

  “Snakes,” Jack muttered. “Definitely not Costas’ scene.”

  “Then you’ll have to go it alone,” Maria said.

  Jack stared at the filth on the fragment of vellum. “I’ll need protective clothing. Some kind of respirator.”

  Aysha nodded at a large plastic crate beside the ladder. “We’re one step ahead of you. Full biological, chemical, and nuclear protection suits liberated from an army depot by a friend of mine.”

  Maria glanced at him. “You good to go?”

  Jack looked at his watch, and then up at the hole into the Geniza chamber above him, black and slightly forbidding. “Okay. There’s no time for dithering or, the gods protect me, for curses. Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Alight came on, harsh, blinding, and the young woman in the center of the room turned her head away from it, shutting her eyes tight against the glare. She strained against the bindings that held her hands to the back of the chair, no longer feeling the pain where the rope had cut into her wrists. Even the slight movement of her head had brought back the sickening stench of the room, full of people bound like her who had lain in their own filth for days, and in the filth of others before them who had died or been dragged away for execution. She had been in here for only a few hours, but with their watches removed and no clock, she was already beginning to lose track of time. The only break in the sepulchral gloom was when the light cut in, when those who still had the energy moaned and whimpered with fear, when their captors came for another vi
ctim.

  The first few times it had happened after she had recovered consciousness, she had managed to look around, above the terrified faces and twisted bodies, and had seen the cupboards filled with chemicals and the half-torn posters on the walls advertising forthcoming exhibitions in the museum. She had been here before. She knew she was in the archaeological conservation labs of the ministry, now used as detention cells by the extremists who had been the driving force behind the new regime. She was only a short walk away from the Old City and the synagogue where they had snatched her, only a stone’s throw from family and friends. Yet she knew she may as well be a world away, beyond rescue. Only a few weeks before, these labs had been a hive of activity, filled with colleagues of hers in the archaeological service. The people around her now had been smartly dressed politicians and civil servants. Those torn posters and soiled clothes might just as well be archaeological relics themselves of a time before Egypt had begun to fall before the forces of darkness and the people began to stare into the void.

  The light shone hot against her face, and she knew it was her turn. A hand pulled her head and jerked it upright, the fingers smelling of khat. A man spoke harshly in English. “Open your eyes.”

  “Turn away the light,” she said hoarsely. “And speak to me in Arabic.”

  “You are a Jew. We will not speak to you in the language of the Prophet.”

  “My family has lived in Cairo for two thousand years. Arabic is the language we speak.”

  She heard the man talk to another in the distinctive dialect of Sudanese Arabic, and the light moved away. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two bearded men in front of her wearing black headbands, both with handguns and one carrying a powerful torch. The closest man waved a tattered piece of paper in front of her face. “What is this?” he said, still speaking in English.

  She squinted at it. “It’s a twelfth-century document from the archive in the synagogue,” she said. “I was taking it away for study when I was brought here.”

  The man leaned forward and spat a stream of khat juice into the face of a woman on the floor, and then turned back. “You’re a liar. Our informant told us you were stealing holy documents of Islam, and he was right. This is written in Arabic. Even the stupidest of my men can see that. This is a page of the holy Qur’ān.”

  She looked at him defiantly. “It’s true that there are pages of the Qur’ān in the archive. They’re one of its greatest treasures. But there are also thousands of other documents in Arabic. If you and your fighters are as holy as you’d like to think you are, then you’d have memorized the Qur’ān and you’d see that this is not a holy page. In fact, it’s a letter from a wealthy Jewish matriarch to one of her three lovers, encouraging him to keep his Muslim faith because she knows that for him it is the true route to God.”

  The man spat again, dropped the fragment of paper, and held her by the chin, coming close to her face. “We know who you work for. You are a spy for the Zionists. We have seen you go into the synagogue with that woman from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria.”

  She said nothing. The man raised his pistol and cocked it beside her ear. “Answer one question, and I will make this easy for you. There is a man we want, a so-called archaeologist who spied in my country when he was supposedly hunting for relics, and who is now on the trail of something we want in Egypt.” He let go of her chin, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled page from a magazine. He straightened it and then held it in front of her. It showed a picture of two men in diving gear on the side of a boat, one of them tall with graying dark hair and the other shorter and stouter. He pointed with the butt of his pistol at the taller one. “Where is this man?” he demanded.

  She pursed her lips defiantly, saying nothing. He rolled up the page, tossed it aside, and then aimed his pistol at the woman he had spat on. There was a deafening crack and her head exploded, brains and blood spraying their legs. He turned back to her, held her chin again, and brought the pistol close enough that she could smell the smoke. “I will ask only one more time,” he snarled. “Where is Jack Howard?”

  She continued to say nothing, sitting as upright as she could and staring defiantly ahead. The man waited for a moment longer, raised his pistol, and then swung the butt at her head, hitting her and throwing her violently sideways. For a brief moment she saw the fragment of ancient text lying on the floor beside the dead woman, and then she saw a terrifying rushing blackness.

  And then nothing.

  —

  Twenty minutes after leaving Maria, Jack was crouched at the bottom of the Geniza chamber looking up at the aperture in the wall leading back into the synagogue. The space was cramped, an arm’s breadth across each way and some six meters high; it was like being inside a large chimney well in a medieval castle. He watched Maria follow him carefully down the rope ladder they had dropped from the aperture, her white protective suit shimmering in the light from the single bulb they had suspended from the top of the chamber. Jack’s own suit felt strangely insubstantial after the countless hours he had spent underwater in a Kevlar-reinforced E-suit, and he had to move and hear the crinkle of the plastic to convince himself that he was wearing anything above his own clothes. He shifted the respirator and clear plastic visor to get a more comfortable view, and then looked at his exposed right hand, already smeared with dirt, where he had cut off the glove and sealed the wrist with a rubber band. They had brought mini Maglites with them, but what he was about to do was going to be a matter of touch and feel, with bare fingers essential for the sensitivity needed to prize out what might remain of the ancient vellum letter in the hole in the wall.

  Maria landed beside him and looked at the smear on his hand. “Solomon Schechter called it Genizaschmutz,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her respirator. “Dust, insects, decayed manuscripts, flecks of whitewash from the ceiling, desert sand, the residue of all those human hands sweating and smudging as they wrote, and of course mouse goo, stuck together with a gummy ooze from the vellum. It’s like pine resin when you get it on your hands. Almost impossible to get off.”

  Jack looked up at the aperture, lit by the single stark bulb, their route out. “So this was filled up to the brim with manuscripts?”

  “Virtually overflowing. They say the opening is up there so that the holy words in Hebrew go directly to heaven, like the soul. In reality it was the only practical place they could put the opening, like a giant rubbish bin. Even though the manuscripts were removed over a century ago, I still feel as if I’m diving into a well of history when I come inside here. Aysha is only a few meters away on the other side of this wall, but it’s as if we’re halfway back to the world of the Geniza, in a kind of shadowy netherland with all those faces and voices about to spring to life. I’ve never felt quite like this before in a medieval manuscript repository. In most cases, like the Hereford Library, the manuscripts were part of a scholarly library, so in your mind’s eye you walk back into a candlelit scriptorium or a monk’s study. Here, you walk back into a bustling Cairo street scene of the eleventh or twelfth century, filled with all the color and vibrancy that life can offer.”

  Jack spied a fleck of lighter colored material sticking to the wall beside his face and put his forefinger on it, peeling it away with his thumb. It was a tiny piece of paper with a letter on it, a serif just visible. Maria opened up a small plastic box that she had taken from a pouch on her belt and Jack gently flicked the fragment into it. She closed the box and replaced it carefully in her pocket. “This is real archaeology, Jack. Creating a huge mosaic from the tiniest of tiny details. That single letter may float through history by itself forever, or it might just form the crucial piece in a jigsaw puzzle. With the Geniza, you never know.”

  “Let’s get the job done,” Jack said.

  Maria pointed to a hole just above the floor of the chamber on the side opposite the synagogue balcony. It led into the outer wall of the building. It was even smaller than Jack had imagined, barely wide en
ough to fit his bicep. He eased himself down until he was lying on his right side, his hand poised to reach inside. He paused for a moment, eyeing Maria. “About that snake,” he said. “The venomous guardian of the Geniza. If there were mice living in there, then this hole isn’t going to have been his lair, is it?”

  Maria looked thoughtful. “The last mouse died in there about five hundred years ago, trapped behind a congealed plug of resinous vellum. The snake could have burrowed its way in there after that. It could be waiting in there for you, Jack.”

  “I’m so glad Costas isn’t here,” Jack muttered, flexing his fingers.

  “There’s a great line from Ben Sira, words on a piece of parchment that was floating in that mass of manuscripts where we’re sitting now. It goes: ‘Concealed wisdom and hidden treasure, what’s the use of either?’ Whatever’s in there needs to come out, Jack. I don’t think the snake will bite.”

  “Okay. I’ll trust you.”

  “There’s something else I wanted to say to you, Jack, while we’re here together. Whatever we find in that hole, you’re going to want to leave here as soon as possible afterward and the opportunity will be lost.”

  Jack rolled back and looked at her. “Maybe not the best time, Maria.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “It’s not that. It’s about scholarship. It’s about the exhilaration of discovery. It’s about what drives people like Solomon Schechter, like Howard Carter, like you, Jack. At the time when the Geniza was discovered, there were many who felt that Jewish scholarship had turned in on itself, like the sophists of late antiquity or medieval Christianity, with too much intellect being wasted on trivia and obscurity, with piety becoming burdensome and negative. The Geniza gave a huge burst of vitality to all that, almost a cleansing. It allowed people to see afresh not just the fundaments of their religion but also the sheer vitality of the people who had lived by it. It was as if what had gone before was foam on the sea of scholarship. But the uncovering of the Geniza created a tidal wave in the sea itself, one that survived even the darkest days of the Holocaust. It drove some of them to a vision of the world that was not partisan, was not divided into separate communities, but was as cosmopolitan as the world they found in the Geniza, a world where peaceful coexistence across all the world’s great religions might be possible. It was idealism, but idealism based on an astonishing historical revelation. That’s what I wanted to say to you, Jack. Every time you make a great discovery, it gives that burst of vitality to the world, a rekindling of wonder and excitement. With another dark cloud hanging over us now, we need that more than ever. Don’t ever give up on the quest.”