Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  Jack stared up at that aperture near the ceiling. He was utterly still for a moment, feeling his heartbeat slow, as it did when he was underwater. “It’s no longer just Jack Howard,” he replied quietly. “The quest is driven by all of us, by the team.” He rolled back, took a deep breath, and thought again. “But I know what you’re saying. It’s the bigger picture, isn’t it? Discovery isn’t just about the adrenaline rush, the thrill of the chase, the problem-solving. It’s about consequences, about what you find and how you present it to the world, about enrichment and uplifting, and sometimes, just sometimes, about improving the human condition. I’m with you on that, up to the hilt. And I’m humbled that you can think of me alongside scholars like Schechter and Carter. I’d say the same about you, as I would about Aysha and Maurice. And I’m not always the star. Sometimes,” he said, flashing her a smile and raising his right hand, “I’m just a long arm, aren’t I?”

  Maria smiled back. “Time you put it into action.”

  Jack bunched his fingers and pushed his hand into the hole, continuing until he was elbow deep. At first he felt only a void, but then his fingers brushed against the edges, against slippery stone and a sticky mass. He tried not to think about what he was touching and pressed in farther, reaching the middle of his bicep and already feeling the edges of the hole constricting his arm. “Still nothing,” he exclaimed, pushing in farther. “I can’t feel the end.”

  “Another hand’s length, no more,” Maria said. “You can do it.”

  He gave another shove, flinching in pain as his shoulder wedged into the hole. “Okay. I’ve got to the far end,” he said, his face pressed hard against the chamber wall above the hole. He closed his eyes, imagining what he was feeling—a smooth but undulating surface with edges that curled back from the underlying stone. “I think I’ve got the piece of vellum,” he said. “About twice the size of my hand? I’m prizing it away now.” He pulled gently at the edges, carefully forcing his fingers behind, working his way around until only the central part of the vellum remained attached to the masonry. Slowly, with infinite care, he pushed his fingers farther behind the flap, feeling it come away millimeter by millimeter until finally it broke free. “Okay. Got it.” He edged backward from the wall as he withdrew his hand, pulling out a blackened object that looked like a piece of leather caught in a fire. He handed it to Maria, who peered at it closely and put it in another lidded plastic box. Jack sat upright, his hand blackened with filth. “Could you see anything?”

  “I could, Jack.” Her voice was taut with excitement. “Maybe twenty lines, and it’s in Halevi’s hand. The upper tear is exactly consistent with the tear we’ve got in the other piece. Let’s get out of here and see if I can read it.”

  Five minutes later they were both outside on the balcony floor stripping off their suits, Jack quickly rubbing off the worst of the dirt from his hand with a pile of wet wipes. Aysha had already taken the box and opened it on the table, and Maria immediately went over and sat in front of it, pulling down one of the angle-poise lamps, and putting on a pair of conservator’s gloves. She carefully removed the vellum, placing it on a plastic sheet on the table, and picked up her magnifying glass and notebook, jotting down words in translation as she peered at the lines. Jack gave up trying to clean his hand and walked over. “Can you see more palimpsest?”

  “Definitely. It’s even clearer than the other piece, but I’m just concentrating on the upper text.” She continued jotting down words, and after about another ten minutes stopped and sat back. She was silent for a moment, and then stripped off her gloves and put the notebook on the table. “You’re going to love this, Jack.”

  “Go on.”

  “You remember we left off where the boy had been following Al-Hakim into the desert, and had secretly watched him faking evidence of his own death?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, this tells what the boy saw next.” She read out from her notebook:

  Now, according to my friend ben Netanel, his great-grandfather followed the caliph to a place where he disappeared beneath a sand dune, and where the boy hidden above saw a long tunnel leading to brilliant light. He tried to follow, but as he began to enter a stone door came crashing down, quickly to be swallowed by the desert. Before it vanished he saw on the door an ancient inscription of the disk with radiating arms that I have also seen in Fustat, at the place beside the synagogue where Moses was found in the reeds by Pharaoh. They say that the place where Al-Hakim left his donkey and his clothes was near the monastery of Qusayr, and the town of Hulwan, but if the boy indeed saw the pyramids, then the place where Al-Hakim disappeared must have been farther north, not far south of Fustat, where I write to you now from the precinct of the synagogue of Ben Ezra, surrounded by all the delights of fruit and wine and beautiful women that this wondrous country has to offer. If you pass this on to my friends the astronomer Ibn Yunus and the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, they may calculate the area within sight of the pyramids close to the Nile where this event took place. I myself would seek out the place in the desert, but I must travel while the sailing season is on us to the shores of the Holy Land and to Jerusalem, God protect it. God knows that I have love for both of you, my son Abraham and my daughter Ribca, and for my beautiful nieces and nephews, and I will pray for all of you in sight of the Temple Wall on the Mount of Olives, inshallah.

  Jack looked at the vellum, his mind reeling. “Amazing,” he exclaimed. “That’s exactly what Costas and I saw from under the Pyramid of Menkaure, only this seems to be from another entrance in another direction, looking west toward the pyramids. What he’s describing is the sun symbol of Akhenaten, and the one he mentions in Fustat may well have been associated with the Akhenaten cartouche excavated by those British officers and taken back to England by my great-great-grandfather.” He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “It’s amazing, though it doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to another entrance that we might get into. The one he’s describing sounds as if it would require a major mechanical excavation to open up, and could be anywhere within a radius of several dozen square kilometers, probably beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo.”

  “I’ll get one of my Hebrew experts back in Oxford to take a look at the translation,” Maria said. “Maybe there’s an alternative nuance to some of those words that might give a better clue.” She glanced at her watch. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get on here. There’s a cluster of smaller fragments of other manuscripts from the hole that need to be dealt with. The clock’s ticking.”

  “Okay,” Aysha said, pulling out her phone. “I’m calling our driver in the Land Rover. He should be outside the main entrance to Fustat within fifteen minutes.”

  Jack turned to Maria. “How did you guess there might be something like this in the second part of the letter? The first half left Al-Hakim’s fate wide open.”

  “Call it instinct. A Jack Howard moment.”

  “You have those?”

  “Very occasionally.” She smiled at him. “Actually, it was something Jeremy found in his research into the Howard Carter papers. He gave me only the barest details in a text message after I’d boarded the plane yesterday for Cairo, but it seems as if Al-Hakim wasn’t the only one to disappear under the desert. And it seems as if there might be a connection with your Royal Engineers officers in the late nineteenth century. Jeremy was expecting his research to be finished by tomorrow and will contact you then.”

  Jack glanced at his watch. There was something else he had wanted to do in Cairo, something he had planned since he and Costas had first laid eyes on the relief sculpture of the pharaoh and the Israelites inside the crocodile temple beside the Nile. There, he had seen the pharaoh in two dimensions; now he wanted to see him in three. He turned to Aysha. “Do we have time to go to the museum? I’d like to see the colossal statue of Akhenaten from Amarna that went with the travelling exhibition around the world a few years ago.”

  Aysha looked uncertain. “It’s shut to the public, but I still
have a pass. Our driver knows the back routes and could get us to the rear entrance. I’m supposed to return you to Alexandria and then I’m straight off to the Faiyum to join Maurice at the mummy necropolis. But we could squeeze in the extra hour if you really want it.”

  “Who knows when I’ll be in Egypt again.”

  Maria eyed him. “You’ll be back. I’ve never known Jack Howard to walk away from something like this.”

  “I’m thinking of visiting Jerusalem next.”

  “That’s going from the frying pan into the fire, isn’t it? There have already been rockets from Syria falling on Haifa.”

  Jack shrugged. “I was there doing research for my doctorate in the week before the first Gulf War, remember? There were no tourists, and I had the Holy Sepulchre all to myself. I told Rebecca she should seize the opportunity to explore as much as possible while she’s there now, when the place isn’t swamped with tour buses.”

  Maria looked at him shrewdly. “If the real reason you’re going to Jerusalem is to look out for Rebecca, forget it. She’d never forgive you. You’ve got to let her plough her own furrow, and then ask you out there herself.”

  Jack pulled out his phone and showed her an image. “That’s the tunnel she’s about to go down under the City of David. She sent this just after we left Alexandria. She wanted Costas to go too, but I texted her about Lanowski’s visit and said Costas might be tied up for a while with some engineering problem on Seaquest.”

  “When you reply, tell her the trip she and I have planned to Greece is definitely in the cards. I’ve just had permission for us to visit the monasteries on Mount Athos to look at the manuscript libraries. At last they’ve agreed to let women in, and she and I are going to be the first.”

  Jack raised his eyes. “Fascinating. I’ve always wanted to have a look in there. Maybe I’ll join you.”

  “As if, Jack, as Rebecca would put it. This is a strictly girls-only trip to a once-strictly-male preserve. It’d look as if we had a chaperone.”

  Jack put away his phone, and paused. “I’ll call you in Oxford. We should spend some time together.”

  Maria turned back to the vellum. “How’s Katya?”

  Jack shrugged. “Haven’t seen her for months.”

  She turned to him. “What’s going on there, Jack? She’s perfect for you. A paleolinguistics PhD who can hold her own in a gun battle and runs her own project on the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan. What is it now, ten years since you first met? She helped you find Atlantis.”

  Jack shrugged. “You helped me find the last Gospel of Christ.”

  “What are you doing, Jack? You need to make up your mind.”

  “She’s with that Kyrgyz guy, Almaty, at the petroglyph site.”

  “Well, I guess at least he’s on the same continent as she is. I know how she feels.”

  Jack glanced at Aysha, who gave him a rueful look. “Time to go, Jack. There’s a curfew at midnight, and we definitely can’t push that.”

  Maria looked at them. “I’m doing an all-nighter here and then I’m on the early morning flight back to Heathrow. I want to get my Hebrew expert at the institute to look at this and then I’ll email you the final translation. And watch out for something from Jeremy. He’s working flat out in the British Museum stores looking for more Howard Carter manuscripts, for anything further on the old soldier and his story of lost treasure under the pyramids. Jeremy usually comes up trumps, if you give him time.”

  “We may not have a lot of that,” Jack said.

  “He was on to the last box of correspondence when I left. With the pyramid a no-go zone, his findings may be the last hope you have of discovering another way underground. Who knows what that guy told Carter.”

  “I’ll text him when I get back to Alexandria, right after I contact the IMU board and do all I can to get your friend Sahirah released. Any plans to return the sarcophagus to Egypt are on hold until she walks free. If we are indeed able to raise it tomorrow, that would bring maximum public humiliation to the antiquities director. Releasing Sahirah should be a price he is willing to pay to keep face.”

  “Tomorrow might be your last chance,” Aysha said. “The antiquities director might not last much longer than that, and whoever takes his place from the extremist junta won’t care less about the sarcophagus returning to Egypt. That is, if there’s even a Ministry of Culture left. It’s already halfway to being an interrogation block.”

  Jack gave her a steely look. “I’m going to insist on her release by midday tomorrow Egyptian time. If there’s no response, I’ll be meeting with the IMU security director and assessing all options.”

  Maria stood, arms folded, and looked up at Jack. “Congratulations on your chariots discovery in the Red Sea, Jack. But it makes me think of lines from Yannai, another poet in the Geniza, on the burning bush in the Book of Exodus. ‘Omens of fire in the chariot’s wind, Pillars of fire in thunder and storm.’ Take care of yourself, Jack. Don’t stretch that envelope too far; otherwise, it’ll be Rebecca coming to find you, not the other way around.”

  Jack looked at her with concern. “Will you be all right here alone?”

  Aysha turned to him. “That beggar you gave money to at the entrance to the synagogue precinct? He’s ex-Egyptian special forces, a cousin of mine, Ahmed. He has a Glock 17 concealed in those rags. He won’t let Maria out of his sight until she’s sitting on the plane for Heathrow tomorrow morning.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want to be coming back here to rescue Maria.”

  “You wouldn’t need to. I’d be here first.”

  Maria paused, and then quickly kissed him on the cheek. “See you in Oxford when this is over.”

  Aysha gave them both a wry smile. “Inshallah.”

  —

  Half an hour later Jack ducked out of the Land Rover into a back street and followed Aysha quickly down a passageway behind the museum. While they had been in the synagogue, Cairo had erupted again, the low cloud over the city reflecting the orange glow of fires and the roar of the traffic punctuated by the wail of sirens and bursts of gunfire. Aysha spoke to the two armed guards at the entrance, showed her pass, and waited as one of them unlocked the door. Moments later they were in a long, ill-lit corridor and then ascending a staircase that came out at the rear of the ground-floor exhibits hall. The entire museum seemed sepulchral, with many of the cases shrouded with sheets.

  “The last antiquities director ordered this, the last archaeologist, that is, before he was ousted by the new regime,” Aysha said as they hurried on. “Everyone here was fearful of a repeat of what had happened to the museums in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covering the exhibits at least buys some time, keeping them out of the eye of the extremists, who see virtually everything in here as un-Islamic. Here we are, Room Three, the Amarna Room. The sculpture you want is in the far left corner under the shroud. I’ll wait here in case a guard comes by and I have to explain what we’re doing. You’ve got ten minutes, maximum.”

  She switched on the light, and Jack left her pacing the entrance to the room. The air smelled musty, tomblike, and Jack had the chilling sensation of being at the end of an era, with the mummies and sculptures and other priceless artifacts celebrated the world over about to be entombed again, swallowed into the ground or smashed to pieces within the ruins of this place. He passed the famous unfinished sculpture of Nefertiti, her beautiful face looming out of the darkness, and then he saw her again in a relief sculpture, no longer so beautiful, with the same elongated profile and same bulbous features as her husband. He stopped at the far corner in front of a shrouded form that towered over the rest of the room, and he carefully pulled off the sheet. The sculpture rose above him just as he had remembered it in the travelling exhibition in London, only here the features were even more deeply accentuated by the shadows. It was a representation utterly unlike that of any other pharaoh from ancient Egypt, with the extended chin, the thick, half-smiling lips, and the bulbous eyes, as if it were from another place and another time alto
gether.

  He had not known for certain why he wanted to see this statue again, but now he realized why. Before she had left for Jerusalem, Rebecca had talked to him about Baldwin the Fourth, the Crusader king who had ruled the city with his Frankish barons in the twelfth century, soon after the Geniza poet Halevi had met his end there. Together they had watched the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, in which Baldwin is portrayed in a golden mask, concealing the leprosy that had ravaged his face and would eventually kill him. Jack had remembered the wooden Burundi face masks with their hooded eyes that he had seen in Sudan, ceremonial masks with a history that may have extended back thousands of years to the time when the pharaohs had tried to conquer the desert. It was there that Akhenaten had experienced his revelation of the Aten, had cast off his priestly role and pushed aside the old religion. Had the tribesmen seen his extraordinary features and created their masks in his image? Or had he seen their masks, the masks of those who lived under the radiance of the Aten, and then had he and Nefertiti adopted them for their own, symbols of their own allegiance to the new religion? How else to explain the transformation of Nefertiti in the sculptures? Instead of signs of illness, as many had suspected, was Akhenaten instead portraying himself like the Burundi, seeking the anonymity that a mask gave him in the light of God?