Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  “Urdu is plausible for an ex-soldier who might have served in India, and he could have accented the English to disguise his true origins,” Jack said.

  “Carter noted that the man he met in 1891 was lucid enough when he was in full flow, but he was physically weak and fearful of being caught,” said Jeremy. “He said he had been a corporal in the Royal Engineers and had been with the river expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884. But after a particularly savage battle, he had been knocked unconscious and lost track of time and place. After a long period of wandering and a terrifying encounter with a crocodile, he found himself in Cairo, where his extraordinary underground adventure took place. He had clung to Carter in desperation as he told the story, clearly tottering on the edge of sanity, babbling about the crocodile and mummies. It was the Royal Engineers cap badge that convinced Carter that there might be some element of truth in the story.”

  “Royal Engineers,” Jack muttered, thinking hard. “How extraordinary. He must have gone up with the river expedition past the crocodile temple, the one that Costas and I discovered on the Nile. And the battle can only have been Kirkeban, the one major encounter with the Mahdi army for the river column. The expedition pretty well disintegrated after that, so it’s plausible that a man left for dead on the battlefield or lost in the river might have ended up that way.”

  Jeremy positioned the computer screen so that Jack could see it. “I know all this because Howard summarized it in his diary entry for the day in 1904 when he rediscovered Jones. He wrote an account of what Jones told him next. I’ve scanned it so you can read it in its entirety.”

  Jack stared at the screen. It showed a single notebook page of handwriting, neat and legible. He began to read:

  13 October 1904. Visited the souk outside the synagogue today to seek Jones, about whom I wrote in my entry yesterday. I feel that with the passage of years I can use his name without fear of compromising his safety, as surely by now his desertion from the army would be beyond retribution, if indeed his story were to be believed. Having searched all the usual places and nearly giving him up for dead, a reasonable conclusion after all these years, I spied the man I described yesterday, and, after observing him discreetly, watching him dispense who-knows-what concoction to a gaggle of credulous Belgians, I approached him; he immediately recognized me and we renewed our acquaintance. I reminded him of his unfinished story, and after some egging he took me in hand and led me to the back corner of the courtyard where the rabbi allows him to sleep and brings him food and water.

  Here is what he told me. One night some three years after the death of Gordon, he and an American, whom I surmised to be none other than the estimable Charles Chaillé-Long, former officer in Gordon’s service and now distinguished author and lawyer (about whose subsequent career I did not apprise Jones, not wishing to divert him from his story, or render him too amazed), along with a Frenchman, an inventor of a submarine diving apparatus, went to a place on the Nile where Jones knew from an ancient carving found in the desert that there lay an underground entrance, below a ruined fort some few miles south of the present city boundary. In dynamiting it open, they were sucked in from their boat, and Jones yet again suffered a knock to the head. He woke up some indeterminable time later, without Chaillé-Long or the Frenchmen, both of whom he gave up for dead, but with the remains of the boat washed all around him, in a kind of darkness suffused by a distant brilliant light.

  At this point I had to hold Jones in my hands to keep him talking. His eyes widened and he spoke feverishly, in the grip of a barely suppressed terror. He talked of deep pools of water, and again of a blinding light. He said that he ate some kind of slimy fish, and, to my considerable consternation, the flesh of long-dead bodies, bodies that he described as if they were ancient mummies. After an inordinate amount of time and much hopeless terror, he came to a great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus. In that chamber he saw many great treasures, gold and amulets and crystal, and he then told me he had made a long-dead friend, who had pointed him the way out. I felt that Jones had strayed into fiction and delirium, and knew this must be the case when he showed me a ring he had taken from the hand of his supposed friend, clearly not Pharaonic or even ancient but a signet from the caliphate, a Fatimid ring of a type I have sold before (a particularly fine one, I have to say, of Al-Hakim I am certain, for which I considered offering him a generous price. But then I saw from the fervor in his eyes that this was not a ring he would be parted from, and indeed that this was a man beyond the draw of mammon). He told me that he had come up from this place under the west bank of Cairo, but that the tunnel had collapsed behind him and could never be found, as the spot had been filled in and floored over.

  I thanked Jones for his story, but will not, I think, return to press him for more. I considered writing to Mr. Chaillé-Long, but I cannot afford to be made a laughingstock if the story should prove false, so I decided against it. My cachet is low enough in Egypt as it is. Of submarine diving apparatus I know precious little, but I might surmise that Jones had come across such an inventor in his career as a sapper, and thus he found a place for him in his story. Jones did also mention an officer of engineers, a Main or Mayne. A check of the Army List in my club library indeed reveals a Major Mayne in 1884. It’s a not uncommon surname, and perhaps, indeed, Mayne was a former officer of his, though the name had disappeared from the list by the following year. Perhaps he too was a victim of that benighted campaign, and, in any event, being in all likelihood long dead, is not a lead to pursue. Cairo to me sometimes seems a miasma of make-believe, of stories of tombs and treasures too numerous for all the ancient dynasties of Egypt many times over. And though I think there is something in Jones’ story, some kernel of truth, it is not one to which I will be returning unless I am stripped of all other possibilities, unless the Valley of the Kings is to be shut to me forever. Oh for just a small pharaoh’s tomb of my own…

  Jack stopped reading, his mind reeling. For Howard Carter, the Fatimid ring had pushed the story beyond credulity, yet it was precisely the detail that nailed it for Jack. He stared at Jeremy. “It’s the ring, isn’t it? That’s the clincher.”

  “Now you know why I was so excited when Maria showed me the Halevi letter. Carter nails it for us by identifying the caliph as Al-Hakim and the ring as a signet, worn only by the caliph and his immediate family. Corporal Jones must have stumbled across his body. What he meant by his new friend pointing the way out is a little mystifying, but Jones may not have been entirely grounded at that point. He’d been underground for weeks, probably months, and may have been hallucinating. Do you remember Wilson in the Tom Hanks film Castaway? People alone in desperate situations make friends out of the most unlikely objects, and a skeleton at least has a semblance of humanity.”

  Jack’s eyes were ablaze. “The other breakthrough is Carter’s reference to the ruined fort on the banks of the Nile, giving us a modern way marker to another entrance to the underground complex. If those ruins can be pinpointed, then there’s a chance, a small chance, that we might be able to find the entrance under the river that swallowed up Jones and the French diver, and an even smaller chance that we might get in.”

  Jeremy grinned at him. “A small chance is still a chance, isn’t it?”

  “Damn right it is.” Jack pulled the satellite phone out of his bag, pressed the key for the secure IMU line, and waited for the connection. He turned to Jeremy. “Can you email that scan to Lanoswki, Costas, and Aysha?”

  Jeremy typed quickly and tapped a key. “Done.” He shut down the computer and slipped it into his bag. “We’ve got to go. Our flight’s boarding.”

  Jack peered at him. “What do you mean, our flight?”

  “You didn’t think I’d come all the way out to Cyprus just to see you and then return, did you? I’m coming to see Rebecca too.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Remember, I didn’t even know myself that I
was coming until this morning. I sent her a text from Heathrow but haven’t had a reply. The last I heard from her yesterday was that she was going underground.”

  “That would be Temple Mount,” Jack said, pursing his lips. “I hope she hasn’t pushed the boundaries. That place is a tinderbox at the best of times. David Ben-Gurion is due to meet me at Tel-Aviv Airport and take me straight there.”

  “IMU’s Israel representative?”

  Jack nodded. “I’m glad you’re coming with me, Jeremy. Rebecca’s got something she really wants to show me, but it looks as if I’m going to be doing a quick turnaround. I may not have more than a few hours in Jerusalem.”

  Jeremy looked at him shrewdly. “Back to Egypt?” Jack nodded.

  “David’s a reserve captain in the Israeli navy. With any luck he’ll be able to get a reconnaissance flight to divert out to Sea Venture for a paradrop, and then it’s a short flight by helicopter to Alexandria.”

  “Sounds like a return to special forces days, Jack.”

  “The real test is going to be Cairo. It was bad enough when we left, but by tomorrow it could be in the grips of an extremist coup. Somehow we’ve got to get through that if we’re going to get to this ruined fort beside the Nile south of the city.”

  “By ‘we,’ do you mean you and Costas?”

  Jack looked nonplussed. “Of course. If he’s up to it.”

  “You need to access some satellite imagery to look for the site of that fort.”

  “Lanowski will be onto it the moment he reads that email.”

  The satellite phone flashed green to indicate a link, and Jack quickly tapped in a number and raised it. After a few moments, a familiar voice answered.

  “Jack?”

  “Costas? How soon can you be in Alexandria?”

  “The Embraer is due to touch down on its return flight to Valencia in two hours, and it can be refueled for Herakleion in Crete immediately. From there I’ll take the Lynx to Sea Venture two hundred miles due south. Twenty hours from now, maybe a little more.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all mapped out.”

  “I’ve learned to be one step ahead of the game, Jack. I knew we were going back even before we left Egypt.”

  “Equipment?”

  “I’ll get everything together on Sea Venture. E-suits, rebreathers, underwater scooters. I’ll need to score some extra oxygen off the equipment storekeeper on Sea Venture. We’re always somehow in short supply with them. But I’ll manage. No worries, Jack. You just do what you have to do with your daughter.”

  “Bring my Beretta, Costas. You know where it is.”

  “Roger that. And I’ll be visiting the armory on Sea Venture.”

  “Rendezvous Alexandria, twenty-four hours from now?”

  “You got it. Over and out.”

  Jack quickly replaced the phone in his bag and got up just as the announcement came on for final boarding. He strode alongside Jeremy to the departure gate, his mind filled with what he had read. A great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus. He was on a knife-edge still, but coursing with excitement. If all went well, a little over a day from now he would know whether the soldier’s story was the key to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. He glanced at his watch, wishing the hours forward. He could hardly wait to tell Rebecca.

  CHAPTER 16

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  Jack had arranged to meet Rebecca outside the Jaffa Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. He saw her there now, in the shade of the ancient wall chatting to two Israeli soldiers who were guarding the entrance. In the last year since turning nineteen, she had grown into a self-confident young woman, her slender limbs and height coming from Jack but her dark hair and complexion reflecting her mother’s Italian background. She was wearing khaki trousers, a T-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots and had on a small backpack. Jack knew that she had spotted him but had not wanted to attract attention, so she was waiting for him to come to her.

  He quickly led Jeremy across the busy street and the pedestrian square and reached her, nodding at the soldiers and giving her a kiss on the cheek. She embraced Jeremy and turned back to Jack. “Good trip?”

  “We were met at Tel Aviv Airport by a friend of mine who dropped us off just up the hill.”

  “I watched the live stream of the sarcophagus being raised on CNN on my iPhone. It seemed to go without a hitch.”

  Jack nodded. “It was a relief to get it on deck. Now the politics begin.”

  She peered at him. “Uncle Costas sent me a text just before you arrived at the airport. Said he’d thanked you but had forgotten to say he owes you. Usually, when he sends me a message like that to pass on to you, it means that something bad happened, but the unspoken hallowed code means you can’t thank each other directly because if you do, then the next time it won’t work out so well. Am I right? And what about that bandage on your arm?”

  Jack cleared his throat. “Okay. There was a small hitch, but everything worked out fine in the end, and we’re all in one piece. I’ll tell you about it later. The crucial thing is that we found the missing fragment of the plaque that was inside the sarcophagus, and it seems to give us a location for getting into the underground complex from the Nile.”

  “So you’re definitely going back to Egypt?”

  “The friend who dropped us here is going to pick me up again in the early evening and take me to the coast south of Tel Aviv, where I’m taking a ride on an Israeli naval reconnaissance plane out to Sea Venture.”

  “You doing a paradrop?”

  “Yep.”

  “You promised me. Do you remember? Almost two years ago.”

  “I said I dropped out of planes only when it was absolutely necessary and not for the thrills. Anyway, you’re your own boss now. You can arrange a paradrop with the IMU training director.”

  “Yes,” she exclaimed, putting an arm around Jeremy. “We can do it together, Jeremy. Our first proper holiday, just the two of us.”

  Jeremy looked more studious than usual as he stroked his beard. “Not really my scene. Diving, yes, maybe, but jumping out of planes? No. I was thinking we could spend a week back in Naples with your mother’s family to give me a chance to get up to speed with the conservation work on the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Some amazing new texts are being revealed. You could help me piece them together.”

  Rebecca looked aghast and pushed him away. “I’m talking holiday, Jeremy, not work.”

  Jack cracked a grin. “Remember what Maria has in store for you. She asked me to tell you that the trip to look at the monasteries on Mount Athos is all fixed.”

  “You been seeing Maria, Dad?”

  “In Cairo. She came out to look at some new manuscript finds in the Ben Ezra synagogue.”

  “I know about the Geniza. You mean you’ve been seeing her at the bottom of a hole in a wall.”

  “Something like that.”

  She shook her head. “You’re the one who needs a holiday with Maria, Dad, not me.”

  Jack smiled at her. Ten years of schooling in New York had given Rebecca not only her distinctive accent but also a candor that he found refreshing, even if it sometimes presented him with awkward truths.

  He glanced at the Jaffa Gate, at the medieval crenellations and stonework that seemed to rise unperturbed above the tides of humanity that swept beneath it, the countless pilgrims and warriors, merchants and prophets who had come to Jerusalem in its long history. The last time he had stood at this spot had been more than twenty years before, on the eve of the first Gulf War, when Jerusalem had been devoid of tourists and the air-raid sirens were sounding. Standing here then, with his khaki bag slung over his shoulder and his camera poised, he had felt like a diver about to plunge into the unknown, and he felt that same frisson now. The crisis that again loomed over Israel and the Near East lent the same sense of danger to the place. He turned to Rebecca. “Okay. I’ve told you about my l
atest find. Now it’s your turn to show us yours.”

  —

  Ten minutes later Jack hurried with Jeremy through a maze of alleyways and narrow streets in the Coptic quarter of Jerusalem. They were trying to keep up with Rebecca as she led them deeper into the city. Apart from army and police patrols and local men who eyed them as they passed, there were few people to be seen, the usual bustle of activity reduced to the minimum as people stayed indoors with the threat of missile attack. Rebecca stopped at a poky hole-in-the-wall street vendor, greeted the woman behind the counter like an old friend, and waited while she squeezed her a fresh orange juice. She took a bread roll as well. “Breakfast,” Rebecca said apologetically. “Didn’t have time earlier.”

  Jack shook his head when she offered to buy him one. “You came here to volunteer for the Temple Mount archaeological project. How’s pot washing going?”

  She finished the roll and wiped her mouth. “Yeah. Good.”

  “Really?”

  “It was fun. For about ten minutes.” She gave Jack a glum look. “They’ve got twenty metric tons of the stuff, Dad. I did a quick calculation as I was sitting in front of my first tray. With each sherd averaging five centimeters across, that means fifty million sherds.”

  “Each one a precious link to history. And one day one of them might just provide a clue to something bigger.”

  “I know. I get that. It’s kind of a privilege. And it is special to a lot of the volunteers who’ve never done archaeology before. But I’ve been spoiled, haven’t I? I was digging at Troy at the age of fourteen, and hunting for Ghengis Khan’s tomb in Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan the year after that. Anyway, I’ve been finding my own links to history.”