Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  Hiebermeyer unrolled a map from the briefcase showing the Giza plateau, the Nile, and the southern Cairo suburbs in between. “All right, Jack. During the 1980s an international company was hired to construct a new sewage system under the Giza suburb, to the south of old Cairo abutting the pyramid plateau. It was an unparalleled opportunity for archaeology, promising the kind of revelations we’ve seen in Athens with construction work in advance of the Olympics or in Istanbul with the new Bosporus tunnel terminus. But the need to get those sewers done was truly desperate, and corners were cut. We got a tantalizing glimpse of what might lie beneath, nothing more. I was a student at the time and managed to join the archaeological team monitoring the work.”

  “Unofficially, as I recall,” Jack said. “Your supervisor wanted you to finish your doctorate, but you wanted a finger in everything going on in Egypt. The antiquities director at the time point-blank refused you a permit. Had your best interests at heart.”

  “Not the way I saw it at the time,” Hiebermeyer said, shaking his head in frustration. “If I’d had another couple of hours out there, we might be a lot closer to our objective right now. I was appalled at how the investigation was shut down as soon as the construction work was finished and all the holes were backfilled. Today it’s all completely buried beneath the suburb that now laps the Giza plateau itself. But the night guard at the most interesting site was a friend of mine, and he let me inside on the final night before it was filled in. What I found was fascinating, though of course I couldn’t tell anyone about it as I was there illegally. At the time I had bigger fish to fry, or so I thought, and I set it aside in my mind. But it suddenly makes sense. This is huge, Jacob.”

  Lanowski tapped a key, and an aerial photo of the Giza plateau appeared on the screen, showing the three pyramids and the Sphinx, the mass of lesser structures and excavated foundations in front of the Great Pyramid, and in the foreground the sprawling buildings of the modern suburb. Lanowski tapped again and the scene transformed into an isometric computer-generated image with a reconstructed overlay showing the plateau with the ancient structures intact. The modern suburb had disappeared, replaced by regular cultivated fields, and suddenly the jumble of ruins in front of the pyramids made sense, with rectilinear buildings, courtyards, and linked causeways. The most striking addition on the edge of the floodplain in front of the pyramids was a large man-made basin and a complex of canals, one of them leading to an irregular waterway about a kilometer east of the plateau that was clearly a branch of the Nile.

  “Give us a rundown, Maurice,” Costas said.

  “Okay. You’ve got the three pyramids, Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure, largest to smallest, north to south. They’re on the edge of a plateau called the Mokkatam Formation, a limestone ridge that rises at this point about fifty meters above the modern suburb. To the east of the plateau is the ancient floodplain of the Nile, to the west the open desert. The limestone is easily quarried and easily tunnelled. The plateau to the east of the Pyramid of Menkaure is completely free of ancient structures, leaving the raised plateau in front bare over almost a square kilometer until you drop down into the floodplain.”

  “You mean where we would have been looking when we were suspended beneath the pyramid, facing east?” Costas asked. “Where we were looking down the blocked-up tunnel?”

  Hieberemeyer nodded. “First, let’s look at what we can see aboveground. This image shows the plateau as it might have looked during the New Kingdom, about the time of Akhenaten, over a thousand years after the pyramids were built. Originally each pyramid would have been fronted by a mortuary temple, and then a further temple—really a kind of entrance portico—on the floodplain below. The two were joined by a causeway. But by the time of the New Kingdom, the mortuary complexes for the Pyramids of Menkaure and Khafre had been removed, and everything was focused on the structures associated with the Great Pyramid. By then, of course, the use of these structures as mortuary temples, to prepare the bodies of the pharaohs for the afterlife, was ancient history, and I mean really ancient history. People tend to think of Pharaonic Egypt as a continuum where everything can be lumped together, whereas in fact we’re dealing with a time span between the construction of the pyramids and the time of Akhenaten—similar to that between, say, the end of the Roman period and the present day. In such a huge expanse of time, we should expect monuments to change in meaning and function.”

  Jack nodded. “So what began as communities of priests perpetuating the memory of the three individual pharaohs—Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure—becomes a unified cult of the ancient pharaohs, centering on the one complex associated with the Great Pyramid. The other temples become redundant.”

  “And more than that,” Hiebemeyer enthused, “the entire cult could have become redundant.” He paused, standing back. “What is it that fascinates us most about the pyramids? It’s not so much the dead pharaohs, but the engineering marvel and the geometry of the alignments, the relationships in particular to the sun. Egyptians of the New Kingdom would have been as awestruck by these ancient monuments as we are today, and would have been well aware of the celestial alignments. They would have celebrated them. It’s my belief that the cult of the pharaohs would have been largely subsumed by a cult of the Sun, of Ra and the other sun gods, a transition that could have taken place already by the beginning of the New Kingdom.”

  “And that brings us to Akhenaten,” Costas murmured. “And to how it was that plaques showing the Aten sun symbol could have been placed inside the burial chamber of Menkaure, something that would have been impossible while his cult was still alive.”

  Hiebermeyer nodded, and pointed at the screen. “Let’s look at these structures in front of the Great Pyramid first. This is what was revealed during the sewer construction. What was officially revealed, that is. First, a mass of mud-brick buildings that was undoubtedly part of the town that sprang up to house the workers and then the priests who maintained the cult. Second, the remains of a huge mud-brick wall, the so-called palace. Third, the massive basalt revetment of the man-made harbor abutting the valley temple, joined to the Nile by canals wide enough to float barges with stone blocks up to the harbor and later for the ceremonial final boat journey of the dead pharaoh from the Nile to the mortuary temple.”

  Costas pointed at a sinuous channel shown to the east of the harbor. “You mean here?”

  “That’s the Bar el-Libeini, the projected line of a channel of the Nile in Old Kingdom times. Since then it’s silted up, and the main channel of the river has progressively migrated east, except in a few places where it has remained in more or less its ancient position. The man-made canals have also been lost, but they would have been huge engineering feats in their own right.”

  “What all this shows,” Jack said thoughtfully, “is that the construction of some kind of passage between the Nile and the Giza plateau, an underground passage, would have been perfectly feasible, and our idea that those radiating lines on the Aten symbol might map out its course is within the realm of possibility.”

  “More than that, Jack. It’s a dead certainty.”

  “Go on.”

  Hiebermeyer took a deep breath, steadying his excitement. “I’ve listed the official discoveries. Well, now for the unofficial ones.” He reached under the computer table, felt around for a moment, and then pulled out a book-sized slab of highly polished granite, the end of a hieroglyphic cartouche deeply cut in its surface. He placed it carefully on the table beside him and then swept his hand across the surface. “This has been my guilty secret for all these years. I’ve been waiting for the right time to reveal it, and this is it. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Costas peered at it. “There’s that bird, the Egyptian buzzard. And the mouth, the face, and the half sun. The rest I don’t recognize.”

  Hiebemeyer’s voice was taut with excitement, and his hand was trembling as he traced out the hieroglyphs. “I found this that night in the trench beside the huge mud-brick wall. This is why I said the so
-called palace; it’s because it wasn’t a palace. There are three certain words here. One is secrets. Another is writing. Another is storeroom, or repository. The only other person I’ve shown this to is Aysha, who happens to be my best hieroglyphics expert. She’s certain it means storeroom of written secrets.”

  There was a stunned silence. “My God,” Jack whispered. “A library.”

  Hiebermeyer stared at Jack, his face flushed. “I always objected to the word palace. A closer approximation would be monastery, a place where priests lived and worked. And just like medieval monasteries, the priestly colleges of ancient Egypt would have been repositories of knowledge. Do you remember the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta, where Solon the Greek heard the Atlantis story? By that stage, half a millennium after Akhenaten, the old knowledge had become fragmented, parcelled among many temples, jealously guarded by the priests and passed down only by word of mouth. The first Macedonian king of Egypt, Ptolemy I, tried to rectify that with his establishment of the great library at Alexandria, though by then much of the old knowledge had died after the closure of the last of the ancient temples. But I believe that he was inspired by a memory of a great centralized repository, a great library, that had existed far back in the glory days of the pharaohs, in the New Kingdom at the time of Akhenaten and his son, Tutankhamun.”

  “And where better than at Giza,” Jack murmured. “The great center for the worship of the sun god during the New Kingdom, and before that of the earliest pharaohs. A place of continuous occupation by a priestly caste for over two thousand years, priests who could safeguard a repository of knowledge through the centuries.”

  “And if this was a library, it could have been the earliest library on this scale anywhere,” Hiebermeyer exclaimed. “That mud-brick wall dates back to the Old Kingdom, to soon after the construction of the Great Pyramid, about 2500 BC. That’s over a thousand years before the heyday of the New Kingdom, before Akhenaten. Imagine what such a repository might have contained: all the knowledge passed down from Egyptian prehistory, from the time of the first hieroglyphic texts of the previous millennium as well as the oldest writings of Mesopotamia. And we’re not just talking about funerary texts, sacred mantras, Books of the Dead, and all the familiar religious tracts, but about material that predates and transcends all that: the earliest sagas and histories, accounts of exploration and discovery, lost medicinal knowledge. Ptolemy’s library at Alexandria would have been only a pale shadow of that.”

  “But like Ptolemy’s library, it could have acted as a magnet for other collections, an accumulator,” Jack said, his mind racing. “I’m thinking about something else, Maurice, about the Minoan queen of Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, about your theory of her legacy in the bloodline that led to Akhenaten and the other great New Kingdom pharaohs. Maybe the Minoan legacy in Egypt wasn’t just about a dynasty and a mercenary army of amazons. Maybe it was far more profound than that, a legacy of preserved knowledge that passed to Egypt after the volcano of Thera destroyed Cretan civilization and the priests fled over the sea to the south from their ruined palaces.”

  Hiebermeyer nodded. “Palaces, but not palaces. People have wondered about the function of the Minoan palaces ever since they were discovered, about the complexes of storerooms, about the labyrinth.”

  Jack closed his eyes for a moment. “Imagine what that might contain.”

  “But then it was all lost,” Costas said.

  Hiebermeyer tapped the screen where the image showed the empty limestone plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s still there. Maybe it went underground.”

  Jack stared, his mind racing. Of course. “Ahkenaten’s City of Light,” he exclaimed. “It’s exactly what Akhenaten would do. He’s a pharaoh who’s created a whole new religion, who has built himself a new capital at Amarna, who has dedicated massive new temples at Luxor and Heliopolis. Refounding the library at Giza, removing it to a more secure location from that old mud-brick complex, bringing it under the aegis of his new cult center to the Aten and putting it underground would be completely in keeping with his vision. Jacob, can we see your plan again?”

  Lanowski tapped a key, and the image transformed to the Aten symbol from the plaques with the pyramids behind, transposed on the actual topography of the plateau. “It fits exactly,” Jack said. “The central sun symbol falls exactly on the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, the place from which the rays emanate. That’s got to be it.” He glanced at Costas. “That must be what we saw down in the tunnel under the pyramid.”

  Costas nodded. “Lit up by sunlight coming through those air shafts in the pyramid, reflected off polished basalt mirrors that magnified it somewhere deep beneath the plateau.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Now for the egress point of that tunnel on the Nile.”

  Lanowski reeled off a twelve-figure set of coordinates. “That pinpoints it to within twenty meters. I simply superimposed the image of the plaque on a modern map, maintaining the exact alignments of the pyramids.”

  Costas peered at the map dubiously. “You really think it can be that accurate?”

  Hiebermeyer and Lanowski both turned and stared at him. Jack put a hand on his shoulder, grinning. “You want to watch what you say. We’re outnumbered by Egyptologists here.”

  “I think,” said Lanowski slowly, eyeing Costas, “given that the ancient Egyptians were able to align a pyramid with geometrical precision, if they really intended this to be a map, then we can trust them.”

  Costas raised his hands. “I was only asking. Mea culpa.”

  Lanowski tapped a key, and a satellite image of Lower Egypt came into view. The Nile Delta and Cairo were clearly visible above the belt of green that marked the course of the river through the desert. He tapped repeatedly, coming closer and closer to a point on the Nile to the south of Cairo. “Google Maps is still down for Egypt, but I kept open the link to Landsat that my friend at Langley sent me when I was researching the Red Sea chariots site. Take a look at this. My coordinates come out almost exactly on this ruined structure half fallen into the Nile. Aysha?”

  “My research shows that it’s early nineteenth century, thought to have been built by Napoleon’s forces when they took Egypt,” she said. “It would have been a ruin by the time Corporal Jones and Chaillé-Long and the French diver undertook their foray in 1892. There’s nothing else like it on that stretch of the west bank of the Nile. There’s no doubt that this is the fort they saw and that Howard Carter mentioned in his diary entry. The entrance to Akhenaten’s tunnel should lie somewhere very close to that spot.”

  “Bingo,” Lanowski said quietly.

  Jack’s excitement was mounting. “Good work, Jacob. Now let’s do some geomorphology on this. We need to be thinking about the water level.”

  “I’m already there,” Lanowski replied, his eyes gleaming. “Obviously, there’s the issue of changes in the course of the Nile over three thousand years. But this is one of those places where the position of the bank has been almost static, as we can infer from the discovery of the tunnel entrance apparently below the modern bank of the river.”

  “It might not have been chance,” Costas said thoughtfully. “Akhenaten’s engineers must have known their river intimately. If they were going to build a tunnel entrance, they’d have chosen somewhere stable.” He glanced at Jacob. “After all, these were the guys who built the pyramids. You said it.”

  Lanowski turned to Costas, his face suffused with pleasure. “Very good, Costas. You’re learning.”

  “What about the river level?” Jack asked.

  “The latest sedimentological research suggests that the New Kingdom floodplain was lower than has generally been believed, though of course we have to factor in the annual flooding and lowering of the Nile that’s now controlled by the Aswan Dam. My calculations suggest that a tunnel built into the bedrock at that point could have been dry for part of the year, and partly flooded for the remaining months when it might have been navig
able.”

  “You mean an underground canal,” Jack said. “Something that would have allowed barges to be poled or wall-walked right up to the pyramid plateau.”

  “Exactly. We’ve already seen a precedent for it in the canals and artificial harbors dug for each of the pyramids when they were constructed, only they were aboveground.”

  “But our tunnel doesn’t lead to a mortuary temple,” Hiebermeyer added.

  “What about the present water level?” Jack asked.

  “My model suggests that the tunnel will be completely submerged, though it may well rise once it reaches the plateau. It will connect with passageways and chambers that have always been above the water level and remain dry today. Ground-penetrating radar survey in the past has revealed nothing like this under the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, but that may only reflect the limitations of the technology. It would be possible for the roof of the chambers to be many meters deep, beyond the range of the radar, but for the chambers still to be above the water table. And there’s no doubt that they exist. You and Costas saw through to some kind of space when you were under the pyramid.”

  “I just hope you can break through from the Nile,” Lanowski said. “When that French diver blew his way in over a hundred years ago, he may have caused a rock slide.”