Costas was still floating on his back, his arms and legs outstretched. “Okay,” he said, his breathing becoming normal. “But hungry. Really hungry.”
Jack sniffed the air tentatively. “Extraordinary smell,” he said.
Costas heaved himself over and hauled himself partway up the slope. “That, my friend, is the smell of ancient Egypt. And from where I am, it smells good. Very good.”
“Interesting,” Jack said, peering back inside his helmet. “My readout shows a slightly lower than normal oxygen content.”
“We know of only one open ventilation point, the shaft under the pyramid where the light got through. And we don’t know yet whether that links to this tunnel.”
“I smell jasmine, thyme, acacia. Almost a hint of incense, and a definite odor of organic decay.”
“Must be something recent,” Costas said, struggling out of his fins. “Rats, maybe. This is a good place for rats.”
“Rats and little fish in the canal. That’s what Jones survived on. When he wasn’t eating mummies.”
“No way. You don’t know that.”
“That’s what Howard Carter’s diary entry said. After weeks down here Jones was desperate, and opened up some coffins. It must have been like eating dessicated old wasp’s nests. With eyes and teeth.”
“Don’t, Jack. Just as I was about to have lunch.”
“It’s midnight. And we didn’t bring a picnic.”
Costas patted the bulge in the front of his boiler suit. “Oh yes we did.”
“You didn’t really bring sandwiches.”
“What do you think I was doing while I was waiting for you to come from Jerusalem? Took over the entire galley on Sea Venture. Brought my own ingredients, air-freighted out from my favorite deli in Manhattan. The one I always tell you I’m going to take you to one day. Gino’s, where you can get a haircut and a shave while you wait. You think you’ve gone to heaven.”
“Okay,” Jack said, grinning and helping Costas to his feet. “We’ll have lunch. But let’s find a way out of this place first, right? Otherwise we might be rationing your very special sandwiches over a very long time, and looking for alternative food sources?”
A little fish flapped out of the water where it lapped at the edge. Slimy looking and with bulging eyes, it was the only other living thing they had seen since leaving the Nile. Costas contemplated it with a distasteful look on his face, and then edged it back in with his foot. “I don’t like the sound of that at all,” he said. “Not at all.”
“You need more rest?”
Costas shook his head, checking the waist strap on his boiler suit and easing the constriction of the E-suit on his neck. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Jack stared up the slope. “Roger that.”
CHAPTER 22
Jack removed the headlamp console from his rebreather backpack, handed Costas’ back to him, and then eased off the backpack and laid it with his helmet on the sloping floor. There were still over two hours of breathing time left in his cylinder, but with Costas on empty and no way of buddy-breathing, he was not going to carry on alone if they came to another underwater passage. After what had just nearly happened to Costas, and Jack’s reaction to it, they were either getting out of here together or not at all.
They both unwound the straps from the back of the lamp consoles and put them on their heads, first checking that the integrated miniature video cameras were still recording. With the backpack air-conditioning unit removed, the E-suits might become uncomfortably warm, but at the moment that was better than being chilled, and the Kevlar would afford protection against bumps and scrapes along the way. Whatever lay in store for them now, Jack knew it was unlikely to be an easy walk-through. And being in a breathable environment did not mean that an escape tunnel out toward Cairo somewhere ahead was still anything more than a shaky hypothesis.
Costas detached the hose from the hydration pack on the left side of his E-suit and took a deep draw on it, patting his boiler suit as he did so to check that everything was there and still in place. He paused for a moment, delved deep into the front pocket, and removed a watertight bag. He unzipped it, grasped the sandwich inside, and took a huge bite. He munched noisily and swallowed as he replaced the bag. “It was going to be my dying thought, and now it’s my kiss of life. Thank you, Gino.” He took another mouthful of water and stowed the tube. Then he panned his headlamp beam over the top of the ramp. “You think that’s the way to go?”
“We don’t have any choice,” Jack replied. “There’s an identical ramp at the end of the channel parallel to us, just visible through the columns, but it joins up to the single passageway ahead. My guess is that it will lead first to some kind of boat stowage facility, probably linked to the artificial harbor that we know was associated with the Old Kingdom mortuary temple. The space we saw lit up from beneath the pyramid three months ago lies somewhere between the edge of the pyramid and the harbor site. We have to hope there will be some kind of entrance to it ahead.”
Costas nodded and then heaved himself upright. “If it had been daytime, we might have seen reflected light coming through those shafts leading from the pyramid. I assume that’s what allowed the caliph Al-Hakim and then Corporal Jones to see their way around this place. As it is, there isn’t even a moon tonight.”
Jack stared ahead, reciting. “ ‘Omens of fire in the chariot’s wind, pillars of fire in thunder and storm.’ ”
“Come again?”
“Something I remembered when I mentioned our chariot discovery in the Red Sea to you a few minutes ago. When I told Maria about our discovery, she quoted those lines to me from another of the medieval Geniza poets, Yannai. His imagery comes from the Book of Exodus.”
“The burning bush, the mountain on fire,” Costas replied. “I had to learn all that stuff backward when I was a boy. I used to think ancient Egypt was a vision of hell.”
“It’s not just ancient Egypt now. You should have seen Cairo when we came through it this evening on the felucca.”
“Are you thinking of the pyramids? That CNN footage we saw in Alexandria?”
Jack nodded. “You’re right that we won’t be seeing sunlight down here. But we may see another kind of light reflected in those mirrors. Akhenaten’s City of Light won’t be illuminated by the rays of the Aten, but it might be lit up by something he would have thought unimaginable, by fires that may as well be drawn straight from the biblical image of hell. The reflection from a burning pyramid is not a way marker that any archaeologist would wish to follow, but if it’s there, it might be all we’ve got to go on.”
—
The ramp sloped up at an angle of about thirty degrees until it reached a platform some five meters above the level of the water. From there it became a rectilinear tunnel about four meters across and three meters high, wide enough for the two of them to proceed side by side. Jack paused to adjust the angle of his camera while Costas carried on ahead, his beam reflecting off the polished veneer of granite that lined the lower part of the walls. About ten meters ahead Costas stopped and peered closely at the side of the tunnel, then he pressed his hands against it.
“Jack, this is interesting. It’s been plastered over. It’s—”
There was a sudden bellow and the sound of collapsing masonry, and Costas was gone. Jack stared aghast, and then quickly made his way forward. Where Costas had been standing was a jagged hole about the size of a small door. He approached it and leaned forward into the chamber that had been revealed. That air inside was dry and aromatic, and made his eyes smart. He blinked hard, coughed, and then saw Costas’ headlamp beam coming from somewhere below, apparently stationary and at an odd angle. For an instant Jack had a yawning feeling of fear. They had basic medical kits inside their E-suits but nothing to treat major trauma other than blood coagulants and shell dressings. If Costas was seriously injured, there was little he could do for him and no way of calling in help.
He pulled himself carefully through the hol
e and peered below, his heart pounding. “Costas, are you all right? Talk to me.”
There was no response, and Jack held his breath. Then the beam from below shifted slightly, and he heard a grunt and a mumbled curse. “Fascinating,” Costas said. His voice sounded impossibly distant, as if coming from deep inside a chasm.
“What’s fascinating? Are you all right?”
“Never seen anything quite like it. Sewn joinery, each timber individually shaped. Amazing technology.”
Jack stared out beyond Costas, and gasped as he realized what he was looking at. It was a huge rock-cut chamber at least ten meters across, the size of a giant water cistern. At the bottom was a mass of timber, disarticulated and carefully laid out. Costas’ beam was coming from beneath a section of stacked planking close to the corner of the chamber beneath him. Jack watched as Costas began to extricate himself. He looked up, shading his eyes against Jack’s beam, his face white with plaster dust. “What do you make of it, Jack? A nautical archaeologist’s dream, or what?”
“It’s fantastic,” Jack enthused. “The chamber must have been airtight before you broke through, preserving all those timbers like that. There’s another of these boat pits still unopened in front of the Great Pyramid, known as a result of archaeologists pushing a fiber-optic camera down into it. Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve just fallen into the dismantled funerary barge of the Pharaoh Menkaure, the boat that took his body down the canal from the river to the harbor and the funerary temple. And you’re right, the joinery is sewn planking. Actually an incredibly robust technique that could produce a hull well up to sea travel, though this is a ceremonial riverboat. You can make out the raking stem and stern timbers, the oars, the fine woodwork of the deckhouse. Amazing.”
As Jack was talking, Costas clambered to his feet and then made his way across to the far side of the chamber, carefully avoiding causing more damage to the timbers. Jack could see that he was heading toward another aperture in the wall, and he watched him crouch down and crawl in until only his feet were visible. There was another sound of collapsing masonry, a small cloud of dust, and then silence, followed by violent coughing. A few moments later Costas’ face reappeared, and he beckoned. “Jack, you really need to see this.”
Jack stepped through the jagged hole and peered over the side. It was about three meters to the chamber floor, and he did not want to risk a broken limb. He stared across. “Is it that good?”
“That good, Jack. You’re not leaving without seeing this. Trust me.”
“All right. I’m on my way.” He found a lip of rock, jammed his fingers into it, and swung out over the edge. Then he lowered himself until he was hanging above the floor. He looked for a landing point and then let himself go, falling into the dust and narrowly missing the edge of the pile of planks. He got up, flexed his legs, and then stepped over the wood toward Costas, who had backed out of the hole to give Jack space to get through.
“It’s another chamber,” Costas said. “At least twice as big as this one. Prepare to be amazed.”
Jack ducked down and crawled in, trying not to scrape his back against the top of the hole. His headlamp beam caught timbers, the joinery visible; they were clearly more boat elements. He pulled himself out of the hole and moved aside to let Costas follow. Then he squatted on the floor of the chamber and aimed his beam upward for a better view.
An astonishing sight met his eyes. Instead of dismembered timbers, it was an intact vessel, the flush planks of its bow only inches from his face. He reached out and touched it, feeling a frisson of excitement. The timbers were covered with pitch, and as Jack eased forward he knocked a pot on the floor that contained a congealed black mass, presumably the source of the material. He shifted to the left and saw a pile of planks and a bronze adze beside a section of the hull that was evidently being repaired. The edges of the timbers showed where they had been sewn together with some form of cord as well as joined with wooden mortise and tenon. Jack stood up carefully, raising himself until his head was just above the gunwale, and panned his beam over the entire vessel.
“See what I mean?” Costas said, standing beside him. “Looks like old Menkaure took a whole fleet with him to the afterlife.”
Jack shook his head. “This isn’t Menkaure. This vessel is characteristically Late Bronze Age, dating more than a thousand years later. And it’s not a river barge. This is a full-blown seagoing ship.”
“No kidding.” Costas stood on a stone block beside Jack, allowing him to see in at Jack’s level. “My God. I see what you mean. Deckhouse at the back rather than the center, wide beam, deck planking. And that’s a mast, stepped down, and stern steering oars. A cargo ship?”
“Do you remember first seeing the timbers of our Minoan wreck off the north coast of Crete ten years ago, where we were excavating when Maurice found the Atlantis papyrus? It’s taken most of the last decade to conserve and record the timbers, but I reviewed the final report just before coming out here. This boat is astonishingly similar in almost every detail. This isn’t an Egyptian ship. It’s a Minoan ship, or at least one built to Aegean specifications or by a Minoan shipwright.”
“How do you know the date?”
“See the row of empty jars in the hold?”
Costas peered over. “Aha. Early amphoras. Like on our Minoan wreck.”
“Canaanite jars,” Jack said. “Second half of the second millennium BC, fifteenth, maybe fourteenth century BC. And I can see a so-called pilgrim flask beside the deckhouse, a typical Aegean pottery oil container you see on Egyptian wall paintings depicting trade with Aegean merchants.”
Costas stepped off the block, eased his way around Jack, and came to the prow of the hull. “Take a look at this. It’s got an evil eye.”
Jack dropped down and moved alongside Costas, then stepped back against the wall for a better view. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “That clinches it. Fantastic.”
“Talk to me, Jack.”
“Look closely. That’s not an evil eye. It’s the Aten, the sun symbol. If you look really closely, you can see it’s even got the radiating lines etched into the planks.”
“Akhenaten?”
“It could only be. It’s the first certain evidence we’ve had of him since that hieroglyphic cartouche at the entrance to the tunnel on the Nile.”
“What’s the Aegean connection?”
“You remember Maurice showing us the Aegean mercenaries he identified on the tomb painting from the mummy necropolis?”
“Who could forget it. The bare-breasted amazons.”
“Well, I think that dynastic marriage in the fifteenth century BC with a Minoan queen brought the Egyptians more than just a ready army of mercenaries. One of the few technologies the Egyptians lacked was seagoing ships, apart from vessels used on the Red Sea that look more like strengthened river craft.”
“Was this a war harbor?” Costas suggested. “A secret naval base?”
“I don’t think so,” Jack murmured. “Not exactly. These aren’t warships; they’re not galleys. They’re also not deep-bellied merchantmen. They’re more like passenger transport vessels, definitely designed for deep-sea sailing with room for plenty of provisions.”
“Ships of exploration?” Costas suggested.
Jack stared, his mind racing. It was possible. “This boat looks as if it was abandoned hastily in the middle of a refit, with tools still left lying around.”
Costas had moved out of sight beyond the prow. “Take a look around the corner, Jack. There’s an empty berth, and in front of it a ramp leading down to where we think the artificial harbor must have abutted this part of the plateau, the exit now completely sealed in.” Jack followed him through and stared at the open space, at the wooden formers that looked as if they had been hastily cast aside. He shook his head, astonished. “One pharaoh goes in dead, another one comes out alive.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just another hypothesis. A best-fit scenario. We know that Menkaure ca
me here dead, probably already embalmed, ready for the rituals of the mortuary temple and then interment in his sarcophagus in the pyramid. What we don’t know yet for sure is how this place figured in Akhenaten’s journey over a thousand years later. Nobody has ever conclusively identified his tomb or his mummy. One possibility is that he may be buried here, and that was what this underground construction was really all about, but my instinct says no. I see this, whatever he built here under the plateau, his City of Light, as something that he saw through to completion and then sealed up before departing.”
“Maybe he mocked it up for any suspicious observers as if he were constructing a funerary complex, a pretty normal thing for a pharaoh to do, when in reality he was planning to do a runner,” Costas suggested. “Maybe that was his final opt out. Come up here as if dead, in a funerary barge like the pharaohs of old, but instead of going to the afterlife he leaves very much alive on a vessel equipped for a long sea voyage.”
“It’s possible. The ship that’s still here was abandoned in the middle of refitting, as if it too had been intended for departure but there was no time to make both vessels ready. Akhenaten must have known his life was in danger. A man like the caliph Al-Hakim, who had done beneficent things, had perhaps endowed some kind of library or seminary at this spot, but had made mortal enemies in the old priesthood for his desecration of their temples and banning of their rituals. Maybe departure was his only option once he had achieved his ambitions and seen the Israelites safely resettled in Canaan.”
“Have you voiced this idea to Maurice?”
Pyramid: A Novel Page 29
