Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

“He says that for a man who founded a new religion, created a new capital city, and seems to have engineered the destruction of his entire chariot army to let the Israelites escape, anything is possible. Akhenaten was ancient Egypt’s wild card.”

  “Just as long as he took Nefertiti with him too.”

  Jack looked at the ship again, making sure his camera took in as much as it could of the astonishing sights around him. It was as if they had walked into an ancient Egyptian shipyard while the workers were out on a lunch break. He turned back to Costas. “Okay. Definitely worth it. Where do we go from here?”

  Costas nodded back the way they had come. “The passageway from the wharf carried on beyond the point where I broke through into these chambers. There might once have been entrances from these sheds into a complex under the plateau, but if so they’ve been sealed up. We could spend hours sounding out the plaster on the walls and not find them. Every entrance seems to have been sealed up, as if this whole place had been mothballed. That might fit in with your theory.”

  Jack followed Costas back through the ship chambers and clambered up the jumble of fallen masonry where they had entered. He heaved Costas up on his shoulders and then strained as he took Costas’ outstretched arm and hauled himself into the passageway. He suddenly felt exhausted and woozy, as if he had experienced a rapid loss of blood pressure, and he leaned against the wall of the passageway and took a drink from his hydration pack. He realized that he had not drunk anything since they had passed beyond Cairo, and he made a mental note to keep hydrated.

  He pushed off and followed, his unsteadiness having passed. Ahead beyond the western limit of the boat chambers he could see Costas’ beam waver, and then stop. As he neared he could see that the passageway had ended, carrying on only as an aperture at head level about half a meter high and a meter wide that extended into the darkness as far as their beams could penetrate. He remembered three months before, staring down a similar slit from under the pyramid, looking in exactly the opposite direction to their position now. Somewhere between the two was the space that had been lit up so brilliantly by the light that had come down through the pyramid.

  He refused to think that that was the end of the road, that what they had seen was no more than a reflection from further tunnels and ventilation shafts. What they had found already had been extraordinary, but there had to be more, a central hub to the radiating passageways indicated on the plaque, something set farther back under the plateau directly ahead of them now.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Costas said.

  “I’m thinking that if there’s another chamber ahead, it must have been accessible from this tunnel if it was used to bring in building materials and workers. But maybe once the work was completed, this tunnel was shut off except for this aperture, with the entrance to the chamber then becoming the hypothetical processional way that we think might be represented by that other arm of the Aten heading toward Fustat.”

  “You mean our hypothetical egress tunnel.” Costas crouched down at the corner of the tunnel and peered closely at the gaps where the slabs of granite abutted one another. “You’re right, Jack. Under the veneer I can see the edges of blocks of masonry. The Egyptians were past masters at this, weren’t they? Creating burial chambers and then devising ingenious ways of blocking them off to deter tomb robbers. Look at all those obstructions that Colonel Vyse had to blow his way through to reach the sarcophagus in the Pyramid of Menkaure. Somebody was doing the same kind of thing here.”

  “Only I don’t think what lies beyond here was a burial chamber.”

  “Maybe not. But I have a horrible feeling that there’s one right here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Beside the floor, Jack. Look down to where I am. There’s a really bad smell coming from it.”

  Jack followed Costas’ gaze and knelt in front of an irregular hole that looked as if it had been punched through a plastered space between two slabs of granite. He saw something, reached in, gingerly pulled it out, and held it under his beam. It was a human hand, a very old human hand, mummified and nearly skeletal. He held it out to Costas. “Ever wanted to shake hands with a mummy?”

  “I knew it. We weren’t going to go underground in Egypt without finding mummies. No way.”

  “I think we might just have found Corporal Jones’ larder.” Jack carefully replaced the hand, took a deep breath, and poked his head partway into the hole. He panned his beam around and revealed a carved-out annex the size of a small bedroom. It was a charnel house, filled with a mass of disarticulated mummies and mummy parts, bedded down in a great mass of feathery material that looked like pieces of mummy wrapping and shredded human skin. He looked for anything diagnostic, and then saw a fragment of wooden coffin casing, its edges gnawed away but part of the painting and hieroglyphs on the surface just visible. He pulled his head out and sat back against the wall of the tunnel, gasping for breath, his eyes smarting from the dust.

  “Well?” Costas said. “Is there a passageway?”

  Jack shook his head, and coughed. “What we’ve got in there,” he said, “is a giant rat’s nest.”

  “Not caused by Corporal Jones after all?”

  Jack nodded, coughing again. “Him too. I’m sure of it. I think he took his cue from the rats. They must have gnawed out a small entrance from this passage, and Jones in his desperate hunt for food must have seen it and enlarged it. There’s more damage in there than rats could cause, and more bits missing. Originally that chamber was stuffed full of intact mummies, but they’re not from the time of Akhenaten. The one fragment of decorated coffin I saw was definitely Old Kingdom, almost certainly from the time of Menkaure. What I think we’ve got here is a secondary burial, mummies probably of viziers and minor officials involved in the construction of the pyramid, cleared out of their tombs by Akhenaten’s workmen to make way for something bigger. It makes sense that the original tombs should have been under the plateau in front of the pyramid. If they were removed and maybe extended to make a larger chamber, then that’s a promising sign.”

  “If we could get through.” Costas eased himself up, looking back distastefully at the hole where the withered fingernails of the hand were poking out. Jack followed suit, and they both peered down the aperture at the end of the tunnel.

  “It could be done,” Jack said after a moment. “Al-Hakim and Jones must have crawled down there, as we haven’t seen any way ahead other than this.”

  “I know what would have drawn them on,” Costas said. “I think this was a light shaft, like the one under the pyramid. Even at night if there was a moon, they would have seen some light ahead, enough to tempt them to try their luck at getting through. After all, by this stage if they were trapped down here, they wouldn’t have had anything to lose.” He glanced back again at the hand. “Other than Jones, leaving his mummy larder behind.”

  “Do we risk it, or double-check for entrances elsewhere?”

  “We could do a recce.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A chirping sound came from the bulge in the front of Costas’ boiler suit, and then it moved. Jack jumped back, startled, but then he relaxed slightly, shaking his head. “You brought along a little friend, didn’t you?” Costas unzipped the top of his boiler suit and a little mechanical eye on a stalk peered out, followed by two miniature robotic hands that slowly reached up and grasped the edges of the suit. “I couldn’t leave Little Joey behind, could I?” Costas said, gently stroking the neck behind the eye. “Not after Big Joey had all the fun at the wreck site.”

  “I worry about you sometimes. Aysha thinks you’d be a great dad to living, sentient human beings.”

  Little Joey seemed to bristle, and cocked his eye at Jack. “Careful what you say,” Costas said. “He’s very sensitive.” He reached in, took the robot out, and placed it on the ledge at the beginning of the aperture. Then he pulled out a radio control unit and strap-on virtual goggles. “He’s programmed to be reactive to his envi
ronment. Because of what we tend to do, I’ve made him fully sensitized to tunnels and the kind of archaeological features we’ve encountered in the past. He’s like a robotic tomb raider. I’ll send him down that tunnel now and he’ll stop and report back anything unusual.”

  “How does he do that?”

  “He’ll tell us. You’ll see.” Costas reached under the tail of the robot and activated a switch. Like its larger counterpart, Little Joey was shaped like a scorpion, with four legs on either side, the single eye on its stalk and two flexible arms, only it was no bigger than a large rat. Costas lifted it and aimed it down the tunnel. But it leapt up, assumed its original sideways position, and looked back at Costas. Then it leapt around again and aimed itself down the tunnel. “He’s very independent,” Costas said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t like to be shown what to do. Always has to try it himself first.”

  “Just like children,” Jack said thoughtfully. “That’s what you’d discover if you had them. Like a certain teenager we know.”

  Little Joey suddenly scurried off down the aperture, his lights showing as pinpricks in the darkness, and came to a halt perhaps ten meters ahead.

  “Dead end?” Jack asked.

  Costas hunched over the radio. “It means he’s seen something, but we won’t know until I’ve booted the system up and he can react. Once that’s done I’ll be able to put on the goggles and see what he sees. It’ll take a few minutes.” Costas stood back, took a deep breath, and wiped the back of his hand over his face, blinking hard.

  “You okay?” Jack said.

  “Beginning to feel the effect. Nothing serious, yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some basic science, Jack. Those extremists at the pyramid were spraying it with some kind of fuel, right? We saw those tanker trucks on the CNN report. It must have been a pretty well-planned operation.”

  “They’ve been threatening it for years. Nothing about this coup is spur of the moment. They’re taking up where the Mahdi left off in 1885.”

  “Well, spraying fuel and igniting it is how you get a stone building to look as if it’s burning. The biblical burning bush is thought to have been based on something similar in appearance, where in some conditions the gas exuding from certain desert species could be ignited to give the appearance of a bush wreathed in flame but not actually burning. Some of that fuel is likely to have entered the pyramid through the shafts that were used to bring light to this underground complex. The fuel will be burnt out long before it reaches us, but that’s not the problem. The problem is what I experienced firsthand during that terrorist strike on my destroyer in the Gulf, when I was trapped by fire belowdecks in the engine room before I managed to escape and help with the rescue.”

  “Fire consumes oxygen,” Jack murmured. “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “You remember the low oxygen readout you noticed after we surfaced? Ever since then, when I’ve exerted myself I’ve felt a little lightheaded. I put it down to the residual effect of carbon dioxide buildup during my final minutes on the rebreather, but this is a better explanation.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s reassuring. I felt it a few minutes ago. I nearly blacked out.”

  “Reassuring, but not. They’ll be jetting fuel continuously at the pyramid to maintain the spectacle, and that means more fuel getting down those shafts. With the outer surface of the pyramid wreathed in fire, the only way the burning fuel inside can feed its flames is by sucking up the oxygen from inside the pyramid, from the shaft, from the burial chamber, from the well we went down three months ago, and ultimately from every connected part of this underground complex. Slowly but surely, we’re being starved of oxygen.”

  “How long, do you think?”

  “Two or three hours, probably. Maybe less.”

  “Well, we weren’t planning on lingering. If we’re in here much longer than that, we’ll never make our rendezvous with the felucca before dawn.”

  “At least it means if we do get stuck down here, we won’t be around long enough to have to eat mummies.” Jack gave Costas a wan look. “I for one do not intend to suffocate because of some deranged extremist.”

  “Amen to that. Let’s just hope Little Joey can save the day.”

  They were interrupted by a chirping sound from down the aperture. Jack angled his headlamp beam and peered down. The robot was shaking and waving its arms as the eye looked back at them and then at the wall in front. “Something seems to be wrong,” he said. “Looks like a malfunction.”

  Costas stared incredulously at Jack. “Malfunction? Little Joey? No way. He’s just excited. It means he really has found something. It shows that the system is coming online.” He picked up the mask, tried it on, and then removed it. “About a minute more, and then I can actually be Little Joey, real time. Lanowski calls it a mind-meld.”

  Jack continued staring at the chirping and chattering apparition that was caught in his beam. “Is he really agitated? I mean, you must have programmed this.”

  “It’s like a smoke alarm. He’s programmed to respond if he finds what I’ve asked him to look for. But he really has been acting like a wilful teenager recently. You think you’ve got problems with Rebecca. I left Lanowski alone with him in the engineering lab for half an hour a few weeks ago, and he hasn’t been the same since.”

  “It’s stopped,” Jack said.

  Costas put on the mask. “Eureka,” he murmured, manipulating the controls. “I’m looking through his eye, Jack. The shaft goes off to the right, and there it is, a very suffused red glow.”

  Jack’s heart began to pound with excitement. “Can you get up to it?”

  “I’m getting there now. About a meter to go. Okay. Looking out over a big room, circular, maybe twenty meters across. Recesses around the edge filled with jars. Holy cow. Holy cow.”

  Jack could barely contain himself. He wanted to be there, to be where Costas was. Jars like that were exactly what Jones had described to Howard Carter. “What is it? What can you see?”

  Costas seemed to be transfixed, his hand motionless on the control lever and his mouth wide open. He slowly let go of the control and took off the mask, his eyes staring into space, and then turned to Jack. “You remember those first ever pictures of King Tut’s tomb? You’re not going to believe what I’ve just seen.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Jack pushed ahead with his feet through the shaft, using his elbows and hands to pull himself along. He inched toward the halogen beam from Little Joey some five meters away where the shaft angled sharply to the right. The image he had seen from the robot’s camera confirmed beyond a doubt what lay around the corner, yet Jack refused to register it until he saw it with his own eyes.

  He could hear Costas grunting and cursing where he had climbed in behind from the tunnel, his frame barely fitting into the shaft. They knew that they must be following in the path of Corporal Jones, and almost certainly the caliph Al-Hakim before that, taking the only passage left open when the ship sheds and the entrance tunnel had been blocked up in antiquity. They were crawling along a shaft that was part of the extraordinary network cut through the rock to reflect sunlight into the underground complex.

  Jack paused, his breathing fast and shallow, remembering that the oxygen level would by now be seriously depleted and that he was not in the first stages of a panic attack. The turn in the shaft was only a few meters ahead. He watched as Little Joey used a miniature air jet to blow dust from a black basalt slab angled at forty-five degrees in the corner of the shaft. The basalt was polished to a glassy sheen and was clearly intended as a mirror.

  Jack shut his eyes until the dust settled and then he saw it, the same extraordinary image they had seen through Little Joey’s eye a few minutes before, a glow of red as if he were looking through a slit into a furnace. His heart began to pound with excitement. He had dreamed of this for months, and now, incredibly, it was just within his reach, something that had seemed virtually impossible only a few days before. />
  Moments later he was around the corner pulling himself to the edge of the aperture overlooking the chamber. Little Joey clattered ahead and perched on the rim, chirping and shaking. The shaft had widened enough to allow Costas to heave himself alongside, his E-suit smeared with grime. As they panned their lights ahead, an astonishing scene met their eyes. They were on the edge of a huge circular space, perhaps twenty meters across and eight meters high where it rose to an apex. On the floor below the apex was an elevated dais capped by a rectangular altar or sarcophagus, its top above their line of vision. From the dais radiating outward on the floor were raised ridges terminating in carved hands, the unmistakable sign of the Aten, the sun symbol of Akhenaten. One of the arms pointed directly to the shaft they had come through and another to a second shaft visible to the left, coming from the direction of the pyramid. Costas gestured at it, his voice hushed.

  “That shaft must be the one we were looking through three months ago from beneath the pyramid. You can see the light from the fire shining through, and reflecting off basalt mirrors around the walls. In daylight the reflection back would be dazzling, exactly as we saw it.”

  “The light of the Aten, concentrated on this one spot,” Jack said. “It’s an incredible feat of precision, ancient Egyptian engineering at its best. Maurice would love it.”

  Costas pointed to the opposite wall of the chamber. “That’s what we want to see, Jack. One of the arms, the longest one, is pointing to an open tunnel. Another one’s pointing to the wall just to the right of us that must lead to the ship sheds. You can see an area of plaster, clearly different from the polished rock veneer, and I bet that’s where the entrance remains sealed up. The entrance to the open tunnel looks as if it was once plastered over as well, and was broken into relatively recently.”

  “Corporal Jones?” Jack suggested.

  “He was a sapper, right? He would have had an eye for constructional detail. He would have been looking for a way out, just as we are. That is, when he wasn’t living in a twilight world of his own, crawling around here like the undead looking for tasty snacks. This place would have been pretty eerie at night with only moonlight reflecting through, enough to unhinge someone already halfway there and weak with hunger. It’s spooky enough in this light.”