“What’s your take on the orientation of that open tunnel?”
“It’s heading toward Cairo. It almost certainly corresponds to that line on the plan leading to Fustat. And it’s clearly above water level, a dry channel. It could be our ticket out.”
“If it’s not blocked by rockfalls.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“I need some time in here, Costas. We need to get as much as we can on video.”
“Thirty minutes, maximum. I can actually feel the air being sucked up that shaft by the fires on the pyramid. If we stay longer than that, we won’t have the energy to get far enough down that tunnel to get out, and then we end up in a terminal countdown.”
Little Joey chirped and sighed, almost an electronic moan, and the eye peered dolefully at Costas. “I know,” he said, stroking its neck. “Good boy. Very good boy.” He pressed something beneath the carapace, and Little Joey jumped slightly, and then settled down and purred. “I can’t give him a biscuit, but I can give him an electronic buzz. It means he’ll go to sleep happy. He might be holding the fort here for some time.”
Jack slithered around until his feet were hanging over the edge, and slowly lowered himself to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Thirty minutes. Keep your camera rolling.”
“Roger that.”
—
As Jack hit the floor he felt for his head camera, making sure it was at the right angle to catch everything he saw. He knew what he wanted to look at. It was what had set his pulse racing when he had heard Jeremy read Howard Carter’s account of what Corporal Jones had seen, and then a few minutes ago when he had looked at the video image relayed from Little Joey. It was what had been sitting in Hiebermeyer’s desk for all those years since he had found it in the excavation beside the plateau, the hieroglyphs that hinted at the truth behind Akhenaten’s City of Light. Jack glanced around the chamber. Akhenaten’s treasure was not to be another Tutankhamun’s tomb, not another trove of gold and jewels and precious artifacts. It was the greatest treasure of all. It was a treasure in words.
Costas dropped behind him and they slowly proceeded along the wall. At intervals of about five meters the rock had been carved into alcoves like the burial niches he had seen in Jerusalem with Rebecca, only here they were not designed for bodies. Each niche was filled with dozens of tall pottery jars, more than a meter high, almost all of them lidded and sealed with a mass of black resinous material. Those that were not lidded had been smashed open, their contents strewn over the floor, visible in front of three of the twelve alcoves that Jack had counted around the chamber. He squatted in front of the first and picked up a handful of material from among the pottery sherds, fragments of papyrus that crumbled to dust as he touched them. Costas thrust his hand deep into the base of one of the smashed jars still remaining in the alcove and came up with a handful of the same material. “My best guess?” he said, letting it drop between his fingers. “Corporal Jones, looking for food. He gave up at the third alcove once he realized that the contents were inedible.”
“What was inside,” Jack murmured, staring at the shreds in his hands, “was papyrus scrolls. This place is a library.” He got up, and did some swift arithmetic. “If there are twelve alcoves containing thirty jars each, and each jar contains four or five scrolls, that’s the best part of two thousand scrolls. That’s way more than you’d expect for a collection of religious tracts and Books of the Dead.”
“Check out the pots,” Costas said. “They’ve all got symbols on them painted in black. The pots in each alcove have the same principal symbol, but then above that, each pot has a unique additional symbol. From my memory of Lanowski’s attempt to teach me hieroglyphics, those upper symbols are numbers. So this must be some kind of cataloguing system.”
Jack brushed the dust from the symbols on one pot and then moved to the next alcove and did the same. “You’re right. Each alcove has an individual hieroglyph: a sheaf of corn in the first, a seated bird in this one, a half-moon in the next one along. I think they’re signifiers like our letters of the alphabet, part of the cataloguing system.”
“Sheaf of corn means religion, squatting bird means science, half-moon means medicine?” Costas said. “Something like that?”
Jack nodded, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were confronting. “Imagine what those could contain.”
“You know we can’t risk opening them, Jack. We have nowhere to take them, and they might just crumble to dust on contact with the air. Our job now is to see to it that this place remains secret until we can get back here with the biggest manuscript conservation team that Maria and Jeremy have ever assembled. Meanwhile our clock is ticking. I’m going to check out that dais in the center.”
Jack turned back to the pots and put his hand on one of them, struggling to contain his emotions. Costas was right, of course. It would be grossly irresponsible to tamper with them now. If there were huge secrets of science and medicine, the cures to diseases, then they could be lost in an instant; far better to leave them here in the hope that a return would be possible. But it went against his grain as an archaeologist not to at least see some writing, to record it with their cameras. Not to do so, to leave empty-handed, would be to leave something unsatisfied in his soul, a need for something tangible to make all the effort seem worthwhile.
Costas’ voice came from the dais. “It looks as if you might have been wrong about Akhenaten leaving here alive. Looks like we might just have solved the mystery of his burial place.”
Jack turned and mounted the steps, gasping in astonishment at the sight in front of him. In the middle of the chamber with the ridges in the floor radiating from it stood a huge sarcophagus in gold, larger even than the outer sarcophagus that had surrounded the mummy of Tutankhamun. The head was that of a man with a slightly upturned nose and almond eyes, reminiscent of Tutankhamun, his braided beard and headdress decorated with strips of faience and his eyes surrounded with inlays of niello to represent the lines of kohl. It was a face unfamiliar and yet familiar, the father of the pharaoh who had accidentally become the most famous in history and yet whose achievements were puny by comparison, cut off by death before he had even reached manhood. Jack knew who it was even before he had gazed down over the figure’s torso, over the crossed arms carrying the jewel-studded staff and ankh symbol, to the circular representation of the Aten with radiating arms that clinched the identity beyond any doubt. Akhenaten.
Costas was peering closely at the edge of the sarcophagus near the feet. “Fascinating,” he said. “The lid was originally sealed over with sheet gold, but then someone’s been around and scored it, cutting through to the crack between the sarcophagus and the lid. It’s been pushed slightly off center.”
Jack knelt down beside him, staring. “Corporal Jones again?”
“Maybe when he got hungry,” Costa suggested. “Before he found those other mummies.”
Jack heaved on the lid, suddenly feeling woozy as he did so, his heart pounding and his chest tight. He knew they were more than halfway through Costas’ predicted countdown before the oxygen level became critical. He pushed again, creating a crack just large enough for him to aim his beam inside. He panned it around, and then looked again. “I think Jones would have been disappointed. There’s nothing inside.”
“Ancient tomb robbers?”
Jack shook his head. “There’s no evidence I can see for robbers ever having gotten inside this chamber. When it was sealed up, that was it for over two thousand years. Ancient robbers would always leave the worthless debris behind, the mummy wrapping and bones, and they’d never have left without hacking off those parts of the sarcophagus that look like solid gold—the hand, the ears, the beard. No, this was empty from the outset.”
“Well, if Akhenaten could pull the wool over the Egyptians’ eyes about the real cause of the loss of an entire chariot army in the Red Sea, then I guess he could fake his own death.”
Jack stared at the face on the sarcoph
agus. It was Akhenaten as nobody had seen him before: not the elongated, misshapen pharaoh with the masklike visage, exaggerating his otherness, but instead Akhenaten the man, a fitting consort to the Nefertiti whose face had transfixed Jack a week before in the Cairo Museum. This was Akhenaten not as the world would know him but as he wished to be seen in the place of his greatest legacy, presiding not as a pharaoh but as a man over a treasure far greater than any of the riches that filled the tombs of his ancestors.
“Jack, take a look at what I’ve just found. These definitely aren’t ancient.”
Costas had followed one of the ridges to the edge of the chamber between the alcoves filled with jars, and was squatting down. Jack walked over and joined him. On a ledge in front of the wall were two tarnished medals, their ribbons faded and dirty but laid out as if they had been carefully arranged. Jack recognized them immediately as Victorian campaign medals. One was silver, showing the Sphinx with the word Egypt above and the date 1882 below, its ribbon made up of three blue and two white stripes. The other was a five-pointed bronze star with the Sphinx and the three pyramids in the center, also inscribed Egypt and 1882 but with the year in Arabic in the Muslim calendar at the foot and surmounted by a star and crescent. Jack carefully picked up the silver medal, wiped the rim, and inspected it closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “It’s our friend 3453 Corporal R. Jones, Royal Engineers. We meet at last.”
Costas picked up the star. “How did he get these if he’d basically deserted?”
“Look at the date, 1882,” Jack replied. “After Jeremy found that account in Howard Carter’s diary, he looked up Jones’ service record in the National Archives. It lists him as missing in action after the Battle of Kirkeban in February 1885, presumed killed. But it also shows that he’d first arrived in Egypt from India in 1882 as part of the expeditionary force sent to support the Khedive against an army uprising, but that soon became embroiled in the war against the Mahdi. So Jones had already had these two medals, the Egypt Medal and the Khedive’s Star.”
Costas examined the star, fingering the crescent on the clasp. “Ironic that British soldiers for years to come would have worn the symbol of Islam and the caliphate on their chests, after having fought a war that many would have seen as a latter-day crusade against the jihad.”
Jack put the Egypt Medal back, carefully laying the ribbon as he had found it. “That’s history for you. Never quite what it seems. Officially the British were fighting for the Khedive of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, the largest Islamic state the world has ever seen. And some among the officers, particularly those who had spent years in the Arab world, were sympathetic to aspects of Islam. Gordon and the Mahdi would have been an interesting meeting of minds, philosophically not that far apart.”
“Well, it’s pretty clear where Jones was coming from,” Costas said, pointing to the wall just to the right of the shelf with the medals. “Take a look at that.”
Jack shifted around and stared. The lower part of the wall was covered in an inscription, written in the neat, precise hand taught to all Victorian schoolchildren, with the subject matter that was often their sole source of simile and metaphor. Jack slowly read it out loud: “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’ ”
“ ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,’ ” Costas murmured. “The Twenty-third Psalm. He must have been awestruck by the appearance of the pharaoh, by the crossed rod and staff on the sarcophagus. Those medals with their images of the sphinx and the pyramids must have seemed like offerings to him, meant for this place.”
Jack took a few steps farther toward the open tunnel heading in the direction of Cairo, stepping over fragments of plaster that Jones must have dug out of the wall over the days it probably took him to open it up. Beneath the plaster he saw something else, a skeletal form. He stared at it and then gestured to Costas. “I think we might just have solved another mystery.”
Costas came over and then stopped abruptly. “I see bones. Don’t tell me. Not Jones’ final mummy feast.”
Jack shook his head. “This is the skeleton of someone who has lain down to die, or been placed in this position. Look at what he’s holding. It’s a little Arab dagger, beautifully engraved on the blade and embellished with gold. I think this is where Jones got his souvenir, that ring.”
“Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,” Costas murmured. “We knew he’d be in here somewhere. Do you think he was trying to escape too? Do you think Jones found his body, and then laid him out like this?”
Jack stared at the skeleton. “The medieval accounts suggest that he went alone at night into the desert on many occasions before disappearing for good, clearly faking his own death. I think after finding that entrance we passed in the tunnel, the partly collapsed ventilation shaft, and exploring this place, he eventually found the light shaft we came through and got into this chamber. Maybe seeing the sarcophagus did it for him, and he decided next time to come in here for good, never to go back.”
Costas sifted the dust on top of the bones. “Maybe he had delusions of grandeur. He could have been the one who tried to open the sarcophagus, not Jones. Look at the way he’s lying, with his arms crossed like that. Maybe he wanted to lie down inside the sarcophagus, to be Akhenaten.”
“Being a caliph was not that much different from being a pharaoh,” Jack murmured. “And Akhenaten isn’t the only ruler in history to want to get away from it all.”
Costas peered down where he had been sifting. “Look at this, Jack. He’s got something in his hands. It’s a small wooden frame containing a piece of papyrus, with text in hieroglyphs.”
Jack knelt down and peered at it, feeling a sudden rush of satisfaction. He had found his piece of text. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “But it must have some special significance to have been framed like that. Let’s make sure we both have detailed images.”
Costas followed after him, leaned over the hieroglyphs, and panned his camera slowly over the papyrus. “Okay,” he said. “That’s done.”
Jack gestured at the open tunnel in front of them. “Our time is nearly up.”
Costas nodded. “There’s one thing left to do. Little Joey.”
“You can’t take him with us.”
“I know. I’ve been dreading this. But I can switch him off. I can’t have him going mad in here like Jones.”
He made his way back to the shaft, and Jack turned to the nearest alcove and put his hand on one of the sealed jars. Costas came back and stood beside him. “Think of yourself as a caretaker of knowledge, Jack, just like those priests of Akhenaten who sealed this place up after he’d left. They were protecting it against Akhenaten’s enemies of the old religion who might have destroyed it, and now we’re protecting it against the modern-day forces of darkness. Akhenaten must have ordered this place to be sealed up in the hope that it would be discovered and revealed some time in the distant future, when the time was right. He left clues in those plaques that have taken all our combined intelligence and even a little bit of genius to work out. It’s almost as if he anticipated a time like ours when exploration like this would be possible, when people would be driven to seek the truth about the past. But the time’s not yet right, Jack. Akhenaten would not have wanted his legacy to be consumed by the fires that are raging above. Maybe the time will come in our lifetimes, or maybe this will be our legacy to pass on to Rebecca and her generation. But right now we’ve got the present to deal with. There’s a girl in Cairo who needs to be rescued, and a lot of people depending on us. It’s time to go.”
Jack pushed off from the jar, took one last look around, and put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. “Roger that. We move.”
—
Almost half an hour later Costas stopped jogging and bent down, his hand on his knees, panting hard. “We must be getting close to an exit, Jack,” he said, his face streaming with sweat. “It’s
getting warmer. And I can smell it.”
Jack stopped beside him, wiping the sweat off his own forehead, and breathed deeply. He realized that he felt stronger, revitalized. Costas was right: They must be close to a source of fresh air. And the smell was unmistakable, a cloying tang of burning, a sharp reminder of what lay in store for them outside. They must be at least three kilometers beyond the Giza plateau by now, but the fire on the pyramids would send heat and the reek of burning fuel far over the desert, a smell that by now would be commingling with the reek and ash of fire from Cairo itself.
They began jogging again, and after a few minutes came to a rockfall that completely blocked the tunnel ahead. Costas crawled up the slope, pulling aside blocks of stone, working feverishly until he reached the top. A cascade of sand came down, and a new kind of light appeared, not the suffused red glow from the tunnel but a flickering darker red that bathed Costas’ face in a luminous glow. He disappeared upward and then reappeared, sliding down the sand until he was back beside Jack.
“Okay. We ditch our E-suits here. Keep your hydration pack, and give me your camera microchip. We’re in the desert maybe a kilometer away from the edge of the southern suburbs, and I can see a road to the west with abandoned vehicles. We might get lucky and find something still with gas.”
Jack unzipped the front of his E-suit, ducked his head and shoulders through, and quickly pulled the rest off. He straightened his jacket and trousers and then removed his headstrap and dismembered the camera. He watched as Costas took out one of the satellite beacons, activated it, and then pointed up. “We’ll have to block this entrance.”
“No problem. A shove of one rock up above and the whole thing will come tumbling down, followed by about ten tons of sand. Nobody walking by would ever guess.”
Pyramid: A Novel Page 31
