by Chris Turner
“Then?”
“It’ll confirm the most plausible theory yet—tunnels leading off in five directions from the main stem where we found Hexsase.”
“Why only five when we’ve got a six-sided pyramid?” mused Chesla, more to herself than anybody.
“Because we’ve got an eccentric pharaoh?” Groedig suggested.
Hillen shrugged. “All I know is that the slightest variation in my estimates will produce contradictory anomalies in the analysis software. Our computerized survey will be compromised. It means we find no catacombs. The parameters have to be set perfectly, otherwise we’ll send beams down and the reflections we get back will be too sketchy to make any proper analysis.”
Chesla pretended to understand the technical particulars. “Yeah, I know, dear, but we’re all bloody counting on you!”
Langley frowned in displeasure. The woman was far too domineering. He wanted to shout, “yes, we all bloody know that, Ms. Bloody Chesla, you cow”, but he desisted, knowing that would be the end of his position on the site. Langley was seized with an uncontrollable tingle up his spine, unable to maintain eye contact with the director. It had happened a lot lately and he was getting used to it but worried. He frowned at the apparatus before him. The main computer was like an octopus—black cables trailing in the sand like tentacles extending from its back ports. A thick cable connected Yisella’s laptop. The ‘octopus’ had its far reach. Groedig had set four equally-spaced black plates, a foot in width, around the perimeter of the site about 20M apart. Thick insulated wires led back to the main computer.
Groedig was fiddling with the devices and busying himself, always checking some pocket doodad with a sensor and an LED—then Yisella’s laptop gave a ding. He only half-listened to what Chesla was saying. Somewhere Yisella’s Toshiba was connected to the main computer, an I-7 or something, that would take the readings and perform extensive calculations. Yisella, lovely, all 5’7”, slender, shapely, and chestnut-haired, was responsible for the smooth operation of the software, and the coding of a few algorithms to suit the needs of the data.
Langley had never been much of a geek—in fact, he hated those techno-dweebs back at college with their technobabble, calculators in the pocket, online chess games, that kind of thing. Somewhere, he found it all secretly fascinating, how electronics and computers could do so much in the field of archaeology. Not that he would admit to such a fascination, for he was no techno-lover. It was all coming and going too fast for his personal taste.
He peered over his shoulder. On Yisella’s flat screen he saw a regularly spaced grid with green lines. An XYZ axis rotated with several mountainous figures shaped like globs of liquid colour—evidently the last, most-recent mapping of six-sided Hexsase. A smaller window popped up, depicting a hypothetical cross-section through the pyramid’s epicentre. It was cut about 30 degrees east of north. Not surprisingly, the colour plot lacked any definite detail. The radio waves blasting out of the small radar-dish came back too weak to give any definite, accurate information. The new rade-sounding technique, a recent technology from Germany, featured a stone-penetrating algorithm that had helped the archaeologists discover the first underground stairwell leading to Hexsase’s tombs. But its range and accuracy was limited. No hidden chambers or passageways had been yet detected inside the pyramid.
Yisella studied another small window with some text:
CMapSet *offset = BmappingTerrain.GetProfileExt(&world,&coordmap);
Langley rubbed his eyes. There were additional lines writ underneath, equally incomprehensible to him, all of which caused him to shudder.
“I don’t know how you can understand all this gobbledegook.”
“That makes two of us,” Hillen replied.
Langley took the opportunity to swing his hand over her shoulder, while expertly bending down and putting his mouth close to her ear. “Say hon, you’ve never told me how your little rig manages to make all those pretty pictures.”
Hillen swung around calmly and removed his probing arm. “This section all has to be mapped in the next few hours, MacGyver. How do you think we’re going to do that while you’re giving me a backrub?”
“True.” Langley jerked his hand back in disappointment. “I get the drift. You’re not a morning person. So, wrong time on my part to conduct social intercourse.”
“Bad choice of words.” Yisella squinted her dark eyes in an all-too-seductive manner. “But I like you, Langley. You’re persistent, but you do catch on quickly.”
The Aussie drew back with a grimace. Well, there was certainly nothing to be done while Yisella was playing hard to get.
While the lengthy process of installing and prepping the hardware was in full swing, he decided to do some poking around in the great pit where at least some useful task presented itself. Shovel, trowel and spade in hand, he loped away, wondering about the enigma of Yisella Hillen. Perhaps he would one day discover her charms and find out what made this woman tick.
* * *
From a nearby open-faced tent, Chesla considered the members of her team. Yisella, native originally to the nature-rich town of Stowe, Vermont, received first class honours from her graduating class. She was all right; always doing her job, not mixing business with pleasure, which was smart on her part—just a bright, young 28 year-old woman fresh from Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Well, as far as she knew anyway. Matt Groedig—here was a different sort. Of no great stature, he was a young man of thirty-ish, wearing spectacles a little bit too small for the size of his eyes. He sported a dark, rounded goatee—ugly in her opinion—a Winnipeg born Canadian who in his own way was alright, a bit gloomy in comparison to the other team members, perhaps even bordering on the saturnine. Definitely one who needed to loosen up a bit and growl a little less often.
Carl Langley she didn’t care for much. A tall, lean and handsome man in a natural kind of way with his straight brushed-back auburn hair, but he was just too smug for her tastes. Actually smug was the wrong word. A casual indifference to life, mixed with a bohemian sardonicism permeated his acts and manner. It was the undertone that she found particularly irritating.
She recalled the circumstance behind his hiring. With the recent discovery of the underground catacombs, the archaeologists were strapped for additional skilled labour. Aid in surveying the tombs and the underground excavations was much needed and Langley’s name had come up in a short list sent by Aksar Behin, the treasury liaison at the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). It seemed that Langley had been in the right place at the right time. Of all the final applicants, six of them, he had replied first and had passed with ease through the interviews and proved sufficiently qualified for the job. His extensive experience on prehistoric rock-art excavations in north-western Australia in the Kimberley region had been a bonus. He had even agreed to contract for considerably less than what other, last-minute archaeologists would have charged—perhaps this was what interested the international venture crew the most.
Chesla frowned. Four new people, hired so quickly: an Egyptian, Abul Haerkar; a Portuguese, Pablo Hizellio; a Pole, Emanuel Postrok, and the Australian, Carl Langley. Whether Langley’s intentions had been altruistic in a pursuit for the pure love of archaeology was up for conjecture—or had he taken it just on a sudden whim to get out of Australia and/or add an eye-catcher on a resume. One thing Chesla was sure about: the mixture of archaeology and funding was a complex and politically-embroiled soup. Langley being hired so quickly was nothing short of an amazing, timely occurrence—one that she would ponder over for months. Nevertheless, this did not discount in any way her suspicion that perhaps it had been a mistake to hire the Australian on this dig…
It was far too late to go through another hiring process. A tight deadline was upon them. Less than three months of precious funding remained—and three months was surely an inadequate time to accomplish the major excavations required to tap Denibus Ar’s secrets.
More immediately was a probl
em of the thin, bony-eyed Bucillo, who now danced around her like a dervish, trying to slow her down with his fussy folios and checklists. She was trying to do a job, not babysit. Alas, this was the price to pay for the position of ‘director’. Bucillo, recommended to her from sources high up, was here to stay. A certain Craig Belanger had fast-tracked his name to the top of the list, undersecretary to the Dean at London University, to whom she was indebted in terms of important contracts.
Bucillo’s claim to fame was his love of Old Kingdom lore, particularly the Sphinx and the pyramid of Cheops and the pharaoh’s immediate descendants. How anyone could be appointed as ‘Assistant Chief’ Archaeologist who had never before even visited some of the out-of-the-way, but must-see ruins was beyond her—like the temples of Abydos and Dendera with their exquisite, high-lotused columns, eerie staircases and unique pictorial art. Ah, Abydos, the once marvellous court whose lingering enchantment looked upon the Old Kingdom necropolis. A small ivory statuette was discovered there recently, the only known in existence of King Cheops, builder of the great pyramid at Giza.
The keen memory faded and Chesla’s organizational mind drew her back to the issue of Bucillo. A long list of alternate candidates preceded him. She would have chosen many of them over Bucillo, but such idealness was not to be had. At least while she was Chief archaeologist on the dig, she would maintain order. Her position was a privilege for which there had been ample competition. It allowed her to govern the tenor of the work environment in a professional way, and the relationships she maintained with her staff.
Chapter 2
The bloated sun peered over the desert. At last the site’s burnt-ochre hills felt the first full rage of heat. Crimson rays limned the seven uncovered columns of Aesgis, firm in their bed of ancient bleached sand, proud in their clockwork oval.
A great pit, four metres deep, 450 metres long and 110 metres wide, yawned before the bright white columns. It had been dug painstakingly and meticulously, excavated by the effort of forty-five dedicated hands over a period of five months. The crater was impressive—akin to some spooky Indiana Jones setting.
At the far western end of the pit loomed the 17M high pyramid, past the six columns of Aesgis arranged in a tight oval. The enigma was built of huge limestone blocks. Its front face, stepped and ridged, was crumbled, brittle and strangely darkened with age. Tilted as it was to the rising sun, it now glinted like a sullen, slumbering beast, taking seven months to move the 35,000 tons of earth to uncover the pyramid alone. Heavy machinery, airlifted from Luxor, had done the bull work. Now that the main, gruelling task of clearing was complete, the same machines lay limp as derelicts, beyond the military compound: bulldozers, dump trucks, a group of backhoes, a caterpillar and a grader.
A force of 20 trained soldiers guarded the site—night and day—for the Egyptian government was protective of her treasures. She made no secret that hers was one of the greatest finds in the Mediterranean world. There had in the past been terrorist attempts to undermine sites and even destroy them—of course, many European and North American nations were always trying to sneak objects of value out of the country.
Four years ago, the pyramid had been just a nondescript hill, covered with sand, very cleverly hidden for many ages until a freak plane crash had left Emmet Herlios, an American Greek, stranded on one side of a great dune. The soft sands had saved his life, protecting him with only minor injuries. His Cessna had plummeted earthward, spun out with a ruptured fuel line, and had skidded sideways and lodged itself wing-deep into the sand.
A dazed Herlios had emerged from his crumpled craft, realizing that the soft, sandy slopes of the hill had slowed his impact, shielded him from a much more fatal impact with the crags not too far away. He had sunk down on his knees in gratitude, marvelling at the providence of fate. The hill’s perfect conic proportions and its shallower-than-usual slopes caused him to blink in curiosity. Such slopes were coated with a fine, but peculiar golden-reddish sand. Herlios sensed that this was no ordinary hill…
In this area of the desert nothing of marked significance existed. Nobody lived within miles of here; only faraway ridges, sunburnt hills, endless vistas of rolling dunes, sculpted into fantastic shapes by timeless winds. The pilot, harbouring only a single canteen of water and a half of a falafel in his stomach, grit his teeth and began to march east, away from the ruthless sun that had killed many before him which beat incessantly on his head.
Herlios was lucky, for the desert would have been his grave. Three days of walking under that baking heat without water or shelter was enough to kill a man.
Mirages played sweet tricks on his eyes; they had brought laughter to his lips. He spied endless castles and towers and cupolas drifting, shimmering on the horizon. His quiet laughter became a maniacal weeping: at last he fell face first and his limbs would no longer move.
As it was, the desert did not claim his life. A passing troupe of camel riders wearing white turbans had spotted his tracks crossing their regular route and became curious of such signs of life in these harsh wastelands. They deviated from their course to investigate and found him lying face down in the sand on the verge of death.
Herlios’s murmurings were incoherent, his lips parched and bone white. The band revived him, gave him water and food, and took him with them, strapped to a camel’s back. Their trek took them another 20km across the desert and through the low-cragged, baking valleys to the small isolated village of Ali-Ukhueh. It was one of the last trading outposts in this desolate region.
The friendly residents in that stone-hutted settlement took him in for convalescence; Herlios regained strength, but it was more than eighteen days before he managed to return to Luxor to speak of his ordeal and break the news to the Cairo air-chartering agency that their Cessna was destroyed.
It was not a half-year later that Herlios, returning from his journeys in the mid-east, alerted a historian friend of his at Columbus University in California, speaking of the extraordinary hill that had played a large part in saving his life. His friend, an amateur archaeologist, was immediately intrigued. The description of the ‘anomalous prominence’ that Herlios had crash-landed into, was unusual enough to be reported and he passed on word to several of his colleagues.
Such channels facilitate fast tracking, but it was not until another year had passed, that Freidreich Swartz, head of the archaeological team in Munich, commissioned a formal investigation of the hill. He believed it to be rife of promise. Herlios was tracked down to locate the site, for he knew the last coordinates of the crash site and could identify the wreckage if found. At last, he was offered an enticing initial stipend of 3500 US to aid the team. If the venture proved successful, Herlios would receive a subsequent 1500 US bonus.
In the beginning there was little doubt in the archaeologists’ minds, that they had undertaken a wild goose chase, as they flew by copter over the baked landscape. The last human-habitable outposts of Muruklai and Ali-Ukhueh passed kilometres away. Nothing as tiny and remote as a felled single-engine could be seen in those endless, dune-haunted expanses. However Herlios’ keen eyes, perhaps inspired by a sixth sense of familiarity, spied a sheen like the brief, bright glare of a lighthouse’s beacon.
The Greek cried out and the men craned their necks to look below.
Through the windows they saw a shiny, whitish-grey metal object protruding below. The pilot swooped for a lower pass and they could all see that it was in fact the half-buried wreck: a small single-propeller Cessna. Most of the fuselage had been covered by drifting sand; only a small section of the tail lay exposed. If not for the brightness of the sun, Herlios would certainly have missed the piercing glint.
Looking down from above, one could spy the wreckage lying on the eastern slopes of a smooth hill with a very shallow grade. The mound itself jutted right in middle of a valley, flanked on both sides by cragged hills.
Swartz gasped. The team had discovered something man-made—and as he had realized, something important.
They hadn’t the tools, equipment or manpower to perform a proper reconnaissance, but Swartz knew he was onto something.
Events, however, did not progress along opportune channels as Swartz had envisaged. It was only with much red tape that the governing board of the SCA in Cairo arranged a joint international venture. To Swartz’s dismay, they did not elect him to lead the expedition. To lighten his consternation, they allowed him to oversee the results from Munich. Grumbling, he had to accept the concessions. The board appointed Alice Chesla as senior archaeologist; Delos Bucillo and Akhmar Ghaas became her first assistants…
Chapter 3
Approaching the eighth month into the excavation, Denibus Ar surrendered many new discoveries. Four lesser tombs were uncovered in the area between the base of the southern hills and the edge of the dredged pit. As for the treasures uncovered…they were magnificent. Two of the four tombs—kings Selleaf’s and Osikos’—contained gold-cased sarcophagi with unspoiled mummies. Antechambers led up to both burial places, rich with priceless golden treasures: flamingos, cranes, herons and majestic water birds of the Nile, also statuettes of what looked like pre-Amenhotep gods—Horus, Seth and Anubis—fans made of reeds and ostrich plumes, crocodile skins—and a single astounding set of papyrus scripts detailing the lives and deeds of kings, patron gods, and their misadventures and their battles.
The two tombs were rich with coloured frescoes, rivalling the blues, greens, and exquisite turquoise pictographs discovered in Queen Nefertari’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1904 by the Italian archaeologist Schiaperelli. To the disappointment of all, the other two tombs were ransacked. They had been desecrated long and were nothing more than empty rock-hewn clefts. The once-beautiful paintings had long been defaced by thieves and plunderers, discoloured with the exposure to wind-blown sands.
