Denibus Ar

by Chris Turner

  Although these four tombs dated as far back as 2670BC around the end of the second dynasty, they were much more recent than the pyramid itself. The discovery was puzzling in itself. Recent scientific techniques now dated the hex pyramid at 3000BC. It was unheard of. No entrance had been found, or could be plausibly assumed—but just three weeks ago the team had discovered the first catacomb—in the pit leading in a direction toward the pyramid. Although the passageway turned out to be a dead-end, the new discovery had inspired Chesla and the archaeologists to believe that other passages might exist—one that would possibly lead directly inside the pyramid. Last week Chesla was quoted in the New York Times as saying, ‘I believe the existence of catacombs leading into the six-sided pyramid is our greatest hope in discovering clues as to the secrets of the origin of Denibus Ar. We must work until then to uncover her mysteries, while not marring the pyramid in any way from the outside. She is surely too awesome a wonder of the ancient world to spoil.’

  Just a few years ago the site was discovered; now even seven months after the uncovering of Hexsase, there remained much work ahead.

  * * *

  Langley by this time had almost reached the edge of the pit without getting distracted. Well almost…On his way he bumped into a big wooden barrel of a man, Captain Sarsenska, chief of the military operation at Denibus Ar. His unblinking grey eyes and immaculate, grey-green regalia were no less precise than his regimented demeanour. Langley stepped back, for even after all this time, he hadn’t gotten used to the walrus-like figure with his Egyptian hawk-nose and high forehead; nor the piercing eyes that peered down at him as if he were an under-servant. Nonetheless, Sarsenska, with his superior airs and measured cordiality, gave him a playful salute as Langley was about to climb down into the pit along the wooden steps and join the workers below.

  The Australian paused to take in the splendour of the expanse. The uncovered ruins lit up at sunrise—a sight of which he never tired.

  The sides of the excavated pit were supported by a crude stone wall, a half metre thick and about 1.5M high. From where he stood, he saw it to be at least 600M to the sunken base of the pyramid.

  Directly below, the gateway pylon stood in ruin. Half its top was crumbled and lay in a jumbled heap at its base. Beyond the gateway stood a low ramp of limestone steps, leading with cryptic significance to the magnificent hypostyle-hall. Here clustered a maze of fifty-two semi-rounded columns, each exceeding more than 6M in height.

  Adjacent the hypostyle hall, but set farther back closer to the pyramid, ran a peristyle of smaller scale but of no less beauty or grandeur. Well-carven inscriptions, exquisite friezes and architraves were unparalleled in beauty in the ancient world.

  Between the flanks of the many lotus-topped columns, stood Obelisk #1, a flawlessly-hewn black granite giant. It towered an impressive 10M into the sky like a silver needle. The mounting cap, remarkably plated with original electrum, was hex-sided, and glowered silver and orange in the morning effulgence.

  Low hills loomed to the north and south. These hills rose higher than the pyramid itself, hemming in the site like the steep banks of a gorge. Beyond Hexsase the arms of the hills opened up to reveal a whitewashed desert that disappeared into a hazy seascape of mirages.

  Already the team, a mix of sixteen sun-darkened Egyptians, was busy at hand. In the foreground, several men passed the excavated rocks along a chain, whose original link came from a place deep underground at the easternmost edge of the pit. Two days before, new finds had been discovered. Now a concerted effort was being made to dredge the entire area. Pockets of men, some of them student trainees, worked in groups, conversing or kneeling, trowelling, screening and sifting, while others catalogued artifacts and chunks of sandstone and limestone that were parts of existing, ancient masonry. Under the direction of archaeologist Akhmar Ghaas, every stone, rock, and shovel of sand was examined, all to be meticulously tagged and taken away by crude wheelbarrows to a loading site by the workers. Baskets and barrows of artifacts were carted away onto a gas-powered conveyor that would lift them out of the pit.

  Upon the labours of these ant-like men, Hexsase looked on indifferently. She peered across the desert, like a living fossil, with an eerie sense of dispassion and disregard for human activity.

  Scratching his head in wonder, Langley paused to peer up at the pyramid and its dawn-ruddied face. Its seven successive mastabas were crafted of a thousand stones now covered in dust. Langley was both awed and vexed by its crazy proportions. Pyramids were supposed to have four sides, not six! The colossus was a thing to be admired but distrusted, something out of a horror book, and the Australian eyed it as if something were here that should not be. He was not the only one who guarded such opinion. Archaeologists and historians alike across the globe could not believe that such a pyramid existed. Why six sides, was the universal question? The fact that none of its kind had ever been discovered was incongruous, even ludicrous.

  In addition to the unconventional configuration, pyramids sheltering tombs of significant dimension concordant with those of the Valley of the Kings were less than a day distant. Why the mixture of old styles and new? It was an important question. Why was there an inexplicable gap in time? Had the more recent kings of the New Kingdom rediscovered the ancient site, declared it holy enough for reuse?

  Langley’s crude speculations could not penetrate the subtlety of the problem. He was taken back into snatches of time, when he was a boy of seven years, a time when clouds had passed over the sun, casting shadows about the ground. Looking up at the northern mountains of his Queensland youth, he had noticed that the cloud lay darkened, dwarfing him, and even at the distance, in comparison he seemed a tiny, fly-like creature. His young mind grappled with the disheartening thought that the mountain, though much larger than him, was dead—a thing of earth and stone—whereas he was a living, breathing organism. Now then, which was mightier—he or the mountain? A giant eagle soared overhead, passing well beyond his reach. It sent a thin, loud shriek in the winds, always borne from the mountains itself and always returning to the mountains thereafter…And here he was now, with just such a ‘mountain’ before him.

  As daydreams were wont, he was transported to a much more recent time: a time set in the remote region of Kimberly in Australia’s outback in the northwestern corner of the hinterland. Deep in the recesses of the Rengeur cave atop the Unhara Gorge, he crouched in the gloom, gazing in wonder at the beautiful, haunting Bradshaw rock art forms that adorned the walls. Some of the human figures were life size, wearing ceremonial garb of headdresses with tasselled tips and short rear feathers. Bodies and limbs were shortened, coloured in reds, blacks, browns, yellows, whites and pale blues. He saw them swim before his eyes in a panorama of graceful movement and action, set alive in the glow of his lantern. He remembered the figures of these native drawings, the so-called Jungardoo. They were believed to represent the first people created by Ngaardja, the supreme Wandjina or rain spirit. It was further said that the paintings were produced by a tiny bird, a bramb-bramba, that lived amongst the rocks. When it spied men or bush spirits, it would strike its beak against the rock until it bled, and then painted the scene with its beak.

  And now, Langley’s mind drifted again, and he was far from Denibus Ar.

  Alone in the solitude of these secluded recesses and drenched in silence had changed him and he felt drawn to those complex, primitive cultures and traditions of those ancient peoples.

  Just three weeks after this vision in the cave, Langley and his coworkers had discovered several ancient bone beads buried in sand, dating between 10000 and 14000BC.

  Spending so much reflective time out in the rugged outback, Langley felt like the proverbial fish out of water. His heart lay emptied like a bladder by the concrete bustle of the big city. An eerie realization seized him…it was almost as if the farther east he travelled, the farther he drew from his destiny. Inevitably he felt the worse for it. He didn’t know why—perhaps it was providence that called hi
m—but he applied for a Jordanian visa. Within three weeks, he was on a plane to Amman. Something had always drawn him there to visit Petra. Being an archaeologist, he felt inspired to wander spellbound amongst the megalithic facades, the colonnades and arches of the spectacular ancient ruin. In the midst of the ancient Mediterranean kingdoms of old, Langley felt as if he were closer to his destiny—closer to what an up and coming shaman, an Aboriginal girl, had communicated to him weeks earlier.

  The same guiding intuition beckoned him like a siren’s call, and a week later, he had chartered a bus to Cairo where he visited the enchanting Giza plateau. Never before had he witnessed the great, hulking pyramid of Cheops. He was sorely amazed to behold the sheer weight of its stupendous size. He marvelled no less at the haunting aspect of the Sphinx nestled at Chephren’s feet, paying homage to his monumental legacy. The half-man, half-lion edifice carved out of a gigantic mound of sandstone, reigned primordial. After so many musty millennia, the creature still greeted the rising sun with its cryptic stare.

  Langley had boarded a tourist train bound for Luxor where he was fortunate enough to visit the Valley of the Kings the next day, and at an early enough hour to witness the progressive excavation of Rameses X, which the SCA had been working on in cooperation with the University of Basel, Switzerland since 1998. A team of them were excavating an extraordinary canopic chest of an ancient Egyptian queen, not yet identified.

  Instantly he was seized with a sudden yearning to be there helping out.

  It was with great coaxing (meaning no small amount of baksheesh) that he managed to ‘slip’ past the entrance guards and approach the field director, Esla Polin-Graathe. She had risen from the dirt to greet him, holding out a grimy hand. Rather than peeved with his slightly unauthorized presence, she proved a lively woman, much fascinated by his work in Kimberley. She had liked him from the start, agreed to accept him as a temporary volunteer when he had hinted at the aspiration of aiding in the excavation. Thus, events had precipitated Carl Langley to participate in the first proof of burial of a queen in the Valley of the Kings. The digging at the mouth of the tomb had been unbearably hot, particularly in midday when the scorching sun came beating down like hellfire. The natural dangers, like scorpions, and the odd snake or two and the potential disease carrying mosquitoes at night were real. But the work was fulfilling, and somewhere Langley felt that he walked closer to the gods.

  Within days he had received word of an opening at Denibus Ar…

  His reverie came to a sudden, brisk end.

  A familiar voice spoke from behind him now; a low, shrewd, nasal drone with the perceptible undertones of disapproval. “We wouldn’t be disturbing your daydreaming now, would we, Mr. Langley?” Akhmar Ghaas, a tall, balding, middle-aged Egyptologist, fixed him a critical stare. He was from Cairo University, and who, besides Chesla, was his immediate superior.

  Langley did his best to shake the wanderlust from his mind. “Forgive me, Professor, I was just admiring Hexsase.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” said Ghaas. He looked up at the pyramid with an adulation that was almost religious. “She’ll tell us her secrets before long, very soon! You’re lucky to be amongst the ones to witness it.” The man’s eagerness was palpable, and Langley could only blink with discomfort. Something about the way Ghaas said it sounded off. He shared nothing of the same emotion and proffered only a distant nod.

  “I’m glad of it, Professor.”

  Ghaas hesitated, appraising the quality of Langley’s lack of excitement. “You are coming to aid in the extraction of these very large rocks in pit E’s section, I see?—and also to aid in the examination of the earth over there?” He pointed to a waist-high mound of ruddy sand where two worker Egyptians, leaning with mattocks under their armpits, paused to take a break. It was more a statement than a question. “I wouldn’t want us to think that you were fooling around on the job.”

  Langley’s muscles knotted. His lips worked but compressed into a stony grin. “I believe,” he said dryly, “that Yasser needs assistance with the earth-screening near the tombs. His progress is very much like my own—slow, slower, and ever slower.”

  Ghaas’s jaw tightened. “Yes, I do believe. Yasser is in very much need of assistance. Snap it up then. Those sleepy feet of yours will win no awards.”

  Langley suppressed a snort. Why was it that everyone was so crazy about schedules and deadlines around here? Didn’t anybody believe in going with the flow? There seemed no life beyond working, screening, tagging, dreaming about rocks and rubble all day?

  He shook his head in bafflement. It was starting to annoy him.

  Ghaas smoothed his rough-stubbled jaw in speculative interest. As if reading the Aussie’s thoughts, he peered at him. “I know that you’re probably not as enthused with your current posting as you would like. As for investigating the tombs…” He trailed off.

  Langley gave a silent curse. Why was Ghaas so pompous? Was it his droning voice or his weirdly remarks that irritated him so much? “…you know it was I who posted you here in the pit and I am sorry to disappoint if you hoped to participate in the work in the tombs. You know that we really need to clean up the outstanding pit excavations so that we can look for more significant material in the underground tunnels.”

  Langley heard Ghaas without listening. Despite the undeniable ascetic features of the scholar, the funny thing about him was that he had a certain habit of keeping his tight white billycap on too sharp of an angle, something that annoyed the hell out of Langley even more. His voice, combined with his heavy foreign accent and off-sounding English, and his billycap were three strikes too many. Now as Langley’s teeth grated, Ghaas’ particular oddities became ever more amplified.

  But he was being too severe with the old chap, Langley told himself jocularly. Really, it was just one of those days. Ghaas wasn’t in fact, all bad; he was just a bit of an old-school busybody—and just the man for the job.

  Langley sighed. With small comfort, he took the opportunity to dismiss himself from Ghaas’ awkward company.

  * * *

  It was 6:30AM and the air down in the pit remained cool. Langley drew a refreshing breath. He held it deep in his lungs, knowing that its coolness would be short-lived. Soon this stretch of the desert would be baking hot.

  Pebbles crunched under his boots. He passed through the not-yet-excavated peristyle and under the shadow of Obelisk #1, a relic so far unnamed. It was crafted of diamond-hard black granite and rose up an impressive 9.5 metres into the air. It was like some mage’s tower, thought Langley. Oddly enough, the obelisk was located in the pit’s centre, blocking the natural avenue paved with massive stones that headed straight toward Hexsase.

  Langley frowned. He was close enough to reach the spire, feel its cool suppleness, and he ran his fingers along its smooth contours graced with rich hieroglyphs, pictographs and emblems stacked totem-like, one on top of each other. Here was a monkey, there a crocodile, there a pharaoh-like god wearing a jackal-mask. Strangely some of the animals were turned upside-down or tilted sideways, like nothing he had ever seen in all his research of ancient Egyptian architecture. Tapered at its summit, the precious peak was cast with a gold-silver electrolyte alloy that gleamed with such brilliance in the sun’s light to be blinding. Obelisk #1 was the only Egyptian obelisk left in existence that harboured this kind of precious metal at its tip. Thieves had long ago plundered all others known. It was no surprise that the two shorter obelisks off to the sides by the pit’s wall, retained no such shiny veneer. They were nicknamed Obelisk #2 and #3, for lack of any other official title.

  Langley skipped between the pillars to exit the peristyle. He turned his gaze toward the uncovered tombs: the final resting places of Selleaf and Osikos, kings of the earlier dynasty. From the outside they were nothing more than darkened, dusty cave mouths leading nowhere but down into lampblack depths. But oh, what treasures they contained! Even the king’s sarcophagi and all the heavier golden statues remained underground in situ. To
remove these antiquities from their original intact condition would prove a painstaking and expensive task, one most likely completed at the very end of the project. Much underground excavation was necessary before the important pieces could be transported to Luxor for further study.

  A sun-bronzed, muscle-toned figure was kneeling beside a tripod fastening a tie-rope to its respective peg—Aseh Yasser, a shiny, round-faced Nubian whose short-cropped black curls almost belied the presence of the vineyard dreadlocks that ran the middle of his back. Langley had taken to him right away. His blithe manner and quick and clever grasp of English was, with the exceptions of Ghaas and Sarsenska, lacking in the majority of Egyptians on the site. Several years earlier, Yasser’s studies at Cairo University had taken him on a two-year USA-Egypt exchange, during which time he had the good fortune to pick up a bevy of Californian expressions. Together, he and Langley shared a kind of silent knowing, exhibiting a rare camaraderie.

  Yasser had risen early and completed the excavation of a one-square metre grid. Four other grids were strung with white string and were now ready to be quarried. Three wire-mesh screens and a pair of jackhammer-drills leaned against a large pile of dirt. An overturned wheelbarrow whose tracks ran a zigzag path toward the conveyor belt slumped behind the eastward-facing gateway pylon.

  “Yasser!” Langley called.

  His friend paused and stared up at him from behind a pair of outlandish sunglasses two sizes too large. He wiped the beads of perspiration off his shiny forehead and rose with a grimy hand.

  “There you are, amigo!” he cried, his bright teeth flashing. The white contrasted with his deeply bronzed face and dark natural curls. “You’re just in time. I finished this first square and found these—” He trailed off, pulling open a pouch that showed a handful of broken bits of bones. “Not much, I’m afraid, but better than nothing.”