Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by David Gibbins

  ‘Show it to me while we walk out.’

  ‘You might want to stay sitting just for this bit. I opened it to see the cover, but I thought you might want to be the first one to open the actual book.’

  Jack took the package from her, glancing at the grubby envelope covered with stamps and nearly illegible writing, and he admired Rebecca’s tenacity in deciphering it. He slipped the volume out, and weighed it in his hands. It was a ruled notebook, a diary or a journal. He realised that he was looking at the back cover upside down, and he flipped it over. There was a hand-written title on the cover. He read it, and then read it again, barely taking it in. He coughed, and read it out loud: ‘“The Journal of Major General Charles Gordon, CB, Garrison Commander at Khartoum, 14 December 1884 to 25 January 1885”.’

  He sat back, stunned. It was the lost final volume of General Gordon’s diary. He could scarcely bring himself to open it. This would surely at last reveal the truth of those last days in Khartoum. He pressed the journal against his chest, and then put it carefully back into the envelope, handing it back to Rebecca. ‘Yours for safe keeping. That may be the most extraordinary treasure of this whole quest. You can begin reading it to me in the car.’

  Four and a half hours later, Jack pulled off the main road and drove down the narrow lane into the village where his great-great-grandfather had lived. It seemed a world away from the desert of Sudan and the war against the Mahdi, but these villages were the idealised image of England that many of the soldiers dreamed of while they were on campaign, and today they were often the places where the last residues of undiscovered papers and artefacts from those years were to be found. He had not been here for a long time, but he remembered the route through the picturesque village square and up the side lane to the row of half-timbered cottages, the rolling summits of the Brecon Beacons looming a few miles behind. He stopped outside the front gate, switched off the engine and enjoyed the silence after the drive, letting Rebecca sleep for a few minutes longer.

  It had been an extraordinary few hours of revelation as she had picked her way through the diary. Gordon’s last entry on the morning of the day he died was a neatly written statement that Jack could remember now from memory: Major Mayne of the Royal Engineers has arrived, with a companion. He is to have this journal for safe keeping, so that it may be published and known to the world. Now I know I am to die. I have stayed with the people of Khartoum to the last.

  Everything about it was astonishing. Now Jack knew where Major Mayne had gone. He and Rebecca were certain that the companion had been Charrière, as that would explain how he came to have the diary. Why it had taken him so long to return it, beyond the lifetimes of most of the players in those events, remained perplexing. Mayne himself must have died for Charrière to have ended up with the diary, perhaps during that final apocalyptic day when the Mahdist forces overran the city. What Mayne was doing visiting Gordon in his final hours was a mystery. There was no other mention in the historical records of a British officer reaching Gordon so late in the day. It must have been a covert mission, top secret. The phrase that repeated over and over in Jack’s mind was Gordon’s final sign-off: now I know I am to die. Had he simply become resigned to the inevitable, to the inescapable outcome of the Mahdi’s attack? Or had he known something else? Jack had remembered Lieutenant Tanner’s letter mentioning Mayne’s rifle, and he had begun to think the unthinkable. Had a British officer been sent in secret in a last-ditch attempt to persuade Gordon to leave, to ensure that he was not captured by the Mahdi and paraded in front of the world? Had that officer been chosen because he was also one of the army’s most skilled marksmen, with instructions to deploy that skill should Gordon refuse to leave? He had remembered the iconic image of the death of Gordon, standing fully exposed on the balcony of the palace; using satellite imagery, Rebecca had determined that he would have been within range of a sharpshooter with a high-powered Sharps rifle on the opposite side of the river, shooting to ensure that he was killed yet leaving no evidence that his death was anything other than that of a soldier fighting to the last against an overwhelming enemy.

  And then on the last page of the diary they had seen a diagram of an archaeological discovery that Gordon had made somewhere along the Nile, a stone plaque that he had sent away in the Abbas, and Jack had realised that it must have been the one that he and Costas had so nearly recovered, and which must now be in the hands of al’Ahmed and his family. It was a precise illustration of parallel and intersecting lines that Jack recognised from the carving that they had found inside the sarcophagus of Menkaure. Gordon had labelled it with the same term that Captain Wichelo of the Beatrice had used to describe the plaque in the coffin: the City of Light.

  The pieces were suddenly falling together. Listening to Rebecca read the journal, Jack had realised that the archaeology from thousands of years ago and the history from little more than a century ago were inextricably intertwined; if it had not been for the archaeology, he would not have embarked on the quest to find out more about Gordon in his family papers, and Rebecca would never have made the discovery. The journal had allowed him to see Gordon as if he himself had opened the door to that room in the palace at Khartoum in 1885, just as Major Mayne must have done; and he had seen neither a mystic nor a messiah, but a man to whom the desert had given a clarity of vision that made compassion for his fellow human beings the guiding force in his life, for those in Khartoum who had come to rely on him for daily survival. He wondered whether Akhenaten too had been misunderstood by history, whether it was not the location of his revelation in the desert that was the discovery they should be seeking but rather the place he had turned to next, where the clarity of vision he too had experienced might have led him to create something tangible, something of benefit to humankind, not in the desert to the south but in the heartland of the civilisation along the Nile from which he had sprung.

  And now there was one final piece of the puzzle to find, a piece that might provide the detail needed to bring those images of Akhenaten’s city from abstraction to reality, to a place that might at last be within the possibility of archaeological discovery that had eluded Gordon and others on this trail for so long.

  Rebecca woke and rubbed her eyes, looking blearily at the cottage. ‘We’re here. Look, there’s Great-Aunt Margaret.’ She opened the door and got out, and the neatly dressed old lady who had come down the path welcomed her with open arms. Jack followed, giving her a hug too.

  ‘It’s lovely to see Rebecca doing so well,’ she said. ‘She’s more amazing than all your adventures put together, you know.’

  ‘Well, she’s part of them now.’

  Aunt Margaret led them through the beautifully tended garden towards the front door; Jack had to stoop to enter the cottage. At the bottom of the stairs she turned around and faced them. ‘Now, before we have tea and Rebecca tells me all her news, I know you’ll want to see what I found after you told me what to look for, Jack.’

  ‘You didn’t have to, Great-Aunt Margaret,’ Rebecca said. ‘We don’t want you hurting yourself.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a bit of the adventurer in me too, you know, Rebecca. I don’t know how much your dad has told you about me, but I’m not called Howard for nothing. When you told me you thought it might have been plastered or painted over, I took my basket of garden tools up there and set to. I haven’t had so much fun since I broke into the fifth High Llama of Llora’s tomb in the Karakorum Desert and got away with his sacred prayer roll, almost.’

  Rebecca coughed politely. ‘You did what?’

  Jack coughed a bit more loudly. ‘Aunt Margaret has, um, a certain history. She worked for MI6. She’s classified up to the hilt.’

  ‘Oh,’ Rebecca said. ‘You mean like Miss Moneypenny?’

  ‘No, I mean like “M”,’ Jack said. ‘She’s actually Dame Margaret Howard, though she never calls herself that.’

  ‘Such a silly title,’ Aunt Margaret said. ‘Use it outside Britain and they think it means you run
a brothel.’ She hesitated at the foot of the stairs, and looked at Jack. ‘Before we go up, lest I forget, your friend Costas has been on the phone.’

  ‘Really? What about?’

  ‘Do you remember when he and I first met, more than ten years ago? It was at the inauguration of IMU.’

  Jack paused. ‘I remember the two of you talking at great length about poetry, about the Arthurian legends. You’d just retired, and you were going to return to your undergraduate passion from Oxford days and write a book about the Holy Grail, about how the legend influenced generations of explorers on their own quests.’

  Aunt Margaret reached over to a small table beside the front door and picked up a brown paper parcel tied with string. ‘When Costas called me this morning, he said that the desert had made him think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and then of the Holy Grail quest that was the inspiration behind the poem. He said that the place beside the Nile where you found the crocodile temple reminded him of the Fisher King, the wounded warrior who guarded the Grail, yet whose kingdom was turned to waste as he did so. And then when you were forced to leave the Sudan he thought of the fragmentation of the Grail quest, about how it had become an aimless journey with no beginning and no end, like the march to nowhere of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. And then he remembered how there was one who through it all was destined to achieve the Grail and heal the wasteland.’

  ‘We studied the legend in school,’ Rebecca said. ‘You mean Sir Galahad.’

  Aunt Margaret handed her the package. ‘Will you see that Costas gets this? It’s a Victorian edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, rather tatty I’m afraid. It was owned by Colonel Howard; he loved this kind of stuff and apparently used to spend his evenings by the fire here reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels and Tennyson and anything in Old English and Norse literature on quests and adventure.’

  ‘Maybe it was an escape from the fear of those years in the lead-up to the First World War,’ Rebecca said, holding the book tight.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But I think many like him at that time saw their lives in those terms, and for them the lesson of the Grail story was that the quest was as important as the destination, a treasure that might remain always out of reach. Colonel Howard had one last quest to fulfil, one that had begun in his early years with a discovery in the jungle of southern India, and perhaps reading this fired him up to resume the journey that gave his life excitement and meaning.’

  Jack cocked an eye at her. ‘This story is really for me, isn’t it?’

  Aunt Margaret smiled. ‘I don’t need to be telling you it, do I?’ She jerked her head up the stairs. ‘I told Costas he really didn’t need to worry. You’ve made it here. You’re back on the quest again.’

  Jack glanced at Rebecca. ‘With a little help from my daughter.’

  Aunt Margaret gave him a steely look. ‘Oh no. You made it here because you wanted to. Jack Howard is not designed to wander about in the wasteland. You’re here because it’s in your genes. It’s in mine too, so I know it.’

  Jack grinned. ‘All right. Point taken.’

  ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Chop chop. Tea’s getting cold. We can’t be talking all day.’

  She led them up the creaking stairs past the first floor and into the attic. Jack stooped low through the entrance, and followed her past boxes and crates to the massive cruck timbers that gave the cottage its name. ‘This is where Great-Grandfather used to work,’ she said. ‘When I arrived here after retiring, his desk was still there, but I’ve moved it down to my own study. It’s a little dusty up here.’ She pointed up to the apex of the crux, where fragments of plaster and chips of paint were spread all around. ‘There you go. It looks a bit like the image on the Khedive’s Star, don’t you think? Those pyramids. I’ve got the Star awarded to Great-Grandfather for service in Egypt.’

  Jack stared. In the hole was a square stone block about fifteen centimetres across, covered in incised carving. He knew without hesitation that it was the missing piece from the wall carving of Akhenaten in the crocodile temple. It had the arrangement of lines that he recognised, including several from the sun symbol of the Aten in the top corner of the chamber wall that terminated just beyond the block. He also recognised the arrangement from the diagram in Gordon’s journal, the image of the labyrinth complex that Gordon had retrieved from the riverside temple.

  That had been expected. He had been as close to certain as he could be that the block came from the wall. What he had not expected was the image in the centre.

  It was not one pyramid, but three, an image known the world over, one of the iconic views of archaeology: the three pyramids at Giza. The smallest of them, the pyramid of Menkaure, where Vyse had found the sarcophagus and the plaque, had a line drawn from the centre of it down into the complex of lines below, as if it were somehow joined to them, like a portal.

  Jack reeled with excitement. Now he knew where Akhenaten’s City of Light had been. Not in the depths of the Nubian desert, not in the place where Akhenaten had experienced his revelation, but in the very heart of ancient Egypt, in the oldest and most sacred place possible, where Akhenaten could have envisaged himself ruling Egypt for all eternity.

  And he knew that others might know of it as well, al’Ahmed and his followers, whose ancestors had known of Gordon’s quest and who might by now have seen the plaque from the wreck of the Abbas and could be on the same trail. Suddenly time was of the essence.

  Jack looked at Rebecca. ‘Do you know where Costas is?’

  ‘With Sofia,’ she said. ‘Showing her the engineering department.’

  He pulled out his phone, clicked the number and waited. After another attempt Costas replied. ‘Jack. I’ve been meaning to call.’ Jack could hear the rumble of machinery in the background. ‘I guess this is about the board of directors tomorrow. We need to get our story straight.’

  ‘The board of directors can wait. I need you to be on a flight with me this evening, with all of our dive gear prepped.’

  ‘Just give me a moment to square it with Sofia.’

  ‘That’s a new one,’ Rebecca whispered.

  Aunt Margaret nudged him. ‘Go for it, Jack. I don’t know where you’re going and what you’re doing, but give ’em hell.’

  Costas was back on the phone. ‘Jack.’

  ‘What’s your status?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Egypt. We’re going to a pyramid. We’re going to dive inside a pyramid. This is as big as it gets. You good with that?’

  ‘You bet. Good to go.’

  26

  On the Giza plateau, Egypt

  Two days later, Jack stood by himself on the Giza plateau outside Cairo, dwarfed by the huge mass of the pyramid of Khufru to his right. Twenty minutes earlier he had used the special pass supplied by Aysha to make his way through the heavy police cordon that had blocked off the plateau for weeks now, part of an unprecedented programme to improve security and allow essential safety and conservation work to be carried out. For Hiebermeyer and his team it had been a godsend, a unique opportunity for sustained exploration inside the pyramids. On this occasion Aysha was not the permit-issuing authority; control of the site had been taken over by the Egyptian Ministry of Defence. The temporary one-day permit she had engineered the week before to send a robot into the pyramid of Menkaure had been extended for a week. Jack had called Maurice from England to tell them of their extraordinary find of the pyramid depiction on the stone slab, and had been on the plane the next day to join Seaquest II on her way back from Spain and organise the airlift by helicopter to Alexandria of the equipment that he and Costas would need for today’s excursion. It still seemed an extraordinary plan, but it was exactly what Jack needed. After long days of soul-searching after their eviction from the Sudan, he was thrilled to be in the field again.

  It was still only early afternoon, but the sun already had a reddish hue to it, the light filtering through the dust and low cloud that
obscured the desert horizon to the west.

  Jack checked a quick text message from Rebecca, who had flown back for her final term at school in New York, and then looked up at the pyramid beside him, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun. He remembered once asking Rebecca to imagine that the pyramids had never been built, and then trying to persuade people that structures of that scale had existed in antiquity; it would be met with flat disbelief. Looking at them today, he recalled the pyramid-shaped basalt outcrops he had seen in the Nubian desert from Semna, and found himself wondering whether the idea for these extraordinary structures had been imported from the natural landscape of the desert homeland of the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians. He made a mental note to try it out on Maurice, and then trudged forward beside the massive blocks at the base. It was curiously unsettling being here at a place normally visited by thousands every day, in a landscape whose features were entirely man-made and yet seemed so implausible that the mind rebelled against the idea. He tried to see them instead as natural extrusions of the limestone substrate jutting out of the desert floor. It made the human presence seem oddly ephemeral, the same feeling he had experienced in the Sudan thinking about the Gordon relief expedition, as if the imprint of all those people could be swept away by a breeze across the sand like the tide of the sea cleansing a foreshore.

  After another ten minutes of brisk walking to the south-west, he had passed the second pyramid and was within sight of the pyramid of Menkaure, only one tenth the mass of the great pyramid but at sixty-five metres still a huge monument, the height of the dome of St Paul’s in London. In front of the entrance he could see a pair of Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicles and a tent, and several people busily carrying boxes and gear around. As he approached, he spotted the distinctive form of Hiebermeyer in his shorts and battered cowboy hat, and beside him the even more distinctive form of Jacob Lanowski, inscrutably wearing a lab coat in the desert. Lanowski was hooked up to a contraption that looked like an early one-man rocket platform, and was walking it forward like a Zimmer frame. Aysha and Sofia were photographing something among the tumbled masonry fragments in front of the pyramid, and Costas was nowhere to be seen. Hiebermeyer spotted him and bounded up, his face wet with perspiration despite the cool November air. ‘Good to see you, Jack.’ He shook hands vigorously. ‘We haven’t got any time to lose. Your equipment is due in half an hour. Who knows when they might revoke our permit.’