Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by David Gibbins

  Costas looked sceptically at the pyramid. ‘That would take a small thermonuclear bomb. One for each pyramid.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s a well-known fact that extremist groups by now have collected enough fissile materials from the former Soviet Union to make several devices big enough to do this kind of damage. It may seem like an extravagant waste of resources when they could bomb London or New York, but the analysts I’ve spoken to think otherwise. Destroy the pyramids and you destroy Egypt’s tourist economy. The radioactive fallout over the suburbs of Cairo wouldn’t necessarily turn the Egyptian people against the extremists, but with the right rhetoric it might make them feel that they had suffered the wrath of Allah for not having bowed to the cause before now. Egypt is already tottering towards becoming an Islamist state, and this could make it a fundamentalist one. With Egypt gone, the next in line would be Sudan and Somalia, and then Libya and Tunisia and Algeria. There would be a nuclear war in the Middle East, and Israel would be obliterated. The extremists would therefore gain far more for the cause of jihad by blowing up the pyramids than by setting off their bombs in a Western capital.’

  ‘Got you,’ Costas said. ‘So that explains the new perimeter fence being built around the plateau.’

  ‘It also explains why this is the last chance we’re ever likely to get for a look inside the pyramid. The whole of the Giza plateau is coming under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defence, rather than the Antiquities Authority. From now on, it’ll take an act of God to allow anyone to ferret around in places where a bomb might be concealed.’

  ‘What about our friend al’Ahmed from the Sudan?’ Costas asked. ‘He seemed to be after the same thing that we are. Jack read me a passage from General Gordon’s final journal volume about how the Mahdi as a young man found a temple by the Nile with that plaque of Akhenaten inside, the one that Gordon took and we located in the wreck of the Abbas. If al’Ahmed’s knowledge of the plaque goes back to the Mahdi, and if his divers manage to get it out of the wreck, he may by now have seen a depiction of the pyramid similar to the one that brought us here.’

  Jack pursed his lips. ‘I think the depiction in the crocodile temple and the one in the Nile temple found by the Mahdi were identical. The clue for us was the missing slab from the crocodile temple that showed the pyramid, whereas the other temple depiction may have been intact. If that also showed the clear image of the three temples at Giza, then al’Ahmed would be hot on this trail as well.’

  Aysha looked at Jack. ‘Ibrahim flew out from Wadi Halfa this morning to help get your gear together on Seaquest II for today’s dive. You wanted to get him out of the Sudan, and we did it in the nick of time. The IMU Lynx did a covert pick-up near the border and was chased by Sudanese police helicopters. I managed to collar him at Alexandria before I drove here, and he said that as of yesterday there had still been no diving on the Abbas, but that a team was being assembled. They’d needed to find Sudanese navy divers who were competent with the IMU equipment they confiscated from you. So I don’t think al’Ahmed is on our trail yet, though it can only be a matter of time. His family business is based in Egypt and he can pull strings here as well. It’s another reason why we wanted you and Costas here as quickly as possible, before someone in the Egyptian government who al’Ahmed can bribe decides to pull the rug from under us.’

  ‘But he’s not a fundamentalist,’ Costas said. ‘He’s not going to want to destroy this place.’

  ‘He’s an Islamist, and would ally himself with extremist groups if it furthers his interests,’ Aysha said. ‘But his focus is the same as ours. He wants to find Akhenaten’s City of Light. And we want to get there before he does. There may be something there just as potent for the future of world order as the fate of the pyramids, and we want to make sure it stays out of his control. We need to see what lies underneath the pyramid now.’

  ‘One question,’ Costas said. ‘What about that keg of gunpowder?’

  ‘I managed to uncoil the fuse, which is hanging down into the antechamber. You can still smell the sulphur on it.’

  Lanowski put a finger up, said, ‘Ah’, and then poked around in his lab coat pocket, producing a cheap orange lighter. He tested it, and threw it to Costas. ‘I bought this off a little boy at the entrance to the site. I felt sorry for him. I knew it would have a use.’

  Costas lit it and stared at the flame. ‘What exactly are you suggesting, Jacob?’

  ‘Well, Colonel Vyse did pretty well with it, didn’t he? Found a lot of stuff. Maybe he was on to something in that passageway.’

  Costas took his thumb off the lighter, thought for a moment and slowly nodded. ‘I’d have to get Little Joey out first, of course. What do you think, Jack?’

  Jack glanced at Sofia. ‘I don’t expect anyone’s mentioned it to you. Put Costas anywhere within sniffing distance of explosives and he’s gone.’

  Sofia marched up to Costas, took the lighter and tossed it back to Lanowski. ‘I have a better idea,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you use this to light the barbecue we’re going to have on the beach when this is all over. The party that Jack always promises Costas.’

  ‘The party that never happens,’ Costas said glumly. ‘Because there’s always some other fabulous treasure to discover.’

  Two Range Rovers came barrelling down the track towards them in a cloud of dust, pulling to a halt at the end of the walkway into the pyramid. Jack saw Ibrahim get out of the first vehicle, and an IMU helicopter crewman he recognised from Seaquest II. He put his hands on his hips and turned to the others, a steely look in his eyes. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The gear’s arrived. Let’s get this show on the road.’

  27

  ‘Jack! Hold tight!’

  A huge thud resounded through the burial chamber of the pyramid, shaking the condensation off the stone walls of the shaft where Jack was suspended precariously on a rope. He spun crazily around, kicking off the walls to stop himself from crashing into them, holding on to the rope that tethered him to the wooden frame they had set up over the top of the shaft. He raised the visor of his helmet and looked up, tasting the moisture in the air and seeing the wavering beam of Costas’ headlamp almost twenty metres above him. ‘What the hell was that?’ he yelled, his voice booming up the shaft.

  ‘It was in the entrance tunnel,’ Costas called down. ‘A giant stone slab dropped into it about five metres up from the burial chamber. It was deliberate, an ancient booby trap. One of those devices to deter tomb robbers. You must have triggered something on the way down.’

  Jack tried to slow his swinging, and looked at the curious arrangement of stone slabs about five metres above him that stuck out of the sides of the shaft like the spokes of a wheel, leaving an aperture in the centre just big enough for him to drop through. He remembered feeling a slight give in the stones as he stood on them. He had studied the elaborate traps that the pyramid builders had set around the burial chambers; it was conceivable that those stones had triggered an alignment in the masonry that caused the slab to drop. But this trap was not simply to deter tomb robbers. He stared down, his headlamp beam reflecting off the smooth walls that dropped to a shimmering pool of water some ten metres below. It was to protect access to something infinitely more valuable, to a treasure that made the adrenalin course through Jack as it did when he knew he was on the brink of a great discovery.

  He stared back up. ‘So we’re trapped?’ he yelled.

  ‘You got it. That slab must weigh ten tons. And the light shaft above the chamber isn’t even wide enough to let in a pigeon.’

  ‘At least nobody can follow us inside.’

  ‘That’s great, Jack. Really reassuring. Makes spending the rest of eternity entombed like a mummified pharaoh really worthwhile.’

  ‘Keep focused,’ Jack shouted back. ‘We’re doing what we came here to do. This shaft must lead to some other access point.’

  He looked down again, searching for the glow from the chemical lightstick he had dropped into the water at the
bottom of the shaft, but it was gone. He pulled another out of the thigh pocket on his e-suit, cracked it and dropped it, watching the green glow tumble down and then splash into the water, revealing the shimmering sides of the shaft and then disappearing too, somewhere far deeper. He looked at the electronic display inside his helmet, checking that the air supply in the streamlined console on his back was still full, and monitoring the temperature inside his suit. He had told Costas to focus, but he was the one who needed to focus more, and Costas knew it. The intercom had failed to work inside the shaft, and when he had shut his visor he had been sealed off completely. He realised how much he had come to rely on Costas beside him, his companion for more than twenty years on countless dives into caves and mine shafts and other enclosed spaces. But this time Jack would have to confront his greatest fear on his own, his fear of being closed in, of finding no way out.

  He felt his heart pound, and his breathing quicken, and he stared down again into the water. There was nothing visible yet, nothing to confirm his hunch. All he had to go on was instinct born of years of luck and intuition. He had to summon up all of his determination and keep going down the shaft until he knew the truth. He concentrated on that objective as he looked down, feeling the belay clamp on his harness, jigging his body up and down to test his weight against the rope. As his beam played on the surface of the water, he saw something bubble up, like a ghostly exhalation from three thousand years before, a waft that made his nostrils tingle. It was a familiar odour, a recent one, but he could not pin it down.

  Costas shouted from above. ‘You smell that?’

  ‘It’s come up through the water,’ Jack yelled back. ‘Must be some kind of natural gas, methane maybe. We should use our breathing gear.’

  ‘It smells just like the Nile,’ Costas yelled back.

  Jack remembered. Of course. It was the distinctive smell of the Nile through Cairo, a river whose man-made canals had once lapped the pyramids, but which was now almost three kilometres distant. He suddenly remembered the story of the wild man who had appeared out of nowhere in the streets of Cairo in the 1890s, with hair and beard down to his chest like a holy man, showing everyone who would listen to him a Royal Engineers cap badge and a corporal’s chevrons, claiming that he had been a British soldier captured by the Mahdi; he said that he had escaped and come to Cairo with knowledge of an ancient underground city beneath the modern streets, but had become trapped there and survived for years eating scraps of ancient mummies and rats and fish from the river. Could it be true? Jack thought hard: fish from the river. Could the water below be an ancient channel from the Nile? If so, it was their way out. And it was the way to a discovery that would astonish the world.

  He shouted up the shaft. ‘Oh, by the way. My aunt Margaret has a book for you. A copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.’

  ‘I know,’ Costas bellowed down. ‘Rebecca gave it to me.’

  ‘You didn’t need to be worried, you know. About me, I mean. But I appreciate it.’

  ‘It’s what friends are for.’

  Jack looked down, dazzled by the glare. ‘I’m not so sure now, though.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, about the quest. This looks like it might be a one-way ticket.’

  ‘Come on, Jack. It can’t be as bad as that crocodile pool. That was the entrance to the underworld. This is the City of Light. And you’re about to go diving again. You love it.’

  Jack looked down, feeling his heart race with excitement. It was true. He loved it. He looked up at Costas. ‘Okay. I’m going in. Open the slab to let the light in.’

  ‘Close your visor,’ Costas boomed back. ‘It could be dazzling. Good to go?’

  ‘Good to go. See you on the other side.’

  ‘You better.’

  Jack pulled down his visor and locked it shut, and then activated the polarising filter to reduce the brightness. On the way down he had seen a series of highly polished obsidian slabs built into the wall at alternating heights, and Costas had realised that one of the narrow sunlight shafts built into the side of the pyramid was angled into the burial chamber such that the light would strike the upper panel and reflect down to the pool below. A stone cover over the first panel pivoted back to expose it, but they had decided not to experiment in case the light dazzled Jack on his way down. But now, with only a few metres to go, it was time.

  Jack heard the scraping of the stone cover being moved. Then it was as if he were staring into the flash of a camera, shocked and dazzled. The light from the sun was magnified by the panels and seemed to burn like fire at each stage down the shaft until it hit the water. The pool acted like a lens, focusing the light down on another mirror far underwater that reflected off into the unknown, in the direction of the Nile.

  Jack suddenly realised what had happened. He was seeing what Akhenaten had seen, the light of the Aten; he was bathed in it, as Akhenaten had been. He remembered all the images that had brought him here, the clues in the carvings: the extraordinary image of the pharaoh and the labyrinth of channels and tunnels, the arms of the Aten spreading over it all. Akhenaten had not just built a new capital city at Amarna beside the Nile; he had come here, to the heart of Egypt, to the pyramids of Giza, to a place that all his energy and the light from the Aten would illuminate: a place where the wisdom of the ages and the knowledge of the world would be under his aegis, where he would reign for ever as one with the Aten, as king of kings.

  There was a sudden jolt. The radiating slabs of rock above had snapped together, cutting Jack off from Costas and severing the rope. He fell, splayed out and spinning, managing to right himself so that he was falling feet first, and then he hit the water and fell far under, deep into another world, his eyes shut.

  When he opened them again, he knew that he was about to make the greatest discovery of his career, one that could change the course of history.

  He had found Akhenaten’s City of Light.

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  Author’s Note

  Menkaure and Akhenaten

  The Gordon relief expedition has always fascinated me because of my own family connection with the story, outlined below, but I also have a long-standing interest in the archaeological backdrop to this novel. I first became intrigued by the story of the brig Beatrice while researching Greek and Roman antiquities lost during shipment to Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the risk of wreck for sailing ships was high. One artefact that never made it was the sarcophagus of the fourth dynasty pharaoh Menkaure, taken in 1837 from his pyramid by the British colonel Howard Vyse and loaded on board the Beatrice at Alexandria, never to be seen again. Apart from the fictional marginal note in Hiebermeyer’s copy of Vyse’s Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 (London, 1840), the evidence for the Beatrice discussed in Chapter 1 is genuine, including her previous use in trade to Canada as revealed in Lloyd’s Register. An unpublished watercolour of her in Smyrna harbour, Turkey, painted in 1832 by Raffaello Corsini, appears on my website. The wreck and the sarcophagus remain undiscovered, though there are indications that she may have foundered close to the location off Spain of the fictional excavation in Chapter 1.

  It is not known whether Colonel Vyse had the sarcophagus of Menkaure packed full of other artefacts, and the plaque of Akhenaten discovered by Jack and Costas is fictional. Akhenaten for me is the most intriguing of all the pharaohs of Egypt, for having ‘broken the mould’ – albeit only for his lifetime – in a culture that resisted change and intellectual development for so long. His conversion to the one God, the Aten, and his likely identification as the pharaoh of the Moses story in the Old Testament, have made him the subject of extensive speculation and controversy, not least by Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism (London, 1939). The unusual physiognomy suggested in Akhenaten’s images may have set him apart as a child and caused him to be derided, just as the future emperor Claudius was to
be in Rome; it is intriguing to speculate whether this was a factor behind his rejection of the world of his upbringing. The relief carvings of him with his beautiful wife Nefertiti and their children are among the most human of all pharaonic portraits, suggesting that his revelation of the Aten swept away not only the old gods and priests but also the unhappiness that he might have experienced in his youth.

  Very little is known about the early life of Akhenaten, and the idea that he made a secret expedition to the Nubian desert to seek revelation is fictional. However, this idea is appealing on several counts: in the desert he would have been able to leave behind the gods and priests of the old religion whose existence clearly troubled him, and he may also have been visiting a place he saw as his ancestral homeland. At Buhen and Amada, two forts established in upper Nubia centuries earlier during the Middle Kingdom, inscriptions show that in year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign an expedition was sent south into Nubia, for an unknown purpose (Amada Stela CG 41806). What is certain is that two temple towns were constructed beside the Nile in upper Nubia during his reign, at Kawa and Sesebi. Both were focused on temples to the Aten, and both contained tantalising hints of the significance to Akhenaten of the southern desert: at Sesebi the finds include a unique depiction of the Aten as ‘Lord of Nubia’, and the ancient name for Kawa, Gem(pa)-aten, means ‘the Aten is discovered’.

  The possibility that the year 12 expedition may have been sent to find gold is highlighted by the discovery of evidence for gold processing at Sesebi, the basis for Hiebermeyer’s fictional discovery near Semna in Chapter 6. The Middle Kingdom forts at Semna are among the best-known Egyptian remains in Sudan, not least for their dramatic location above the Great Gate of the second cataract, now submerged as a result of the rise in the level of the Nile caused by the Aswan dam. A vivid first-hand account of Semna as it once appeared is provided by Colonel William Francis Yates in The Campaign of the Cataracts: being a Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884–5 (London, 1887): it was a ‘wild and lonely spot’, where ‘from the ruin-crowned cliff on the east bank … one sees only the serrated ridges and calcined peaks of a savage solitude’. Yates describes the archaeological remains: on the ‘wind-swept summits of steep impending cliffs . . . lie two ruined temples [sic]; the massive but crumbling walls of a fortress crowns the whole crest of the cliff on the east side’. My depiction of the geology and river topography is derived from fieldwork carried out in 1902 by Dr John Ball (Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 59.1, 1903), as well as during excavations at Semna carried out from the 1920s to the final project in the 1960s before the sites were inundated.