PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  So that was his next book. That was why he had come to Egypt. It had nothing to do with his mother’s advocacy of all things mystic, or the Gestalt notion that he must put her and her shapeless philosophy of life behind him as a whole. Stone maps. An excuse for a book. Funded by his publisher. Why not?

  Now, less than a week after his arrival at Cairo International, he was sitting in his room at the Mena House Oberoi, watching the sun set on the Pyramids of Giza and

  second-guessing this reckless thing he was about to do. Because at one a.m. he was going to meet three decidedly shady Arabs from the black market of Cairo’s antiquities underworld and possibly forge his way into an unknown passage on the south face of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

  Already he had made a trial run, after bribing guards, a clandestine climb up the stepped stone courses on the less conspicuous side nearly to the top or rather to the truncation, since the top-stone had never been seated on the 4,500 year-old structure. Despite the loose debris and numerous footholds that shortened the reach from one course to the next, it had been an arduous ascent. He had reached that height scraped, bruised and stiff. And now he was going to do it again.

  There were something like two and a half million stone blocks in the pyramid, and you couldn’t slide a piece of paper between any of the exposed ones, but this one the precise location marked on the stele was fitted straighter and possibly smoother, if he could trust the laser pointer with which he had examined the seams. Aware that the known entrance lower down on the north face had been a hinged stone, he would be looking for a similar trigger or balance mechanism when he returned with help. The blocks were smaller the higher you went on the pyramid, but the one in question was even small for the upper courses. Small enough, he decided, that it might actually be pulled or pushed by a handful of men. Never mind that the Great Pyramid was held to have no more secrets. He hadn’t come all the way to Egypt with an explicit map just to take archaeology’s word for it.

  Hence, he had enlisted an Arab mafia, which was easy enough to do. You merely expressed interest in going beyond the monotony of a guided tour and Alakazam! bearded men in successively shabbier robes led you to one phony site after another on the Giza plateau. They had shown him a mastaba that held an unnamed pharaoh, and another part of the necropolis complete with a curse. He had a stele, he had told them, something of interest if he could find the right person to help him interpret it. By evening he had engaged the services of two streetwise Sunnis and a Bedouin, and the next morning he had hired a Nubian bodyguard to protect him in turn from the first three. The bodyguard had one of his Garmin Rino 2-way radios with global-positioning capability, purchased a year ago for travel in the anti-American Mideast. He made it clear that he had no permit, no government papers, and with a straight face he had accepted the assurances of his nocturnal associates that they would take care of all bribes and considerations necessary to the quest. There would be no witnesses, the Bedouin said. Which was why, after putting the Peruvian stone map in a briefcase and leaving it in the Mena House hotel safe, he set off on foot up Pyramids Road in the dark at exactly 12:40 a.m.

  ***

  They were waiting for him, the Nubian bodyguard sitting on his haunches in the sand thirty feet away from the three Arabs. He had seen only the Sunnis’ Pajero parked on the other side, and he wondered how the Nubian had arrived.

  It was a situation of his own making, but he liked it less and less. No official blessing, no tether, a plethora of unknowns, and the Arabs he had hired seemed only to understand English when it suited them. They flanked him when he approached, casting darting looks at each other in the moonlight. He pointed the destination, and the Bedouin led.

  The scuff of his shoes amid the silent passage of four other men made him

  self-conscious, but then the exertion of the climb took over, and he was caught up again in the majesty of this lone survivor of the Seven Wonders of the World. A tomb, a vehicle for eternity. When you gazed up from the base with the cosmic night for a backdrop, you saw a jumbled stone road to the stars.

  He tried to visualize the pyramid’s interior as he moved. Where was the King’s Chamber? Where were the incomplete airshafts (if airshafts they were) from the Queen’s Chamber? Having a sense of where things were would be critical if he got inside. If. He knew the story of the Arab caliph Al Mamun who had first penetrated the pyramid in modern times. The unbreached casing stones had still been on the pyramid then, the north entrance still undiscovered. Around 820 A.D., Al Mamun heated the limestone, poured cold vinegar over it, and used a battering ram to force an entrance. No such options for Lane Andersen. He was entirely dependent on a single clue and his studied orientation to the discoveries of history’s Al Mamuns. But the higher he climbed in the company of his unholy trio plus one, the less sure he was of anything. He couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and he couldn’t see the pyramid for the stones.

  The climb by the Bedouin’s chosen route went much more quickly than his preliminary solo effort had, however. High up on Khufu’s tomb, Lane zeroed in on the spot he had previously identified. Again the Arabs flanked him on the narrow course, and the Nubian stood a step further to his left. Kneeling, he took out a cheap lighter he had purchased and ran a flame slowly up and down the seams of the block. There was no wavering. But then, he really hadn’t expected to pick up a draft from so tight a fit.

  With a glance, he ordered, “Push.” Doubtful eyes lingered on him. They were biding their time, he realized. If the stele meant anything, fine, and if it didn’t, he was still a plum waiting to be picked for whatever they could squeeze out of him.

  He put his shoulder to the stone and sour sweat moved alongside. They braced, grunted, gave up. He turned on his flashlight and examined the seam.

  “Limestone,” he said pointlessly.

  No one else spoke. Blocks were loose, blocks had fallen, blocks moved, cracked, flaked what was so absurd about this one yielding? He moved into it again. The grunts were louder this time, and either there was movement or it was the compression of flesh against an immovable object. Again, the flashlight.

  He wiped his finger through the powder that lay at the bottom corners of the stone. Held it up.

  No one was impressed. Five men against a limestone block of no great size, they may have rocked the thing ever so slightly. Nevertheless, they put muscle and sinew into a third effort, and this time there was a grating sound, fragments, a discolored line where the seams had backed off. Lane didn’t have to speak. They all saw. The next push produced a solid rumble and momentum that left their hands.

  Open Sesame!

  The limestone block moved four inches, dropped slightly, and slid to a stop less than three feet from its original position.

  What greeted their sense of smell was the mustiness of five millennia, and what appeared to them was a square shaft big enough for a trim person to slip through into absolute blackness beyond. The Egyptians had expected nothing at all, and Lane had expected to disprove an artifact that seemed now to substantiate his mother’s illusory life. But, of course, it was all man-made. Nothing magical here, nothing to overturn the Cartesian universe. Nary a stench, nor an earthquake, nor a supernatural animal coming out of tunnels in Sacsayhuaman an ocean away, as his mother had believed. Sensational, though. No doubt about that. What a find! This was going to make his next book, produce some filthy lucre. And the incredible miniaturization on the raised glyph that was going to lead to major revisions and theorizing as well. He had to admit, he had been wrong about the fraud business. The stele was a legitimate map with stunning implications, considering where it had been found.

  “Well, it’s not an airshaft,” he said, probing with his flashlight beam. The steps revealed were as crude as speed bumps, at least thirty or forty of them angling sharply away into nothingness. With a pointed look at his bodyguard, he thumbed the yellow Garmin sticking up from his breast pocket. “Everyone wait till I get back,” he directed. Wriggling through the opening, he had
a feeling it was the last order he would give.

  He had sensed it before: frozen time, the sterile muteness of undisturbed stone, a vapid chill that sucked at the bones. And so he knew that whatever awaited him at the bottom had been waiting since the limestone block rolled shut. He was the first to enter this passage in 4,500 years.

  At the fifth step he crouched to get his bearings: south face, somewhat east of the pyramid’s center. One of the vents from the King’s Chamber should be close by. The channel was distinct from the other passages, claustrophobically narrow but a little taller and the angle steeper than the twenty-six degrees of the passageways in the rest of the pyramid. It forced him to lean back as he continued down, free hand out for balance.

  Yard by yard the beam of the flashlight recorded black exudations on limestone and, in one stratum, an odd pattern of crusted salt on the left wall such as archaeologists had found in the fifth ceiling chamber above the main burial room. He was probably past the burial room, passing the Grand Gallery, in fact, which meant he must be very close to intersecting a known passage. But the walls showed no sign of a connecting link or a granite plug such as blocked other junctures, so why weren’t the steps turning to avoid it?

  It was beginning to dawn on him that the walls were unlike the rest of the pyramid. Not even the hastily carved well shaft that plunged down through a grotto to two subterranean chambers was this rugged, or the pit itself in the bottom of the so-called “upside down room” some six hundred feet below the apex. The shaft he had entered was too high and too rough to be a part of the system; it was more like the forced entry of the caliph Al Mamun’s on the north face. And he noticed now that the nameless ichor that appeared to be seeping through crooked seams was intermingled with scorch marks. That threw him for a moment until he remembered that Al Mamun had used fire and cold vinegar to shatter stone blocks. Whatever had been done here was similar but more effective.

  So who had carved this curious passage that plummeted unrelentingly or should he say ascended? Because to his untrained eye it looked like the strike angle of the chisel marks was upward. The sheering force was all coming toward him. And if that was true, then the passageway hadn’t penetrated into the pyramid. It had thrust its way out.

  Chilling. Easy for a tingle of apprehension to happen when you were standing in a forbidden place, unsanctioned, unwelcomed by dead denizens of a disturbed tomb, and with unsavory hired henchmen waiting at the end of your lifeline. He tried to rescue himself from growing unease with a new theory:

  The passageway had been created in secret not long after the pyramid was built and looted. Hence, it was an inside job. The unsophisticated and less detectable entrance high up had probably been finished at night and its casing stone hinged. Things were then brought in. Things that would fit. Treasure would fit. And there must be something kind of sensational at the bottom, like a royal corpse. Not a perfect explanation. How had they gotten rid of the debris, for instance? He would have to work that out when he wrote the book.

  At this point he must be below the Queen’s Chamber, he thought. Could a pharaoh truly be buried at the end of this descent say, Khufu himself asleep in eternity, moved there by priestly subterfuge after the original looting had taken place? The dizzying steps dropped away into darkness, past where the grotto must have been at the base of the pyramid, past even the lesser and greater subterranean chambers and the so-called “bottomless pit.” Lane Andersen, modern mortal, sidled down steps last tread by ancients, leading with his right foot, catching up with his left, legs shaking with fatigue, fingers feathering the crusted wall until they were tender with abrasions. By now he suspected that he was going down the “Up” escalator. A deep foreboding arose. What the hell was down there?

  Revised theory: the passageway had gone in two directions from some breakout point in the vicinity of the Grand Gallery. They had tunneled in two directions.

  But the chipping on the walls said otherwise. It was all ascending. Theory canceled.

  And another thing. He had traveled too far to still be within the realm he sought to penetrate. The angled shaft was leveling into a passageway that stretched as far as the flashlight beam carried. And that forced him to accept a disquieting fact: the Great Pyramid of Giza was no longer above him.

  7

  He knew he should be thrilled. That would be rational. A stele from Peru was connected with the pyramids of Egypt at an undreamed of depth beneath all other excavations at Giza, and though of course it had nothing whatever to do with forces beyond man, he was on the verge of something monumental. So he should be thrilled. But what he felt was a dryness in his throat, an icy knot in his gut.

  His pocket compass deep within the earth said he was heading south, and that should have been further into the Western Desert, but the air was spore rich and dank. Very un-desert-like. And the seams of blocks had disappeared when he had passed through the base of the pyramid, yielding to unquarried limestone that bore a sooty film. Hermetic silence no longer pressed in on him. The tunnel throbbed with something maddeningly close to revealing itself in a perceptual clue. His senses flowed vainly after it like a scanner in search of a stronger signal.

  Theory three: the Great Pyramid of Giza had been built on an older site, and the pharaohs must have known. In this view, the whole plateau of Sphinx and three greater pyramids and eight lesser ones, the mastabas and necropolis and mortuary temples and boat pits, were not strictly speaking a fresh subdivision. They were urban renewal. Because before the Old Kingdom, before the dynasties, the climate in this part of Egypt had been different. That much was known fact. The climate had been different, and then the desert came. Lane Andersen found it irresistible to believe that he was standing at the bottom of a cultural footprint at least 8,000 years old.

  If there was any doubt, it was dispelled when he made the next discovery. Misgivings and feverish excitement churned together when he saw literally the writing on the wall. It looked nothing like hieroglyphics. The wedge-shaped gouges vaguely resembled cuneiform but were separated by raised dots not unlike braille. Sumerians, Akkadians, Asyrrians, Babylonians who had writing like this? Dazed, he realized that even his wildest estimates of antiquity were being exceeded.

  And then the pending sensory clue he hadn’t been able to pick up glinted into being. He saw faint tracers that almost relieved the blackness, blotches that floated like afterghosts of something not quite formed. From perhaps thirty feet away it came together again with sudden force as a green laser beam shot straight into his eyes. He moved his flashlight and the origin of the green ray flickered, betraying a reflection. Cautiously he reeled in the source, walking steadily forward until he stood before three triangles of viridescent quartz set flat in the rough wall.

  The notion that they represented the Giza pyramids came and went in the same instant. They were not correctly arranged. He struggled to imagine it as a stylized image and came up with a triangular face inverted below triangular ears. The glare of his flashlight abated as he turned slightly. Then he drew back in astonishment. It was a face. A very real and vividly feral animal head appeared in the translucent depths of the quartz: a jackal.

  He stared, unable to comprehend. DisneyWorld did things like this. Holographic plastic rings that came out of Cracker Jack boxes gave you embedded animal faces. No ancient civilization could have produced it. He struggled for context any context until necessity became the mother of invention and a desperate answer formed. Nature encased live insects in amber, and this was a similar anomaly done with an animal somehow. Clever artisans had made a lucky find, which they had ground and polished into stylized triangles. He reached out and the open eyes of the animal seemed to follow his fingers over the translucent material. Phenomenal.

  Moreover it had to be a prototype of the jackal-headed god Anubis. Anubis,

  jackal-of-all-trades having to do with death. The styling was almost the same. No hypothesis could be too flamboyant, given the finds he was making, he thought jubilantly. Maybe the pyr
amids had even been suggested by such triangles, and that was why the pharaohs had built on this site. Later, he would work it out later: the jackal culture that birthed antiquity. Lane Andersen, author of 13 Myths that Shape the World, would make it fourteen in the follow-up. And just then, as he passed the flashlight beam from left to right across the jackal’s deathless stare, the white light in his hand flickered a sickly yellow and went out.

  He shook the device in vain. New two days ago from a merchant in Cairo, it shouldn’t have happened. Unscrewing the lens cap he reversed the batteries by feel, screwed the cap back on. Click, click. Bad day at black rock. The flashlight didn’t rattle the same, though. Had something dropped out of the bulb housing? He felt around his feet.

  Shit.

  He wished he were writing The 14th Myth right now, hunkered down in front of his computer screen back at good ol’ Willmont College rah, rah. Make that Amen-Ra, Ra. Lord, it was dark. Lord. Careful with the royal titles down here. He took three solid breaths and reminded himself that this was an acid test for a rational man.

  But he should not have turned around while feeling on the floor of the tunnel, because now he was no longer one hundred percent sure which direction he was facing. He groped for the wall, extended, groped, extended. Putting his feet together, he turned ninety degrees to the right, stuck out his arm, took three steps. Took another five. Ten. “Hey!” he shouted, intent on the acoustics.

  Someone should do a study some time of the differences between echoes in a tunnel and echoes in a cavern, because if he didn’t know better he would swear he was in the latter. A big, big cavern.

  Fifteen steps this time. About face . . . forward . . . march. Arm out. Heil, wall! But there was no wall. Just the fifteen steps before the icy knot was back in his gut and nausea was hogging all the air. And he was pissed off, too. Because he could imagine his mother telling him to trust and have faith and go with the flow and all that limp, ineffectual stuff that had gotten her nowhere and left him abandoned as a child until he had learned to shake off the mumbo-jumbo and use his brains. In one of their last arguments she had said, “A benevolent force is in control of the universe, so no matter how bad things seem, it must somehow be all right when we get to our ultimate destination,” and he had said, “Didn’t Judy Garland sing that?”