Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  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.’

  Jack watched Lanowski. ‘I won’t ask.’

  ‘Geophysics. Some kind of sonar contraption. Says it can detect water as well. I haven’t seen any result from it yet, but the other stuff he’s brought has been pretty good.’

  As they reached the vehicles, there was a familiar honking and snorting sound behind them, and then a very large tongue wrapped itself around Hiebermeyer’s face, making him splutter and push it away. Jack looked round and saw a camel looming between them. Costas was on top, in full Lawrence of Arabia gear but with aviator sunglasses. He peered down at Hiebermeyer. ‘You know, camels really do seem to like you.’

  Hiebermeyer wiped his face, grumbling. ‘Aysha says I’m like a salt lick.’

  Jack looked up at Costas. ‘You seem to have overcome your aversion to camels.’

  ‘Just needed time to get my desert legs,’ Costas replied, jumping off and patting the animal affectionately on the neck. ‘Just as long as you stay away from its rear, everything is all right.’ The camel emitted a strange blubbery noise, and an indescribable smell filled the air. ‘Well, almost all right.’

  They moved away to give the camel some space, and Jack gestured over at the two women. ‘Here they come now.’ Lanowski had also spotted them, and was struggling out of his contraption. Hiebermeyer waved them towards the pyramid. ‘Come on. I’ll talk
as we walk.’

  ‘Akhenaten,’ Costas said, struggling to keep up. ‘Why we’re here.’

  ‘Right,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘First we find that Akhenaten inscription at Troy about the frontier defences, mentioning Semna. Then you and Jack finally decide to find the sarcophagus of Menkaure. High time, if you ask me. On the back of that, I decide it’s time to have a look at this pyramid again. Meanwhile Aysha begins excavating at Semna, and we start to find evidence of Akhenaten’s expeditions into the Nubian desert. I never thought there would be any connection between Akhenaten and the pyramids. But I should have known better. He was a consolidator, not an expander. He wanted not to export his vision like the jihadists, but to bring it back to the Egyptian people. And not to the Egyptian royal capital where he had grown up – Thebes, a place he had left in disgust, with its priests and falsehoods – but to an older, purer place, where the Aten could be seen every day shining through the forms that had been created by his ancestors, that would take on a new meaning under his control. To the pyramids at Giza.’

  Costas was almost running alongside him to keep up. ‘But before Jack found that plaque from the Akhenaten depiction with the pyramids on it, what gave you the connection with this place?’

  ‘It’s what I always tell my students. It’s what I told Aysha when she first came to me. Always go back to the original texts. And I don’t mean the ancient texts. I mean the books and manuscripts of the first European explorers in Egypt, since the eighteenth century. A huge amount has been lost since then: wall paintings destroyed after tombs were opened and exposed to the elements, inscriptions hacked away and looted. The journals of the first archaeologists are a unique resource, often recorded in meticulous detail.’

  Jack peered at him. ‘Colonel Vyse?’

  Hiebermeyer beamed, stopped, took three worn volumes out of the satchel he was carrying and laid them side by side on the sand. ‘Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837.’

  ‘The book that contained the clue to the sarcophagus of Menkaure,’ Costas said.

  Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. ‘Jack and I dreamed of discovering that sarcophagus when we were at boarding school. It was something we could both be passionate about, me as a budding Egyptologist, Jack as a diver. And then our Cambridge tutor Professor Dillen gave me this first edition of Vyse’s work as a graduation present. I pored over every word of it, but then set it aside and only returned to it earlier this year when Jack told me about that tantalising note about the wreck of the Beatrice slipped into the edition of the book he had been shown in England. I knew that something about those books had been niggling at me since I’d started to think about Akhenaten again at Troy, and as soon as I opened them I realised what it was. Vyse hadn’t just investigated the pyramids at Giza. He’d travelled extensively up the Nile as far as the great temples at Abu Simbel, and much of the first volume is taken up with an account of his discoveries. What I’d completely forgotten was that he went to Amarna.’

  ‘Akhenaten’s new capital,’ Costas murmured.

  Hiebermeyer opened one of the volumes to a bookmarked page. ‘At that date Amarna was scarcely known. After Napoleon had invaded Egypt, his Corps de Savants visited the site in 1799, and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson first surveyed it in 1824. But Vyse gives us a unique record of tomb inscriptions he found there several years later. That was what had been niggling at me. When I read it again, I could barely contain my excitement.’

  ‘Spill it, Maurice,’ Costas said.

  Hiebermeyer pushed his glasses up his nose and cleared his throat. ‘Vyse tells us that the interior consisted of three small apartments, and appeared to have been covered with paintings, by then almost entirely defaced.’ He put a finger on a section of text and read it out. ‘“Processions of prisoners of a red complexion, but with the features of Negroes, were amongst the figures that could be made out; also a solar disc with rays, like that over the entrance, and beneath it the figures of a king, and of a queen dressed in high caps; the whole being surrounded with various hieroglyphic inscriptions.”’

  ‘That sounds very like the imagery in the crocodile temple,’ Jack said.

  ‘Wait for what comes next,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘“Over the door of this tomb, a solar disc was inscribed, from which rays with hands at their extremities extended as from a common centre; two figures, one of them apparently that of a king, were represented as worshippers in a kneeling position; and on each side hieroglyphics, and circles, or discs were introduced.”’ He pointed to a small drawing that Vyse had included in the text, showing the image he had just described. ‘Take a look at this. The lower part of that depiction, below the kneeling worshippers, forms a truncated pyramid, like a large altar. But if you extend the sides upwards, they reach the Aten symbol and you have a complete pyramid. Seeing that, I worked through all of the known pyramids of Egypt. By Akhenaten’s day, many of the lesser pyramids would already have been crumbling, and were a long way from the main administrative centres. So it had to be one of the Giza pyramids; it would have been entirely consistent for Akhenaten to choose one of them to celebrate his new god, in the centre of the most sacred ancient site in Egypt. And I doubted whether it would have been one of the two larger ones, which were still associated with the cult of Khufru and his son and would have been far more difficult to modify to Akhenaten’s purpose. So it had to be the pyramid of Menkaure.’

  ‘And that was confirmed for you when we found that slab packed inside the sarcophagus showing Akhenaten,’ Jack said. ‘Something that Vyse may well have taken from inside the burial chamber too, from a wall sculpture that has since disappeared.’

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t my only clue.’ Hiebermeyer bounded to the edge of the pyramid, and put a hand on one of the huge slabs of stone cladding the lower courses of the structure. ‘You see these?’ he said. ‘Granite, brought all the way from Aswan near the border with Sudan. Each slab weighs at least thirty tons. An incredible feat of transport, bringing them all the way downriver and then dragging them across the desert to this place, more than four and a half thousand years ago.’

  ‘But the cladding was left incomplete,’ Costas said.

  ‘The standard view is that the cladding was abandoned at Menkaure’s death, but the exterior was then completed in mud brick before the pyramid was dedicated to his father.’

  Jack peered at Hiebermeyer. ‘I know that look. You have another theory?’

  Hiebermeyer stared at him. ‘Where else is there granite in this pyramid?’

  Jack paused. ‘If I remember correctly, the core of the pyramid is built of local limestone quarried here on the plateau, except for the cladding and some stone around the burial chamber, which is also Aswan granite.’

  Hiebermeyer slapped his leg in excitement. ‘Exactly. And that’s where I made my great discovery. While you two and Sofia were in your submersible finding the sarcophagus that once lay inside the pyramid, I was taking Little Joey for a sniff around the antechamber. You’ll be astonished at what I found, Jack. Astonished.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘Jacob, can we see the 3-D isometric view?’

  Lanowski pulled an iPad from his bag, tapped it and handed it to Hiebermeyer, who pointed at the image on the screen as they crowded around. ‘Here you see the entire known complex inside the pyramid; known, that is, until today,’ he said with a glint in his eye. ‘Up here in the entrance shaft you can see the triple portcullis, the three massive granite slabs placed there as deterrents to tomb robbers at the time when the chamber was sealed up with Menkaure’s mummy inside. Now look at this.’ He tapped an icon and another image appeared, a close-up photograph of a slab of stone. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  Costas peered closely. ‘Well, it’s granite. Red granite from southern Egypt. And it’s got hieroglyphs on it. That’s the crocodile, isn’t it? We’ve seen that before. It means pharaoh.’

  ‘Good. We’ll make an Egypt
ologist of you yet. And the others?’

  Jack stared at them. ‘That’s the cartouche of Akhenaten.’

  Hiebermeyer beamed at him. ‘And guess where Little Joey found that? She extended her miniature camera into a crack behind one of the portcullis slabs.’

  ‘Good God,’ murmured Jack. ‘That cartouche is a standard royal quarry mark, isn’t it? That means this was quarried at the time of Akhenaten.’

  ‘It means that the granite slabs around the interior of the chamber don’t all date to the time of Menkaure after all. It means that over twelve hundred years later, the pharaoh Akhenaten ordered those chambers to be sealed like Fort Knox, using the hardest stone available in Egypt and building a portcullis that would have taken a team of masons months to chisel their way through.’

  ‘Do you think this pyramid was reused, that it was Akhenaten’s tomb?’ Jack said incredulously. ‘I thought they’d pinned that down to the Valley of the Kings.’

  ‘That’s only ever been guesswork,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘And I think this was more than just a tomb. Jacob, your results?’

  Lanowski cleared his throat. ‘I brought our deep-penetration radar here, the one we used to find your crocodile temple in the Sudan. The Giza plateau has been criss-crossed numerous times by geophysics teams, but nobody’s used equipment with the penetration depth of ours. A run over the desert immediately to the east of the pyramid, in the direction of the Nile, revealed the usual mass of tombs and quarries in the bedrock beneath the sand. But underneath all that was the faint shadow of something else, at about the level of the river. It looked like large rectilinear structures, rock-cut channels or canals.’

  Hiebermeyer glanced at Jack. ‘Colonel Vyse noted that in many places the ground seemed hollow. And all he did was bang it with a metal rod. See what I mean? The clues were there in his book, in the first accounts of this place. But Lanowski’s data were incredible. Our IT people at the Institute at Alexandria are refining it now, to make the image clearer. It looked like a ghostly outline of part of the image we’ve already seen several times, the one that Akhenaten is shown inspecting in the slab from the sarcophagus you saw underwater, and the maze-like image drawn in Gordon’s diary from the slab in the wreck of the Abbas.’