The Pyramid Prophecy

by Caroline Vermalle

  After finally reaching his destination, Moswen opened the gilt-painted doors. He gasped.

  Never before had he seen the room so tightly packed. Cameras on tripods lined each side of the seating area. Every seat was occupied, and large numbers of journalists were sitting on the floor leaning against the walls. The logos stuck to the cameras boasted of all the big international media outlets. Some of the spectators turned to Moswen, who suddenly saw himself as they must have seen him: disheveled and, in its wake, the stale smell of sweat and fear.

  But he quickly forgot them: Dr. Al-Shamy, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), director of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo and premier archeologist in the country, had stepped onto the podium.

  An image of a mummy appeared on the huge screen. A murmur of admiration ran through the room. Then silence settled.

  Al-Shamy, a large man of indeterminate age, bent over the pulpit. His hair was jet black, underlined by fine grey lines at the temples and all of it much too thick to be real. The black shirt and blue jeans may have seemed too informal for the gravity of the occasion, but together with tinted glasses which hid the hollowness of his features, were carefully designed to disguise the passage of years. This was a man who had learned the hard way that perception was everything.

  The archeologist adjusted his piercing gaze and began to speak in his characteristic nasal monotone.

  “For ninety years, since Howard Carter first brought to light the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, there has been a tradition within media circles of insisting on claiming that even the slightest find associated with Pharaonic Egypt is ‘the biggest discovery since Tutankhamen'. Throughout my career as a guardian of the treasures of King Tut and as a representative of Egyptian archaeology, I have personally never used this phrase, even though many of you have tried to force me into it.”

  Discrete and knowing chuckles rippled through the room.

  “But today,” Al-Shamy continued gravely, “with the discovery of Queen Nefertiti and the seventy-three items associated with her tomb, I give you, ladies and gentlemen of the press, after a century of waiting, the soundbite you've been waiting for. Yes, I can confirm that this is, indeed, the greatest discovery since Tutankhamen.”

  Journalists applauded as Al-Shamy, looking even more severe than usual, posed for the photographers in front of the large picture of Nefertiti.

  Moswen squinted as the camera flashes caused a new wave of nausea and forced him to hesitate. His head throbbed as he searched in vain for a solution. How was he supposed to talk to Al-Shamy in front of all these journalists? And what if one of the media overheard what he had to say to his boss? Before he could find the answers to his questions, the stern voice of Al-Shamy rang out once again from beneath the gilded moldings.

  “Before I share with you the treasures that this discovery has brought to light, I want to talk a little about Nefertiti. We often forget that the epoch in which she lived, called the Eighteenth Dynasty, was a period marked by profound revolution. The pharaoh Akhenaten, her husband, had abandoned the religion of the time and established a new order. This would have impacted all levels of Egyptian life and met with strong resistance from the people and the powers that reigned. The country was also experiencing major epidemics of influenza and plague, which weakened it further. When I look at the history of Egypt in the time of Akhenaten, I can’t help but see similarities with the upheavals that our country endures today. And yet, more than three thousand years later, do we remember Akhenaten’s reign as one of chaos? No. Instead, we recall it as one that gave birth to such excellence that it is still shines today. But most importantly, we remember the serene grace of Nefertiti.”

  He cleared his throat and continued to speak.

  “Nefertiti is the symbol of our resilience and of our culture. From schoolchildren forming their identity as citizens, to men and women who build the Egypt of tomorrow from the debris of Tahrir Square, right through to the archeologists who work day and night to safeguard our heritage: all Egyptians recognize Nefertiti as their queen.”

  He paused and stared at his audience like a judge staring down the accused.

  “Nefertiti represents eternal Egypt,” he continued, hammering his words onto the ears of his listeners. “And yet she will never return to Egypt.”

  A journalist shouted: “Is it true the mummy is cursed?”

  Al-Shamy’s dark, unforgiving stare zeroed in on the corner of the room where the unwelcome question had erupted. He said nothing, letting silence express the magnitude of his contempt for both the rumor and the press corps. The reporter cowered in his seat.

  As the entire Champollion Room waited in baited breath, Moswen slowly approached the podium.

  11

  A few hours earlier

  * * *

  Florence sighed with frustration.

  It was a pain to be sitting here, and the impressive view of the three pyramids of Giza was no compensation at all. She was hot and her fluorescent tank top stuck to her curves. It was six in the evening, and yet she was sure that she could feel the sting of sunburn on the white tattooed skin of her shoulders.

  The cameraman was dozing against his tripod. The sound recordist was grumbling because he couldn’t get his caffeine fix. They had rushed dinner to be here on time, but now the guide was late.

  The night shoot for BBC Television was not starting out well at all.

  And to think that at that very moment, Florence could have been sipping iced tea surrounded by the cold marble of the Four Seasons Hotel lobby. Her mind turned again to Andrew, that moron. But that only made her temper worse.

  Florence Mornay had pink hair, red fuchsia lips regardless of the season or reason, a sharp tongue and gave the impression of not taking anything too seriously. Her deep vowels and perfect diction combined with a slight West Country twang suggested upper-class roots from somewhere near Cornwall, but this was so out of keeping with her numerous tattoos and prolific swearing that many thought it just a ruse.

  They were wrong.

  Her full name was Florence Ottoline Desiree Mornay-Devereux. The name Mornay-Devereux had been emblazoned upon the pages of encyclopedias thanks to the glorious deeds her ancestors had performed through the ages. Many statesmen, some intellectuals, a few knights – but none so well remembered as Vivant Mornay, a gentleman traveler, archeologist and antiques collector. His name was still mentioned more than a hundred years after his death, not because he had led a more remarkable existence than his forefathers, or left a deeper imprint in humanity’s history. But his gracious – some said convenient – contributions to the world’s top museums had earned him the honor to have one of the less visited wings of both the British Museum and the Louvre named after him.

  Charles Mornay, Florence’s father and the tenth Viscount of Falmouth, had long worked to distance himself from Vivant Mornay and his brand of mindless plundering, cultural appropriation and colonial arrogance. Charles had instead worked all his life, and in his spare time railed against the establishment from his seat in the House of Lords. He had instilled in Florence, his only daughter, a healthy respect for hard work and cultural sensitivity. He had taught her to always question the easy path presented by the good fortune of noble birth, and for that Florence was grateful.

  The family tree of her mother was just as storied and perhaps even more prestigious. So much so that it had proved too burdensome for Eloïse Devereux, the young hippie poet who, as soon as her daughter was born, chose to fly towards the freedom offered by a spiritual community in India, rather than face being caged in Falmouth Manor’s luxurious domesticity. She never returned.

  Florence, the last in the direct bloodline, gifted at birth with a famous surname, a loving father and a revenge to take on an abandonment never quite explained, desired one thing only: to make a name for herself. But despite a doctorate in archeology from the University of Oxford and a few minor screen television credits for a couple of BBC films, at
twenty-eight years of age, the prodigal daughter was decidedly a nobody.

  Until she found the Nefertiti story.

  She would never forget that stormy night in Berlin when she first heard it. She had tried hard to, though. The faceless mummy in the dark basement, the woman with a skull tattooed on her face, and that strange fever that had brought visions and long-buried secrets. If the world media found what was on record fascinating, her off-the-record conversation had to be the strangest she’d ever had. A shiver ran down her spine. She got up and paced to make the images of that night go away. Nobody had to know how she had secured the exclusive rights to a prime time television documentary – that was her secret. Hers and the tattooed woman, but she wouldn’t talk, she was sure of it. All that mattered was that Florence got her promotion and her name would forever be linked to Nefertiti. All was well, if it wasn’t for Andrew Sheets, the incompetent toad who had been assigned to co-direct the documentary with her.

  She looked at her watch again. Twenty minutes had passed and the site of Giza was practically deserted. Since the revolution, it seemed that guides outnumbered tourists. To get a filming permit had been complicated by the fact that the Supreme Council of Antiquities was in complete disarray. Staff changed every other day and at the senior levels, only Dr. Al-Shamy, the general secretary, had managed to retain his position. But, just when she had given up, Florence had received the filming permit she had been waiting for with only days to spare. As luck would have it, the slot they had been given had fallen at precisely the same time as the press conference. Andrew got the air-conned Four Seasons, she got the sweltering heat and the claustrophobia-inducing pyramid.

  The sound recordist cursed. The guide who was to accompany them into the pyramid stood only a few yards away from them, just out of earshot. He had been speaking for over a quarter of an hour with a young male tourist who looked like some kind of Ghostbuster.

  Amateur Egyptologist, Florence thought. Cairo had always been full of them.

  The guide was gesticulating wildly, and the Ghostbuster seemed to be getting increasingly angry. Finally, the young man gave up, sat down on a stone and took out a cigarette. The guide signaled to Florence and her team to follow him towards the pyramid.

  As they entered Cheops, the largest of the three pyramids in the Giza site, Florence took a deep breath. She could already feel the panic mounting within her. Millions of tons of stone suspended above her. The largest tomb in the world. Only one way out. Hell on earth.

  The pungent odor emanating from the corridors didn’t help. She had no memory of having been assaulted by the smell on her previous visit as a tourist when she was younger, and yet now it was so strong that she was on the verge of losing her early dinner.

  “Does it always stink like that?” she asked the guide.

  “It is sulfur, in the Queen's Chamber,” he replied in broken English. “But in recent days, very strong.”

  Unfortunately, the foul-smelling Queen's Chamber was precisely the room they had to film in first. The room, so named by the early archeologists to differentiate it from the King's Chamber located higher up, was at the crossroads of the axis of the pyramid. Except for its unequal paving and a gate set into a corbeled niche on one side, it comprised only of bare sandstone walls about fifteen feet long by fifteen feet wide.

  Not exactly photogenic, Florence thought.

  She asked the cameraman to use a handheld camera and to film as if the viewer was walking into the chamber. But to achieve that, he would have to go back into the corridor, an oppressive space three feet wide and only four feet high.

  Florence sat on the floor against the wall, by the tripod. She placed the monitor on her lap and connected it to the camera. As the smell threatened to overwhelm her, she said in a bored voice, “Camera. Action.”

  John, the cameraman, tried to film the Queen's Chamber from every angle, from every perspective. But ultimately there was nothing to see on the monitor screen other than bare stone walls.

  “Cut. That’s fine,” Florence said as she struggled to stand up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “It's not fine for me,” interrupted Robin, the sound recordist, as he removed his earphones. “Someone was talking in the hallway. Can you tell them to shut it?”

  Florence looked behind her, as did the crew. The passage was more than a hundred feet long and was completely straight.

  There was nobody.

  Robin adjusted his headphones again and listened, shifting the boom microphone from one side of the passage to the other.

  “Yeah, okay, that’s better,” he said sulkily. “Can we do it again?”

  “Fine, but make it quick,” Florence snapped.

  She then realized that she had not swallowed in quite some time.

  The sides of the passage were closing in on her, and she could sense a claustrophobia attack coming. She clenched her jaw and watched as John repeated his camera movements. But before Florence could say “Cut”, Robin interrupted again.

  “I swear there is an echo. If they don’t zip it, we’ll be here all night, for Christ’s sake!”

  The guide picked up his walkie-talkie and rattled off a few short sentences in Arabic.

  After listening to the response, he said, “We are the only ones inside. No-one else.”

  Robin fiddled with a few knobs on his recorder. “There is a voice, I’m not dreaming it. It sounds, like, I don’t know, someone groaning?”

  The cameraman sneered. “Cut the crap, Robin, I’m in no mood for this. I’m practically sleepwalking here. Let’s just get this wrapped, alright? Do you really need sound for this, Florence?”

  Before she could reply, Robin looked John straight in the eyes and without a word, tore off his headphones and thrust them into the cameraman’s chest. John let out a long sigh and donned the headset. All eyes were fixed on him.

  After a few seconds, he took the headset off and said rather jovially, “I don’t hear anything. Robin, you should stay off the shisha–”

  Suddenly the echo of an acute growl filled the passage.

  Florence almost jumped out of her skin. “What the hell?”

  “Sounds like it’s coming from down below,” Robin said, more nervous than smug.

  “There is no down,” the guide said. The darkness managed to hide the panic in his eyes but not in his voice. “This passage, the chamber. That's all.”

  Robin sought out the origin of the sound with his pole as if searching for buried treasure with a metal detector. Florence’s whole body was focused on the noise.

  There it was again. It sounded like it came from a child, or an animal.

  There had to be a rational explanation, but at that moment she was incapable of finding it. She noticed that the guide was wringing his hands, never taking his eyes off Robin. She caught John’s gaze and found herself making the familiar sign with her finger which he understood immediately. He pushed a few buttons on the camera.

  Secret filming mode.

  Robin was kneeling in the hallway when he suddenly exclaimed, “Shit!”

  At the bottom of the wall was a hole, the size of a fist. Robin fumbled in his pocket to find a lighter. The flame gave a pop, then danced in front of the hole. There was air coming out of the hole.

  “You must all leave now, please,” the guide said hurriedly, no longer trying to hide his panic.

  But Robin ignored him. He cupped his hands around his mouth and nose and then pressed them to the bottom of the wall. “Is someone there? Can you hear me?”

  Florence had trouble breathing, but she was checking the camera; John was still recording.

  He pushed the guide to one side and put the lens against the opening. Florence stared at the monitor, mesmerized. There was a shaft wide enough for two or three rats. The light traveled about three feet into its depth before it was lost in darkness. There was no telling how long it was.

  “No filming, no filming!” the guide screamed.

  “I'm not filming,” John lied,
“it’s just for the light!”

  The guide bit his cheek as his walkie-talkie went into over-drive. When Florence checked the small screen again, her heart stopped. She had seen a subtle change in light at the end of the tunnel.

  On the other side, something had moved.

  12

  “Mom, don’t worry, I'm perfectly safe here.”

  Max snuffed out his cigarette before throwing the butt into the small pile he had created. He sat down heavily onto one of the blocks of the Cheops pyramid, his mobile phone to his ear.

  With his shoulder-length chestnut hair, six-foot-tall toned frame, fashionable T-shirt, vintage army shoes, and not to mention his twenty-six years, it would be natural to assume that he was not the kind to give in to the impossible recommendations of his mother.

  But today, she had watched too many news reports on TV, and he loved her too much to ignore her anxiety.

  “Mom, I promise you, nothing will happen to me. Yes, I love you too. Give dad a hug too. Bye, Mom.”

  Max hung up, pressed “Redial”, and waited.

  On the horizon, the clouds of orange dust rose from the ground, squirmed and disappeared.

  The khamsin, Max thought. The wind from the Sahara, with its warm, dry breath that made men crazy and brought bad omens.

  “Hello, SCA.”

  “Good morning, ma'am,” Max said in Arabic, trying to keep the desperation from his voice.

  “My name is Max Hausmann. I am a Ph. D. student in conservation architecture at the Architectural Association in London. This morning one of your colleagues called and gave me permission to come and do an R.P.S. reading in Khufu today at six o’clock. I showed up with all my gear, but no one here seems to know anything about it, and I was not allowed in. This is the third time I call your department, but each time I get cut off. Would you please, ma’am, kindly check in your files? My name is Hausmann, H. A. U. S. M. A. N. N.”