by Anna Butler
Hugh came out to wave us off, accompanied by all the remaining guards other than Sam. He rubbed at his chest. “I’m sorry this is holding me back. I should be going up there with you.”
“I wish you were. There’s no one I’d trust more.”
He ducked his head, grinning.
Theo gathered us all at the base of the pyramid for a final lecture before we started the ascent, while he and Whelan checked ropes and knots and other such technical things. “You’ll be tempted to pull yourselves up by your arms. You’ll tire faster if you do, and I warn you, it will hurt. Try instead to push up with your legs and use your hands for balance and security. Your legs are used to bearing your weight, and your arms aren’t.”
We all murmured our understanding.
He glanced up the pyramid and scowled. “Watch for the wind too. It will come across the plateau and has nowhere to go when it hits the pyramid, but up. I’m not too worried, as we aren’t climbing very high and the wind isn’t that strong, but it’s best to be prepared.”
Wind shear. The wind would roil and boil against the stone sides of the pyramid, buffeting we poor benighted climbers. I’d used the same principle the day before, where the wind hit the plateau sides, to regain control of the Brunel. It had been useful then. Perhaps less so, now. Well, nothing to be done about it. We had to get into the damn pyramid, by whatever means we could find.
We had no proper climbing harnesses, of course, and contented ourselves with ropes knotted around the waist. I insisted Nell was roped to one of our two most experienced climbers, who would climb alongside her, with someone going ahead with a second attached tether, an anchor rope to hold her weight if she slipped. Theo volunteered with a quite endearing eagerness, and it was no surprise he sent Whelan on ahead. Nell, cock-a-hoop at the thought of joining the search, said she would have consented to being yanked up in a basket if that had been the only possibility, and smiled pure sunshine at everyone as she set off at Theo’s side. Tatlock and I were close beneath her, Ned and George were to our left, climbing with Günter. Like Nell, he was roped to his companions, with George above them with the anchor rope. Günter’s mouth had locked tight at being treated in the same way as Nell, as if it called his masculinity into question. But with his leg injury, he had no choice but to accept the inevitable with as much grace as he could muster.
“Good luck!” Hugh called after us. I was sorry to leave him behind.
“I’ll bloody need it.” Tatlock’s gloomy mutter sounded heartfelt. He glanced up at Nell, immediately above him. “I s’pose I’m here to break her fall. This chief guard lark isn’t all beer and skittles.”
I wasn’t sympathetic. “I thought you did it for the glory.”
He sniffed. “Not for the pay, anyway. Watch where you’re putting your feet. I don’t want to explain myself to the Guv’nor if he’s suddenly short another First Heir.”
“Pfft. Watch your own great clodhoppers.” I glanced at his outsize hobnail boots. They barely squeezed onto some of the narrowest ledges, and making sure Tatlock didn’t plunge to the base of the pyramid was yet another task added to my anxious climb.
We didn’t rush it, but kept at it, steady and slow. It wasn’t a difficult ascent, but it was arduous. I was quite relieved to haul myself over the edge of the first step and onto the wide shelf, rotating my shoulders to get the ache out of them. Despite Theo’s warning, it was impossible not to use one’s arms. We’d all pay for it later, when our aching muscles gave us what for.
The roof of the first step made a wide ledge, at least a hundred feet from the edge to the wall of the second step. We stood among tussocks of wiry grass and feeble, knee-high bushy shrubs, and pretended to admire the views while we caught our breath. We were in the middle of the north face of the pyramid, looking down onto the roof of the tent. We were still almost five hundred feet below the summit, but the view of the plateau and the northern portion of the surrounding hills was impressive. Lammergeiers and hawks reigned in a sky so clear and pale a blue as to seem translucent. Even lacking the oppression of Khartoum’s hammering heat, the sun kept the winter at bay. We were all warm enough in our light jackets, and it was a pleasant place to stand and relax overused muscles. We shed our ropes with heartfelt expressions of relief, leaving Theo and Whelan to coil them into neat piles.
Günter balanced on his good leg and straightened the other, rotating his foot. If he was in pain, he hid it well. “Shall we split up and explore the shelf for doors?”
Ned glanced right and left. “That makes sense. You take Theo and Miss Lancaster, Günni, and go west. Rafe and I will take the eastern side.”
“With luck, any doors will be obvious.” Günter’s gaze up the pyramid face was almost a prayer. “I am hoping for good luck.”
“Ain’t we all,” Tatlock murmured, stumping along at my side.
We headed east along the ledge, with Ned closest to the pyramid wall since he’d be better placed than any of us to recognise a hidden door. I admired the views. Oh, not the hills. I’d already admired those. The views I had on every sidelong glance, of Ned’s profile against the dark basalt. Soul-satisfying.
Ned sighed as we walked. Not a sad sigh, you understand. The sigh of the archaeologist revelling in his work, yearning for more discoveries.
“I thought you were mad, you know, when those Greek photographs had you haring off chasing after rainbow-hued wild geese.” I waved an arm around. “Now I know you are.”
Ned laughed. “This place might as well be overrun with wild geese hunting red herrings. I haven’t seen anything yet that might be an entrance.”
We hadn’t yet reached the corner with the eastern face, when a bellow came from behind us.
“Ned! Ned! Come quick! We’ve found a way in!” Theo, yelling like a maniac to attract attention, danced in place, waving one arm around his head. “Come on!”
Ned’s smile was brighter than sunrise. He grabbed me with both hands and laughed, and then we turned and raced back the way we’d come, hurdling bushes and leaping over grass tussocks like a pair of schoolboys.
Theo met us in the middle, close to our piles of rope. “There’s a sort of outcrop of rock”—he waved a hand along the northern face towards the northwest corner—“and the door’s behind it. The blocks curve out quite imperceptibly, so it isn’t obvious until you’re right on it. Come on, they’re waiting for us. They won’t go in before you do.”
“No wonder I couldn’t see anything from below!” Ned jog-trotted along, face alight with excitement. “There may be more doors you can’t see until you’re right on them. Hell, this pyramid is unique!”
Theo was right. The blocks curved out in a long, graceful, shallow arc. At the end of the curve, where it jutted out from the main pyramid face, the door stood before us, right on the northwest corner.
Of course it faced northwest, pointing back towards distant Aegypt. Thoth had a liking for order and precision.
Nell, Günter, and Whelan waited for us, brimstones ready in their hands. Nell danced on light feet, Whelan was stoic, but Günter’s expression was one of such hearty goodwill I found myself grinning at him.
The grin didn’t last long. A door was one thing; getting inside was quite another. Our two Aegyptologists spent several minutes arguing about whether the door opened inwards or outwards—it swung on a spindle, it turned out, through 270°, so could do either, a discovery that quelled argument in favour of a delighted alliance as soon as they realised it—and quite a few more moments of manly grunting and pushing before we could creak its ancient hinges open enough for us to set it moving on the spindle. We kept it in motion by more manly effort and not a little sotto voce profanity until it opened to reveal a doorway higher than my head, broad enough for a man to walk through without turning sideways. It opened onto shadow.
“Your pyramid, Ned.” Günter gave one of those peculiarly Germanic bows, sharp and precise and with a bang of his heels. “After you.”
Ned was a picture. His smi
le could have ignited the basalt we stood upon. I dropped my hand onto his shoulder and pressed hard, all the contact I could allow myself in company. He turned to look at me, his smile sweetening, and, with a deep breath, he stepped inside.
I took a moment to tell Sam Hawkins the news over the Marconi, taking his savage “Damn!” as his way of wishing us luck. I treated Sam’s strictures with remarkable patience. “Of course I’m keeping an eye on him. And so is George. Yes, George will report in. Stop worrying.”
I let his sulphurous invective wash over me, and walked through the doorway. But for Tatlock, I was the last one inside.
The doorway opened into a chamber similar in size and shape to the one far below, where the tent was pitched. We turned on our brimstones, and the Star Map Chamber—that’s what we came to call it—sprang to life before our eyes.
The brimstones brought a constant light to a darkness thousands of years old, picking out the gleam of greens, blues, and red ochre on the walls. Thoth was everywhere, life-size, bigger than life-size, dominating the room. He watched us from every wall, his ibis head side-on to show a single eye, his red-ochre shoulders turned towards us. No marauding goddess in these paintings. Instead he was surrounded by representations of the heavens I’d seen for myself, lying in the warm sands squinting along the line of Ned’s arm and hand as he traced the constellations the ancients had known. Each image of Thoth had his head crowned with stars, reminding us he created this place to measure space and time.
How long was it since eyes had seen those paintings to wonder at the deeds of the god, or at the eye of Thoth staring back at them from beside the curving beak of his ibis’s head? And whose eyes?
Thoth chasing the God’s Eye, the Eye of Ra, to beseech her to stop her vicious campaign of destruction in the deserts. This pyramid, built smack in the place on the ibis plateau to mirror the painted bird’s eye on the wall before me. The plateau’s eye looking back to the northwest, to Aegypt. The pyramid, built for Thoth’s eyes to watch and measure the heavens.
The entire pyramid was another God’s Eye.
I followed close behind Ned, dividing my glances between his broad shoulders and the images on the walls, between his all-too-human flesh and bone, and the eye of Thoth watching us with who knew what intent. Whoever Thoth had been, I couldn’t believe it was no more than a gifted genius canonised after his death and raised to godhead by those lesser beings who came after him. I was just as chary of thinking him a god.
But I was damned sure he hadn’t been human.
At the end of the chamber, another doorway led to a corridor, a narrow darkness heading southeast, diagonally in towards the centre of the pyramid.
“Careful, now.” Ned was already a yard along the corridor and spoke over his shoulder.
“The air is good,” Günter said. “How extraordinary.”
Too often these ancient structures and underground tombs were poisonous enough to choke a man’s breath, much like the hazards faced in coal mines where the atmosphere might extinguish men’s lives with the same ease as it did the candles and caged canaries sent down to test it. But somehow this strange place pulled in fresh, untainted mountain air from outside and whisked away the old and stale.
Just as well. We were fresh out of canaries.
“The Marconis aren’t working,” George told us. “All this stone blocking the signal, I expect.”
A blow, but not unexpected. No radio waves were likely to penetrate over a hundred feet of solid stone pyramid.
The darkness shrouded us, despite the brimstones. A crow’s wing was less black than the inside of the pyramid, and a blind man would have fared better, being more used to the sort of gloom that pressed upon the eyes and doused all thought and memory of light. No glimmer anywhere, no tiny shafts worming through the blocks to capture errant sun rays as in other pyramids. Darkness lived here, in unholy union with the shadows that hovered and moved on the rims of the yellow-light circles of our brimstones, slithering down the undecorated walls to pool behind us.
In consequence, the distance we walked might not have been great, but we were as slow as a death knell.
Ned stopped so suddenly in front of me, I ran into his back. Behind me came the various bangs and scuffing noises of the rest of our group coming to a halt.
“I might be seeing things.” Ned paused. “Switch off your brimstones for a moment, everyone.”
Shadows swooped in like bats on the wing.
“I thought so.” Ned leaned back. In the concealing darkness, I rested my hand on his shoulder, and he brought his free hand up to cover it and squeeze. “There’s a light ahead.”
Nobody expended breath on pointless speculation, but neither did anyone seem eager to go on and find out more about it. Instead feet shuffled in the darkness and someone behind me coughed, the harsh sound rolling up under the roof to fall in dying echoes.
“Right.” Ned switched on his brimstone and started off.
Another fifty feet. We switched off the brimstones again, for the last time.
The corridor ended on the western wall of a long, rectangular vestibule. At its far end, another corridor headed east. More thrilling, to our left a staircase spiralled up until swallowed by shadow, begging to be explored. The light, though, spilled in through a tall wide doorway in the south wall.
Ned paused on the threshold, breathing hard. Just for a moment. Then he pulled back his shoulders and walked through the portal into the Place of Verification.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A chamber the size of a young cathedral, undecorated walls vanishing upwards to be eaten by dusky gloom, vaulted roof so high it held back those myriad rocky blocks unseen, cloaked in a stygian blackness reminiscent of the tomb. Lampstands carved in the likeness of papyrus reeds stood scattered here and there, circled by groups of the carved, backless stools so familiar from mortuary paintings. One such lamp stood beside a great golden throne. The lampstands supported clear—glass?—containers in the shape of lotus flowers, filled with glowing twists of blue vapour. A narrow table, fifty or sixty feet long, took up almost the entire length of the south side of the room, reminding me of a chemist’s workbench. It held wonders. Wonders we had no hope of understanding.
Machines, gadgets, and instruments of wood and polished glass and metals that may have been brass and bronze, but perhaps something quite unknown, shining in the lamplight with glinting, winking eyes of untarnished brassy golds and coppery reds. Propped against a carved wooden box filled with what appeared to be silver sand was a collection of tiny machines the size of children’s toys. Larger ones, the disembowelled innards of immense clockworks, with their cogs and wheels stilled and at rest, were everywhere—inert, but filled with potential, with the sense they’d spring to life at a touch. Many artefacts were wreathed in wires adorned with metal balls soldered to brass rods, made to rotate around each other. Tools, all unrecognizable to me, had been left amongst them, as if laid aside for the moment and waiting to be picked up again and put to use. Bits of papyrus lay scattered over the table, covered not in the everyday writing known as demotic, but with exquisite hieroglyphs.
And in the centre of the chamber, what had to be the centre of the entire pyramid… dear Lord.
A great square trench, a pit, each side at least twenty feet long. A waterless moat around a central stone island, bridged, one on each side, by thin, flat spans a little like gangplanks. Metal, perhaps, rather than stone. In the middle of the island, itself a perfect square, rose another narrower stone column soaring up to disappear into the shadows hiding the roof, held in the embrace of a four-sided machine—or four machines, one for each side of the column. It was difficult to be certain which.
I didn’t know what it was.
At least, I didn’t know what it did. But it wasn’t unfamiliar. I’d seen images of a model, much smaller and much simplified, but surely the same—images in the tomb at Hermopolis and in the Deliberation Chamber below us, not to mention photographs of the rusted, fused
mechanism dredged up from an ancient shipwreck lying in the silt at the bottom of the Mediterranean near the island of Antikythera.
This was Thoth’s machine. No small toy to soothe an angry goddess, but an apparatus towering above our heads, wheels moving and cogs biting into each other. It was doing something. Thoth alone knew what.
I swallowed, working my mouth to get enough moisture in it to find my voice. “Ned.”
“I see it. Antikythera.”
I circled the column. No. I still couldn’t be sure if it was one machine or four. Each side had broad similarities but distinct differences too, held within a rectangular framework joined the corners.
At the base of each face of the device, a host of polished metal cogs of all sizes from a sixpence to a cartwheel, stacked up horizontally, the way a banker stacks his sovereigns, moved against each other in a slow pavane to drive shafts and gears.
Higher up, the apparatus thrust out long limbs of more stacked cogs and wheels at odd angles, terminating in great glassy spheres chock-full of twisting vapours. Spiral gears twice the size of a man’s head turned against each other, teeth meshing, spinning the spheres on their axes, while pinion wheels running along a rack a foot wide revolved that entire section with all the lethargy of treacle over ice. When the spheres reached the edge of their frame, the rack propelling them arched over across the bronze uprights onto the next face of the column, turning through two hundred and seventy degrees to continue the spheres’ sluggish circuit. It reminded me of nothing so much as a model of a solar system, with planets orbiting their sun. Just don’t ask me which one.