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 Egyptologist 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 broug
ht 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.’
‘A mortuary complex?’ Jack said. ‘A city of the dead?’
‘That’s what I’d have guessed,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘The ultimate preparation for the afterlife, like King Tut’s tomb but on a grand scale, a labyrinth of chambers under the pyramids. But I think it was more than that. I think Akhenaten envisaged the site of the pyramids as the main temple to the Aten. I think this underground place wasn’t shrouded in darkness like a lost tomb. I don’t think this was a city of the dead. I think this was a city of the living. A city of light.’
‘How do we get to it?’ Costas asked.
‘Do you remember the image of the smaller of the three pyramids on Corporal Jones’ plaque? It showed a line descending from the centre of the pyramid into the ground. As soon as Jack sent me that image from his aunt’s house, I was back here like a shot. I realised what something else I’d discovered while I was looking at those granite cartouches was all about. Or rather, something else that Little Joey discovered.’ He pointed to the tent set up beside the parked vehicles. ‘Follow me.’ He led them over, glanced at his watch, and then scanned the plateau in the direction of Cairo to the east. Jack knew that he was looking out for the telltale pall of dust from an approaching vehicle; they needed it to be their IMU equipment arriving from Alexandria and not a security convoy from the Egyptian authorities.
Hiebermeyer ducked inside the tent and Jack followed, the others coming behind. He gestured towards a laptop open on a table surrounded by a jumble of wiring and control panels. The screen showed a frozen image of an interior space, with a dark cylindrical shape in the background and a metallic articulated arm in front. Costas leaned forward, staring. ‘That’s Little Joey!’ he exclaimed.
Lanowski beamed at Costas. ‘I stripped her down so that she could get into the really narrow spaces. The way you’d configured her, she wasn’t going anywhere we wanted.’
Costas turned his head slowly and stared at him. ‘You did what?’
Lanowski beamed at him again. ‘This is a previously unknown passageway. I found it using the echo-sounder, and then we unblocked it and sent in the robot.’
‘It’s a shaft that lets in sunlight to the antechamber,’ Hiebermeyer added, his voice tinged with excitement. ‘It was when I saw the intensity of the beam and its direction that I realised we were on to something new. It shone down on to a slab of granite on the floor, one that Vyse seems to have left undisturbed, distracted perhaps by the discovery of the sarcophagus chamber. Little Joey triggered something and the slab slid aside. It’s like a well, with perfectly smooth sides, and the beam of light reflected off a polished surface and then far down into the depths. At the bottom is water, Jack. Water. That’s why you’re here. I believe that whatever lies below us was not only lit up by the light of the Aten, the beam of the sun streaming through the temple, but was also a place of underground canals linked to the Nile and therefore to the Nile’s source, the place in the desert far to the south that Akhenaten saw as the birthplace of the sun god.’
‘We’ll need climbing gear for that shaft,’ Costas murmured.
‘We’ve set up a wooden frame with a fixed belay rope to allow a descent. If you can get down there with diving equipment, we can see what lies at the bottom.’
Jack stared at the screen, his mind racing. ‘What about Little Joey? She can operate underwater, can’t she?’
Hiebermeyer coughed. ‘We’ve had a slight hitch.’
Costas reached over and wiggled the control handle. The image on the screen remained frozen. He narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘You’ve got her stuck, haven’t you?’
Lanowski opened his arms. ‘If I hadn’t streamlined her, she’d never have got into that passageway and we wouldn’t be here.’
‘And she’d never have got jammed.’ Costas stared at the jumble of cable around the computer. ‘I knew I should never have trusted anyone else with my toys. It’s going to take me a while to sort this out. The first thing is to get inside and try to free her physically.’
‘No time for that now,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘I’m expecting a visit from the Egyptian security chief any time. As far as they’re concerned, we’re just doing a visual evaluation of the new passageway. I need to get you and Jack into that pyramid with your equipment before they arrive.’
‘How did you get the security people to keep their distance until now?’ Jack asked.
‘I told them that Little Joey found a keg of gunpowder rammed into a crack above the entrance to the antechamber.’
‘Gunpowder?’ Costas said incredulously. He pointed at the cylindrical shape visible on the screen. ‘Is that what that is?’
‘It’s covered in black dust, the exuviae of insects and bats,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘But the wood of the barrel’s perfectly preserved.’
‘Standard early-nineteenth-century excavation technique,’ Jack said. ‘That’s how Vyse explored the interior of the pyramids. He blew his way through them.’
Costas gestured at the vertical gash up the north side of the pyramid, and then at the fragmentary remains of blocks tumbled below on the desert floor. ‘Looks like someone had a good go at it there.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘You’re right, but not using gunpowder. That was the sultan Saladin’s son in the twelfth century, at the time of the crusades. He ordered the pyramids to be destroyed, but this was as far as they got before giving up.’
‘Why destroy the pyramids?’ Costas asked.
‘Same reason the Taliban ordered the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘Saladin’s son decided that the pyramids were against Islam. There’s been a threat from extremist groups in Egypt to carry on where he left off. The Egyptian government are taking it seriously.’
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.’
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