Their hydrology was pretty advanced.
Had to be!
So what’s this got to do with the Pyramids?
Their other source of water.
Here Phibes takes a long pull on his coffee looking for, but not quite seeing the connection.
Ataturk throws him a hint. Quaternary Aquifer. Ever hear of it?
Aquifers. Yes! The Quaternary lies beneath the Pyramids. The builders tapped into it by chance when they laid the foundations. Gizeh’s water is close to the surface. It’s been trapped there for two million years.
Not wanting to show his surprise, Phibes turns the conversation around. You going with me, he asks as he bites into a macaroon. Coconut, one of his favorites.
No. I have people to see in port. We can go to Cairo when you get back.
Cairo, I know.
I’m sure you do! Just after one the next day, the flotilla eased into Alexandria’s harbor led by tugboats. It was greeted by a few shrills from the harbor whistles. A fowling cannon mounted on a rusting turret shore side rendered the salute but the charge misfired, dropping the shell into the waters just beyond the docks.
Phibes smiled at his friend, who was struggling mightily to suppress a laugh. Here they were, on the bridge of this mighty flagship (and former battle cruiser), plying the same waters that the Greeks, the Romans, and the dynastic Egypt kings sailed before them, only to be met by off‐key whistles and limp cannon fire.
A small outboard‐motor‐driven dinghy hove into view. In its prow, his chest resplendent with medals, stood the commander of this small craft, his hand raised in salute to his honored guests. It became clear from his rakishly brimmed cap that he was the official greeter ‐ that he was indeed the harbormaster ‐ of this great and ancient port.
The man was piped on board the Sultan Osman and escorted right up to the bridge by a pair of smartly dressed midshipmen. There, pulling a crumpled wad of paper from his pocket, he read the official greeting to his guests after which a midshipman brought in another tray of coffee and baklava.
The harbormaster was medium build, chunky but not pudgy. Osman, he said introducing himself with a sly smile and anticipating some play on his name, it being the same as his hosts’ warship. But none was forthcoming. Instead, Ataturk wanted to know about the harbor, about the hulks left there after the war and the mines, to say nothing of the silting? The Nile dumps thousands of tons of good black dirt into the harbor every year that it washes down from the uplands, dirt that could have been saved had the local governments lifted a finger to conserve this basic resource.
The harbormaster shrugged his shoulders and pulled another baklava from the plate. The next morning Phibes was given a lorry, fully equipped with emergency provisions, along with his personal driver, Sgt. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐, a veteran of Ataturk’s 19th Division, to make the trip to Gizeh.
You cannot be too careful when you go into the desert, he cautioned. It’s no walk in the park. Keep your landmarks in sight at all times. Distances are always more than they seem and never ever go anywhere without a water jug!
Phibes had to stifle a smile at his friend’s cautions as he and the Sergeant piled into the lorry. Ataturk caught it and both men broke out laughing.
Hurry back, he said. We’re motoring to Cairo tomorrow. Lunch at Groppi’s. Know the place?
Heard of them.
Taste, man. It’s all about the taste. Once you’ve had their tarts, nothing else will do! Really? Really! Besides, you’re too thin. Typical bachelor tired of his own cooking ‐ do you cook? ‐ and grabbing something on the way to work and back.
I get by. Sure you do. Bangers and mash. Have ‘em sent up to my quarters every now and then. We’re not all that backward, you know. Ankara’s a new capital and if you ever get stationed there you’ll feel right at home‐‐well, almost.
Generous of you!
For now, let’s get some good grub into you. Afterwards, we’ll play some poker. You do play cards, don’t you?
I do.
Good. Then Bet el Hom it is.
Bet el Hom? Home of the Mother. On School Street. Farida Sabbagh’s place. It’s her private residence so there’s no hanky panky. Farida is as straight as the day is long. The players know that which is why they keep coming back.
Who gets to cut the deck?
She does ‐ every game! What time do you leave?
Before sun up. It’s a three‐hour trip.
We’ll see.
You do that. Ataturk did a quick check of the lorry and finding what he saw to his liking, shook his friend’s hand and headed for the ship’s ladder.
Phibes and the driver piled into the lorry. Just as they were leaving, a roadster pulled up nearby. It was a smart cream‐colored Hispano with a soft top, not the same model that he drove but close.
A woman was at the wheel. Her red wide‐brim chapeau kept her face from view but what was visible behind the windshield was very fine indeed!
Kemal Ataturk ‐ a man of the highest standards! They set out at dawn, the best time to travel in this broiling landscape. Scenes of unremitting decrepitude marred the great seaport but we will not elaborate upon them out of respect for its citizenry. Phibes was glad to be gone from it so quickly thanks to their early departure.
Even at dawn, there was a lot of traffic on the roadway. Donkeys stepping along surprisingly smartly beneath the burlapped‐balls of clover on their backs. Queues of men shouldering their short hoes were filing into the rice paddies along the riverbank. There, the black dirt was the richest on the planet.
Presently the driver pulled over to check the water and oil. They’d been driving close to the river and now, from the bit of gravel they were on, you could hear the bulrushes waving in the current.
Moses! Phibes thought to himself. But then a deeper, more urgent sound impinged. A growl! Scanning the riverbank, Phibes spotted a cluster of tall bulrushes at water’s edge waving under the heavy thumping’s and thuddings of struggle.
Then silence. But then with a horrendous rush, the bulrushes erupted again. Through the leaves he could see that a jaguar had a caiman in his jaws, the reptile twisting in agony, breaking loose and caught again just as he was about to slip into the river, bloodied now, screaming hisses and trying to grasp the jaguar’s clawed feet in his jaws, failing that, the blood rippling across his leathered back, the light in his eyes went out. He dies!
* * *
The pyramids hoved into view just after they got back on the road, three very big grey shapes (Phibes expected brown to be their color) one of them dwarfing the other two by almost twice as much.
The Great Pyramid it was called, often with much reverence. Khufu, its 4th dynasty builder, never in life achieved anything to compare to the great Ramses II or to Akhenaton. But in death, his memorial was to become one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World thanks to his one great idea: that Pharaoh, who lived in grandeur on Earth, should so live in grandeur through all eternity.
Khufu’s tomb, at 481’ tall and 781’ around its base, is very popular amongst travel agents and coffee‐table book publishers. No other structure on earth can compare to it for sheer bulk and mystery. Its once perfectly smooth sides meet at a point at the top, so sharp that it is much avoided by birds. And even though it has suffered the inroads of grave robbers for centuries, the Great Pyramid still has secrets to reveal.
Phibes took it all in and then, like he always did when coming to a new place, stepped briskly about the pyramid grounds, circling them several times and weaving in and out ‐ to get sense of the place before he could form any opinion about the where and the how and the why of this strange and ancient location. (He did the same kind of walkabout whenever he came to a new intersection in his hometown of London: he regarded it before entering.)
The tourist buses kept arriving in the oiled lot across the roadway, sidling next to the ones already parked in a herringbone pattern there and churning up the dust despite the recent oiling. The lot, wh
ich looked like it could hold a hundred busses, was filling up quickly.
As the busses rolled in, squads of little kids descended upon them. They were well organized: one group sold trinkets, another held out trays of chewing gum and those little bottles of colored water that you could chew on once you finished your drink. The taller kids formed up the janitor brigade, swarming each bus with homemade brooms and making a pretty good job of it against the caked dust that had built up along the drive from Alexandria.
Phibes’ driver had parked their lorry in the automobile lot across the roadway. It was absolutely packed this morning with the broughams and roadsters and cabriolets belonging to the upper crust of the Continent and of England, people who traveled out of duty to their personal enlightenment. And who had their vehicles shipped along with them on their travels, as was their custom.
These folks were dressed as if they were attending a formal garden party this morning. Indeed, most of the men wore morning suits: waist high striped trousers tucked in under an eleven‐button fawnskin vest, this latter garment covering a very stiffly starched (with bluing) 200‐count pima cotton shirt with a folded pointy collar and a matching waffle‐cloth bowtie.
Each man wore a distinctive tiepin to show his individuality and it was here that this gentlemanly crew really sported their differences ‐ in a blazing array of diamonds and rubies and pearls, in gold and silver and platinum, with an occasional opal or lapis from the Far Eastern contingent.
Americans were in the minority today but their stickpins were a few sizes larger than the norm ‐ Yankee Pride, of course! Otherwise, their morning coats and beaver toppers blended in with their counterparts across the pond ‐ a black sea of penguins trotting after their biddies.
These matrons ‐ none of them under 40 ‐ were as differentiated as the residents in the zoo’s avian pavilion! And where their men were bound to a single style, they rejoiced in bird‐like discord: broad‐brimmed straws, silk turbans, felt cloches ‐ hats of every color and fabric encased their marcelled locks, many worn at flirty angles by ladies whose flirtation quotient had zeroed out decades ago.
High ‐heeled shoes and boots were de rigueur for these explorers and those in their number who wore long gowns struggled to keep their footing as they tried to lift their hemline above the oiled and gritty parking lot.
A few of the young women (40ish) wore stylish A‐frames made popular by that up‐and‐coming designer, Coco Chanel. The rest, clinging to the Gibson Girl waist of their youth, suffered silently.
After all it was noontime. This was the desert. And the sun was exerting its usual dominance ‐ producing a broiling 97‐degree ground temperature by way of welcome for today’s visitors.
Many had brought their servants with them as an added precaution. These were now moving about with silver trays of finger sandwiches and punch. A few champagne buckets were in evidence, mostly amongst the Russian contingent.
Discreet deliveries of eau de cologne were taken by the ladies, but these furtive sprays served to punctuate rather than to conceal the cloud of sweat that was rising above these fancy folks in the all‐to‐still air.
* * *
Phibes, after sizing up the Pyramids from various angles, climbed a slight rise to take in the larger picture. There he took note of the similarity between the waves of the sand dunes and the waves of the great sea on the horizon.
Then he entered the vestibule of the Great Pyramid. No one was about as he moved along. Cool and dark it was but not with the expected silence. He listened for it, for the silence of eternity…but it just wasn’t there. Instead there was noise, a steady flowing sound.
Water!
FOSSIL WATER
“The boundary between desert sun and fossil water can have extraordinary properties…if that point is ever reached.”
Herbert Angler, Chemical Jurisprudence, emphasis, the author’s.
Today we are 50 centuries removed from the first stirrings of Egyptian Civilization, a people who spent their days in this world preparing for the next. Theirs was a funerary society that prevailed ‐ thrived, even ‐ against the timelessness of sun and sand for more than 3000 years.
But Egypt wasn’t always sun and sand. And if you move the marker back 400 centuries you will discover a lush green landscape dotted with lakes and streams and a Nile teeming with fish.
Water. Could it have turned the Egyptian’s eyes away from the netherworld? Is the question that hangs over this ancient civilization and all who would learn its secrets? In the grand sweep of history few discoveries have generated more excitement than King Tutankhamen’s Tomb. The flocking crowds were dazzled by its gold and diamonds and rubies, pushing Lord Caernarvon to instant celebrity by its discovery, a fame that was only heightened by the raft of sudden and mysterious deaths that swept away members of his expedition within a very few years of King Tut’s re‐appearance.
A more scholarly if no less spectacular find, the Rosetta Stone gave us the key to what the ancient Egyptians thought and did. Against these two landmarks, Kamal el Malakh’s unearthing of the boat pits inside the Great Pyramid looms rather small.
But it is not insignificant. The pits were concealed by 15‐ton blocks of limestone, each one fitted ‐ like the rest of the giant stones that made up that mighty edifice ‐ to less than 1/50“ tolerances. It had white sides according to the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus but these have weathered considerably.
Three of the five pits were empty. A fourth pit contained a cedar boat, 143’ in length that was still seaworthy after four millennia.
What seas did this sturdy vessel travel? It had no sails and there were no watermarks around its hull. But the wood chips lying about the floor of the pit suggest that this ship never saw sea duty. Rather, that it was built and buried inside the pyramid awaiting, along with his wives and slaves, Pharaoh’s summons.
Kamal el Malakh made his discovery in 1954. Up until that time the pits were hidden away from the legions of grave robbers who’d descended upon the Great Pyramid within weeks of Khufu’s entombment, and ever since. Prior to el Malakh for all intents and purposes these boat pits didn’t exist…except for one man: Anton Phibes.
He learned of them during his travels in the British Foreign Service. There, amongst the faceless aides and administrators, he met an occasional standout, someone who could grasp the larger picture and who was doing something about it. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was such a man.
We’ve seen earlier that Phibes had met him just after the Great War when he was sent to Istanbul as an observer. Turkey was on the losing side. The already‐decrepit Ottoman Empire had been carved up at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the only man standing between its remnants and total collapse was Ataturk.
Water supply was Phibes specialty and it was through Ataturk that Phibes came into contact with the water‐ savvy well diggers and dam builders of the Old and Middle Kingdom and with their astonishingly modern conservation practices.
Their hydrology, of dykes and dams and channels, captured enough water to see them through even the most severe drought. It would have given them a permanent solution to their water needs had the Egyptians kept their population stable. But they didn’t and it didn’t and so the well‐watered verdure of their native landscape had long‐since sizzled away beneath the unremitting sun.
Ancient Egypt ‐ the Land of the Pharaohs, of the pyramids, of deserts stretching beyond the horizons ‐ is the conventional wisdom. Scholars and grave robbers alike saw the leavings of this ancient and funerary civilization as a place to be probed and plundered. It held its conquerors including the great Bonaparte, in thrall. Learn from its secrets, indeed! Rather, pillage its gold and other treasures.
For all of its sordid scholarship Egyptology has another side, an uplifting even spiritual side but one that is avaricious as well.
Eternity. Read the texts, the stelae, the inscriptions (and scribblings) on the walls of the tombs and you will read this universal yearning for ete
rnity.
How modern is that?!
The Egyptians were no different from anyone else. They ate, worked, slept and had children. None of them wanted to die. But knowing that they would sooner or later leave their surroundings, their accomplishments, their possessions, the Egyptians wanted to take as much with them as they could to assure their comfort and security in the Great Beyond.
Who wouldn’t? You can take it with you was a core belief amongst these ancients. The Pyramids were built large to accommodate all of Pharaoh’s possessions. To live and live well for all time! was their spiritual weathervane even unto Akhenaton, that great reformer.
PREPARATION
She was radiant. He had never seen Vulnavia look so fresh, so very poised. She presented a picture of the Assured Woman ‐ and the way she slanted her eyes was very welcoming.
But it was her skin that made Vulnavia special today. Its opalescence had taken on a red hue ‐ the look of good health!
You are very beautiful, Vulnavia! Phibes couldn’t resist saying it to her over and over. And was she blushing when she heard the words?
They were in the observatory. It was one of those rare London mornings of sunshine and clean breezes. Vulnavia was polishing the telescope barrel with a piece of folded chamois. The eagle, in an odd act of accommodation, had hopped up onto the dome’s aperture where he was casting glances on the busy pavement down below, all the while eyeing Phibes who was sitting on the workbench looking at the package that Vulnavia had placed there for him.
Abruptly, Phibes untied the string and folded back its brown paper wrapper to reveal a plate of bangers and mash from F. Cooke’s, a favorite of his when he was in HMDS.
How did Vulnavia know? This gorgeous creature knew more about him than anyone else! He smiled at the thought. Silence is golden.
Nine months earlier he had emerged from his ‘hibernation’ in the sub‐basement. He and his beloved Victoria had taken refuge there when Inspectors Trout and Schenley had stormed the building.
Dr. Phibes Vulnavia's Secret Page 4