by Layton Green
Again: How many of those could there be?
Alexandria, Egypt
18
Despite a twenty-hour odyssey that included a brutal layover in Istanbul, Andie felt reasonably well rested when she arrived at Borg El Arab International Airport on the outskirts of Alexandria. After barely sleeping for days, she had decided a little rest was more important than constant vigilance on the airplane, and she let herself crash during the flights. Yet her wariness returned the moment she left the airport and hired a taxi to drive her to the modern version of the Library of Alexandria.
The highway into town snaked through the desert sands like a desiccated black tongue. Soon the skyline of the city appeared, a dense cluster of minarets, skyscrapers, and whitewashed apartment buildings pressed tight against the Mediterranean. The city looked more and more decrepit the closer they drew, yet in a romantic way, she thought, a decaying idol on the edge of the palm-lined sea, brimming with the mystique of a bygone era.
During the layover in Istanbul, Andie had sent emails to Dr. Corwin at both his work and home addresses. She used a brand-new account and an old-school internet café to ensure she remained anonymous. At the Alexandria airport, she had purchased a SIM card with twenty gigabytes of data for a ridiculously low price, and on the drive into town she logged into the new email account, praying for a reply from her mentor.
Crickets.
She wanted to verify his corpse was in the morgue, but a little research told her it took five to seven days to repatriate a body from abroad under normal circumstances—and much longer in the case of murder. She did not dare contact the Italian police again, and doubted they would help her in any case.
The taxi entered Alexandria from the south and cleaved right through the heart of the city. As Andie stared out the window, the minarets and crumbling white apartment buildings evoked a strong childhood memory. She had visited Egypt once before, the only overseas trip her family had taken, splurging on the advance for her father’s novel. After absorbing the sights of Cairo, they had cruised the Nile, visiting the Valley of the Kings and Abu Simbel. Andie was eight. It was a big deal for the family, but mostly she remembered getting sick from the street food, listening to her parents argue about money, and smelling alcohol on her father’s breath every morning.
Yet one happy memory stood out. She remembered her mother as someone who vacillated between periods of intense concentration and absentminded, almost vacant stares, as if her mind were somewhere else even when she wasn’t working. Still, Andie had loved her mother very much, worshipped her even, and she remembered their time together fondly: visiting science museums and planetariums, dining at Mexican restaurants at the beginning of the month, elaborate bedtime stories on the nights when her mother’s research did not consume her. Her mother had especially loved Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet, though Andie remembered being confused and a little scared by those books as a child.
The day they arrived in Cairo, despite the jet lag and exhaustion from the journey, her mother insisted they take a night tour of the pyramids. Right that very moment.
Andie’s father kicked his shoes off, declared he was not moving an inch, and cracked a beer from the minifridge. Her mother glared at him but gave her daughter no choice: after a quick change of clothes, Andie was shepherded out the door and down to the lobby, her mother’s eyes bright with anticipation. She had chosen a hotel in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, for this very reason.
Outside, after an exchange of money took place with a short Egyptian man with a funny conical hat and a mustache, he ushered them into the back seat of a brown Opel with a huge dent in the side. Even at that age, it was clear to Andie the man was not a real guide, and this was a dicey situation her mother had arranged on the fly.
It didn’t matter. As soon as those monolithic testaments to human achievement came into view, far larger than Andie had expected, far larger than anything, her mother’s eyes gleamed with an inner light, a feverish excitement Andie had never before witnessed.
Though access to the pyramids was limited after dark, her mother used the cold authoritative voice she sometimes deployed to make the driver get as near as they could, then commanded him to pull over and wait. Her mother took Andie by the hand and walked straight into the thin sands at the edge of the road, parallel to the barricade, stopping only when they had an unobstructed view. Andie still remembered the kiss of cool night air on her skin, the dry smell of the desert, the silence between passing cars that enveloped her like a warm blanket.
And there they were, even more immense than before. A trio of shadowy sentinels rising proudly out of the desert as if they belonged to some other world, backlit by a crescent moon and a surreal view of the Milky Way, timeless, hulking, eternal. Andie felt a strange lump in her throat at the sight, overcome by an emotion she couldn’t name, her first feeling of numinous awe at the sight of something so much greater than herself.
Her mother had wrapped Andie in her arms from behind and whispered in her ear. Usually Andie pushed the painful memories away, but this time, only hours away from where she had once sat cross-legged with her mother on the beige sands, she gave in.
“Magical, isn’t it?” her mother said.
Andie nodded.
“The Great Pyramid—that’s the one on the right—stood as the tallest human-made structure for almost four thousand years. That’s most of recorded history. The ancient Egyptians called it Ikhet, which means ‘glorious light.’ When it was built, the Egyptians covered it with a casing of polished limestone that reflected sunlight, causing the pyramid to sparkle like a diamond. It shone so bright it could have been seen from the moon. Imagine, Andie. A jewel that’s visible from outer space.”
“Why did they build them?” Andie asked.
“No one knows for sure. They’re almost certainly tombs for Egyptian pharaohs, but some people think they serve other purposes as well. Perhaps a signal to somewhere very far away, or a message to the gods.”
“What do you think?”
When her mother didn’t answer, Andie turned and caught a small, distracted smile lifting the corners of her lips. “The Great Pyramid is located exactly where the extended lines of latitude and longitude intersect,” her mother said softly. “Do you understand what that means?”
“Not really.”
“It means it’s located at the exact center of the Earth’s landmass, even though it was built long before longitude and latitude were invented, at a time when this sort of knowledge was believed to be thousands of years in the future.”
“They must have been really smart.”
“Maybe smarter than we will ever understand. We still even don’t know how they built them. The number of stones in these three pyramids alone could build a wall around France, and each block weighed as much as a small elephant.”
“An elephant!”
“The crazy thing is, Andie, not very long before they built the pyramids, the Egyptians were still piling mud bricks together in twenty-foot-high burial structures called ‘mastabas.’ How did they go from dirt mounds to building stairways to the stars, in such a short amount of time?”
Andie felt a little lost by this idea.
“We think we’re so superior to our ancestors, but that’s not the case at all.” She laughed as she squeezed her daughter’s shoulder. “I’m sure one day you’ll think you know everything and I don’t know anything.”
“I already do.”
“Well, you just remember the pyramids, Little Mouse. Let me tell you a few more things. The Great Pyramid—the one on the right—has air shafts angled in correspondence to objects in outer space. The three pyramids together are aligned precisely with the stars of Orion’s belt—Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—as they would have appeared to the ancient Egyptians, with the Nile in the position of the Milky Way. And the pyramids point north, to within five-hundredths of a degree of the magnetic pole. Not even the Royal Observatory in Greenwich is that precise!”
; “What about my question?” Andie said distractedly, not sharing her mother’s delight in these random facts.
“What’s that, lovie?”
“Why do you think they built them?”
Her mother moved closer, holding her hand as they gazed together at the beauty and mystery of the night. “The Egyptians believed the afterlife was a mirror of the living world. Isn’t that a nice thought?” Her mother’s voice was almost a whisper. “That after death we might go someplace like our world, only different.”
“Would we be together there, Mommy? You and me and Daddy?”
Her mother tilted her head to rest it on Andie’s shoulder, her hair tickling the back of Andie’s neck. “Of course, Little Mouse. Of course we will.”
Hating how weak her memories made her feel, disturbed by her mother’s long-ago answer to her question, Andie stared out the window of the taxi as a chasm opened deep inside her and threatened to swallow her whole.
By the time Andie arrived at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, her romance with the city’s nostalgic charms had faded. She felt drained by the interminable journey, beaten down by the crowds and pollution and cement eyesores, the endless urban sprawl. It did not help that her taxi’s air-conditioning had given out halfway, forcing her to keep her window lowered and endure the cacophony of blaring horns and the soiled air of the inner city, a demonic intermingling of smog and fried offal mixed with whiffs of sewage.
Yet the closer they drew to the harbor, the calmer the city grew, as if the languid waters of the Mediterranean lapping against its shores exerted a hypnotic effect. Though the ancient city had long ago disappeared, shoved into the sea by earthquakes and burned to the ground during wars and religious purges, it had experienced periods of revival over the centuries, and Andie caught glimpses of forgotten glory on the shabby streets: palm-fronted colonial buildings, the occasional statue, mosques and synagogues and Coptic churches, glimpses of dusty white ruins scattered about the city like the discarded bones of bygone civilizations.
To reach the entrance of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the driver had to circle around on a busy freeway that cut off the city proper from the narrow beaches along the coastline. The modern iteration of the famous library resembled an enormous white discus sticking out of the ground at an angle, sloping down to the sea. Surrounded by a puzzle box of dated apartment buildings withering in the sun, the gleaming library looked like an alien ship that had crash-landed in the middle of the city.
Just to the north, perched on a spit of land extending into the mouth of the harbor, was a handsome citadel that bore a marked resemblance to an enormous sandcastle. The driver startled Andie—he had not spoken since the airport—by pointing at the fort and declaring it the former site of the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. She envisioned this urban monster of a city as the beacon of progress it once had been, home to queens and emperors and an honor roll of the world’s great philosophers, a wonderland of palaces and gardens and architectural novelties.
Knowing she might not have much time before someone figured out her location, she left the taxi and hustled to the entrance of the library, the balmy air perfuming the breeze. A familiar feeling of being watched overcame her as she purchased a ticket and approached the glass-walled entrance beneath an elevated walkway. Her step slowed as she crossed the handsome paving stones, until she stopped ten feet from the door, frozen in place, searching every face in sight.
Why am I so paranoid around libraries?
Or is someone waiting for me inside?
The granite wall supporting the rear of the disk was carved with letters and characters from the world’s known alphabets. During her layover, she had read how the architects intended the circular diaphragm of the library, which extended four levels below ground and seven above, to symbolize the cyclical nature of knowledge as it ebbs and flows through time. All in all, it was a very impressive site, a fitting ode to past glory and an archetype for a new era.
On a whim, still balking at entering, she took out the Star Phone and pretended to be a tourist snapping photos. When she peered at the high glass wall above the entrance, she gasped as the image seen through the viewing lens blurred, again inducing the disorienting sensation of movement in her mind. Her vision stabilized to reveal a familiar motif carved in stone, a legendary creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion.
Though adopted by the Greeks and other cultures, she knew the sphinx was derived from Egypt, a powerful symbol of a watchful presence. A guardian, a protector.
Unlike the laughing image of Democritus, the three-dimensional sphinx superimposed on the library did not move, but overlooked the entrance in solemn repose. The admonition of this warder of temples and tombs was clear: beware to any who defiled this shrine, this repository of sacred knowledge.
Andie lowered the Star Phone. Nothing had changed on the face of the device. She returned it to her pocket and let out a deep breath. The presence of the sphinx gave her confidence she was on the right track, as well as a sense of calm.
Someone, she felt, was watching over the library.
But who?
Was it the ghost of scholars past? Someone from this mysterious society to which Dr. Corwin belonged? Someone aligned with the people who wanted to kill her?
She knew she was taking a risk by entering—but she had taken a risk from the moment she embarked on this path and opened the safe behind the Ishango bone. Her objectives had not changed, and she would just have to weigh the dangers as they arose.
If someone was watching, so be it.
The main section of the library was a cavernous space with eight terraces, each focused on a different sphere of knowledge. Famed as the largest reading room in the world, it was sunlit and beautiful, supported by slender columns that soared to a domed ceiling. The shelves and carousels spaced throughout the room matched the color of the light-grain wood floor.
Andie knew the library contained millions of volumes and felt overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. Now that she was here, what was she supposed to do? Was there some hidden meaning she was missing?
Legions of people milled about, most of them young Egyptians browsing the shelves or poring over books at the carousels. She tried a grand sweep of the room with the Star Phone, to no effect. After that, she wandered through the other sections of the library. Scattered about were lost artifacts from the ancient city, including pieces of the great lighthouse and stone blocks covered in hieroglyphs, unearthed by archaeologists in the waters offshore. Yet the Star Phone revealed nothing new until she found another sphinx embedded at the entrance to a hallway leading to the city archives section.
The smaller room inside had a flat, low ceiling more reminiscent of a typical library. The archives contained books and multimedia on the history of Alexandria. Was there a particular book or microfiche she was supposed to find? Another sphinx? A secret doorway?
A thorough sweep with the Star Phone revealed nothing. To the stacks then. With a deep breath, she decided to start with some research on the original library and see if she uncovered anything unique to the collection. She ignored the constant nagging feeling of being observed, even in this quiet little room, and forced herself to focus.
She soon discovered the loss of the original library was far greater than she had even realized. The world had known other great centers of learning. Mesopotamian, Aksumite, Sumerian, Assyrian. Timbuktu. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad. But none as ambitious as the ground on which she was standing. Ptolemy I, who studied under Aristotle as a boy, alongside Alexander the Great, had founded both the library and the adjoining Shrine of the Muses—the origin of the term museum. The fame of the library had ushered in a golden age of knowledge, a kingdom of the mind. By the middle of the third century BCE, Eratosthenes had calculated the circumference and diameter of Earth—believing it was round—within an accuracy of fifty miles. Others mapped the stars and catalogued the constellations. Aristarchus developed a heliocentric model of the
solar system two millennia before Copernicus.
In the adjoining museum, the vivisection of condemned criminals had led to the discovery of the central nervous system and the hypothesis that the brain, and not the heart, sheltered the mind. Euclid penned his Elements at Alexandria, perhaps the most influential work in the history of mathematics.
The advancements had flowed out of the library and transformed the city itself. Andie was awed by the accounts of the beauty and sophistication of ancient Alexandria. Powered by running water, mechanical birds whistled from within gardens and fountains, and statues played instruments or lifted wineskins to their lips. The clever use of pneumatics allowed temple doors to open and close as if by magic, and enabled automatic streetlamps to light the wide central avenue. The mathematician Hero, the greatest engineer of antiquity, developed a play performed by rope-and-axle-controlled automata—perhaps the world’s first robots. He also invented a coin-operated drink dispenser for the city, and a revolving sphere powered by a pressurized container of water.
Good God, she thought. The world’s first steam turbine engine, invented sixteen centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
Recovered fragments from the library’s catalogue system hinted at massive collections of rhetoric, law, lyric poetry, medicine, natural sciences, and other disciplines. Written accounts of the Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians, and countless other cultures swept away by history. Scrolls of Zoroaster. Buddhist writings. Unknown plays by Homer and Sophocles. Early translations of the Pentateuch and the Septuagint.
Her mind reeled at the possibilities. It was as if only a fraction of Shakespeare’s plays had survived, or just one of Einstein’s theories.
She kept researching the demise of the library, to illuminate it in more detail. Julius Caesar had unwittingly destroyed much of the library when he was under siege inside the city and set fire to the enemy fleet. The fire spread from the harbor to the buildings along the waterfront, including the library. Presumably some of the collection was preserved, but no one knows for certain.