by Talbot Mundy
“Let’s hope it’s true!” said I.
“Let’s hope it isn’t true!” Grim answered. “Any such sum of money as that would turn Egypt into Hades! If it’s there it means civil war, whoever gets it! With Europe’s treasuries in their present state the news of it would drive sane men crazy! We must pick our men and pledge them to secrecy before we tell them anything at all.”
“Hasn’t the Egyptian Intelligence got any inkling?” I asked.
“Apparently not yet.”
“Do you think there’s any such sum buried anywhere?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Why not? Herodotus got his information from men who read off to him the hieroglyphics painted on the outer casing of the Great Pyramid. According to him, no less than sixteen hundred talents of silver, which is the equivalent of about three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, were spent on garlic, radishes and onions alone for the labour-gangs. That gives just an inkling of the total cost. The ruler who spent so many millions — his name was Khufu or Cheops — wasn’t spending his last nickel. He had his hands on money, that boy had, and there’s no record that he left any of it for the next man. Where did it all go? Khufu suffered from megalomania. Every Egyptian king made plans for being as important in the next world as in this, and they all tried to take money with them when they all tried to take money with them when they the pyramid, and could force gangs of a hundred thousand men to work at it without pay for twenty or thirty years, could conceive the idea of taking a couple of billion dollars with him into paradise. Is that so, or isn’t it?”
“You think this money’s in the pyramid?”
“Of course I don’t. Every inch of space inside the pyramid has been accounted for. There never was anything in there. It’s the most monumental bluff in the history, fixed up in every way to look like a treasure-house, or a rich man’s tomb. When Al Mahmoun’s men broke in and found the passage leading to the upper chambers, the whole passage was full of loose stones that had to be taken out one by one before they could ascend. It was physically impossible for anyone to have ascended before them since the time when the pyramid was finished and closed up. Yet when they got to the so-called King’s Chamber it was empty. There never had been anything in it. Khufu was supposed to be buried in it, but he wasn’t. He was the richest Pharaoh Egypt ever had. He must have been, or he couldn’t have built the pyramid. Where was he really buried, and what did he do with his money?”
“I’ll bet you the contractors got all he had,” I answered.
“If you want to bet, I’ll bet with you,” said Grim. “But you’re making a fool bet. Do you kid yourself that a man who caused to be painted in huge figures on the outside of the building the amount that he spent on radishes would let anybody beat him out of ten cents? Think again. He was a miser! Do you suppose that a man who could throw that colossal bluff and command all those resources wouldn’t be resourceful enough to hide his savings where nobody could find them?”
“Well, who picked up the trail at this time of day, and how?” I asked. “What makes anybody think that Khufu hid his billions on Joan Angela Leich’s lot?”
“That’s a long story,” Grim answered, “and involves flights of higher mathematics that are over my head. It includes astronomical measurements, an understanding of the precession of the Equinox, and Lord knows what else. I suspect there’s only one man in the world who really does understand, and he’s crazy. I’ve been trying to get hold of that man for several days past, but they’re keeping him incommunicado, and as his name isn’t known and he seems to have no friends or relatives, it’s impossible to get a writ of habeas corpus. I don’t even know where he is. I can only guess.”
“How did you learn of his existence, then?”
“Narayan Singh got wind of him. Narayan Singh can go snooping around where I would get killed in a jiffy. Between us we cooked up a scheme to get hold of the old bird, but whether we’ll succeed is another matter. He’s crazy; that’s our one hope. Narayan Singh proposes to go crazy too. He’s working up the differential calculus in Arabic. The pyramid is a perfect maze of absolutely scientific measurements that have puzzled the most learned men in the world ever since Napoleon’s French commission began their investigation. Nobody could ever dope out why those measurements should be so perfect, and at the same time why there should not be one single mark or figure or inscription anywhere inside the pyramid by way of explanation. They’ve all come to the same conclusion, however — that the architect of the building, whoever he was, knew more natural science than all the high-brows in the whole world know today.
“It’s the only building in the world, for instance, that is oriented exactly north, south, east and west. It bears an accurate relation to the whole earth’s weight, and its original height, before the cap-stone was quarried off for masonry for some pasha’s palace, was an equally accurate proportion of the earth’s mean distance from the sun. There’s plenty more; that’s only by way of illustration.”
“A thousand acres is a whale of a big claim to open up,” I said.
“Unless we get hold of our learned lunatic,” Grim agreed. “But listen — that lot is in the middle of a perfect wilderness; there’s nothing to identify it except the beacons left by surveyors twenty years ago; it’s a square of sand with a well near the middle. It stands to reason, then, that if these Gyppies are so sure of its being the real place they’re going on something else than figures. They’ve checked up that old lunatic in some way, and they’ve seen something with their eyes that corresponds with Something he has told them. I’ve been out to the property and looked it over. Barring Joan Angela’s huts there’s nothing but sand and the well. So it must be the well that constitutes their evidence.”
“Is it full of water?”
“Up to Nile level. Rises and falls with the Nile.”
“How far from the Nile?”
“Thirty miles.”
“Too far away for any kind of artificial connection,” I said.
“Think so?” Grim answered. “Old Khufu brought some of the stone for that pyramid from hundreds of miles away in blocks of eighty and a hundred tons — stuff that modern engineers wouldn’t know how to shift ten miles, let alone set in position. What would forty miles of tunnel mean to a man of his determination? I’ll tell you another thing: Herodotus wrote down a story he heard about an underground passage from the pyramid to the Nile, through which the water was supposed to flow into a great tank underneath the pyramid; but the story proved false, for the simple reason that the foundations of the pyramid are considerably higher than Nile high-water. But those old legends have a way of being based on truth.”
“Yes,” I said. “There was Jeremy’s mine in Midian.”
“Suppose,” Grim went on, “that Khufu was trying to make his real tomb impregnable as well as undiscoverable. To flood it with water would be as good a way as any, wouldn’t it? You know that story about the Bank of England having a lake of water underneath it? They did the same stunt in Alexandria with the Catacombs — flooded them to keep out robbers, and to this day the lower levels haven’t been explored for that reason; they connected them up with the sea, and you can’t pump the Mediterranean dry. All right — the only chance Khufu would have of turning on a limitless supply of water would be to connect up with the Nile. He could start to dig a tunnel forty miles away without attracting much attention, for the pyramid was probably giving the crowd plenty to think about. If he lined the tunnel with stone that wouldn’t necessarily cause comment either, because so many million tons of stone were being hauled to the pyramid that, if he diverted some of it, folk might not notice. He could claim he was building a temple somewhere else, for instance. But when the tunnel approached the Nile that would be another matter.
“The banks of the Nile were densely populated; they’d soon get wise to the tunnel, and he’d have to invent a good excuse. Why shouldn’t he put a yarn into circulation about a secret waterway from the Nile to the pyramid? I’m wil
ling to bet that’s exactly what he did; and I think that when we come to examine that well on Joan Angela’s lot more closely we’ll find that it taps the conduit that was designed to make old Khufu’s real tomb impregnable against thieves.”
The conversation was interrupted by a row on deck, and we went out to see Cappy Rainer struggling under the incubus of U.S. navigation laws. They’re wonderful laws, but then he is a wonderful man, and perhaps they were designed to give such born Vikings their opportunity. I don’t know exactly what had happened, but somebody had refused to do something or other, and had threatened the skipper with the U.S. Consul.
“Go to the Consul, will ye?” he was roaring, standing on one of the forward hatches with his tunic all unbuttoned. “Maybe. But they’ll carry ye there feet forward! Get me in trouble, will ye? All right! I’ve been in trouble scores 0’ times. I’m used to it! I’m not one 0’ your hot-bath seamen that needs clean sheets twice a week before he can stand a watch. Salt-water’s my name, and I’m here to prove it! Hell’s whiskers! Why, when I went to sea there wasn’t one 0’ you bastards would have been allowed to lick the shore-dirt off the third mate’s boots, let alone clean ’em. And you stand there and think you’ll tell me how to run this ship! Go to the Consul, will ye? Not alive, ye won’t! I’ll beat your brains out first! Ye think maybe I can’t lick the lot of ye? Come on and try, you sniveling dock-rats!”
He peeled off his tunic and threw it on the hatch.
“Come on — any one of ye! Come on, four of ye, then, if one’s afraid! I’ll take and beat your brains into stuff the hogs won’t eat! Trouble with the Consul, eh? Well, you won’t live to know about it! Come on. If ye’ve got guts! Let’s see six of ye try and lick me! Let’s see six of ye start for shore without my leave, then! Let’s see the man that dares refuse an order on this ship! Now then — ye heard me say ‘Off-hatches.’ Show me the man that hangs back when I count four, and I’ll show ye a corpse! One-two...”
It became a mighty busy ship before he started to say three, and then he had to come back on the bridge and repeat the whole argument to Grim and me, with variations explaining what he had said exactly as if the whole harbour had not heard him.
“That’s a hand-picked crew down there,” he bellowed, as if he suspected us of being at the bottom of the mutiny. “They’re treated good, and paid the salaries O’ railroad presidents! Clean sheets twice a week — hot baths — hotel Waldorf banquets three times a day — eight hours’ work — and three mates to watch they don’t do too much! And, barring they’re lazy, they’re more or less all right until they get near Egypt. But soon as the smell O’ this Goddamned country gets under their noses they’re no more good than goats in church! I tell ye, Egypt’s a lousy cesspool of a country! It ‘ud rot the guts of a Nova Scotia bosun! I’ll be crazy as a coot now till they see my stern-light swingin’ out O’ here. You two boys had better beat it.
“No, don’t stay to dinner. I’m not fit company for a vivisectionist until I’m out o’ this! Go on; pitch your grips into a boat and leave me to stand off the damn fool laws o’ the United States and Egypt! I’m a master mariner, I am — nursemaid to a crew of dock-rats and third-assistant- vice-consul’s office-boy! Good-bye. See ye sometime, somewhere. Call again when ye want a lift. Push off as soon as ye’re in the boat; I’ll stand by to kill any o’ my soft-sleeping courtesans that tries to jump in after ye! They’re as crazy for the shore as sharks after garbage! Good-bye! Good- bye!”
Cappy Rainer was right about Egypt.
CHAPTER IX. “Lent us by Ah Li Wan”
So now you know how you get ashore when you’re not on the ship’s papers. What explanation the captain makes to the port authorities is between them and the captain. Grim and I, having time to kill until the night train pulled out, visited the tomb called Komesh-Shukafa, whose lower levels are all under salt water. It is a fascinating place, and exasperating, for the splendour of the upper part and the obvious wealth of the family for whom it was first built makes it likely that those lower levels contain treasure worth diving for.
“You see,” he said, “when invaders came they simply let the water in. Why shouldn’t old Khufu have done that? The care these people took makes you think they had something down there worth protecting. What about Khufu then? These people may have spent a hundred thousand dollars on this mausoleum. He spent more than a hundred million on a mere bluff. Do you begin to see the possibilities?”
I suppose, as a matter of fact, you have really got to be a professional miner to feel the full tug of buried treasure at your heart-strings. Cupidity has not got much to do with it. I don’t believe the sight of a hundred million dollars in the open would make any decent fellow forget the laws of right and wrong; but it’s another thing altogether to believe that some such sum is hidden in the earth, idle and useless. It isn’t gold, but the game of getting out the gold and putting it to work that thrills you and makes you throw dice with fortune. At any rate, that’s my experience, and I’ve been mining all my life.
It exasperated me to have no diving-suit, to go down into those lower levels and explore them made me so discontented that I couldn’t carry on a conversation. So you’ll understand why I dreamed all that night on the Cairo Express that the pyramid was on my chest, and that old King Khufu was sitting alongside grinning at me just out of reach. I saw in the dream long processions of fellahin, nearly naked, carrying bars of gold done up in papyrus and disappearing with their burdens down a shaft, while the priests of Amen-Ra kept count. And I couldn’t get to see where they were putting the treasure because the pyramid held me fast. Then King Khufu turned into Meldrum Strange, and laughed more diabolically than the king had laughed. And after a while the pyramid and old King Khufu and Meldrum Strange and Joan Angela and Moustapha Pasha and Grim and Mrs. Aintree became all mixed up in a mad dance amid a shower of gold, while Narayan Singh and a white bearded, one-eyed lunatic made astronomical calculations with the aid of a planisphere and a surveyor’s plane-table. On the whole it was a feverish night, but hardly more so than the weeks that followed.
The very first day in Cairo produced excitement. We drove straight to Grim’s quarters, where Narayan Singh had a meal all ready, as well as information that he was almost bursting to impart; but the great Sikh held his peace until after the servant had left the room, and the three of us sat down on the deep corner lounge with our backs against a crimson Bokhara hanging. Then:
“Sahibs, I have found the lunatic!” he began.
He was too pleased with the accomplishment to be self-satisfied about it, but not so swept away by his enthusiasm as not to pause and see the effect on us.
“Thus and so it happened,” he went on, when we had suitably expressed our satisfaction. “To look for him was to hunt for one star in the Milky Way. To inquire for him was to be mocked. To set spies hunting for him was to warn the enemy of danger, for the spy is very rare who makes a real secret of his purpose. So, what then? I remembered that he is a lunatic, and the nature of a lunatic is this — that forever he repeats his role. Like the camel that grinds out semsem in a dark vault, he goes round and round, sleeping and waking, one day like another, indifferent to everything except his one obsession. So. And the nature of our lunatic’s madness is what? It concerns the pyramid and stars and mathematics. And now another point. As a soldier I have served in many wars. Not only have I fought in nine campaigns, but I have spied; and, whereas any man can fight, or can be taught to fight, the gift of spying is a rather rare one. So it has been my lot more often than befalls most men to venture behind an enemy’s lines for information; and according to those officers whose orders I obeyed the most useful information I could ever bring them was concerning details of the enemy’s supplies. From that they would deduce all manner of things. So I bethought me, and the fashion of my thoughts was this:
“Wherever that lunatic may be, he needs supplies, of one kind or another. But his wants are surely few in the way of food and clothing, and such as they might be th
ey can be bought at any of a thousand places, and a man might hunt for a hundred years in vain tracing the onions and the roots of garlic from one place to another, and from hand to hand.”
“Quite so,” said Grim, “now where’s the lunatic?”
But a Sikh will not tell his story in any but his own way.
“I knew no more than you, sahib. But I reasoned thus-neither mathematics, nor astronomy, nor pyramids are purchasable in the Fish Market. And a lunatic is often an exacting man. Be he ever so tractable when given freedom to pursue his fantasy, deprived of that opportunity he may grow ravenous, or even die. And considering his importance to the men who hold him prisoner, it occurred to me that they will keep him satisfied if possible. So I turned my back on the bazaars and sought elsewhere, and by and by, on the afternoon of the same day, Jimgrim Sahib, that you left for Alexandria, I found a shop in a quiet street, where a Chinaman sells books on mathematics in many tongues, as well as more sorts of strange instruments than any but he could conceive to exist.
“Old of mutual confidence, he assuring me that Sikhs are brute beasts who make incorruptible but fierce policemen, and I replying that the Chinese are neither for the present nor the future, but are corpses whom the gas of ancient graves has raised into a sort of imitation life. And on that basis we conversed, becoming very friendly.
“And at last, seeing I was patient, he began to tell me how the Chinese invented all instruments centuries before the West had given up cannibalism. And I told him that was like the Chinese, to invent instruments they had no use for, nor could understand. Whereat he began to show me many marvels, and to tell me the use of them, and to lie about what the Chinese had accomplished with such things three thousand centuries before the present era.