by Talbot Mundy
“Sahib, leave me in this room alone with all these!”
“He’d better have help, hadn’t he?” suggested Naylor.
Grim nodded, and Joan Angela looked scared.
“D’you mean you’re going to kill them all?” she demanded.
“Oh, Lord, no!” answered Naylor.
“Pile your arms outside in the hall, you men!”
The Tommies filed out, grinning hugely. They left their tunics outside, too, and came back rolling up their shirt sleeves.
“Now understand, men,” said Naylor. “This is strictly unofficial. Nobody’s got to be killed. You’ve seen ladies put to gross indignity, and you’ll govern yourselves accordingly. It’s personal between you and these Egyptians. You may fall out for fifteen minutes. Shall the rest of us go outside?” he suggested pleasantly.
So we tiled out, and Narayan Singh reset the broken door in place behind us. We carried all the rifles and tunics downstairs, just as a precaution in case some more than usually active Bey or pasha should contrive to escape through the broken door. Then we went out into the garden to hear music. It was good music, of the sort that Egyptians understand; a little wild for white ears, and without much melody, but with a sort of rhythm to it that was fascinating in its way. Some of the high notes seemed off key, and, in common with nearly an Oriental music, if it possessed harmony it was of a nature unintelligible to the untaught ear. But it fairly pulsed with sounds like drum-beats; that part was comprehensible.
“You see, Joan Angela,” said Grim, laughing aloud at a more than ordinarily high falsetto screech that skirled through a broken window-pane, “if we arrested them the secret would be out, whereas if they go and complain about this we’ve still got perfect evidence against them, and all their names. They’re getting thrashed, and that’s good for them. They’ll be afraid to complain, or to make any further trouble.”
“Besides, you know, Miss Leich,” said Naylor, “those men of mine put up with no end of dog’s work to-day — being hit without hitting back, and all that kind of thing. You wouldn’t rob them of an opportunity like this?”
“I’m only sorry Mrs. Aintree isn’t in the room. That might make her realize,” she answered.
But I did not believe that. I don’t believe it yet. She would merely have said that those Egyptians were suffering for their own sins, which of course was true, and would have flattered herself that she was the instrument of Providence.
There began to be more or less silence upstairs — the tune petered out to a frazzled end in fact — before the expiration of the fifteen minutes, so Naylor blew his whistle and the soldiers came down on by one, examining torn shirts, and feeling at bruises. They put on their tunics, picked up their rifles, and fell in in front of Naylor, not grinning, but with the air of men who have put through an important job.
“Now, have any of you helped yourselves?” asked Naylor. “If any man has taken anything, I’ll look the other way while he gets rid of it. Looting and justice don’t go together, you know.”
He turned his back deliberately, but none of them made a move.
“All right,” he said. “Fall in then. ‘Tshun! Stand at ease! Now, I want no talking about this. If you’re asked any questions, refer the questioner to me and answer nothing. You’ve done a white man’s job. It was a great privilege. Now do the right thing by your officer and don’t let your tongues get me into trouble. ‘Tshun! Back to the lorry now. Forward — march!”
Narayan Singh came last downstairs. He might have been coming from saying his prayers in a temple.
“Such creatures should be skinned and thrown to the crows,” he remarked, “but we did the next best thing. What now, sahibs?”
CHAPTER XVI. “Cleopatra, who would have liked to sell Egypt’s soul again”
I don’t know what the authorities did about Zegloush and his accomplices. Grim took that list of names to headquarters, and we were given permission to go ahead as secretly as possible with the excavation. It is rather easy to guess what happened, however, without shooting wide of the probabilities.
Nothing is more improbable, for instance, than that Zegloush or any of that gang we caught in the upstairs room was in a fit condition to go about for several days. And, as they were not arrested, someone in the confidence of the authorities undoubtedly paid all of them a visit. It is likely that, viper fashion, they showed their fangs and threatened to make public what they knew if they should be prosecuted. Having plenty of trouble on their hands, the authorities preferred to avoid a prosecution, but undoubtedly threatened in return to prosecute and hang the lot if they let so much as a bleat escape them regarding the supposititious Khufu treasure.
Nobody knew exactly, or even nearly, when independence would be granted, if ever, and there was always the possibility that it might come sooner than anticipated; Zegloush stood to gain by keeping the secret. If at the same time he could prevent the existence of treasure from being proved, and keep the treasure underground until after the British let go the reins, there was always a chance that he and his gang might get possession of it. Joan Angela’s title to the land would be worth about ten cents if ever Zegloush should be in a position to pull the political wires.
Zegloush and his intimates could still reach channels through which they stirred up the mob, for word of mouth is much more difficult to control than written or printed communications.
So, although we took a gang to Joan Angela’s camp, and the authorities quartered an officer and twenty men in the huts for our protection, the neighbouring villagers became more and more threatening, and there even began to be half-veiled hints in the local vernacular press to the effect that foreigners were desecrating ancient monuments and planning to loot the country before the Egyptians themselves could get control.
We weren’t out of the wood. Anything at all against any foreigner was good propaganda just at that time. Any violent invective that could arouse the fellahin and set the whole country by the ears was regarded by the would-be statesmen as sound policy. And nothing was more certain than that the first whisper that we had unearthed enormous treasure would plunge the whole country into civil war: for every political party, and almost every individual, to say nothing of the foreign bankers who held Egyptian promises to pay, would stop short of nothing in order to get a share of it.
The solution was the idea of Grim and Chu Chi Yi between them. The engineering end of it was mine. The ticklish work was done by Captain Naylor and the same identical Tommies who had helped Narayan Singh administer “field punishment” that afternoon. Joan Angela paid the expenses, and provided the successful camouflage by granting an interview at the right time to the reporters of several newspapers, including representatives of all the Arabic press, who jeered at her in their columns afterward and mentioned her as “the modern Cleopatra, who would have liked to sell Egypt’s soul again, but failed.” However, Joan Angela failed in nothing, not even in the fun.
Our task was made at the same time more easy and more difficult by the circumstance that the two members of the council who were in the secret till regarded it as a burlesque. They seemed to think there was perhaps one-tenth of one per cent of a grain of truth underlying our delusion-just about sufficient to set Egypt by the ears, and therefore something to be handled circumspectly. They were all in favour of the trick that Grim proposed to play, but deadly in earnest in insisting that there the whole thing should stop. We had to deceive them, as well as the Egyptians.
The main difficulty was to waste sufficient time, for we needed weeks, not days, to tackle the real job. We had to invent labour trouble, broken derricks, sliding sand and a dozen other expedients to explain why it took so long to uncover the masonry that Atkins had come on when he first began prospecting. We knew that was not the right direction to explore in, but the longer we could keep the rest of the world believing that the treasure was supposed to lie underneath those slabs, the more time we had for real prospecting. So we did things that would have made a striking
bricklayer weep for very shame at such loafing and stupidity. Whenever we got enough sand cleared away in order to up-end one of those thirty-ton slabs, either a rope or a chain or a sheer-leg was sure to give way. Or, failing one of those things, all the sand would come sliding down the bank and provide another three or four days’ job of digging.
Meanwhile, we pulled down one of the biggest huts and re-erected it on a spot that Chu Chi Ying indicated after making careful measurements; and inside the hut, using a picked gang, in eight-hour shifts, who carried the sand away quite a distance in buckets on their heads, we dug in real earnest. At the end of five days we had uncovered thirty feet of a masonry tunnel that was built as scientifically and substantially as the pyramid itself. We were lucky enough, or else Chu Chi Ying was clever enough with his calculations, to descend on it at a point where it began to curve in order to lead toward the Nile.
During the whole of the time that the digging was going on there was trouble with the near-by villagers, and there was even some talk of reinforcing our small contingent of soldiers, who had to shoot over the heads of raiding-parties sometimes as often as three or four times a day. The shooting was explained in Cairo as “rifle practice.”
We had to blast to get into that tunnel we had found. The cement that old Khufu’s engineers had used was of such good quality that they had been able to spread it thinner than a sheet of writing-paper, and it had set so that the tunnel was practically one solid piece of stone, forty miles long, without a break or a crack in it anywhere.
Nor was that the least amazing part of it, for it was twenty-one feet deep, inside diameter, and, at the time when we broke in, the upper nine and a half feet were out of water. The rise and fall of the Nile at that point is about sixteen feet, and taking the level of the river at that time into consideration it was obvious that there would always be a considerable air-space all along the tunnel — room, for instance, for a small boat.
So the two chief mysteries now were: Why should Khufu have constructed such an enormous tunnel? and: How had his engineers prevented it from silting up with mud in the course of four thousand years? Even supposing that it flowed in a wide loop and had an outlet back into the Nile at some point lower down, it should have silted none the less, for the Nile carries mud in solution until the water looks like pea-soup, and the mud settles so fast that not only has the whole Nile delta been formed by it, but the river-bed itself is considerably higher than it was in Pharaoh’s day.
The first mystery was solved by Grim, who produced some books on ancient Egypt. According to them there was some connection in the Ancient Egyptian mind between dying and going over water — so much so that the funeral processions of wealthy folk were all made in boats. The corpse in its magnificent sarcophagus was taken by boat across a lake, followed by all the mourners.
Apparently Khufu’s water journey had been postponed; at any rate no record of it has ever been discovered on any of the walls on which it was customary to depict the personal history of every king from the time of his ascending the throne until his death. Moreover, there was that account given by Herodotus to bear in mind. Herodotus came on the scene more than a thousand years after the event, but according to him the legend in his day was definite that Khufu had been buried in a place unknown, that was connected by a tunnel with the Nile.
So it seemed probable that, in order to avoid too much publicity and the consequent discovery of his tomb by thieves, Khufu had caused the boat-ride to be postponed until after his interment. To a man who could conceive such a gigantic hoax as the construction of the pyramid, with its three million cubic yards of fitted and cemented masonry, it can have hardly called for much additional effort of imagination to consider himself quite capable of taking that ferry-ride alone, without the aid of priests and their assistants. So what could be more plausible than that he should make provision for it by constructing his tunnel high enough for the upper part to be above Nile-level and so leave room for a boat? Whether that guess was right or not, we received some circumstantial confirmation of it later.
It was not long before we solved the other problem, of how the tunnel had been kept clear of mud. But first we had to discover where the intake from the Nile might be, and Chu Chi Ying could give us no pointers about that. He said there were no measurements in the pyramid on which to base calculations for that problem; so we had to go at it from where we were and hunt like rats in a drain.
We procured one of those flat-bottomed duck-punts with a small motor in the stern, in which expensive Egyptians like to fool about among the reeds while their hired men catch ducks in a net. And we blasted and broke the tunnel roof until the hole was big enough to lower the boat through without filling. An acetylene torch and some candles in case the acetylene gave out, four good life-preservers, and some long poles completed the outfit, and we were ready. The boat would hold four without too much crowding, and Joan Angela, Grim, Captain Naylor, and I climbed in. Nothing less than a warrant for her arrest would have kept Joan Angela from coming with us.
We pushed off slowly, using the poles at first, the tunnel echoing to every sound we made, so that we could hardly hear each other speak, and it was by that means that we discovered how the tunnel had been kept free from silt; for the poles went down into a foot or so of mud and then touched rock, except in places. At intervals of about twenty yards there were wide gaps in the floor where the poles went down so deep into the mud that we could hardly pull them out again. The floor on either side of those gaps was at different levels, that farthest away from the Nile being always the higher of the two by at least two feet, and, as far: as we could determine by groping, those were stone pockets whose throats faced the flow of water and caught the silt. The constant repetition of that arrangement for forty miles, and the almost immeasurably slow current, explained why the water reached the well in a condition fit for drinking without being filtered.
We poled perhaps for half a mile before starting up the motor. There was a smell of wet stone, but the air was not too stale to breathe. There was a certain amount of slime on the sides of the tunnel, but that sort of stuff apparently needs daylight to grow rankly, and you could usually see the joints in the masonry, although you couldn’t have thrust a knife-blade in between them anywhere.
Crocodiles are supposed to have been exterminated from the lower reaches of the Nile, but not so. There were monsters in there-great, blind brutes whose scales were almost white, and who must have had quantities of fish to live on. There was a ledge a little more than a foot wide along each side of the tunnel about six inches below the present water-level, and the filthy brutes dropped off those ledges in dozens as we sent the rays of the acetylene torch along in front of us. Scales had grown over their eyes, but they were not quite insensitive to light. Their greyness made you think of lepers.
There was no other life down there but crocodiles and the fish, whose presence had to be presumed. Once we got the motor going, and its roar turned the tunnel into the very mother of all noise, we saw not another living thing, but ploughed ahead six miles an hour, leaving a wake behind us that washed the tunnel sides and added its own swishing to the tumult. It was useless trying to speak. Atkins and Chu Chi Ying told us afterward that they could hear the din of our progress until we reached the very end, and that they knew the instant we started back.
There was nothing to mark the distance, and no way of judging it except by time; even so, we did not know the exact speed of the boat and the thought of a collision with submerged rock and an upset among those sightless monsters was no encouragement to us to speed. We throttled the engine down after a while to the slowest rate at which it would keep on turning, and stopped it altogether, using the poles again, whenever we reached a bend — which was about once in every mile or so.
Sometimes there were sharp turns, twice repeated, as if the tunnel engineers had had to avoid tough rock; or they may have been designed as an added precaution against silt. The nearer we approached the Nile, the more frequent t
hose turns were, and the deeper the silt became in the pockets; we lost all sense of direction after a while and, strangely enough, the sensation became one of going down-hill, as if we were descending into the very bowels of the earth, whereas, as a matter of fact, allowing for sand-dunes and ridges, we were at no point more than a hundred feet below the surface.
There is nothing like darkness to make a journey seem interminable, and it felt as if we bad been a whole day, instead of six hours, underground when we came to the intake at last, and the tunnel opened out into a vast stone tank, whose roof was made of monoliths, supported on upright pillars eight feet thick that rose out of the water in a long row down the centre.
This was another exhibition of Khufu’s royal extravagance; not a stone in that great tank can have weighed less than thirty tons, and some of them — those in the roof particularly — must have weighed two or three hundred tons apiece. And so perfect was the masonry, so accurate the joining and the geometrical design, that not one stone had shifted from its place in all those thousands of years. The place was as perfect as on the day it was built and sealed up.
But it was all right to admire the engineering; what we had to discover was some way of reaching the surface, or at least of identifying the spot, so that we might return and continue operations from above. We could hear the Nile, sucking and swishing and gurgling, but as the intake was under water we could not discover its arrangement, or even guess how Khufu’s engineers had solved the problem of silt and rubbish removal at that point. Obviously there was some sort of grating, and it was probably of stone, with spaces wide enough to admit small crocodiles, but too close together to let the grown ones out again. They were certainly wide enough apart to let big fish swim through, else what did the crocodiles eat? But they were invisible; and the bottom just there was fathomless: we drove one pole down so far into the mud that we could not recover it, and nearly upset the duck-punt in the attempt.