by Talbot Mundy
It was Joan Angela who thought of the solution. She had been reading about the pyramid, and studying the religions and superstitions of ancient Egypt more than the rest of us.
“If Khufu planned to make his journey after death, along this waterway, how did he propose to escape at this end? He must have left an exit,” she said. “Do you recall how, when Al Mahmoun’s men forced an entrance into the pyramid, they had almost given up hope when they heard a stone falling in some hollow place inside? There may be some such stone left here that will fall if it gets a shock.”
We examined the end of the wall nearest to the Nile, but there was no sign there of any loose stone, or of a stone that could be pried loose with anything less than dynamite.
“Wouldn’t he plan to emerge upward?” Joan Angela suggested.
That being probable — for all men seem to think of heaven as being somewhere overhead, although where the Australians and Chinese would go when they die in that case is unpleasant to imagine — we turned the acetylene light on the roof. By standing up in the boat we could very nearly touch the roof with our fingers, so that, as we shifted the boat about and used the torch systematically, we were able to scrutinize every inch of it. Then we saw what we had not seen before-that the middle pillar of all was only two feet thick at the top and was cut in the form of steps all the way down to the water on the side nearest the Nile, at which point it was eight feet thick like all the others. And at about the point where the roof-stones would have rested on that pillar if it had been of the same thickness as the rest, there was a square of limestone set between the granite. It was set flush, and finished off so smoothly that the difference in colour was the only clue to it, and although apparently it was not fastened in place with cement, the joints were so absolutely perfect that friction should have been enough to hold it in place for centuries.
“I’ll bet it’s dropped in place from overhead, and weighs at least two tons,” said Grim without enthusiasm.
“I’ll bet!” Joan Angela answered. “Give me that pole. Now, push the boat clear.”
She shoved against the stone, but nothing happened, except that the boat shot all over the place and she nearly fell into the water.
“Somebody stronger take a hand,” she suggested. So I took the pole, and we shifted the boat so that Grim and Naylor could hold its stern against the next pillar. I shoved so hard that, what with my weight and the pressure, the bow all but went under, and suddenly the limestone moved — not more than a fraction of an inch, but enough to set the end of the wet pole slipping on its smooth surface. I tried to recover my balance, but Grim’s hands slipped on the rock he was clinging to and I went overboard at the same instant that the limestone block gave up its four-thousand-year grip on the granite and plunged down into the tank along side me!
I was thinking of hungry crocodiles, and I scrambled out as if the underworld were after me. Above us gaped a four-square black hole, just big enough for one man at a time to pass through Comfortably — King Khufu’s gate to heaven!
I went up first and helped Joan Angela through after me. The others followed with the torch and candles. We were in an oblong chamber, thirty feet by twenty, lined with porphyry. There were no beams visible above us, and the porphyry ceiling twenty-eight feet high — as we found out afterwards — glowed as smoothly as the hand-rubbed floor and walls. It was a piece of absolutely perfect workmanship, and empty. There was not even dust, and the air was almost impossible to breathe.
But at one end, that nearest the Nile-the eastern end that is-there was a perfect Egyptian doorway in the middle of the wall. It was apparently a blind door, for the space between the marvellously moulded uprights was filled up with the same smooth porphyry that covered walls, floor and ceiling.
We could not stay then to examine it; we were gasping for air already, and although a little air came in through the square hole we had entered by it would only have been a matter of seconds before we all collapsed. So we climbed back into the boat, Joan Angela first, and I last. I lingered to make sure of the direction of that door.
“There must be an earth-mound overhead,” I said. “We can find that from the outside. Joan Angela, we’ve won the game! Old Khufu pays the bets!”
CHAPTER XVII. Magnificent simplicity
It was after midnight when we emerged from that tunnel and found Chu Chi Ying and Atkins waiting for us. They had had some trouble in keeping inquisitive labourers at bay, but having heard our engine barking in the tunnel all the while had only been in doubt about our safety when we stopped the thing. According to Atkins they could not distinguish a word we said, but could identify our voices miles away.
Chu Chi Ying’s face wrinkled into smiles as he sat listening to us, nodding like an automatic toy.
“Sometime finding porphyly chamber same size, same shape, same evlything upstairs in pylamid,” he announced with an air of conviction. “Way out pylamid top-side. Find him some day. Me savvy.”
He was really only interested in the pyramid. The treasure did not attract him; what gave him exquisite delight was seeing the proof that his deductions were correct. He was too old to care for money, or too wise; I don’t know which. Our motive from now on became wholly mercenary.
Dawn found us down by the Nile in two Ford cars, exploring for a mound to correspond with the porphyry chamber and the tunnel’s end. We found it. There was a place where a great grey rock thrust itself a short way out into the Nile and rose for fifty feet above the water. Inland, its southern end was all rock, but it shelved downward toward the north and north east, and there the earth had lodged so deeply that a fellah saw fit to own it, rig up a water-wheel, and grow crops. Joan Angela bought that piece of land from him at his own price — a price that would have put a war-crazed alien profiteer to shame; and he went away disappointed and grumbling at having been robbed, with a fortune in his pocket.
Then we really went to work; but first we had to build a long shed for camouflage, and in doing that we unearthed the stone foundations of an ancient temple. There was nothing whatever remaining of that old temple except foundations, part of the flooring, and one end wall with an unroofed chamber behind the wall that had been used by the priests for their mysteries. You find the same sort of chamber in all old Egyptian temples, but the remarkable part about this one was that it backed against the rock, which had been trimmed off vertically and carved to represent doorposts. The space between the doorposts was blocked with one enormous granite slab whose edges were so beautifully mortised into the carved post as to be almost undiscoverable without a magnifying glass.
We had to get ropes and lumber on the scene before we dared tackle that granite slab and, even so, we had to chip the edges with a chisel all the way round before we could insert a wedge to pry it loose — only to discover then, to our amazement, that it was no false door, nor yet a covering set in place to conceal a door, but the actual door itself. It was balanced in the middle, top and bottom, and revolved on stone hinges when a pressure of about a hundred pounds was applied to the right-hand side.
It gave access to a narrow passage in the rock of about: twice its own width. That passage was twenty feet long, and blind, but the end of it was built of porphyry, and when we set a jack against a plank up-ended on the porphyry wall and began to apply pressure exactly the same thing happened; a porphyry door revolved against the clock, away from us, and we walked straight through into that marvellous, empty, polished chamber above the tank at the secret tunnel’s end.
Now Khufu and his priests no doubt intended that marvellous piece of architecture to symbolize the awe-inspiring emptiness and peace that await all royal applicants at heaven’s gate. But the floor was good and slippery, and we danced on it. I would just as soon play golf or tiddly-winks as dance, but Joan Angela insisted, so we did the U.S. two-step all over Khufu’s floor. Maybe we’d better say that she did, and I did my best. Grim and Naylor did a breakdown, South Carolina style, though Naylor refused to tell where he learned that noble
art. We had solved how to get the treasure out without betraying it, providing there was treasure! Counting your chickens before they are hatched is profitable business, despite the proverb-mongers, if you do it in the right mood.
Nothing remained to do at that end, except to keep intruders away. The next thing was to build a dam across the tunnel, at the point where we originally blasted our way in, and then pump the water away from Khufu’s island tomb, which we were confident of reaching by way of the well as soon as all the water was exhausted.
But that was a lengthy job. We had to get cement to start with, and set up forms, and mix and pour the stuff, observing without much pride the difference in quality between our cement and the mixture made by Khufu’s engineers. The job had to be done carefully, because if the dam should give way, enough water could come flowing down that tunnel to drown us all in a very few minutes.
We procured a good American rotary pump from a dealer in second-hand machinery, and an oil-fired steam-engine to drive it. You can get any kind of black man to wet-nurse a boiler, but what the same man can do to a kerosene- or gas-engine would take two skilled mechanics to adjust again.
There was no trouble, of course, about getting rid of the water. We simply pumped it out over the dam and back into the tunnel toward the Nile; but there were hours, and even days, when we suspected we had merely cut a circular tunnel in the middle and were trying to pump the whole Nile not only dry but back into itself. An immense space had to be cleared of water-not only the lake surrounding Khufu’s tomb, but galleries and holes and tunnels, whose purpose none has guessed yet, but whose aggregate content was prodigious.
We finally got a second pump and another engine, and the two together gave us a twelve-inch flow of water, which began to make an impression. Meanwhile, we had to keep on working at the false excavation, and long before the pumping was finished the sand was thrown so far back, and so many of the huge monoliths were exposed that we could invent no further excuse for delay. So we got a new, stout sheer-legs set in place, with a hoisting gear capable of lifting thirty tons, and after another day’s hard labour contrived to get a chain round one of the stones. All we could do then was to hoist the monolith and set baulks of timber under it, which was enough, though, to provide access to the gloom below.
And oh, the rush when the baulks were in place at last and the great stone came to rest on them! Every hired man on the lot, Tommies and Gyppies and all, went down through the dark slot like rats into a hole, imagining gold and diamonds and all the farms and public-houses and motor-cars the loot would buy! They did not wait for lamps or candles, but probably expected to find their way by the light of the gleaming gems that would be heaped up in piles in the tomb. And at that, they were no bigger fools than the rest of us, who buy gilt-edged stock in mines that don’t exist.
We were in no hurry. Chu Chi Ying was much too positive and had hitherto been much too often right in his calculations for us to buy any stock in that hole; so we sat on top and waited for reports, merely sending down a lantern by the last man-a private from the Tower Hamlets of London Town. We waited for an hour, listening to the rumble of their voices and the occasional sound of great stones being shifted, before the same man showed his face in the opening once more, lantern in hand.
“Gawd blimey, it’s a dormitory!” he remarked.
“A perishin’ vault full O’ lines O’ drinkin’-troughs, wi’ lids on ’em what weighs a ton apiece! Inside, nothing but blokes’ bones, what all died kickin’! Come an’ see, miss!”
“No treasure?” she asked.
“Not a thripenny bit. And we’ve ‘unted!”
We climbed into a spacious vault that looked as if it had been hewn from solid rock, but was patched up with masonry in places to make it rectilinear and smooth. It was three hundred feet long from end to end, and down the length of each side, in triple rows, were plain stone sarcophagi, from most of which the lids had already been forced by our gang of invaders-a simple enough business, because they had not been fastened down in any way, but had been kept in place by sheer dead-weight.
There were no wooden coffins inside those stone boxes; no mummy- wrappings, nor any of the usual trappings of the Egyptian corpse; but inside each was a grown man’s skeleton. Not one of the lot lay straight. The legs of some were raised, as if they had died in the effort to force off the stone lid. They had been buried naked and alive. And what was worse, some gruesome stuff had been put in with them, to preserve them.
We had the gang lift off every lid, and with the aid of lamps and candles we examined each interior carefully. There was not in any one of them the slightest trace of ornament or jewellery, or of anything that could identify the individual or explain the reason for his burial alive. But Chu Chi Ying laughed. A Chinaman can always see humour in cruelty; even the best of them seem to have that characteristic.
“Damn fools bury Khufu. By an’ by priests bury them. Dead men not say much!” he remarked. That was the long and short of it. Those were the bodies of men who carried Khufu into his last resting-place, treasure and all, and the priests had stopped their mouths — unkindly, as the way of such priests is.
Well, we had a story for the newspapers, at any rate. We had an alibi, and perfect proof of the failure of our excavations. We had a story for the soldiers and the labour-gang to tell in barracks and bazaars, and something to show the reporters, who came out and grinned at Joan Angela. We stopped the pumps, that afternoon of the famous interview that all the papers published with such scathing sneers at “foreign Americans, who think they know so much, but whose brains are nothing better than mechanical, producing no literature worthy of the name,” so nobody got wise to the fact that we had other excavations under way.
A very learned Egyptian professor burst into print with the explanation that the place we had found was an execution dungeon for the worst type of criminals, and neither very ancient nor of more than casual interest. A discovery has to be “hig-liff” and distinctly more than casual to interest Egypt. Even the fellahin began to be less troublesome.
So we were able to cut down our guard of British Tommies to the original ten under Naylor’s command, hand-picked by him; and with them we made a bargain, which, as far as I know, every single man has loyally kept. That done, and the last inquisitive reporter gone to write his acridly sarcastic comments, we resumed work with the pumps, while Grim went back to Cairo to confer with the financial member of the council and arrange for a Government boat to lie at anchor close by our new shed on the bank of the Nile.
It was a peculiar coincidence, which nobody ever seemed to notice, that that gas-driven, white-painted, yacht-lined inspection-boat was manned and occupied exclusively by officers, who lay aboard and yawned, and wondered at intervals what the confounded tamasha was all about. But they were young men, who had been told, although by no means everything, too much to care to ask for further information.
One thing that we did while waiting for that water to disappear was to pull down several of the wooden huts belonging to the camp and saw them up into short lengths ready to be nailed together in the form of rough boxes. It might have given the game away if we had ordered boxes made in Cairo.
There came a day at last when the pumps sucked little else but mud, and choked accordingly. By that time we had a wooden shed built over the well, with a door that could be barricaded from the inside as well as padlocked from without; and inside that hut we had high rubber boots, lanterns, electric torches, picks, crowbars, and two of those ever useful screw-jacks with which you can shift almost anything that can be shifted. We also had a stout beam fixed in place across the top of the well, from which a rope-ladder hung, and we had plenty of rope in addition for making safe our further descent into the unknown labyrinths.
The hut had no windows, and two of our Tommies guarded the place on the outside. We even had food with us, to avoid the necessity for interrupting our explorations. We started the descent so provided in every way that we could find that trea
sure, and get rid of it too, if expedient, without once coming to the surface.
Joan Angela claimed the right to go down first, and after some argument we let her have her way, that being the only possible solution, for she would not yield. So down she went with a lantern in hand, and I went next after her, armed with a club. The rope-ladder was easy, of course, but nothing could have been more difficult than that slippery ramp below, down which I had nearly drowned myself on the first prospecting trip. Even with a good stout rope to cling to, it was impossible to keep your feet, for the slime of centuries had established itself on the smooth stone, and our descent became a series of spasmodic efforts to check the speed. Somewhere up above us Mrs. Watts let go the rope and screamed; Naylor tried to get in her way by throwing his legs out, but she carried him with her, and the two dropped down on top of me, one on each side of me, clinging to each other; it was the sheerest piece of luck that I did not let go the rope and lower the lot of us down on top of Joan, in which case there would have been four first-class casualties for a beginning.
For from the lower lip of the descending ramp, that connected the well with the underground cavern, to the floor of the cavern itself was a drop of more than forty feet. We had to go down hand-over-hand, swinging in darkness, and, as I said, Joan Angela went first; but she surrendered her lantern to me, and by holding to the rope with one hand I contrived to attach the lantern-bail to the end of a ball of twine and to lower it foot by foot as she descended.
Mrs. Watts was in a hopeless predicament, for she was afraid to go over that edge, yet unable to get back. Nobody wanted to go down ahead of her, for fear she would let go her hold and fall on the unfortunates below. So finally, after a lot of talk, and after Joan Angela had called up cheerily to me to let go the lantern because she stood on rock bottom, I took Mrs. Watts down pick-a-back, as the only way out of the difficulty — and a darned, difficult, knuckle-breaking, desperate expedient at that!