by Talbot Mundy
Then, standing at the bottom, peering about us by quivering lantern- light, we got another illustration of Khufu’s forethought. He had conceived it possible that someone in the centuries to come might empty out the water by some means, and had made provision for their reception after they should lose their footing on the slippery ramp and come hurtling downward. The rock on to which we had to step as we let go the rope was carved into regularly spaced fangs three feet in height, two feet or so apart, and of about the same shape and thickness as an elephant’s tusk. It would have been absolutely sure death to fall on them. Nor was that all. There were crocodiles — blind, white-scaled monsters in there — waiting to finish what the stone fangs left undone! My instinct that day when I made the first descent was right.
Joan Angela screamed and jumped. I brought down my club on a brute’s snout in the nick of time. If they couldn’t see, they could smell or else hear, and nine of them came slithering their tails to left and right across the slimy floor, their teeth rattling like castanets and their great claws scratching on the rock.
There was no swarming up that rope again to safety, for the others were coming down it. The only chance was to stand among those stone fangs and use the club until Naylor could get down with his Army revolver. Naylor had only six cartridges. The blind brutes set their snouts and armoured claws between the stone uprights, and tried to force their shoulders through to reach our legs, and if you think they did not fight back when their snouts were struck you have another guess due. They hissed, foaming at the mouth, and although they could not see, as we speak of sight, whenever I struck at one of them another was certain to snap at the club, and several times my arm was within an ace of being caught in the clattering jaws.
And stink! It was worse than carrion, that smell of the guardians of Khufu’s tomb, much worse. Carrion is stuff you can understand; the reek of those filthy reptiles told of centuries of unintelligible gruesomeness.
When Naylor got down he put six shots into them, and five took effect; but that left four of the monsters to be dispatched by some other means, and although crocodiles are not nearly as dangerous out of the water as when in it, in spite of superstition to the contrary, one medium-size wooden club was no argument. Moreover, something had to be done about it fairly soon, for the soldiers were swarming down hand-over-hand behind us, and there was not going to be room for all of us to stand between those fangs of rock. On the other hand, lantern-light seemed to have some effect on their scale-covered eyes, for they rushed at the lanterns, so that whoever stepped outside that pale had either to fight in the dark or else expose himself to double risk.
The ultimate solution was clumsy, but effectual. We had to put all lights out except one, and swing that on outward on a pole that one of the soldiers had brought along for exploration purposes. The brutes snapped and hissed at that, and I swatted them. I’m a hefty specimen, and what I hit most usually breaks, but it was rather too much of a cave-man shambles to come under the heading of amusement.
Then, though, at last we were ready for the great adventure, and it was merely a matter of minutes then before we knew the secret of Khufu’s burial arrangements, although that was not the whole of the problem yet.
Herodotus was right. Chu Chi Ying was right. We were in a cavern of vast dimensions that entirely surrounded an island of rock. And the rock under the island was undermined, so that it stood on rows of rectangular stone uprights, and when the cavern was full there was water over, under, and all around it. On the floor of the basin between the island and the outer walls there were no less than twelve deep pits with sloping sides, presumably for catching silt, which they had done, whether or not that was their purpose, for they were all about two thirds full.
We walked all round the island without discovering any means of entry, but it had been so obviously trimmed off square by hand, and was so plainly artificial at one corner, where masonry had been added to bring it into alignment, that the mere absence of an obvious opening did not discourage anybody, We made the circuit three more times, like the children of Israel parading round Jericho, but no walls fell for our convenience, although quite a lot of optimism dawned.
For one thing, there was the strength of those stone uprights to be considered. They were beautifully shaped, and arranged rather like the whalebone in a “right” whale’s mouth; and each one in itself was slender when compared to the bulk of the island overhead. Each was much too small, for instance, for a man to have burrowed upward through it to avoid the water; but there was a veritable forest of them, spaced hardly more than a foot apart, and they were obviously intended to bear a prodigious weight — something heavier than the island itself, which could have been supported safely by less than a quarter of their number. That gave us ground for believing that the island was hollow, and that the hollowness had weight enclosed in it.
The soldiers favoured blasting. That was just the military point of view, which is certainly practical enough in an age when the walls of cities no longer fall conveniently at the prayer of invading hosts. But there was something a lot too dignified, and stately, and calmly beautiful about the proportions of that wonderful island for the rest of us to care to use dynamite without trying other means first. Even Chu Chi Ying, a convinced iconoclast, who cared for nothing under heaven but the calculus and its solution, and who had come down the rope on Grim’s back because he said it was time to die soon, anyhow, so that danger did not matter time any more, was indignant at the suggestion of shooting away the props until the whole mass should collapse. Moreover, the dynamite was up aloft in the shed beside the well, and nobody wanted to shin up there and fetch it.
So we got the soldiers to make a platform of their backs, and clambered up on to a ledge that faced toward the eastward at the island’s narrowest end. From that point of vantage the ledge seemed like a threshold and the island like a small dark temple of beautiful proportions, perfect in design and measurements as the Great Pyramid itself. In length, it was about a hundred and twenty feet; in breadth, sixty; in height, perhaps twenty-eight; but there were no doors or windows visible, nor any indications of a door, so we had the wooden pole passed up and used it on the wall in front of us in the same way that Koreans ring their great bells. The wall boomed hollow!
“If his body is inside there, I’ll bet you Khufu left some way of getting out without too much exertion,” said Joan Angela, “Try pushing hard.”
But I had another intuition of impending danger. I took the pole first, and did some measuring. Making a rough estimate — for the pole was too short for accuracy — I came to the conclusion that if there was a door in the wall that faced us, and supposing it were made out of one huge slab, that slab would be long enough when lowered to form a ramp from the threshold to the floor of the cavern. Supposing such a stone to be lowered in that way, it would make a fairly convenient means of sliding up heavy weights, such as a stone sarcophagus, and if unwelcome intruders were to be standing on that threshold when it should fall outward...
“And on whomsoever it falls, it shall grind him to powder,” I said. “Suppose we all get off here!”
So we did. There was no means of setting a screw-jack against the perpendicular stone, for the threshold sloped downward at an angle of thirty-five degrees, and if my surmise was correct, that the facing rock was hinged at the bottom, a jack set against the lower end would not have done much good. The problem was how to get that great slab to fall forward, supposing that it really was designed to do so, and at the same time, how not to be underneath it when it fell.
The surface was absolutely smooth. There was not a crack to be seen, although that could partly be accounted for by the deposit of dark slime. The only way that I could see out of the difficulty was to damage some of the supports after all, on the theory that the weight on the floor might then cause a fractional sag, which would tilt the door forward and start it.
But there we were faced by another difficulty, for those uprights were so closely set together tha
t nobody could force his way between them; and to stand in front to do the damage would mean the imminent risk of being crushed under the falling door. It began to look as if someone would have to go back for the dynamite, but I decided to try one forlorn expedient first.
So we set to work with the picks and crowbars, and tried to smash the uprights at either corner, not expecting to produce a sag in the floor so easily as all that, but hoping that the vibration of the blows might communicate itself through the masonry and loosen something above that depended on balance for its stability.
And about the tenth blow turned the trick! A section of stone in the middle of the front wall, amounting to a fifth of the whole width, tilted outward from the top without warning and fell with a two-hundred ton crash, so that it broke loose from its stone hinges below and smashed itself to fragments on the cavern floor! The din was an explosion. The cracking stone sent splinters whizzing like sharpened shrapnel.
But some of the broken pieces were large enough to form stepping-stones, and we scrambled up, flashing our lights into the gap the monolith had left. But our lights fell on another blank wall, of polished granite this time, and again I had an idea to call our party back. No amount of striking at the supports seemed to make any impression on that sheet of polished granite, so I tried poking at it with the pole from as far to one side as could be managed, so as to avoid the thing if it fell on me. But instead of falling outward like the other, it showed symptoms of revolving on a central hinge, yielding an appreciable fraction of an inch when I thrust against the pole with all my might.
“Let’s all get up there now and shove,” suggested Naylor.
But I still had an idea. It seemed to me that a man who had thought of that simple means of flattening intruders, by balancing a monolith to fall forward on them, might also have thought of something slightly more intricate by way of a trap for such fortunates as had escaped the falling door. It would be the most natural thing in the world to get up there and shove against that polished granite the moment it showed signs of yielding. If Zegloush Pasha had been with us, or even Moustapha and Mrs. Aintree, I would have sent them up to shove without an atom of compunction. I know others, too, whom I might have employed without prejudice on that occasion. But the gang we had with us was a good gang, and Joan Angela is simply irreplaceable.
I sat down for a minute to think, and the sharp edges of the broken stone I sat on hurt the part that I sit with and provided the idea. That piece of stone weighed about two hundred pounds and it occurred to me that if we could catapult it in some way against the granite leaf, that might be hint enough for any hidden mechanism to start performing.
We had plenty of rope and a good, stout pole, but you need rather more than that to construct a working catapult in fifteen minutes. However. I had the idea all right and a pendulum is just as good. There were two sockets high up in the sides of the opening into which stone projections had fitted to help preserve the balance of the outer monolith. I cut the pole to an exact length to fit across the opening with one end in each socket, and stood on the shoulders of Grim and Atkins while I fitted the pole in place; it had to be forced in, and made a good, tight fit.
The rest was simple. All we had to do was to throw the rope over that beam, tie the rock to one end of it, and haul up until we could set it swinging at the proper level. In that way we were able to deliver blows on the granite leaf that amounted to something.
I guess we swung the rock against the granite knocking on Khufu’s bedroom door for admittance, as you might say, nine or ten times before anything happened. Then, however, the granite revolved at least a foot. And then the top fell free from the retaining socket, and the whole mass tumbled outward, as the first had done. I don’t think it weighed more than ten tons; but ten tons are enough.
That was the last of Khufu’s hints to strangers. The tomb yawned wide, and we climbed up over the debris to investigate, Joan Angela leading the way with an electric torch. And the first sight was bitter disappointment — disillusion — anticlimax — although beautiful; you had to admit that it was beautiful.
There was only a narrow passage down the midst of the rock, and at the end of it one plain sarcophagus of hand-rubbed granite, resting on a carved stone boat. Khufu had even provided the ship in which he proposed to sail to heaven down that forty-mile-long tunnel he had made! That was all there was in there. That sarcophagus did not hold wealth enough to settle the debts of nations.
Yet, as I said, it was beautiful, for the tomb had been watertight. Not even damp had entered to spoil the gilding. All down one side, the wall was finished in dull gold; in silver all down the other, although the floor and ceiling were of polished granite and there was no skirting-board or decoration of any kind to conceal the joint between granite and gold and silver; it struck me that it would have looked better if there had been something of the sort.
However, we all hurried along to the sarcophagus, and got busy with crowbars prying off the lid — no easy task, for the lid weighed tons, rested in a mortise, and was fastened down with stone pegs that were difficult to find. However, we got it off at last, and tipped it over sideways against the gold wall, where it knocked off a section of solid gold sheeting about six feet high by three in width, for all the world like a piece of wall-board, and of about the same thickness, but heavy enough, of course, to fall like lead; and it had the ring about it that no man ever mistakes for anything but gold when he has heard it once.
Joan Angela screamed, not with fright but with sheer amazement. There was no more gilt in that place than there was garlic! The walls on either hand were lined with solid gold and silver sheets supported on granite uprights, and behind them on either hand the gold and silver treasure of Khufu was stacked in ingots from floor to roof, rows and rows and countless rows of them without a fraction of an inch between except where passages were left that gave just enough room for a broad-shouldered man to pass!
All was gold on one side. All was silver on the other, and whoever could estimate the value of it all has quicker brains than I have. Even Chu Chi Ying refused to state the amount approximately; he sat down on the boat that bore Khufu’s sarcophagus, with a “told you so” expression on his face, and borrowed a cigarette from Grim. I take it that was his comment on the situation.
The simplicity was magnificent. There was no attempt at ornament, inscription, comment, explanation. There lay Khufu, and there was his money — or rather the money he had wrung and raked and filched from Egypt in the course of fifty years. Inside the stone sarcophagus was the customary wooden one, and another wooden one inside that again, but never a mark or hieroglyph on any of them to announce who the occupant might be.
We raised the inner lid of all, and there lay his mummy, plainly wrapped, with the jars containing entrails alongside of him; but we did not pull the wrapping off the mummy, for it seemed a shame to risk damaging the relics of that arch old miser, who could live so masterfully thoughtful for his latter end and die in such prodigious state.
Consider the gall of the old rascal! Think of wringing all that bullion in taxes from the folk who had to build the pyramid to help him hide the place where he proposed to stow it all away! And then consider him lying there without so much as a name on his coffin, but with all that good money to right and left with which to purchase his way into heaven — and within a hundred yards of him the dungeon in which the men who had stacked the bullion were done to death!
And what hold had he over the priests, do you suppose, that prevented them from telling the next king where Egypt’s treasure lay? The next man must have come to a throne whose treasury was empty, and although the priests of those days took small stock in kings, but rather used them as an adjunct to the priestly power, you would think they would have made some use of their secret knowledge. For they must have known of that treasure. Nothing could be done in those days without the knowledge of the priests, nor even without their permission. Wouldn’t the story of the politics of that make better readin
g than the quarrels of the League of Nations?
However, our job, like Khufu’s, was accomplished. There remained no more to do than to set a guard over the tomb, and to start that prodigious treasure on its way in the duck-punt along that forty-mile tunnel to the Government boat that waited near our big shed by the Nile. The bargain we lad made with the soldiers was that they should hold their tongues and be paid, provided sufficient treasure were discovered, the equivalent of five thousand pounds apiece. Naylor received his reward from the authorities direct, and I don’t know how much it amounted to; but Joan Angela refused to touch a nickel’s worth of the treasure, subject to her one original condition, that the British should appoint trustees to use the treasure in the public interest, and that she herself should be one trustee.
And, of course, neither Grim nor I could take any of it, for we were the employees of a firm that had undertaken a definite task for a stipulated fee, to include expenses. Joan Angela paid Meldrum Strange’s bill in due course, and that ended our connection with the affair.
But if you want to check me upon this story, I will point to a few clues that you may follow if you wish.
In the first place, then: There are ten ex-private soldiers who all purchased their discharge from the British Army on the same date, and who are all now settled in business in one English county town. That’s only a coincidence, you might say, but here’s another one: On Joan Angela’s ranch in California there is a man named Atkins who is boss storekeeper, and generally responsible for goods and chattels. He seems to have private means, for he drives his own car, and smokes cigars of a kind that you and I can’t afford much oftener than once a year.
And here’s yet one more clue: In Singapore, in a little side street that runs down toward the quays, there lives a Chinaman named Chu Chi Ying, who teaches no more “fat-fool first mates” how to pass examinations for their master’s ticket, but smiles nearly all day long and amuses himself by making marvellous astronomical calculations. He seems to have an income quite sufficient for his needs, and a portrait of Joan Angela hangs on the wall just inside the doorway of his house. Go and look, if you don’t believe me. On your way, consider the stuffed, blind, white crocodile in the Gezivich Museum, Cairo.