‘These guys are getting more reckless the longer this Arab Spring goes on,’ said Aleta, offering a sympathetic smile as she waved them away.
‘For them, it’s more like an Arab Winter.’ O’Connor gently hit the brakes as one, more desperate than the rest, flung himself on to the bonnet. Hotel security cleared the way through to the entrance, and closed the boom gate behind their car.
‘This place has so much history,’ said Aleta, after they’d checked in and settled into the Montgomery Suite, which had been decorated with many of the hotel’s original masterpieces. The splendid door to the suite was inlaid with mother of pearl, and the living room was furnished with antique furniture. ‘Trust you to get us a suite with furniture from a harem!’
O’Connor grinned. The furniture had indeed been sourced from the harem of a bygone sultan. The hotel itself had initially been built in 1869 as a hunting lodge for the Egyptian king Isma’il Pasha, and hadn’t opened as a hotel until 1886. Over a hundred years later, it had retained all of its former glory. O’Connor detested ritzy five-star hotels, preferring those with a story to tell, and Mena House was no exception. While they hadn’t added their own names to the guest book, there were some very distinguished entries, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the future King George V and Queen Mary, Agatha Christie, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon; and here too, in 1977, the Mena House Agreement had been thrashed out between President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, leading to the Camp David Accords and an historic peace treaty between the long-time enemies.
‘Thank you for this,’ Aleta said, as they stood out on the suite’s private terrace, and she rested her head on O’Connor’s shoulder. Beyond the sixteen hectares of gardens and palm trees, the Great Pyramid and the two smaller pyramids stood as sentinels to the ages, their secrets still intact. ‘I’m still not accustomed to your standard of accommodation.’
‘This isn’t a dress rehearsal; this is life, and we’re living it,’ said O’Connor, putting his arm around Aleta’s slender waist. ‘When Accounts query it, I will argue persuasively that it was necessary to be close to the object of our investigation . . . and given what I found in the Kashta Palace, I suspect there’s an element of truth to that. I’m still none the wiser as to why someone like Crowley would have an interest in this Euclid Papyrus. What time are we due with Professor Badawi?’ His hand wandered on to the top of Aleta’s taut thigh.
‘In another hour . . . and no, as much as I might find that proposition attractive, it will take us that long to get through the traffic.’
‘What proposition?’ protested O’Connor, unable to stifle a grin.
‘I know that look! Taxi or drive?’
‘Taxi – this place is on a par with Lima and New Delhi. I’m over driving for one day.’
Professor Hassan Badawi was once again waiting to ensure there was no problem with security, and minutes later Aleta and O’Connor found themselves inside Badawi’s musty, wood-panelled office, sharing tea with the professor.
‘I’m so sorry to have read what you’ve been through, Hassan,’ Aleta began. ‘The mask of Tutankhamun was an unimaginable loss.’
Badawi smiled wanly. It seemed to Aleta that he had visibly aged. ‘We can only hope the mask will be recovered soon. You can’t put a price on it, and it’s not only a loss to the museum, of course, it’s a loss to the whole of society.’ Badawi sipped his tea. Shai, or tea, was the national drink in Egypt, a position that coffee had never rivalled. It was so important that the Egyptian government ran tea plantations in Kenya to ensure a quality supply.
‘Nearly two million people visit this museum every year . . . or used to,’ Badawi continued. ‘It seems we’ve been hit with a double whammy. The loss of the funerary mask has been devastating enough, but ever since the overthrow of Mubarak, the country’s been in turmoil, and tourism has been decimated. We’re really struggling.’
Aleta detected a tear in the old professor’s eye and she placed her hand on his arm.
‘I must apologise,’ he said, reaching for his handkerchief, ‘but this country has so much potential . . . so much! We used to provide leadership in the Arab world, and now we’re in a shambles. Over twenty million Egyptians are living on US $1.50 a day, or less, and it’s getting worse.’
‘Egypt will rise again, and you have a lot of friends who will do everything they can to help,’ Aleta offered reassuringly.
O’Connor watched the exchange between the two renowned archaeologists with interest. Two people who cared deeply, not only about the past, but about injustice and the future. Injustice in the world was something O’Connor had long struggled with himself. Given his assignments and the nature of his employment, he’d compartmentalised his anguish and banished those thoughts to the deeper recesses of his brain. But every once in a while a conversation like the one he’d just witnessed brought to the fore his frustration with the widening gap between the mega-wealthy and the poor, and, increasingly, a struggling middle class.
‘Yes,’ said Badawi. ‘We can only hope that Egypt’s military government will be temporary, and that democracy will rise again, otherwise corruption and nepotism will be worse than under Mubarak, and we had thirty long years of his dictatorship.’ Badawi reached for a file on his desk. ‘In between police investigations and media intrusion, I’ve been thinking about our last meeting. There’s something really exciting about that photograph you showed me . . . and it’s to do with the dots over the pyramids.’
Aleta felt a pang of remorse that she hadn’t been entirely honest with her old friend, but she put her feelings to one side as O’Connor caught her eye. ‘Yes . . . the superimposition of what looks to be a constellation over the top. But there’s still argument over whether they’re aligned with Orion, or Cygnus,’ Aleta said, excited to find that an archaeologist of Professor Badawi’s standing was thinking along the same lines. ‘You think Euclid might have been trying to tell us something?’ Aleta asked, after she’d outlined her theory on the two celestial bodies.
‘He may have been. If the pyramids were not only aligned with the compass points but the movement of the stars as well, this is an exciting find. And I’m not one to delve into astronomy, but did you see that recent show on crop circles in the United Kingdom?’
Christ, O’Connor thought. Here we go again.
‘No . . . I’ve been travelling. What show?’ Aleta asked, her interest thoroughly aroused.
‘Three more crop circles have appeared next to the Chilbolton Observatory in the UK – the Flower of Life, a detailed image of the Cygnus constellation, and a third which depicts the planets in our solar system,’ Badawi explained, ‘all of them extraordinarily intricate.’
‘Appeared just after closing time at the Elephant and Castle,’ said O’Connor, a wicked grin on his face.
‘Just ignore him, Hassan. For a scientist, he has some peculiarly philistine views.’
‘Then the scientist in our midst,’ Badawi countered, ‘might be interested to know that a chemical analysis of the flattened wheat showed the crop’s molecular structure had been altered. They found rare radioactive isotopes which have never previously been found in a wheat crop.’
Aleta stared at O’Connor over the tops of her glasses with a ‘what do you have to say to that’ look.
‘Hmm.’ O’Connor didn’t concede any ground, but his interest was suddenly piqued. It was the first time he’d heard about the chemical analysis of isotopes.
‘Did the show throw any light on what the latest circles might mean?’ asked Aleta.
Badawi smiled. ‘Our friend the scientist over here might think this far-fetched,’ he said, giving Aleta a conspiratorial wink, ‘but there’s speculation from quite reputable scientists that one may contain a warning. The solar system circle accurately depicts our planetary system, with one change. Earth is depicted with a jagged edge and a plume, which may be a representation of a planet rapidly warming – a ring of fire with a plume of smoke
. As to the Flower of Life, the ancient representation of what we’d call radiant or free energy comes with a coded formula for a technology that produces energy without combustion, a technology that is based on the laws of nature, or the planet’s vibrations – more than one scientist thinks that’s worth looking at.’
‘And the Cygnus constellation. I wonder if we should be looking at the significance of Cygnus instead of Orion?’ Aleta asked.
‘The Cygnus alpha star over the cemetery to the north-west of the middle pyramid has me intrigued,’ said Badawi. ‘Are you familiar with the northern night sky, Doctor O’Connor?’
‘Only the major formations . . . I couldn’t claim astronomy as a speciality,’ replied O’Connor.
‘One of the better maps was drawn by John Perring in 1837.’ Badawi got up from behind his desk. ‘I’ve laid it out over here on the chart table. You can see he’s produced a detailed layout of the pyramids and the rest of the Giza plateau. Now, if we overlay Cygnus,’ Badawi said, fitting a transparency of the constellation over the map, ‘we can see the alpha, delta, gamma and epsilon stars, as well as the Cygnus beta star which falls over the Gebel Ghibli or ‘southern hill’ area east of the smallest pyramid on the boundary of an Islamic cemetery. But it’s this small, unnamed star here that falls inside the Islamic cemetery that caught my attention.’
‘I wondered about that,’ said Aleta. ‘It seems to fall over a well that Perring’s marked on the map?’
‘Exactly,’ said Badawi, his dark eyes reflecting an enthusiasm for discovery and a possible solution to a long-standing puzzle. ‘The well was known in ancient texts as Bir el-Samman.’
‘And now?’ asked O’Connor.
‘It’s still there, but an Islamic cemetery is out of bounds to non-Muslims, so before you can investigate the well, we’ll need approval. The Muslim Brotherhood, or what’s left of it, has its hands full right now. The military government is arresting its leaders left, right and centre, and its focus is elsewhere, although I still have contacts. But there’s another problem. It’s an artesian well, so it’s connected to the water table beneath the Giza plateau, and that may mean an underwater maze.’
‘We’re trained to handle that,’ O’Connor assured the Professor. ‘If there’s anything down there, it’s probably been undisturbed for a very long time, so the visibility should be okay.’
‘I hope so,’ said Badawi. ‘For a long time now, there’s been speculation on what might lie beneath the pyramids, including predictions that one day, we will find the lost Hall of Records, although hard-headed archaeologists keep no more than an open mind on that.’
O’Connor grinned disarmingly. ‘The Hall of Records? You will have to excuse my ignorance, but the more I hang around here, the less I seem to know.’
‘The Hall of Records, like the lost Library of Alexandria, is said to contain papyri recording the history of ancient Egypt . . . although unlike the Library, we only have vague reports to go on,’ Aleta explained. ‘In the fifteenth century, al-Makrizi, a Cairo-born historian, wrote of subterranean passages that had been constructed in the vicinity of the pyramids for, as he put it, “depositories of the wisdom and acquirements in the different arts and sciences”. And even before al-Makrizi, the fourth-century Greco-Roman historian Marcellinus wrote about winding subterranean passages near the Pyramids.’
‘We’ve perhaps come close on a couple of occasions,’ said Badawi. ‘Henry Salt, who was the British consul general here in the early 1800s, discovered an entrance to some catacombs to the west of the Great Pyramid.’
‘But no papyri?’ O’Connor asked.
‘No,’ said Badawi. ‘But in 1934, the tomb of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife, was found between the second pyramid and the Sphinx by Doctor Helim Hassan from the American University in Cairo. The chambers were explored in the nineties, and there are three tiers, one on top of the other, with access facilitated by vertical shafts. But again, no Hall of Records, and no papyri. And of course, the water table’s risen since ancient times, so that may make things difficult.’
‘Diving in confined spaces,’ O’Connor mused aloud. ‘That’s not without its risks.’
The Muslim elders led the way into the cemetery to the south of the Sphinx, accompanied by Professor Badawi. O’Connor and Aleta followed with their gear. They passed through row after row of tombs, some dome-shaped, some with V-shaped roofs, some square, but all kept in white-washed condition, until finally they reached a grove of sycamore trees, including one that O’Connor judged to be over 200 years old.
O’Connor put his diving gear down near the paving stones around the well and extracted a lead from his pack.
‘Professor Badawi, could you explain to the elders that I’m going to drop this weight into the well, to check its depth?’ Better to have them understand each step than mistakenly take offence, he thought.
The translation into Arabic complete, O’Connor swung the lead line into the semi circular–shaped well and paid it out, watching the coloured knots that were ten metres apart. ‘It’s deep,’ he said finally, ‘about 15 metres to the surface of the water, and then another 45 metres to the bottom.’
‘So we’re looking at diving in about 30 metres of water,’ said Aleta, ‘and perhaps deeper if there are connecting passages through the water table.’
O’Connor nodded, unravelling a rope ladder and securing it around the base of the nearest sycamore tree. The gear and safety checks took another twenty minutes, but finally, he and Aleta were ready.
‘There’s not going to be much room,’ O’Connor said, ‘so I’ll do the exploratory dive, and we’ll see where we go from there.’ He attached his fins to his belt, and began the descent to the inky black surface below. He reached the surface of the water, put on his fins, switched on his head-mounted dive light and continued to use the rope to assist in the descent until he came to the last rung, some five metres below the surface. As black as the water appeared from above, down here it was clear and the powerful headlight beam picked out the ancient stone walls of the well. O’Connor checked his depth gauge and continued his descent. At nearly 25 metres, he saw it. The stone wall had given way to natural rock and an opening just below him that was about two metres across. O’Connor reached for his powerful hand light to supplement the one on his head. And just in case that failed, he had a third. It was a cardinal rule for diving in confined spaces and caves: always carry three sources of light. Despite the progress in technology, dive lights remained the least reliable of all diving equipment, and to be caught in a cave without any light source was a major cause of fatalities.
The natural tunnel ran at a right angle from the well toward the Pyramids themselves.
37 Missoula, Montana
Abigail Roxburgh sat in her office in Missoula. Unable to work, and with a tear rolling down her cheek, she absent-mindedly switched on the television. Not surprisingly, with the presidential election now less than a fortnight away, all the news channels were covering it. She settled for CNC and Walter Cronkwell.
‘We’re joined again by Susan Murkowski, this time from Alaska. So what’s the feeling on the hustings up north, Susan?’ Cronkwell asked.
‘Very positive for Carter Davis, Walter.’ The shot switched to Susan Murkowski, standing beside one of the marble pillars at the top of the steps of the Capitol Building on Fourth Street in Juneau.
‘We’re here in the capital of Alaska, where, despite the concerns of environmentalists over EVRAN’s plans for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, Davis’s promise of new jobs has him in front in the forty-ninth state of the union – a state that is perhaps lucky to be part of the United States at all.’
‘Yes . . . we tend to forget,’ Cronkwell intoned, ‘that Alaska was actually purchased from the Russians in 1867 for two cents an acre. At today’s prices, that only amounts to US $120 million, and even then, Alaska wasn’t admitted to the union until very late, in January 1959. I guess since oil had yet to be discovered
, the Russians would have had no idea of Alaska’s value.’
‘That’s so, Walter, but those who love the pristine nature of this wilderness would argue that’s worth way more than dirty black gold.’ The camera panned across the stunning vista of Juneau harbour and the small city nestled at the base of snow-capped mountains that were thickly forested with pine trees.
‘So with less than two weeks to go,’ Cronkwell continued, ‘someone who was virtually unknown outside of Montana a year ago is now looking like he could pull off a miracle . . . Davis might just be the next president of the United States?’
‘Indeed he could. He was, as we all know, a surprise winner in the Iowa caucuses. It seems like only yesterday but that was nine months ago, and back then not too many political commentators, this journalist included, thought he would last the distance in the race for the Republican nomination. But in the intervening period, he’s gone on to even more surprising wins in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, Colorado, Minnesota, Maine and Missouri.’
Abigail Roxburgh bit into her handkerchief. She’d watched every one of those wins, ballot by ballot, and even then, she’d thought she could remain quiet. It was still possible that her governor might return to Montana.
‘But I think people really started to sit up and take notice when Davis swept the Republican field on Super Tuesday,’ Murkowski said, ‘when he took nine of the ten states on offer. And once he took California, Texas, and Florida, it was all over. Those states alone gave him 116 electoral college votes and by then the Republican nomination was his.’
‘And in the meantime, the wheels seem to be falling off Hailey Campbell’s campaign?’
Murkowski nodded. ‘Less than two weeks out from the election, she’s sacked her campaign manager, Chuck Buchanan, who was chief of staff to President McGovern.’
The Alexandria Connection Page 31