Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (19 page)

“We’re caught in a political game, Jack. Ownership is always going to be an issue with an artifact like this, and where there are conflicting claims of ownership, the winner is always going to want to trumpet their prize. And now there’s the added factor of the leverage it might give us in Egypt with the antiquities people.”

“That’s the one plus for me. But I still feel uncomfortable playing the media game and seeing archaeology used as a pawn like this.”

“Chances are you won’t even see it being raised. The instant we’re on deck, you’ll be whisked off to the sick bay for a complete checkup, and then you’ll probably have a spell in the recompression chamber. After that my guess is you’ll be out of here as soon as the medicos allow you to fly, if not sooner. Heading toward the Holy Land.”

Jack stared for a moment at the sarcophagus, his mind back on the Cairo Geniza and the Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, on the extraordinary letter that he and Maria had read only the evening before in Cairo.
Heading toward the Holy Land
. Halevi too had travelled from Spain to the land of the Old Testament, certain that after a lifetime of searching, the answers to his questions lay there, that revelation for him could come only in the land of the Israelites. Jack had begun to feel the same too, now even more strongly with the discovery of the missing fragment of the plaque, that he was being driven back to the only place where he could find his own personal redemption, the resolution to a quest that had come close to costing him everything.

Costas nudged him. “By the way, thanks.”

Jack stared at him, his mind already focused on Jerusalem, on seeing Rebecca again. “Huh?”

“For the rescue. Thanks.”

“Oh, yeah. No problem. You would have done the same for me.”

Costas tapped the casing. “Yeah. Probably. Wouldn’t have been able to live with myself afterward. Would have hated to lose a good submersible like this.”

He grinned at Jack, and then made a whirling motion at Joey and gave a thumbs-up. The eye peered closely at them and cocked sideways, and then the manipulator arm pivoted upward on its elbow and the hand extended palm outward toward them, as if blowing them a kiss.

“Now that
was
weird,” Jack said.

The submersible shuddered, and they both lay back and braced themselves. They felt it rise and swing sideways, free of the seabed. After a few seconds hanging motionless, Jack saw the depth readout slowly but surely begin to reduce, meter by meter. As they rose above the cloud of silt created by their departure, he looked out the viewing port beside him and saw Joey bustling around the sarcophagus, feeding the hawser beneath it and then jetting over to the other side to pull it through. A pool of light in the darkness became smaller and smaller until it was no more than a smudge of yellow, and then it was gone entirely. All Jack could see was blackness, the utter void of the abyss, as if the wreck of the
Beatrice
and their extraordinary discovery had been no more than a phantasm of the night, as quickly dispelled as it had been conjured up.

He shut his eyes, and was instantly, dreamlessly asleep.

“J
eremy! Good to see you. We haven’t got much time.”

Jack stood up and extended a hand as the tall young man loped through the airport concourse toward him. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers and carrying a compact backpack. He shook Jack’s hand, sat down at the coffee table, quickly opened the rear of his pack, and took out his computer. He glanced at the people milling around the terminal. “Is there anywhere more private?”

Jack shook his head. “This is as good as it gets. Rule number one of travelling incognito is to be part of the crowd, not apart from it.”

“You worried about being spotted?”

“The last thing I want is for one of my journalist fans to tweet about how they’ve just seen me in Cyprus checking in to a flight to Israel only two days after the world saw me off Spain raising the sarcophagus. Reminding the extremists in Egypt that we also have a research presence in Israel might be the final card that brings everything crashing down around Maurice. We’re walking on a knife-edge as it is, and I don’t want to provoke the Egyptian regime any further.”

“I heard that the medicos on
Seaquest
wanted you to
wait three days for observation before flying,” Jeremy said.

“That was just precautionary. I didn’t breathe any compressed gas at depth, so there was no problem with excess nitrogen. I had some soft-tissue rupture in my sinuses and air passages but no lung collapse. Even the twenty-four hours I agreed to stay was pushing it. The Israelis banned incoming private and commercial aircraft other than El-Al three hours ago, meaning that the Embraer had to put me off here in Cyprus. The latest threat of an all-out terrorist attack from the extremists in Syria means that they’re probably on the cusp of halting incoming flights altogether, which would cut me off from seeing Rebecca. And then to cap it all, I’ve just had a text from Aysha saying that Maurice and the rest of his workers are on their way back to Alexandria from the Faiyum this afternoon. That can mean only one thing—that they’ve been booted out. Events could be coming to a head very quickly.”

“At least the delay gave me the chance to come out and see you,” said Jeremy.

“We could have Skyped.”

“Not when you see what I’ve got to show you. When I saw the image you sent us yesterday of the plaque, I knew you’d want everything I could fire at you.” Jeremy glanced up at the departures board in front of them. “We’ve got forty-five minutes to final boarding. That should be exactly enough time.” He flipped open the computer and began typing.

Jack took a deep breath, trying to forget his frustration over the lost day, and watched Jeremy. He had grown a thick black beard but still looked as boyish as he had eight years before when he had joined Maria as a graduate student in her palaeography institute in Oxford. It was hard to believe that he now had a doctorate as well as a prestigious research fellowship from his Oxford college under his belt, and had just returned from a six-month sabbatical at Cornell University, his alma mater, where he had turned down a faculty position
in order to remain as assistant director of Maria’s institute. For IMU he had become an invaluable complement to Maria where ancient writing and textual analysis was concerned, and for Jack no small part of his role had been the friendship he had developed with Rebecca since she had joined her first IMU project while she was still in high school.

Jeremy stopped tapping and looked at Jack. “You ready?”

“Fire away. About Howard Carter.”

“Right. After what Maria told me about the Halevi letter from the Geniza, you’ll see how this fits. Carter was born in London in 1874, the son of a painter. He went out to Egypt at the age of seventeen as a draftsman. Within a year he was working under Sir Flinders Petrie at the excavation of El-Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital, and by the age of twenty-seven he was inspector general of monuments for Upper Egypt. But then he resigned after a dispute, spent four years as a painter and antiquities dealer, and only gradually got back into archaeology proper. He eventually found patronage from Lord Carnaervon to begin his exploration of the Valley of the Kings. In 1924 he chanced on the tomb of a little-known boy pharaoh, and the rest is history.”

“So somewhere along the way, he heard the story of the mad Sufi claiming to be an English soldier in the Old City of Cairo. Aysha told me about the article she’d found.”

Jeremy nodded. “It was in an issue of the Cairo
Weekly Gazette
from 1904. The
Gazette
was less a newspaper than a social and entertainment journal for the British community in Cairo, with a travel section mainly aimed at ladies disposed to explore Old Cairo while their husbands were away doing frightfully important things like drinking gin in their club. One of the columns was a whimsical offering by an anonymous lady who described how the Sufi had become something of a tourist attraction. He evidently played up to the ladies, who were fascinated by him. It was hot and steamy, and they
were bored and frustrated. I think there might have been a bit of the Rasputin effect.”

“But none of them believed his story.”

“They might not have, but somebody else did. What Maurice remembered when Aysha found that article was Howard Carter’s journal from his so-called lost years, between his resignation as inspector general in 1903 and the beginning of his exploration in the Valley of the Kings some ten years later. Because that period has less bearing on the lead-up to the discovery of Tut’s tomb, it hasn’t received as much attention from biographers, so some of his papers from that time haven’t been thoroughly studied. But trust Maurice to have done so, while he was researching some of Carter’s manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford when he was a student.”

“I remember him going there,” Jack said. “He was trying to trace the whereabouts of a sculpted head of Akhenaten that had been sold in Egypt before the First World War, and he remembered Carter’s period as an antiquities dealer. Back then the distinction between archaeologist and antiquities dealer was less clearly defined, with some eminent scholars being both. Carter was forced into it as he had no private means and felt his career as an archaeologist was over.”

“It took a lot of ferreting about, but eventually I found the diary that Maurice had seen for 1908,” Jeremy said. “It makes for fascinating reading, and is a spotlight on the period. It shows that Carter really had his nose to the ground, like any good dealer. Cairo was awash with antiquities at the time, with mummies falling off the back of camels brought in by hopeful Bedouin from the desert, and every street urchin hawking a pocketful of scarabs and little bronzes. Carter had his trusted network of informants, including former Egyptian employees of his in the antiquities service who had also fallen on hard times. They were unable to find legitimate work because Carter himself had been blacklisted. It
was a world of patronage and corruption, with some senior officials up to their neck in it.”

“Plus ça change,”
Jack murmured. “So he came across the Sufi, and his tall tales of treasure?”

“Actually, he’d come across him a lot earlier than 1904,” Jeremy enthused. “And this is what makes the story that bit more plausible, because there is a consistency between the accounts. When Carter first arrived in Egypt as an impressionable teenager in 1891, he threw himself into Cairo, lapping up all the history and mystique he could find. It was then that he first saw the man, begging outside the Ben Ezra synagogue. He wasn’t yet the mad mystic of the
Weekly Gazette
seventeen years later, but simply one of innumerable filthy and emaciated beggars on the streets of Cairo. Carter tried practicing his beginner’s Arabic on the man, who became frustrated and replied in English. He swore Carter to secrecy and showed him a battered Royal Engineers cap badge. It was only a few years after the failed Nile expedition, and the human detritus of war was also very visible in Cairo at the time. Destitute and maimed veterans of the Egyptian army as well as miscreant British soldiers were scraping a living however they could in the backstreets of the city. Some of them were mentally unbalanced by their experiences fighting the dervishes. But the Mahdist threat from Sudan was still very real, and Kitchener’s promise to avenge the death of General Gordon rung in everyone’s ears, so to be fingered as a deserter risked the harshest penalty.

“Howard seems to have kept to his word, though, and the man, a former sapper called Jones, began to tell him an incredible story of being trapped underground for months on end. But just as Carter was planning to return to hear more, he was whisked off to Amarna by Petrie, and it was only in 1904 with the downturn in his fortunes that he came back to look for the man.”

“Who by then was the mad mystic,” said Jack.

“Self-styled, with an appearance to match: bald with a skullcap, a huge gray beard, sun-blackened skin. He
lived by selling gullible European ladies restorative balms that he claimed to have been given by Osiris himself during an underground journey to the afterlife. He was evidently quite a character, theatrical with a deep, booming voice, speaking a strangely accented English as well as Urdu and Arabic. Local children flocked to hear his tales. He’d become something of a celebrity.”

“Urdu is plausible for an ex-soldier who might have served in India, and he could have accented the English to disguise his true origins,” Jack said.

“Carter noted that the man he met in 1891 was lucid enough when he was in full flow, but he was physically weak and fearful of being caught,” said Jeremy. “He said he had been a corporal in the Royal Engineers and had been with the river expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884. But after a particularly savage battle, he had been knocked unconscious and lost track of time and place. After a long period of wandering and a terrifying encounter with a crocodile, he found himself in Cairo, where his extraordinary underground adventure took place. He had clung to Carter in desperation as he told the story, clearly tottering on the edge of sanity, babbling about the crocodile and mummies. It was the Royal Engineers cap badge that convinced Carter that there might be some element of truth in the story.”

“Royal Engineers,” Jack muttered, thinking hard. “How extraordinary. He must have gone up with the river expedition past the crocodile temple, the one that Costas and I discovered on the Nile. And the battle can only have been Kirkeban, the one major encounter with the Mahdi army for the river column. The expedition pretty well disintegrated after that, so it’s plausible that a man left for dead on the battlefield or lost in the river might have ended up that way.”

Jeremy positioned the computer screen so that Jack could see it. “I know all this because Howard summarized it in his diary entry for the day in 1904 when he rediscovered Jones. He wrote an account of what Jones
told him next. I’ve scanned it so you can read it in its entirety.”

Jack stared at the screen. It showed a single notebook page of handwriting, neat and legible. He began to read:

13 October 1904. Visited the souk outside the synagogue today to seek Jones, about whom I wrote in my entry yesterday. I feel that with the passage of years I can use his name without fear of compromising his safety, as surely by now his desertion from the army would be beyond retribution, if indeed his story were to be believed. Having searched all the usual places and nearly giving him up for dead, a reasonable conclusion after all these years, I spied the man I described yesterday, and, after observing him discreetly, watching him dispense who-knows-what concoction to a gaggle of credulous Belgians, I approached him; he immediately recognized me and we renewed our acquaintance. I reminded him of his unfinished story, and after some egging he took me in hand and led me to the back corner of the courtyard where the rabbi allows him to sleep and brings him food and water
.

Here is what he told me. One night some three years after the death of Gordon, he and an American, whom I surmised to be none other than the estimable Charles Chaillé-Long, former officer in Gordon’s service and now distinguished author and lawyer (about whose subsequent career I did not apprise Jones, not wishing to divert him from his story, or render him too amazed), along with a Frenchman, an inventor of a submarine diving apparatus, went to a place on the Nile where Jones knew from an ancient carving found in the desert that there lay an underground entrance, below a ruined fort some few miles south of the present city boundary. In dynamiting it open, they were sucked in from their boat, and Jones yet again suffered a knock to the head. He woke up some indeterminable time later, without Chaillé-Long or the Frenchmen, both of whom he gave up for dead, but
with the remains of the boat washed all around him, in a kind of darkness suffused by a distant brilliant light
.

At this point I had to hold Jones in my hands to keep him talking. His eyes widened and he spoke feverishly, in the grip of a barely suppressed terror. He talked of deep pools of water, and again of a blinding light. He said that he ate some kind of slimy fish, and, to my considerable consternation, the flesh of long-dead bodies, bodies that he described as if they were ancient mummies. After an inordinate amount of time and much hopeless terror, he came to a great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus. In that chamber he saw many great treasures, gold and amulets and crystal, and he then told me he had made a long-dead friend, who had pointed him the way out. I felt that Jones had strayed into fiction and delirium, and knew this must be the case when he showed me a ring he had taken from the hand of his supposed friend, clearly not Pharaonic or even ancient but a signet from the caliphate, a Fatimid ring of a type I have sold before (a particularly fine one, I have to say, of Al-Hakim I am certain, for which I considered offering him a generous price. But then I saw from the fervor in his eyes that this was not a ring he would be parted from, and indeed that this was a man beyond the draw of mammon). He told me that he had come up from this place under the west bank of Cairo, but that the tunnel had collapsed behind him and could never be found, as the spot had been filled in and floored over
.

I thanked Jones for his story, but will not, I think, return to press him for more. I considered writing to Mr. Chaillé-Long, but I cannot afford to be made a laughingstock if the story should prove false, so I decided against it. My cachet is low enough in Egypt as it is. Of submarine diving apparatus I know precious little, but I might surmise that Jones had come across such an inventor in his career as a sapper, and thus he
found a place for him in his story. Jones did also mention an officer of engineers, a Main or Mayne. A check of the Army List in my club library indeed reveals a Major Mayne in 1884. It’s a not uncommon surname, and perhaps, indeed, Mayne was a former officer of his, though the name had disappeared from the list by the following year. Perhaps he too was a victim of that benighted campaign, and, in any event, being in all likelihood long dead, is not a lead to pursue. Cairo to me sometimes seems a miasma of make-believe, of stories of tombs and treasures too numerous for all the ancient dynasties of Egypt many times over. And though I think there is something in Jones’ story, some kernel of truth, it is not one to which I will be returning unless I am stripped of all other possibilities, unless the Valley of the Kings is to be shut to me forever. Oh for just a small pharaoh’s tomb of my own…