Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (31 page)

Jack’s heart began to pound with excitement. “Can you get up to it?”

“I’m getting there now. About a meter to go. Okay. Looking out over a big room, circular, maybe twenty meters across. Recesses around the edge filled with jars. Holy cow.
Holy cow
.”

Jack could barely contain himself. He wanted to be there, to be where Costas was. Jars like that were exactly what Jones had described to Howard Carter. “What is it? What can you see?”

Costas seemed to be transfixed, his hand motionless on the control lever and his mouth wide open. He slowly let go of the control and took off the mask, his eyes staring into space, and then turned to Jack. “You remember those first ever pictures of King Tut’s tomb? You’re not going to believe what I’ve just seen.”

J
ack pushed ahead with his feet through the shaft, using his elbows and hands to pull himself along. He inched toward the halogen beam from Little Joey some five meters away where the shaft angled sharply to the right. The image he had seen from the robot’s camera confirmed beyond a doubt what lay around the corner, yet Jack refused to register it until he saw it with his own eyes.

He could hear Costas grunting and cursing where he had climbed in behind from the tunnel, his frame barely fitting into the shaft. They knew that they must be following in the path of Corporal Jones, and almost certainly the caliph Al-Hakim before that, taking the only passage left open when the ship sheds and the entrance tunnel had been blocked up in antiquity. They were crawling along a shaft that was part of the extraordinary network cut through the rock to reflect sunlight into the underground complex.

Jack paused, his breathing fast and shallow, remembering that the oxygen level would by now be seriously depleted and that he was not in the first stages of a panic attack. The turn in the shaft was only a few meters ahead. He watched as Little Joey used a miniature air jet to blow dust from a black basalt slab angled at forty-five degrees in the corner of the shaft. The basalt was polished
to a glassy sheen and was clearly intended as a mirror.

Jack shut his eyes until the dust settled and then he saw it, the same extraordinary image they had seen through Little Joey’s eye a few minutes before, a glow of red as if he were looking through a slit into a furnace. His heart began to pound with excitement. He had dreamed of this for months, and now, incredibly, it was just within his reach, something that had seemed virtually impossible only a few days before.

Moments later he was around the corner pulling himself to the edge of the aperture overlooking the chamber. Little Joey clattered ahead and perched on the rim, chirping and shaking. The shaft had widened enough to allow Costas to heave himself alongside, his E-suit smeared with grime. As they panned their lights ahead, an astonishing scene met their eyes. They were on the edge of a huge circular space, perhaps twenty meters across and eight meters high where it rose to an apex. On the floor below the apex was an elevated dais capped by a rectangular altar or sarcophagus, its top above their line of vision. From the dais radiating outward on the floor were raised ridges terminating in carved hands, the unmistakable sign of the Aten, the sun symbol of Akhenaten. One of the arms pointed directly to the shaft they had come through and another to a second shaft visible to the left, coming from the direction of the pyramid. Costas gestured at it, his voice hushed.

“That shaft must be the one we were looking through three months ago from beneath the pyramid. You can see the light from the fire shining through, and reflecting off basalt mirrors around the walls. In daylight the reflection back would be dazzling, exactly as we saw it.”

“The light of the Aten, concentrated on this one spot,” Jack said. “It’s an incredible feat of precision, ancient Egyptian engineering at its best. Maurice would love it.”

Costas pointed to the opposite wall of the chamber. “That’s what we want to see, Jack. One of the arms, the longest one, is pointing to an open tunnel. Another one’s
pointing to the wall just to the right of us that must lead to the ship sheds. You can see an area of plaster, clearly different from the polished rock veneer, and I bet that’s where the entrance remains sealed up. The entrance to the open tunnel looks as if it was once plastered over as well, and was broken into relatively recently.”

“Corporal Jones?” Jack suggested.

“He was a sapper, right? He would have had an eye for constructional detail. He would have been looking for a way out, just as we are. That is, when he wasn’t living in a twilight world of his own, crawling around here like the undead looking for tasty snacks. This place would have been pretty eerie at night with only moonlight reflecting through, enough to unhinge someone already halfway there and weak with hunger. It’s spooky enough in this light.”

“What’s your take on the orientation of that open tunnel?”

“It’s heading toward Cairo. It almost certainly corresponds to that line on the plan leading to Fustat. And it’s clearly above water level, a dry channel. It could be our ticket out.”

“If it’s not blocked by rockfalls.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“I need some time in here, Costas. We need to get as much as we can on video.”

“Thirty minutes, maximum. I can actually feel the air being sucked up that shaft by the fires on the pyramid. If we stay longer than that, we won’t have the energy to get far enough down that tunnel to get out, and then we end up in a terminal countdown.”

Little Joey chirped and sighed, almost an electronic moan, and the eye peered dolefully at Costas. “I know,” he said, stroking its neck. “Good boy.
Very
good boy.” He pressed something beneath the carapace, and Little Joey jumped slightly, and then settled down and purred. “I can’t give him a biscuit, but I can give him an electronic buzz. It means he’ll go to sleep happy. He might be holding the fort here for some time.”

Jack slithered around until his feet were hanging over the edge, and slowly lowered himself to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Thirty minutes. Keep your camera rolling.”

“Roger that.”

As Jack hit the floor he felt for his head camera, making sure it was at the right angle to catch everything he saw. He knew what he wanted to look at. It was what had set his pulse racing when he had heard Jeremy read Howard Carter’s account of what Corporal Jones had seen, and then a few minutes ago when he had looked at the video image relayed from Little Joey. It was what had been sitting in Hiebermeyer’s desk for all those years since he had found it in the excavation beside the plateau, the hieroglyphs that hinted at the truth behind Akhenaten’s City of Light. Jack glanced around the chamber. Akhenaten’s treasure was not to be another Tutankhamun’s tomb, not another trove of gold and jewels and precious artifacts. It was the greatest treasure of all.
It was a treasure in words
.

Costas dropped behind him and they slowly proceeded along the wall. At intervals of about five meters the rock had been carved into alcoves like the burial niches he had seen in Jerusalem with Rebecca, only here they were not designed for bodies. Each niche was filled with dozens of tall pottery jars, more than a meter high, almost all of them lidded and sealed with a mass of black resinous material. Those that were not lidded had been smashed open, their contents strewn over the floor, visible in front of three of the twelve alcoves that Jack had counted around the chamber. He squatted in front of the first and picked up a handful of material from among the pottery sherds, fragments of papyrus that crumbled to dust as he touched them. Costas thrust his hand deep into the base of one of the smashed jars still remaining in the alcove and came up with a handful of the same material. “My best guess?” he said, letting it
drop between his fingers. “Corporal Jones, looking for food. He gave up at the third alcove once he realized that the contents were inedible.”

“What was inside,” Jack murmured, staring at the shreds in his hands, “was papyrus scrolls. This place is a library.” He got up, and did some swift arithmetic. “If there are twelve alcoves containing thirty jars each, and each jar contains four or five scrolls, that’s the best part of two thousand scrolls. That’s way more than you’d expect for a collection of religious tracts and Books of the Dead.”

“Check out the pots,” Costas said. “They’ve all got symbols on them painted in black. The pots in each alcove have the same principal symbol, but then above that, each pot has a unique additional symbol. From my memory of Lanowski’s attempt to teach me hieroglyphics, those upper symbols are numbers. So this must be some kind of cataloguing system.”

Jack brushed the dust from the symbols on one pot and then moved to the next alcove and did the same. “You’re right. Each alcove has an individual hieroglyph: a sheaf of corn in the first, a seated bird in this one, a half-moon in the next one along. I think they’re signifiers like our letters of the alphabet, part of the cataloguing system.”

“Sheaf of corn means religion, squatting bird means science, half-moon means medicine?” Costas said. “Something like that?”

Jack nodded, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were confronting. “Imagine what those could contain.”

“You know we can’t risk opening them, Jack. We have nowhere to take them, and they might just crumble to dust on contact with the air. Our job now is to see to it that this place remains secret until we can get back here with the biggest manuscript conservation team that Maria and Jeremy have ever assembled. Meanwhile our clock is ticking. I’m going to check out that dais in the center.”

Jack turned back to the pots and put his hand on one of them, struggling to contain his emotions. Costas was right, of course. It would be grossly irresponsible to tamper with them now. If there were huge secrets of science and medicine, the cures to diseases, then they could be lost in an instant; far better to leave them here in the hope that a return would be possible. But it went against his grain as an archaeologist not to at least see some writing, to record it with their cameras. Not to do so, to leave empty-handed, would be to leave something unsatisfied in his soul, a need for something tangible to make all the effort seem worthwhile.

Costas’ voice came from the dais. “It looks as if you might have been wrong about Akhenaten leaving here alive. Looks like we might just have solved the mystery of his burial place.”

Jack turned and mounted the steps, gasping in astonishment at the sight in front of him. In the middle of the chamber with the ridges in the floor radiating from it stood a huge sarcophagus in gold, larger even than the outer sarcophagus that had surrounded the mummy of Tutankhamun. The head was that of a man with a slightly upturned nose and almond eyes, reminiscent of Tutankhamun, his braided beard and headdress decorated with strips of faience and his eyes surrounded with inlays of niello to represent the lines of kohl. It was a face unfamiliar and yet familiar, the father of the pharaoh who had accidentally become the most famous in history and yet whose achievements were puny by comparison, cut off by death before he had even reached manhood. Jack knew who it was even before he had gazed down over the figure’s torso, over the crossed arms carrying the jewel-studded staff and ankh symbol, to the circular representation of the Aten with radiating arms that clinched the identity beyond any doubt.
Akhenaten
.

Costas was peering closely at the edge of the sarcophagus near the feet. “Fascinating,” he said. “The lid was originally sealed over with sheet gold, but then someone’s
been around and scored it, cutting through to the crack between the sarcophagus and the lid. It’s been pushed slightly off center.”

Jack knelt down beside him, staring. “Corporal Jones again?”

“Maybe when he got hungry,” Costa suggested. “Before he found those other mummies.”

Jack heaved on the lid, suddenly feeling woozy as he did so, his heart pounding and his chest tight. He knew they were more than halfway through Costas’ predicted countdown before the oxygen level became critical. He pushed again, creating a crack just large enough for him to aim his beam inside. He panned it around, and then looked again. “I think Jones would have been disappointed. There’s nothing inside.”

“Ancient tomb robbers?”

Jack shook his head. “There’s no evidence I can see for robbers ever having gotten inside this chamber. When it was sealed up, that was it for over two thousand years. Ancient robbers would always leave the worthless debris behind, the mummy wrapping and bones, and they’d never have left without hacking off those parts of the sarcophagus that look like solid gold—the hand, the ears, the beard. No, this was empty from the outset.”

“Well, if Akhenaten could pull the wool over the Egyptians’ eyes about the real cause of the loss of an entire chariot army in the Red Sea, then I guess he could fake his own death.”

Jack stared at the face on the sarcophagus. It was Akhenaten as nobody had seen him before: not the elongated, misshapen pharaoh with the masklike visage, exaggerating his otherness, but instead Akhenaten the man, a fitting consort to the Nefertiti whose face had transfixed Jack a week before in the Cairo Museum. This was Akhenaten not as the world would know him but as he wished to be seen in the place of his greatest legacy, presiding not as a pharaoh but as a man over a treasure far greater than any of the riches that filled the tombs of his ancestors.

“Jack, take a look at what I’ve just found. These definitely aren’t ancient.”

Costas had followed one of the ridges to the edge of the chamber between the alcoves filled with jars, and was squatting down. Jack walked over and joined him. On a ledge in front of the wall were two tarnished medals, their ribbons faded and dirty but laid out as if they had been carefully arranged. Jack recognized them immediately as Victorian campaign medals. One was silver, showing the Sphinx with the word
Egypt
above and the date 1882 below, its ribbon made up of three blue and two white stripes. The other was a five-pointed bronze star with the Sphinx and the three pyramids in the center, also inscribed
Egypt
and 1882 but with the year in Arabic in the Muslim calendar at the foot and surmounted by a star and crescent. Jack carefully picked up the silver medal, wiped the rim, and inspected it closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “It’s our friend 3453 Corporal R. Jones, Royal Engineers. We meet at last.”

Costas picked up the star. “How did he get these if he’d basically deserted?”

“Look at the date, 1882,” Jack replied. “After Jeremy found that account in Howard Carter’s diary, he looked up Jones’ service record in the National Archives. It lists him as missing in action after the Battle of Kirkeban in February 1885, presumed killed. But it also shows that he’d first arrived in Egypt from India in 1882 as part of the expeditionary force sent to support the Khedive against an army uprising, but that soon became embroiled in the war against the Mahdi. So Jones had already had these two medals, the Egypt Medal and the Khedive’s Star.”