She looked around the area some more, directing her light to the ceiling and walls above the water. If the entire chamber was dry, she noted, it would have been a very high ceiling indeed. It would have been a lot of trouble to have excavated such a large space beneath the pyramid and then to line it with stone blocks. She knelt on the edge of the flooded chamber, staring absent-mindedly into its depths while she thought about it. Why would the Egyptians have gone to so much trouble to build a tomb or chamber around an existing aquifer? Or even to import water into the chamber, to flood it intentionally? Why would they flood it on purpose?
Staring down into the depths of the watery chamber, she knew the answer had to lie with whatever waited down there. Although she was a certified recreational SCUBA diver, this kind of specialty dive was far beyond her abilities, as well as those of the rest of her team. She would have to recruit some outside help. She thought about this for a moment. The list of scuba-diving archaeologists in her contacts was a short one. But she was the archaeologist, after all, she only needed someone who could dive in a tricky environment, could follow basic direction, and who happened to be somewhere relatively nearby with a willingness to help out. A smile crossed her lips as she recalled an email she’d received from a friend a few days earlier.
She knew exactly who to call.
Chapter 3
Carter Hunt dismounted the camel and looked around at the excavation site. A small tent city had been erected a stone’s throw from the pyramid, and now at mid-day under blistering desert sun, there was no one to be seen walking around.
“So where’s your friend?” Jayden asked, placing special emphasis on the word as he climbed down from his own dromedary. As if in response to the question, one of the tents suddenly opened and a short, attractive woman with long hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a khaki outfit, immediately made eye contact with them. She raised a hand and waved as she strode toward them.
“Carter! So glad you could make it!” She trotted up to them and gave Hunt a big hug while Jayden made suggestive expressions over her shoulder. Both men were single and he knew that Hunt had dated Madison in the past.
“Anything for a friend. Not going to lie, though, it helped that we were already in country. Flying out here for a scuba dive from the states might have been a bit more problematic.”
She smiled while shaking hands with Jayden. “Of course, that’s why when I remembered you said you were going to be here with Jayden, I called you straight away.” She looked over at the pyramid before looking back to Hunt. “This is so exciting! I can’t wait to show you what I found.” She waved toward the tent she’d emerged from. “Come on, let’s get you out of the sun.”
Hunt paid the man with the camels, who had also towed a cart behind one of the dromedaries with their scuba gear. Then they walked over to the tent, where Madison pulled the entrance flap aside, ushering them in.
Hunt gave her a lopsided grin while looking around at the tables stacked with computer gear and video monitors. “Wow, impressive setup. You really bring a lot of stuff when you go camping.” A ham radio station occupied one table, while the LiDAR equipment was laid out on another.
Madison laughed good naturedly. “You make it sound like we sleep in and have s’mores every night around a campfire singing Kumbaya.”
Hunt smiled in return. “I’m sure you manage to get some work done. You always were a workaholic. After all, that’s how you got to be a tenured professor and world-class researcher at the tender age of…what are you now, thirty?“
Jayden nodded, acknowledging Madison’s accomplishments while admiring the technical setup in the tent.
“Carter, really, a woman doesn’t discuss her age!” Madison said with mock indignation, moving to a laptop open on a table. “Thanks again for stopping by. The number of people willing to cart scuba gear across the desert by camel to help me on my dig was pretty small, so I’m very glad you’re here. Now take a look at this.”
Hunt and Jayden stood next to the archaeologist in front of the computer. On the screen was the LiDAR image depicting the previously undetected subterranean chambers off to one side of the pyramid.
She pointed to the space between the chambers and the pyramid. “These are connected by a series of multiple passageways, or tunnels, of which I explored one.”
“And you just found these yesterday?” Hunt asked.
Madison pointed to one of the chambers outlined in the LiDAR image. “Not the first two chambers — here — which we found last week, but this new one, here.” Her finger stabbed the screen over the chamber that was farthest from the pyramid itself. “It’s flooded with water.”
Hunt and Jayden exchanged puzzled glances. Hunt put it into words. “Water in a sealed Egyptian pyramid chamber?”
Jayden pointed to the image. “Could it be the result of some kind of excavation technique, where it was deliberately flooded with hoses for some reason?”
Madison shook her head firmly. “No. That’s not a technique I’ve ever heard of and I don’t see what good it would do anyway.”
Jayden shrugged. “I guess that’s why I’m not an archeologist.”
“So you want us to scuba dive in that flooded chamber and tell you what’s down there, is that about the gist of it?” Hunt asked, steering the conversation back on track.
Madison nodded enthusiastically. “That’s essentially it. Are there artifacts or hieroglyphics down there or is it just an empty chamber? How deep is it?”
“What’s the water temperature?” Jayden wanted to know.
“It was cool to the touch, but not cold. At the edge anyway. I didn’t go for a dip.”
Hunt looked to Jayden. “We should wear exposure suits. There could be an inversion layer, a thermocline, where it’s cold at the bottom.”
“Or who knows, even really hot!” Jayden said with a laugh.
Hunt made eye contact with Madison. “You want us to get wet today, then?”
Madison grinned broadly. “I thought you’d never ask. Let me get some of my team together to help with the gear and setting up some portable lights, and we’ll get underway right after lunch.”
Two hours later, Hunt, Jayden, Madison and half a dozen members of her archaeology team reached the chamber Madison had climbed through in order to access the flooded chamber. Battery powered utility lights were set up to light the space without the need for flashlights. Hunt and Jayden looked around, duly impressed by their new surroundings.
Jayden wore a mystified expression as he asked Madison, “So we’re like some of the first people to be in this room for thousands of years?”
The archaeologist nodded. “That’s right. This chamber was discovered only a few days ago, and is off limits to the public — to anyone without a permit from the Egyptian authorities, which I was lucky enough to have been granted.”
“It’s not luck, Maddy, it’s hard work.” Hunt pointed out.
“Speaking of hard work,” she replied, “there’s a fair bit of that in our future before we can get that scuba gear through to the new passage.” She nodded to the wall of jumbled stones she had climbed up and through in order to access the flooded chamber.
The team set to work displacing stones to allow enough space for them to transport gear through safely. When that was done, Hunt wheeled the cart full of scuba gear into the new passageway while Madison led the way toward the watery room. The rest of the team again set up utility lights in the new space. The light reflected off the water and cast moving shadows about the walls and ceiling.