Jack peered ahead. Still there was nothing. And then a huge hollering and whooping erupted from the crew crowded around the video screen on Seaquest II. Jack quickly glanced back at the screen, and saw that Rebecca had positioned the camera directly above the shape of a cannon lying half buried in the sediment. She had spotted it at the furthest swing to port of the manipulator arm, and Costas quickly brought the submersible about to aim in that direction. Then they saw another gun, and another. Had Rebecca not seen the first one, they would probably have missed the site entirely and gone off into the abyss, realising their mistake too late for another search. Jack felt a surge of pride: she might well have saved the day. ‘Good work, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Now let’s gently hose down that first gun and have a look at it.’
They watched as the water jet located about two thirds of the way up the manipulator arm uncurled itself and looped down like a snake to blow a gentle jet over the gun, dispersing the sediment over the breech and revealing corroded metal. Macalister was the resident naval ordnance expert, and he immediately piped up. ‘No doubt about it, it’s a nine-pounder, a so-called long nine,’ he said, his voice edged with excitement. ‘Typical of the guns you’d have found arming merchant ships in the Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century.’
There was another noise from the crew, more of a gasp, and Sofia joined in. ‘Look, Jack. There it is. It’s fantastic.’
She and the crew were watching video from the camera, but Jack was looking at the real scene through the porthole, a few metres behind them. He stared into the gloom, seeing more guns but nothing else. And then he spotted it. Directly ahead, the sediment had formed a hump in the seabed. In the centre, almost completely buried, was a rectilinear stone sarcophagus, its lid shifted and much of the sculpted sides buried, but still unmistakable. It was just like the image in Jack’s dreams. They had found the sarcophagus of Menkaure.
‘Congratulations, Jack,’ said Macalister, the sound of whistling and clapping coming from the crew behind him. ‘A marvellous end to the season.’
‘Congratulations to everyone,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘A team effort, as always.’
Costas drove the submersible a few metres forward and then rose above the sarcophagus so that it was clearly visible. The ten or twelve guns that poked out of the sand around it formed the ghostly outline of a ship. There was nothing else to be seen, just the stone and the guns, and for a moment Jack thought how the sediments of the seabed were like the sands of the desert; how they seemed to reduce the evidence of human endeavour to its bare essentials, to its boldest statements and nothing else. The sea floor was a place that made the efforts to tame it seem minuscule and arrogant; a place whose elemental clarity attracted certain men on a quest for revelation, from the time when the world was beginning to rediscover ancient Egypt, and from deepest antiquity almost five thousand years before, the time of the first pharaohs and the pyramids.
Macalister’s voice crackled again. ‘Okay, Costas. We’ve got a two-metre swell on the surface. I’ve asked Rebecca to relinquish control of the manipulator arm and shut it down. We’ve got all the imagery we need. You need to ascend.’
‘Roger that,’ Costas said. ‘Blowing tanks now.’
Jack slid back to the console, flipped off the audio feed to the ship to keep their conversation to themselves and looked at Costas. ‘Can you override the system so that I can control the arm?’
‘You heard Macalister,’ Costas said. ‘Remember your end of the bargain.’
‘It’d only be for a few minutes. If you shut off the video stream to the ship, they wouldn’t know we were still using it. As far as Macalister is concerned, we’d be ascending.’
Costas paused, and then shook his head. ‘Okay, Jack. You have the con.’
Jack jumped back to the space between the seats and grasped the handle that controlled the manipulator arm. He arched the arm over the lid of the sarcophagus, to the gap where the lid had slid sideways and the interior of the coffin was revealed, and dropped the camera down towards the triangular hole. He had guessed that it might be just large enough, and he had been right. The camera disappeared inside. He activated the powerful miniature light array surrounding the camera, but all he could see on the video screen was sand, a close-up view of the sediment that evidently filled the sarcophagus. He moved the camera from side to side, but still there was nothing. ‘Come on, Jack,’ Costas said. ‘One more minute, max.’
He took hold of the handle that controlled the water jet, and aimed the nozzle through the hole, switching the jet to its most powerful setting. There was nothing to lose, and nothing inside the sarcophagus after all this time that would be delicate enough to be damaged. For a second or two the camera would be in the eye of the dust storm created by the water jet, and he might just see something before the silt clouded the image.
He pressed the trigger. The image exploded into a maelstrom of sand, obscuring everything.
And then he saw it.
For a second it was there, the image of a pharaoh, wearing a crown and a skirt but with an oddly shaped physiognomy: a protruding belly and a jutting chin. Beside him was his consort, a queen with shapely breasts and hips, her hair over her shoulders. The pharaoh was leaning over something as if he were creating it, lines forming a matrix like a labyrinth or a maze, a pyramid in the centre, and over it all the rays of the sun, shining from a disc above. And then the image was gone, lost in the swirl of sediment. ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Jack.
‘What the hell was that?’ Costas said.
‘Do you remember Captain Wichelo’s interleaved sheet in his copy of Vyse’s book? You wondered whether there was something else I wasn’t telling you. Well, that was it. Wichelo mentioned a stone plaque that Vyse had packed in the sarcophagus, something he’d found inside the pyramid. That pharaoh’s not Menkaure; it’s Akhenaten, and his wife Nefertiti. Wichelo said that Vyse called the carving “the City of Light”.’
‘Did you get photos?’
‘At least one. I need to email it to Maurice. This will astonish him.’
‘Then the sooner we leave here, the better.’ Costas pulled a lever to blow air into the ballast tanks, and they began to ascend. Jack kept peering down, watching the sarcophagus as it disappeared into the inky blackness, and then settled back to study the images he had taken.
‘That’s a hell of a manipulator arm,’ Sofia said.
‘Thanks,’ Costas replied ‘You should come to the IMU engineering lab. Really. I can show you a lot more like that.’
‘Come and have dinner with me in Cartagena tonight. After I call the Minister of Culture and tell her about this.’
‘Tonight. Sure. Cool.’ Costas looked slightly flummoxed, and then smiled at her. ‘Yeah. I’d really like to. That’d be great.’
Jack tore his eyes away from the screen and turned around. ‘I hate to throw a spanner in the works, but we might just have to go somewhere else this evening.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said. ‘I should have seen this coming. Sorry, Sofia. I think it’ll have to wait.’
‘No problem. I’m going to have my hands full anyway documenting this and filing my report for the Ministry. They’re going to want a press release, pronto. I think they’re really going to make a major deal out of this, and it’ll be my big break. It’ll be great for news of an underwater discovery off Spain to be about archaeology rather than some rip-off treasure-hunters who think they can hoodwink us into believing that they’re archaeologists. This could lead to a lot more IMU involvement in Spain, and I’d love to push for that. But I’ll be waiting for you. And I won’t take no for an answer.’