It was not one pyramid, but three, an image known the world over, one of the iconic views of archaeology: the three pyramids at Giza. The smallest of them, the pyramid of Menkaure, where Vyse had found the sarcophagus and the plaque, had a line drawn from the centre of it down into the complex of lines below, as if it were somehow joined to them, like a portal.
Jack reeled with excitement. Now he knew where Akhenaten’s City of Light had been. Not in the depths of the Nubian desert, not in the place where Akhenaten had experienced his revelation, but in the very heart of ancient Egypt, in the oldest and most sacred place possible, where Akhenaten could have envisaged himself ruling Egypt for all eternity.
And he knew that others might know of it as well, al’Ahmed and his followers, whose ancestors had known of Gordon’s quest and who might by now have seen the plaque from the wreck of the Abbas and could be on the same trail. Suddenly time was of the essence.
Jack looked at Rebecca. ‘Do you know where Costas is?’
‘With Sofia,’ she said. ‘Showing her the engineering department.’
He pulled out his phone, clicked the number and waited. After another attempt Costas replied. ‘Jack. I’ve been meaning to call.’ Jack could hear the rumble of machinery in the background. ‘I guess this is about the board of directors tomorrow. We need to get our story straight.’
‘The board of directors can wait. I need you to be on a flight with me this evening, with all of our dive gear prepped.’
‘Just give me a moment to square it with Sofia.’
‘That’s a new one,’ Rebecca whispered.
Aunt Margaret nudged him. ‘Go for it, Jack. I don’t know where you’re going and what you’re doing, but give ’em hell.’
Costas was back on the phone. ‘Jack.’
‘What’s your status?’
‘Where to?’
‘Egypt. We’re going to a pyramid. We’re going to dive inside a pyramid. This is as big as it gets. You good with that?’
‘You bet. Good to go.’
26
Two days later, Jack stood by himself on the Giza plateau outside Cairo, dwarfed by the huge mass of the pyramid of Khufru to his right. Twenty minutes earlier he had used the special pass supplied by Aysha to make his way through the heavy police cordon that had blocked off the plateau for weeks now, part of an unprecedented programme to improve security and allow essential safety and conservation work to be carried out. For Hiebermeyer and his team it had been a godsend, a unique opportunity for sustained exploration inside the pyramids. On this occasion Aysha was not the permit-issuing authority; control of the site had been taken over by the Egyptian Ministry of Defence. The temporary one-day permit she had engineered the week before to send a robot into the pyramid of Menkaure had been extended for a week. Jack had called Maurice from England to tell them of their extraordinary find of the pyramid depiction on the stone slab, and had been on the plane the next day to join Seaquest II on her way back from Spain and organise the airlift by helicopter to Alexandria of the equipment that he and Costas would need for today’s excursion. It still seemed an extraordinary plan, but it was exactly what Jack needed. After long days of soul-searching after their eviction from the Sudan, he was thrilled to be in the field again.
It was still only early afternoon, but the sun already had a reddish hue to it, the light filtering through the dust and low cloud that obscured the desert horizon to the west.
Jack checked a quick text message from Rebecca, who had flown back for her final term at school in New York, and then looked up at the pyramid beside him, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun. He remembered once asking Rebecca to imagine that the pyramids had never been built, and then trying to persuade people that structures of that scale had existed in antiquity; it would be met with flat disbelief. Looking at them today, he recalled the pyramid-shaped basalt outcrops he had seen in the Nubian desert from Semna, and found himself wondering whether the idea for these extraordinary structures had been imported from the natural landscape of the desert homeland of the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians. He made a mental note to try it out on Maurice, and then trudged forward beside the massive blocks at the base. It was curiously unsettling being here at a place normally visited by thousands every day, in a landscape whose features were entirely man-made and yet seemed so implausible that the mind rebelled against the idea. He tried to see them instead as natural extrusions of the limestone substrate jutting out of the desert floor. It made the human presence seem oddly ephemeral, the same feeling he had experienced in the Sudan thinking about the Gordon relief expedition, as if the imprint of all those people could be swept away by a breeze across the sand like the tide of the sea cleansing a foreshore.
After another ten minutes of brisk walking to the south-west, he had passed the second pyramid and was within sight of the pyramid of Menkaure, only one tenth the mass of the great pyramid but at sixty-five metres still a huge monument, the height of the dome of St Paul’s in London. In front of the entrance he could see a pair of Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicles and a tent, and several people busily carrying boxes and gear around. As he approached, he spotted the distinctive form of Hiebermeyer in his shorts and battered cowboy hat, and beside him the even more distinctive form of Jacob Lanowski, inscrutably wearing a lab coat in the desert. Lanowski was hooked up to a contraption that looked like an early one-man rocket platform, and was walking it forward like a Zimmer frame. Aysha and Sofia were photographing something among the tumbled masonry fragments in front of the pyramid, and Costas was nowhere to be seen. Hiebermeyer spotted him and bounded up, his face wet with perspiration despite the cool November air. ‘Good to see you, Jack.’ He shook hands vigorously. ‘We haven’t got any time to lose. Your equipment is due in half an hour. Who knows when they might revoke our permit.’
Jack watched Lanowski. ‘I won’t ask.’
‘Geophysics. Some kind of sonar contraption. Says it can detect water as well. I haven’t seen any result from it yet, but the other stuff he’s brought has been pretty good.’
As they reached the vehicles, there was a familiar honking and snorting sound behind them, and then a very large tongue wrapped itself around Hiebermeyer’s face, making him splutter and push it away. Jack looked round and saw a camel looming between them. Costas was on top, in full Lawrence of Arabia gear but with aviator sunglasses. He peered down at Hiebermeyer. ‘You know, camels really do seem to like you.’
Hiebermeyer wiped his face, grumbling. ‘Aysha says I’m like a salt lick.’
Jack looked up at Costas. ‘You seem to have overcome your aversion to camels.’
‘Just needed time to get my desert legs,’ Costas replied, jumping off and patting the animal affectionately on the neck. ‘Just as long as you stay away from its rear, everything is all right.’ The camel emitted a strange blubbery noise, and an indescribable smell filled the air. ‘Well, almost all right.’
They moved away to give the camel some space, and Jack gestured over at the two women. ‘Here they come now.’ Lanowski had also spotted them, and was struggling out of his contraption. Hiebermeyer waved them towards the pyramid. ‘Come on. I’ll talk as we walk.’
‘Akhenaten,’ Costas said, struggling to keep up. ‘Why we’re here.’
‘Right,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘First we find that Akhenaten inscription at Troy about the frontier defences, mentioning Semna. Then you and Jack finally decide to find the sarcophagus of Menkaure. High time, if you ask me. On the back of that, I decide it’s time to have a look at this pyramid again. Meanwhile Aysha begins excavating at Semna, and we start to find evidence of Akhenaten’s expeditions into the Nubian desert. I never thought there would be any connection between Akhenaten and the pyramids. But I should have known better. He was a consolidator, not an expander. He wanted not to export his vision like the jihadists, but to bring it back to the Egyptian people. And not to the Egyptian royal capital where he had grown up – Thebes, a place he had left in disgust, with its priests and falsehoods – but to an older, purer place, where the Aten could be seen every day shining through the forms that had been created by his ancestors, that would take on a new meaning under his control. To the pyramids at Giza.’