‘Good. We’ll make an Egyptologist of you yet. And the others?’
Jack stared at them. ‘That’s the cartouche of Akhenaten.’
Hiebermeyer beamed at him. ‘And guess where Little Joey found that? She extended her miniature camera into a crack behind one of the portcullis slabs.’
‘Good God,’ murmured Jack. ‘That cartouche is a standard royal quarry mark, isn’t it? That means this was quarried at the time of Akhenaten.’
‘It means that the granite slabs around the interior of the chamber don’t all date to the time of Menkaure after all. It means that over twelve hundred years later, the pharaoh Akhenaten ordered those chambers to be sealed like Fort Knox, using the hardest stone available in Egypt and building a portcullis that would have taken a team of masons months to chisel their way through.’
‘Do you think this pyramid was reused, that it was Akhenaten’s tomb?’ Jack said incredulously. ‘I thought they’d pinned that down to the Valley of the Kings.’
‘That’s only ever been guesswork,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘And I think this was more than just a tomb. Jacob, your results?’
Lanowski cleared his throat. ‘I brought our deep-penetration radar here, the one we used to find your crocodile temple in the Sudan. The Giza plateau has been criss-crossed numerous times by geophysics teams, but nobody’s used equipment with the penetration depth of ours. A run over the desert immediately to the east of the pyramid, in the direction of the Nile, revealed the usual mass of tombs and quarries in the bedrock beneath the sand. But underneath all that was the faint shadow of something else, at about the level of the river. It looked like large rectilinear structures, rock-cut channels or canals.’
Hiebermeyer glanced at Jack. ‘Colonel Vyse noted that in many places the ground seemed hollow. And all he did was bang it with a metal rod. See what I mean? The clues were there in his book, in the first accounts of this place. But Lanowski’s data were incredible. Our IT people at the Institute at Alexandria are refining it now, to make the image clearer. It looked like a ghostly outline of part of the image we’ve already seen several times, the one that Akhenaten is shown inspecting in the slab from the sarcophagus you saw underwater, and the maze-like image drawn in Gordon’s diary from the slab in the wreck of the Abbas.’
‘A mortuary complex?’ Jack said. ‘A city of the dead?’
‘That’s what I’d have guessed,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘The ultimate preparation for the afterlife, like King Tut’s tomb but on a grand scale, a labyrinth of chambers under the pyramids. But I think it was more than that. I think Akhenaten envisaged the site of the pyramids as the main temple to the Aten. I think this underground place wasn’t shrouded in darkness like a lost tomb. I don’t think this was a city of the dead. I think this was a city of the living. A city of light.’
‘How do we get to it?’ Costas asked.
‘Do you remember the image of the smaller of the three pyramids on Corporal Jones’ plaque? It showed a line descending from the centre of the pyramid into the ground. As soon as Jack sent me that image from his aunt’s house, I was back here like a shot. I realised what something else I’d discovered while I was looking at those granite cartouches was all about. Or rather, something else that Little Joey discovered.’ He pointed to the tent set up beside the parked vehicles. ‘Follow me.’ He led them over, glanced at his watch, and then scanned the plateau in the direction of Cairo to the east. Jack knew that he was looking out for the telltale pall of dust from an approaching vehicle; they needed it to be their IMU equipment arriving from Alexandria and not a security convoy from the Egyptian authorities.
Hiebermeyer ducked inside the tent and Jack followed, the others coming behind. He gestured towards a laptop open on a table surrounded by a jumble of wiring and control panels. The screen showed a frozen image of an interior space, with a dark cylindrical shape in the background and a metallic articulated arm in front. Costas leaned forward, staring. ‘That’s Little Joey!’ he exclaimed.
Lanowski beamed at Costas. ‘I stripped her down so that she could get into the really narrow spaces. The way you’d configured her, she wasn’t going anywhere we wanted.’
Costas turned his head slowly and stared at him. ‘You did what?’
Lanowski beamed at him again. ‘This is a previously unknown passageway. I found it using the echo-sounder, and then we unblocked it and sent in the robot.’
‘It’s a shaft that lets in sunlight to the antechamber,’ Hiebermeyer added, his voice tinged with excitement. ‘It was when I saw the intensity of the beam and its direction that I realised we were on to something new. It shone down on to a slab of granite on the floor, one that Vyse seems to have left undisturbed, distracted perhaps by the discovery of the sarcophagus chamber. Little Joey triggered something and the slab slid aside. It’s like a well, with perfectly smooth sides, and the beam of light reflected off a polished surface and then far down into the depths. At the bottom is water, Jack. Water. That’s why you’re here. I believe that whatever lies below us was not only lit up by the light of the Aten, the beam of the sun streaming through the temple, but was also a place of underground canals linked to the Nile and therefore to the Nile’s source, the place in the desert far to the south that Akhenaten saw as the birthplace of the sun god.’
‘We’ll need climbing gear for that shaft,’ Costas murmured.
‘We’ve set up a wooden frame with a fixed belay rope to allow a descent. If you can get down there with diving equipment, we can see what lies at the bottom.’
Jack stared at the screen, his mind racing. ‘What about Little Joey? She can operate underwater, can’t she?’
Hiebermeyer coughed. ‘We’ve had a slight hitch.’
Costas reached over and wiggled the control handle. The image on the screen remained frozen. He narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘You’ve got her stuck, haven’t you?’
Lanowski opened his arms. ‘If I hadn’t streamlined her, she’d never have got into that passageway and we wouldn’t be here.’
‘And she’d never have got jammed.’ Costas stared at the jumble of cable around the computer. ‘I knew I should never have trusted anyone else with my toys. It’s going to take me a while to sort this out. The first thing is to get inside and try to free her physically.’
‘No time for that now,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘I’m expecting a visit from the Egyptian security chief any time. As far as they’re concerned, we’re just doing a visual evaluation of the new passageway. I need to get you and Jack into that pyramid with your equipment before they arrive.’
‘How did you get the security people to keep their distance until now?’ Jack asked.
‘I told them that Little Joey found a keg of gunpowder rammed into a crack above the entrance to the antechamber.’
‘Gunpowder?’ Costas said incredulously. He pointed at the cylindrical shape visible on the screen. ‘Is that what that is?’
‘It’s covered in black dust, the exuviae of insects and bats,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘But the wood of the barrel’s perfectly preserved.’
‘Standard early-nineteenth-century excavation technique,’ Jack said. ‘That’s how Vyse explored the interior of the pyramids. He blew his way through them.’
Costas gestured at the vertical gash up the north side of the pyramid, and then at the fragmentary remains of blocks tumbled below on the desert floor. ‘Looks like someone had a good go at it there.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘You’re right, but not using gunpowder. That was the sultan Saladin’s son in the twelfth century, at the time of the crusades. He ordered the pyramids to be destroyed, but this was as far as they got before giving up.’