“You’d still have volunteered,” Jack said. “You’d never have let me do this alone.”
Mohammed appeared beside Lanowski, looking anxious. “Okay, boys,” Lanowski said. “You’ve got to go. See you back on board in a few hours, inshallah.”
“Thanks, Jacob. Look after yourself. No shore expeditions, remember?” Jack turned to Costas. “Good to go?”
Costas made a diver’s okay signal. “Good to go.” They both shut their visors, and Jack felt the slight increase in pressure as the helmet sealed and the rebreather came online. A second later the in-helmet screen display activated to the left and right of his main viewport. It was a low-light readout that could show up to thirty variables, from carbon dioxide levels to pulse rate. He tapped the computer control inside the index finger of his left glove and reduced the display to the minimum, to show depth in meters, compass orientation, and external water temperature. He raised his right arm in an okay signal to Lanowki and Mohammed, then turned and did a thumbs-down signal to Costas. He descended two meters, bleeding off air manually from his suit and waiting for the automated buoyancy system to compensate. He pulled down the aquajet after him and waited while its computer altered the trim in the small ballast tanks on either side of the unit, an automated process that self-adjusted with depth to ensure that the scooter remained neutrally buoyant.
He switched on his helmet light but was dazzled by the reflection of particles in the water that reduced the visibility to almost zero. He switched it off and was again in blackness, the moonless night meaning that no light filtered down from the surface. As he stared out, he remembered the lines that Jeremy had read from Howard Carter’s diary, the account that Carter had heard from Corporal Jones of what went on here that night in 1892 when Colonel Chaillé-Long and the French diver had accompanied Jones to this very spot. He could well imagine the trepidation of the diver as he went down with his homemade gear, yet also his excitement at seeing that the valve and cylinder worked and at what he might discover on the riverbed below.
What had happened then was a mystery. All Jack knew for certain was that somewhere down there must lie the remains of that diver, and of the boat that had been sucked down by the same vortex that had taken Jones into an underworld that had sent him spiraling further on his own descent into madness.
Costas tapped him on the shoulder, and Jack could just make out the glow of the readout inside his helmet a few inches away. “Jack, testing intercom. Over.”
“Reduce the squelch level about twenty percent.”
“How’s that?”
“Good. Visibility’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen. We’re going to have to rely on the virtual terrain mapper.”
“Mine’s already on. It’s a revelation, Jack.”
Jack tapped his finger and a green isometric lattice appeared in front of his visor, gradually filling with detail as the multibeam sonar built into the top of his helmet mapped out the riverbed in front of them. The display provided a continuously adjusted virtual image with a time lapse of about half a second as new data streamed in. Jack was constantly amazed by the clarity of the images it produced, and this time was no exception. It was as if they were suspended in midair above a sharply angled scree slope some twenty meters from top to bottom. To the left the slope was covered with debris from the nineteenth-century fort, the building whose ruined form on the shore had been their way marker, the feature described by Corporal Jones to Howard Carter. To the right was a more regular shape about ten meters below the surface, an overhanging ledge about five meters across with another jumble of material below it, much of it larger, more regular blocks. The red tracking lines showing the GPS fix converged on his screen directly in front of the ledge. Jack’s heart began to pound. This could be it.
Costas dropped below, his aquajet held in front. “I’m activating my helmet camera and the recording function on the terrain mapper. That means everything we see will be recorded on the memory chip.”
“Check,” Jack said. “I’ve done the same.”
Jack felt something bump his fins, and a spectral form seemed to undulate across his terrain mapper. It filled the entire lower half of the screen and swayed from side to side, caught like a series of stills in a time lapse. “Did you see that?” he exclaimed. “I could swear something swam by. It seemed to be all tail.”
“No, I did not see it,” Costas said, his voice quavering. “I definitely did not see it. What I saw was a glitch in the mapper. This is reality, not a nightmare.”
“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Jack said. “A serpent off to join the party, heading to the hell of Cairo.”
“It never existed, Jack. You’ve just got a touch of Mohammed’s river fever.”
Jack held his aquajet by the handles on either side of the encased propeller housing, released the safety lock with his thumbs, and pulled the trigger. He felt the backflow of water course down his body. The jet had a deflector so that at full throttle it dropped just below the diver, keeping the flow of water from the propeller clear and unobstructed. Costas came alongside and they both gunned the jets forward. They quickly came to within a few meters of the GPS fix and then released the triggers.
Jack stared at the image on his terrain mapper, taking in the detail. It was astonishingly clear, as if he were looking at a wall of masonry on land with the naked eye. He remembered Lanowski’s model showing how the scour effect of the Nile at this point could have kept the submerged bank free from loose sediment, a phenomenon also manifest in the whirlpools and eddies that made Mohammed and his fellow felucca captains so apprehensive. And there was no doubt about it now. The block in front of him that had looked like a ledge was fixed into the bank, part of a larger structure rather than fallen masonry. It was clearly a lintel, a huge block that must have weighed ten tons or more. Below it on either side he could just make out two massive upright blocks, and between them a jumble of stone that had fallen in from the sides.
Jack did a double take, not entirely believing what he was seeing, swinging from left to right and back again to re-create the image on his terrain mapper. Exactly the same features came into view. He was absolutely convinced of it now. It was an entranceway, an ancient portal beneath the Nile. Its depth put it exactly on Lanowski’s prediction for the level of the Nile at low water in the second millennium BC, allowing a partly flooded channel to act as an underground canal beneath the desert, wide enough to take barges that could have been walked or poled along. He clicked on his headlamp, and as he came within inches of the lintel he began to make out the stone beyond the reflected haze of particles in the water, unmistakably the fine-grained red granite favored by the New Kingdom pharaohs as a prestige building material. He stared more closely. He realized that he was not just looking at a smoothed surface of granite. He was looking at hieroglyphs. He switched back to the terrain mapper, and suddenly there it was, the cartouche that had become etched in his mind over the last months, from the crocodile temple in Sudan, from the plaque they had found with the sarcophagus on the wreck, from Rebecca’s underground find in Jerusalem. He put out his hand and traced his finger over the bird at the beginning and the sheaf of grain at the end. He stared for a moment longer, mouthing the word Akhenaten.
Costas’ voice came through the intercom. “Jack, we’ve got a problem.”
“I’ve just found the hieroglyphs. We’re bang on target.”
“I mean down below the lintel,” Costas said. “I think I can see what happened back in 1892.”
Jack dropped a few meters below the overhanging block to where the terrain mapper showed Costas’ form above the pile of blocks between the uprights of the portal. In front of him he could see where the blocks filled the entrance, with cracks leading to deeper spaces beyond. Costas’ voice came on again. “I think the diver blew open the stone doors that once sealed off this entrance, and in the process caused the rockfall that’s blocked it up again for us. But there’s one spot where I think we might get through, directly in front of me now, where my terrain mapper shows a block that could be dislodged. With a little assistance.”