“No more C5,” Costas repeated. “But you’d need a cruise missile to open up that entrance now.”
“What’s your predicted oxygen timeout?”
“Two hours and fifty-five minutes at my current breathing rate.”
Jack turned and stared down the tunnel. Two hours and fifty-five minutes, and at least five kilometers until the beginning of the Giza plateau, the point where the tunnel might rise above the waterline. There was no way they could make that distance, or even half of it, without the aquajet. The passage down the tunnel had been the biggest gamble of their plan, and the odds were now stacked dramatically against them. If Costas’ aquajet failed to start, or if it ran out partway along the tunnel, they would be doomed to an inevitable agonizing countdown, able only to swim forward in desperation until exhaustion overtook them and their oxygen ran out. Jack stared into the constricting walls of the tunnel and the black hole ahead. For the first time he felt a tightness in his chest, a pinprick of fear. They might not get out of here alive.
He swam over and grasped the right handle of the aquajet, and watched as Costas’ finger hovered over the trigger in front of the left handle. Everything now depended on what happened next. For a moment they hung there motionless, side by side, the aquajet held in front of them, aimed down a tunnel that right now seemed more forbidding than any they had ever dived down before. Their survival, even if they made it to the surface, was threatened by the apocalypse of biblical proportions that was now engulfing Egypt.
Costas pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled again. Still nothing. Jack stopped breathing. Costas held down the emergency start switch on top of the aquajet and pulled the trigger again. Suddenly it whirred to life, and Costas gunned it a few times. It moved them forward. He put it in neutral and held it firmly in front. “You ready for this?” he said. “Prepare for the ride of your life.”
Jack took a deep breath. “Time to go.”
CHAPTER 21
Forty minutes later Costas eased off on the throttle of the aquajet and they slowed down to swimming speed, allowing Jack to relax his grip on the handle and focus more on the tunnel around them. The most telling feature so far had been a line of foot-sized indents carved into the side walls at intervals of about a meter and running the entire length of the tunnel from the outset.
Jack had recognized the indents not from ancient parallels but from the Black Country in England, where he had once explored an underground canal from the time of the Industrial Revolution and seen where the bargemen had lain down and walked their vessels along the walls of the canal. The same had happened here, three thousand years earlier, only the Egyptians with their engineering exactitude had provided their bargemen with secure footing along the entire length of the canal. For Jack it was confirmation that this was indeed a passageway for boats to make their way between the Nile and the Giza plateau, with the Nile at low water lapping just below the level of the footings.
The tunnel could have accommodated vessels up to three meters in beam and one and a half meters in draft, large enough for the type of river barges that plied the surface canals to the pyramids during their construction. They had been hauled by teams of oxen and slaves plodding along the towpath just like those English canal boats of the nineteenth century that Jack had examined.
Costas reduced the speed by a further setting and Jack felt the wake wash forward, his legs dropping with the reduced momentum. He could see nothing but the receding darkness of the tunnel ahead, and he felt a niggle of unease again. “Do we have a problem?”
“I’m trying to reduce the drain on the battery. We’re not at critical yet, but it’s showing the orange warning light.”
“What do you make of our position?”
“In the absence of GPS reception down here, we can only go by dead reckoning. The tunnel has maintained a straight course almost exactly due west, bearing toward the southern end of the Giza complex in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, just as Lanowski mapped it. And the aquajet’s computer calculates a lapsed distance of four point three kilometers. That puts us a kilometer or so from the point where Lanowski thought the tunnel could break above the water level.”
“If the tunnel links to the complex we saw from beneath the pyramid, then it has to rise above the water level,” Jack replied. “The intensity of light we saw reflected through that shaft in the pyramid could only have come from mirrors set up in dry spaces, as refraction through water couldn’t have produced anything so bright.”
“We have to hope that the other radiating arms on that map represent tunnels that are above water too. Otherwise we’re dependent on finding an exit from the main complex, and if that means the shaft we saw from beneath the pyramid, then we’re going nowhere. The shaft had been filled with masonry so that the aperture for the light was a slit less than half a meter high. There’s no way we’re getting through that.”
“While you were in never-never land today on the felucca, Lanowski and I worked up a best-fit CGI for what might lie ahead of us. The plaque from the shipwreck, the one that shows the Aten symbol superimposed on the Giza plateau and the desert, had a total of eight arms radiating southeast to northeast toward the Nile, all of them extending out from the sun symbol that we imagine represents the central complex below the plateau. Our tunnel is the second arm from the bottom, the one running nearest to due east. We guessed that two of the other arms might also represent actual tunnels or canals and not just be symbolic depictions. One of them must be the aboveground canal used during the months of the year when the Nile was in full spate, when the tunnel we’re in would have been completely submerged and unusable. We think the above-water channel may well have been the canal already in existence from the time of the pyramid construction, adapted and perhaps strengthened by Akhenaten’s engineers.”
“You mean the canal from the Nile to the artificial harbor that was dug in front of the pyramid, beside the mortuary temple?”
“Right,” Jack replied. “Each of the pyramids originally had one. All trace of the above-water canal from the Pyramid of Menkaure has been lost beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo, but we think it’s likely to be the next radiating line of the Aten symbol to the north of us, at an arc of thirty degrees from our tunnel and reaching the Nile about two kilometers north of our entry point. But it’s the line above that one that interests us most. When Lanowski superimposed the depiction from the plaque on the modern map, keeping to the exact alignment of the pyramids, not only did our line end up exactly at the Napoleonic fort, but the line two up from that, the one I’m talking about, abutted the river directly opposite Fustat, Old Cairo.”
“Which didn’t exist in antiquity,” Costas said.
“Not as we see it now. But knowing about the masonry block with the Akhenaten cartouche found in 1892 by those Royal Engineers officers beside the synagogue confirms what Maurice has long suspected, that the other blocks of that date found in the medieval walls of Fustat were not all reused from Akhenaten’s great temple at Heliopolis, to the northeast of Fustat, but included material from a structure whose remains lie beneath the boundaries of medieval Fustat itself. If you extend the Aten line across the river, it points almost exactly to the site of the synagogue.”
“So you think all these features from Akhenaten’s building program were interconnected — the Heliopolis temple, the structure under the synagogue, and this complex in front of the pyramids.”
“The Egyptians were really into alignments, right? It’s the kind of thing you can do in the desert over long distances, by line of sight. Maurice thinks that this was intimately tied up with worship of the sun, and that the Aten symbol with its very precise radiating lines suggests a particular fascination for Akhenaten himself. Maybe the passion for geometry that shows in the planning of his capital at Amarna should lead us to look for the same kind of grandiose conception here. With polished stone surfaces you can make the rays of the sun link together distant places, something that we might see in microcosm in the mirrors that we know must direct the light beneath the plateau. But Lanowski and I concluded that the line leading to Fustat may well represent another real tunnel, one likely to be above the flood level of the Nile so that it could be used all year round. The tunnel we’re in now and the above-water canal were used mainly for barging in building materials and other goods, at low water and high water, respectively. The tunnel from Fustat might have been some kind of processional way for priests and even the pharaoh himself.”