A little fish flapped out of the water where it lapped at the edge. Slimy looking and with bulging eyes, it was the only other living thing they had seen since leaving the Nile. Costas contemplated it with a distasteful look on his face, and then edged it back in with his foot. “I don’t like the sound of that at all,” he said. “Not at all.”
“You need more rest?”
Costas shook his head, checking the waist strap on his boiler suit and easing the constriction of the E-suit on his neck. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Jack stared up the slope. “Roger that.”
CHAPTER 22
Jack removed the headlamp console from his rebreather backpack, handed Costas’ back to him, and then eased off the backpack and laid it with his helmet on the sloping floor. There were still over two hours of breathing time left in his cylinder, but with Costas on empty and no way of buddy-breathing, he was not going to carry on alone if they came to another underwater passage. After what had just nearly happened to Costas, and Jack’s reaction to it, they were either getting out of here together or not at all.
They both unwound the straps from the back of the lamp consoles and put them on their heads, first checking that the integrated miniature video cameras were still recording. With the backpack air-conditioning unit removed, the E-suits might become uncomfortably warm, but at the moment that was better than being chilled, and the Kevlar would afford protection against bumps and scrapes along the way. Whatever lay in store for them now, Jack knew it was unlikely to be an easy walk-through. And being in a breathable environment did not mean that an escape tunnel out toward Cairo somewhere ahead was still anything more than a shaky hypothesis.
Costas detached the hose from the hydration pack on the left side of his E-suit and took a deep draw on it, patting his boiler suit as he did so to check that everything was there and still in place. He paused for a moment, delved deep into the front pocket, and removed a watertight bag. He unzipped it, grasped the sandwich inside, and took a huge bite. He munched noisily and swallowed as he replaced the bag. “It was going to be my dying thought, and now it’s my kiss of life. Thank you, Gino.” He took another mouthful of water and stowed the tube. Then he panned his headlamp beam over the top of the ramp. “You think that’s the way to go?”
“We don’t have any choice,” Jack replied. “There’s an identical ramp at the end of the channel parallel to us, just visible through the columns, but it joins up to the single passageway ahead. My guess is that it will lead first to some kind of boat stowage facility, probably linked to the artificial harbor that we know was associated with the Old Kingdom mortuary temple. The space we saw lit up from beneath the pyramid three months ago lies somewhere between the edge of the pyramid and the harbor site. We have to hope there will be some kind of entrance to it ahead.”
Costas nodded and then heaved himself upright. “If it had been daytime, we might have seen reflected light coming through those shafts leading from the pyramid. I assume that’s what allowed the caliph Al-Hakim and then Corporal Jones to see their way around this place. As it is, there isn’t even a moon tonight.”
Jack stared ahead, reciting. “ ‘Omens of fire in the chariot’s wind, pillars of fire in thunder and storm.’ ”
“Come again?”
“Something I remembered when I mentioned our chariot discovery in the Red Sea to you a few minutes ago. When I told Maria about our discovery, she quoted those lines to me from another of the medieval Geniza poets, Yannai. His imagery comes from the Book of Exodus.”
“The burning bush, the mountain on fire,” Costas replied. “I had to learn all that stuff backward when I was a boy. I used to think ancient Egypt was a vision of hell.”
“It’s not just ancient Egypt now. You should have seen Cairo when we came through it this evening on the felucca.”
“Are you thinking of the pyramids? That CNN footage we saw in Alexandria?”
Jack nodded. “You’re right that we won’t be seeing sunlight down here. But we may see another kind of light reflected in those mirrors. Akhenaten’s City of Light won’t be illuminated by the rays of the Aten, but it might be lit up by something he would have thought unimaginable, by fires that may as well be drawn straight from the biblical image of hell. The reflection from a burning pyramid is not a way marker that any archaeologist would wish to follow, but if it’s there, it might be all we’ve got to go on.”
The ramp sloped up at an angle of about thirty degrees until it reached a platform some five meters above the level of the water. From there it became a rectilinear tunnel about four meters across and three meters high, wide enough for the two of them to proceed side by side. Jack paused to adjust the angle of his camera while Costas carried on ahead, his beam reflecting off the polished veneer of granite that lined the lower part of the walls. About ten meters ahead Costas stopped and peered closely at the side of the tunnel, then he pressed his hands against it.
“Jack, this is interesting. It’s been plastered over. It’s—”
There was a sudden bellow and the sound of collapsing masonry, and Costas was gone. Jack stared aghast, and then quickly made his way forward. Where Costas had been standing was a jagged hole about the size of a small door. He approached it and leaned forward into the chamber that had been revealed. That air inside was dry and aromatic, and made his eyes smart. He blinked hard, coughed, and then saw Costas’ headlamp beam coming from somewhere below, apparently stationary and at an odd angle. For an instant Jack had a yawning feeling of fear. They had basic medical kits inside their E-suits but nothing to treat major trauma other than blood coagulants and shell dressings. If Costas was seriously injured, there was little he could do for him and no way of calling in help.
He pulled himself carefully through the hole and peered below, his heart pounding. “Costas, are you all right? Talk to me.”
There was no response, and Jack held his breath. Then the beam from below shifted slightly, and he heard a grunt and a mumbled curse. “Fascinating,” Costas said. His voice sounded impossibly distant, as if coming from deep inside a chasm.
“What’s fascinating? Are you all right?”
“Never seen anything quite like it. Sewn joinery, each timber individually shaped. Amazing technology.”
Jack stared out beyond Costas, and gasped as he realized what he was looking at. It was a huge rock-cut chamber at least ten meters across, the size of a giant water cistern. At the bottom was a mass of timber, disarticulated and carefully laid out. Costas’ beam was coming from beneath a section of stacked planking close to the corner of the chamber beneath him. Jack watched as Costas began to extricate himself. He looked up, shading his eyes against Jack’s beam, his face white with plaster dust. “What do you make of it, Jack? A nautical archaeologist’s dream, or what?”
“It’s fantastic,” Jack enthused. “The chamber must have been airtight before you broke through, preserving all those timbers like that. There’s another of these boat pits still unopened in front of the Great Pyramid, known as a result of archaeologists pushing a fiber-optic camera down into it. Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve just fallen into the dismantled funerary barge of the Pharaoh Menkaure, the boat that took his body down the canal from the river to the harbor and the funerary temple. And you’re right, the joinery is sewn planking. Actually an incredibly robust technique that could produce a hull well up to sea travel, though this is a ceremonial riverboat. You can make out the raking stem and stern timbers, the oars, the fine woodwork of the deckhouse. Amazing.”