“Speaking of horizons, I wonder what really did happen to Akhenaten,” Aysha said.
“The sun rises in the east, and sets in the west,” Costas murmured.
“What did you say?” Jack said.
“Well, if you’re going to worship the sun, you look east or you look west. It’s too bright in the middle.”
“Moses and the Israelites went east,” Lanowski said.
“So which way did Akhenaten go?” Jack tapped his pencil, staring at the image of the empty coffin, and then swivelled the map on the table so that his line of sight took him from Egypt across North Africa and beyond, due west.
“Uh-oh,” Costas said, peering at him. “It’s that look again.”
“You know all those theories about the origins of the pyramids in Mesomerica?” Jack said. “We need to look at every scrap of evidence, and I mean every scrap, for Egyptian exploration to the west. If Akhenaten set off in search for his own promised land, it could be anywhere west of Libya.”
“I’m on it,” Lanowski said, sliding the laptop in front of him, brushing his hair aside, and pushing up his little round glasses. “I’ll start with the fringe stuff first. I’m pretty good at working out which of those theories are crackpot and which have a modicum of sanity behind them. Some of those guys are alarmingly like me.”
“Maurice?” Jack said.
Hiebermeyer stared at the map and slowly nodded. “After finishing at the mummy necropolis, my new project was going to be an excavation near Mersa Matruh, a trading site on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt close to the Libyan border. Aysha and her team had already begun to evaluate all the known evidence for Egyptian trade farther west. One of the most intriguing reports comes from the early Phoenician outpost at Mogador, on the Atlantic coast of Mauretania, where surface finds have apparently included fragments of New Kingdom pottery.”
“Fourteenth century BC?” Jack said.
“It’s possible.”
“We have a standing invitation to excavate there,” Aysha said.
Costas slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. “There you go. Just say yes. Egyptology lives on.”
Jack turned to Costas and cracked a smile. “And you, my friend, have free rein to go and tinker with submersibles. There’s a possible Egyptian wreck off Sicily I’ve always been meaning to visit that might just need your expertise, and provide the stepping-stone we need to take this theory forward.”
Costas’ eyes lit up. “That’s even better than a beach holiday, Jack. Way better. With Maurice’s gin and tonic, of course. And you’ll be amazed at what my guys have come up with while we’ve been crawling down slimy tunnels under the desert. I can’t wait to show you.”
They began to disperse, and Jack sat back, exhausted but elated. The horizon had suddenly opened up for him again, and the possibilities seemed endless. He stared at the map, his eyes narrowing. He had that feeling again, the overwhelming instinct that he was onto something big, as big as any quest he had pursued before. He felt the ship’s engines begin to throb, and he looked out to sea, already planning the next few days, his mind racing.
Game on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Tracy Devine and Sarah Murphy in New York, and Marion Donaldson and Sherise Hobbs in London; to my previous editors Caitlin Alexander and Martin Fletcher; to Crystal Velasquez and Kay Gale for their copyediting; to the rest of the teams at Bantam Dell and Headline, including Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, and Ben Willis; to the Hachette representatives internationally, including Donna Nopper; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston, and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates; to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson, and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates; and to my many foreign publishers and their translators.
I owe a continuing debt to Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my writing, and for her support. The formative period of travel and fieldwork behind this novel was funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I’m grateful to the staff of Cambridge University Library for allowing me to examine original documents from the Cairo Geniza when I was a graduate student there, to the Royal Engineers Museum and Library in Chatham for help with research on the officers who appear in this novel, and to Peter Nield for introducing me to recent work on the life of the caliph Al-Hakim. Finally I owe a special thanks to my daughter for organizing a trip to the Black Country Museum in England, where I was able to “wall-walk” a barge in an underground canal just as I have imagined happening in Egypt more than three thousand years ago.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Hidden wisdom and concealed treasure: what is the use of either?
The idea that the Giza plateau in Egypt might contain underground passageways and chambers has long fascinated archaeologists, particularly following the discovery in the 1950s of two pits beside the Pyramid of Khufu containing the pharaoh’s funerary boats. The existence of mortuary temples, man-made harbors, and canals leading from the Nile has long been known, and was given further credence when digging for a new sewage system under the adjacent suburb of Cairo in the 1980s revealed tantalizing evidence for further structures — one of them a huge mud-brick wall interpreted by some as part of a “palace” or priestly complex. The engineering feat in cutting these waterways is in many ways as extraordinary as the construction of the pyramids themselves. Despite being one of the most intensively studied sites in the world, there is much about the Giza plateau that remains open to speculation, including the possibility of subterranean complexes that have been inaccessible to exploration and lie beneath the range of ground-penetrating radar.
A further possibility, that such a complex might contain an extraordinary revelation, a secret hidden away by a heretical pharaoh, is the basis for this novel. By the time of the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after the pyramids had been completed, it seems likely that the cults of the three individual pharaohs of the Giza pyramids had coalesced into one, and that this unified cult had become associated with the worship of the sun god Ra. When Amenhotep IV — the future Akhenaten — discarded the old religion in favor of his new sun god, the Aten, and changed his name accordingly, he may have sought a new cult center away from the traditional focus of priestly power in Thebes, and chosen instead a place that remained the oldest and most powerful expression of kingly power in Egypt and already had a strong association with the worship of the sun. Akhenaten was one of the greatest builders of all the pharaohs, with new temples at Heliopolis, not far from Giza, and at Luxor, not to speak of his magnificent new capital at Amarna. The idea that he might have directed that energy to a new complex at Giza — drawing on all the experience in rock cutting, canal building, and large-scale schemes evident in the Old Kingdom structures — is a compelling one, and plausible in terms of the engineering and architectural ambitions that his builders were capable of realizing.