Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I reluctantly stayed as ordered to help Jomard and Monge make more measurements of the pyramids, sharing the tent they’d staked a short distance from the Sphinx. After having promised a quick return, I was uneasy being such a distance from Astiza and the medallion, especially with Silano in Cairo. But if I ignored Napoleon’s very public command I risked being arrested. Besides, I felt I was getting closer to the secret. Perhaps the medallion was a map to another passageway in the big heap of stone. Then there was October 21 ^ st, a date I’d plucked off the lost ancient calendar that might or might not have any accuracy or significance, and was still two months away. I didn’t know how any of this fit together, but maybe the savants would turn up another clue. So I sent a message to Enoch’s house, explaining my predicament and asking that he get word to Yusuf’s harem of my delay. At least I knew what I should be looking at, I added. I simply lacked clear understanding of what I should be looking for.

My temporary exile from the city was not entirely bad. Enoch’s house was confining and Cairo noisy, while the empty silence of the desert was a respite. A company of soldiers bivouacked in the sand to protect us against roaming Bedouin and Mamelukes, and I told myself that staying here a couple nights might actually be the safest thing for Astiza and Enoch, since my absence should deflect attention from them. Silano had hopefully accepted my story that the medallion was at the bottom of Abukir Bay. I’d not forgotten poor Talma, but proof of his killer, and revenge, would have to wait. In short I pretended, as humans are wont to do, that the worst was for the best.

As I’ve said, there are three large pyramids at Giza, and all three have small passageways and chambers that are empty. Kephren’s pyramid is still covered at its top by the kind of limestone casing that at one time gave all three structures a perfectly smooth, polished white surface. How they must have glistened, like prisms of salt! Using surveying instruments, we calculated that the Great Pyramid, when it came to a precise point, had a height of 480 feet, more than a hundred feet higher than the pinnacle of the cathedral of Amiens, the tallest in France. The Egyptians used only 203 tiers of masonry to reach this prodigious altitude. We measured the slope of its side at fifty-one degrees, precisely that needed to make height and half its circumference equal to both pi and Jomard’s Fibonacci sequence.

Despite this eerie coincidence, the pyramids’ purpose still eluded me. As art they were sublime. For utility, they seemed nonsensical. Here were buildings so smooth when built that no one could stand on them, housing corridors awkward for humans to negotiate, leading to chambers that seemed never to have been occupied, and codifying mathematics that seemed obscure to all but a specialist.

Monge said the whole business probably had something to do with religion. ‘Five thousand years from now, will people understand the motive behind Notre Dame?’

‘You’d better not let the priests hear you say that.’

‘Priests are obsolete; science is the new religion. To the ancient Egyptians, religion was their science, and magic an attempt to manipulate what couldn’t be understood. Mankind then advanced from a past in which every tribe and nation had its own groups of gods to one in which many nations worship one god. Still, there are many faiths, each calling the others heretics. Now we have science, based not on faith, but reason and experiment, and centred not on one nation, or pope, or king, but universal law. It doesn’t matter if you are Chinese or German, or speak Arabic or Spanish: science is the same. That’s why it will triumph, and why the Church instinctively feared Galileo. But this structure behind us was built by a particular people with particular beliefs, and we might never rediscover their reasoning because it was based on religious mysticism we can’t comprehend. It would help if we could someday decipher hieroglyphics.’

I couldn’t disagree with this prediction – I was a Franklin man, after all – and yet I had to wonder why science, if so universal, hadn’t swept all before it already. Why were people still religious? Science was clever but cold, explanatory and yet silent on the biggest questions. It answered how but not why, and thus left people yearning. I suspected people of the future would understand Notre Dame, just as we understand a Roman temple. And, perhaps, worship and fear in much the same way. The revolutionaries in their rationalist fervour were missing something, I thought, and what was missing was heart, or soul. Did science have room for that, or hopes of an afterlife?

I said none of this, however, simply replying, ‘What if it’s simpler than that, Doctor Monge? What if the pyramid is simply a tomb?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that and it presents a fascinating paradox, Gage. Suppose it was supposed to be, at least principally, a tomb. Its very size creates its own problem, does it not? The more elaborately you build a pyramid to safeguard a mummy, the more you call attention to the mummy’s location. It must have been a dilemma for pharaohs seeking to preserve their remains for all eternity.’

‘I’ve thought of another dilemma as well,’ I replied. ‘The pharaoh hopes to be undisturbed for eternity. Yet the perfect crime is one that no one realises has occurred. If you wanted to rob the tomb of your master, what better way than to do it just before it is sealed up, because once it is, no one can discover the theft! If this is a tomb, it relied on the faithfulness of those closing it. Who could the pharaoh trust?’

‘Unproven belief again!’ Monge laughed.

Mentally, I reviewed what I knew about the medallion. A bisected circle: a symbol, perhaps, for pi. A map of the constellation containing the ancient polar star in its upper half. A symbol for water below. Hash marks arranged in a delta like a pyramid. Perhaps the water was the Nile, and the marks represented the Great Pyramid, but why not etch a simple triangle? Enoch had said that the emblem seemed incomplete, but where to find the rest? The shaft of Min, in some long-lost temple? It seemed a joke. I tried to think like Franklin, but I was not his match. He could toy with thunderbolts one day and found a new nation the next. Could the pyramids have attracted lightning and converted it into power? Was the entire pyramid some kind of Leyden jar? I hadn’t heard a roll of thunder or seen a drop of rain since we’d arrived in Egypt.

Monge left to join Bonaparte for the official christening of the new Institute of Egypt. There the savants were at work on everything from devising ways to ferment alcohol or bake bread (with sunflower stalks, since Egypt lacked adequate wood) to cataloguing Egypt’s wildlife. Conte had set up a workshop to replace equipment, such as printing presses, that had been lost with the destruction of the fleet at Abukir. He was the kind of tinkerer who could make anything from anything. Jomard and I lingered in the pinks and gold of the desert, laboriously unreeling tapes, pitching aside rubble, and measuring angles with surveying staffs. Three days and nights we spent, watching the stars wheel around the tips of the pyramids and debating what the monuments might be for.

By morning of the fourth day, bored with the meticulous work and inconclusive speculation, I wandered to a viewpoint overlooking Cairo across the river. There I saw a curious sight. Conte had apparently manufactured enough hydrogen to inflate a balloon. The coated silk bag looked to be about forty feet in diameter, its top half covered with a net from which ropes extended downward to hold a wicker basket. It hovered on its tether a hundred feet off the ground, drawing a small crowd. I studied it through Jomard’s telescope. All those watching appeared to be Europeans.

So far the Arabs had displayed little wonder about Western technology. They seemed to regard us as a temporary intrusion of clever infidels, obsessed with mechanical tricks and careless with our souls. I’d earlier enlisted Conte’s help to make a cranked friction generator for a store of electricity in what Franklin had called a battery, and was invited by the savants to give a mild shock to some of Cairo’s mullahs. The Egyptians gamely joined hands, I jolted the first with a charge from my Leyden jar, and they all jumped in turn as the current passed through them, provoking great consternation and laughter. But after their initial surprise they seemed more amused than awed. Electricity was cheap magic, good for nothing but parlour games.

It was while watching the balloon that I noticed a long column of French soldiers issue from Cairo’s southern gate. Their regularity was a marked contrast to the mobs of merchants and camel drovers who clustered around the city’s entrances. The soldiers tramped in a line of blue and white, regimental banners limp in the hot air. On and on the ranks came, a glittering file undulating like a millipede, until it seemed a full division. Some of the force was mounted, and more horses pulled two small field guns.

I called to Jomard and he joined me, focusing the spyglass. ‘It is General Desaix, off to chase the elusive Murad Bey,’ he said. ‘His troops are going to explore and conquer an upper Egypt that few Europeans have ever seen.’

‘So the war isn’t over.’

He laughed. ‘We’re talking about Bonaparte! War will never be over for him.’ He continued to study the column, dust drifting ahead of the soldiers as if to announce their coming. I could imagine them good-naturedly cursing it, their mouths full of grit. ‘I think I see your old friend as well.’

‘Old friend?’

‘Here, look for yourself.’

Near the column’s head was a man in turban and robes with half a dozen Bedouin riding as bodyguard. One of his henchmen held a parasol above his head. I could see the slim rapier bouncing on his hip and the fine black stallion he’d purchased in Cairo: Silano. Someone smaller rode by his side, swathed in robes. A personal servant, perhaps.

‘Good riddance.’

‘I envy him,’ Jomard said. ‘What discoveries they’ll make!’

Had Silano given up his quest for the medallion? Or gone to look for its missing piece in Enoch’s southern temple? I picked out Bin Sadr as well. He was leading the Bedouin bodyguard, rocking easily on the back of a camel while holding his staff.

Had I avoided them? Or were they escaping me?

I looked again at the smaller, shrouded figure and felt disquiet. Had I been too obedient, lingering at the pyramids too long? Who was that riding at Silano’s side?

I knew of him, she had confirmed.

And she had never explained what, precisely, that meant.

I snapped the telescope shut. ‘I have to get back to Cairo.’

‘You can’t go, by Bonaparte’s orders. We need a compelling hypothesis first.’

But something disastrous had happened in my absence, I feared, and I realised that by staying out so long, I’d unconsciously been putting off the task of tackling the medallion and avenging Talma. My procrastination may have been fatal. ‘I’m an American savant, not a French private. To hell with his orders.’

‘He could have you shot!’

But I was already running down the slope, past the Sphinx, toward Cairo.

The city seemed more ominous on my return. Even as Desaix’s division had emptied some houses of French troops, thousands of inhabitants who’d fled after the Battle of the Pyramids were returning. Cairo was emerging from post-invasion shock into being the centre of Egypt again. As the city grew more crowded, the inhabitants regained their urban confidence. They carried themselves as if the city still belonged to them, not us, and their numbers dwarfed ours. While French soldiers could still cause pedestrians to scatter as they rode racing donkeys or marched on patrol, there was less scuttling out of the way of lone foreigners such as myself. As I hurried through the narrow lanes I was bumped and jostled for the first time. Again I was reminded of the oddities of electricity, that strange prickling in the air after the parlour experiments that women found so erotic. Now Cairo seemed electric with tension. News of the defeat at Abukir Bay had reached everyone, and no longer did the Franks seem invincible. Yes, we were dangling on a rope all right, and I could see it beginning to fray.

Compared to the bustle of adjacent lanes, the street at Enoch’s house seemed far too quiet. Where was everyone? The home’s facade looked much as I’d left it, its face as unreadable as that of the Egyptians. Yet when I got near I sensed something was amiss. The door wasn’t tight against its frame, and I spied the bright yellow of splintered wood. I glanced around. Eyes watched me, I sensed, but I could see no one.

When I pounded on the entry it gave slightly. ‘ Salaam.’ My greeting’s echo was answered by the buzzing of flies. I pushed, as if shoving against someone holding the door on the other side, and finally it yielded enough that I could squeeze in. It was then I saw the obstruction. Enoch’s gigantic Negro servant, Mustafa, was lying dead against the door, his face shattered by a pistol shot. The house had the sickeningly sweet scent of recent death.

I looked at a window. Its wooden screen had been shattered by intruders.

I went on, room by room. Where were the other servants? There were spatters and streaks of blood everywhere, as if bodies had been dragged after battle and butchery. Tables had been toppled, tapestries ripped down, cushions overthrown and cut. The invaders had been looking for something, and I knew what it was. My absence had saved no one. Why hadn’t I insisted that Enoch hide, instead of staying with his books? Why had I thought my absence and that of the medallion would protect him? At length I came to the antiquities room, some of its statuary broken and its caskets overthrown, and then the stairs to the musty library. Its door had been staved in. Beyond was dark, but the library stank of fire. Heartsick, I found a candle and descended.

The cellar was a smoky shambles. Shelves had been toppled. Books and scrolls lay heaped like piles of autumn leaves, their half-burnt contents still smouldering. At first I thought this room was empty of life too, but then someone groaned. Paper rustled and a hand came up from the litter, fingers painfully curled, like an avalanche victim reaching from snow. I grasped it, only to elicit a howl of pain. I dropped the swollen digits and shovelled blackened papers aside. There was poor Enoch, sprawled on a pile of smouldering books. He was badly scorched, his clothes half-gone, and his chest and arms roasted. He’d thrown himself onto a bonfire of literature.

‘Thoth,’ he was groaning. ‘Thoth.’

‘Enoch, what happened?’

He couldn’t hear me in his delirium. I went upstairs to his fountain and used an ancient bowl to get some water, even though the fountain ran pink from spilt blood. I dripped some on his face and then gave him a sip. He sputtered, and then sucked like a baby. Finally his eyes focused.

‘They tried to burn it all.’ It was a groaning whisper.

‘Who did?’

‘I broke free to run into the blaze and they didn’t dare follow.’ He coughed.

‘My God, Enoch, you threw yourself on the fire?’

‘These books are my life.’

‘Was it the French?’

‘Bin Sadr’s Arabs. They kept asking where it was, without saying what they meant. I pretended not to know. They wanted the woman, and I said she’d gone with you. They didn’t believe me. If I hadn’t run into the fire they would have forced me to tell far more. I hope the household didn’t talk.’

‘Where is everybody?’

‘The servants were herded into storerooms. I heard screams.’

I felt utterly futile: foolish gambler, dilettante soldier, and pretend savant. ‘I’ve brought all this on you.’

‘You brought nothing the gods did not wish.’ He groaned. ‘My time is over. Men are becoming greedier. They want science and magic for power. Who wants to live in a time like that? But knowing and wisdom are not the same things.’ He clutched me. ‘You must stop them.’

‘Stop them from what?’

‘It was in my books after all.’

‘What? What are they after?’

‘It’s a key. You must insert it.’ He was fading.

I leant closer. ‘Enoch, please: Astiza. Is she safe?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where’s Ashraf?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you learn anything about the twenty-first of October?’

He grasped my arm. ‘You need to believe in something, American. Believe in her.’

Then he died.

I sat back, hollowed. First Talma, now this. I was too late to save him, and too late to learn what he’d learnt. I used my fingers to close his eyes, shaking with rage and impotence. I’d lost my best link to the mysteries. Was there anything left in this library to explain the medallion? Amid the ashes, how could I know?

Cradled to Enoch’s breast was a particularly thick volume, bound in leather and blackened at the edges. Its writing was Arabic. Had it been of particular importance in deciphering our quest? I pried it loose and looked in ignorance at its ornate script. Well, perhaps Astiza could make sense of it.

If she was still in Cairo. I had a grim idea who the small, shrouded figure was who’d been riding next to Silano as Desaix’s troops marched south.

Anxious and lost in my own worries, I trudged back up the stairs and into the antiquities room without caution. It almost cost me my life.

There was a high, anguished cry and then a lance thrust out from behind a statue of Anubis the jackal like a bolt of lightning. It crashed into my chest, knocking me backward, and I collided with a stone sarcophagus, my wind gone. As I slid down, dazed, I looked at the shaft. Its spear point had pierced Enoch’s book, only the last pages stopping it from thrusting into my heart.

Ashraf was at the end of the spear. His eyes widened.

‘You!’

I tried to speak but could only gasp.

‘What are you doing here? I was told you were held by the French at the pyramids! I thought you were one of the assassins, looking for secrets!’

I finally found enough air to speak. ‘I spied Silano leaving the city with General Desaix, riding south. I didn’t know what that meant, so I hurried back.’

‘I almost killed you!’

‘This book saved me.’ I pushed it, and the spear point, aside. ‘Can’t even read it, but Enoch was cradling it. What’s it about, Ash?’

Using his boot to hold the book while he wrenched the lance free, the Mameluke stooped and opened it. Fragments puffed out like spores. He read a moment. ‘Poetry.’ He threw it aside.

Ah. What we choose to die with.

‘I need help, Ashraf.’

‘Help? You’re the conqueror, remember? You who are bringing science and civilisation to poor Egypt! And this is what you’ve brought to my brother’s house: butchery! Everyone who knows you dies!’

‘It was Arabs, not French, who did this.’

‘It was France, not Egypt, which upset the order of things.’

There was no answer to that, and no denying that I’d become a part of it. We choose for the most expedient of reasons, and upend the world.

I took a laboured breath. ‘I have to find Astiza. Help me, Ash. Not as prisoner, not as master and slave, not as employee. As a friend. As a fellow warrior. Astiza has the medallion. They’ll kill her for it as brutally as they killed Talma, and I don’t trust asking the army for help. Napoleon wants the secret too. He’ll take the medallion for himself.’

‘And be cursed like everyone who touches it.’

‘Or discover the power to enslave the world.’

Ashraf’s reply was silence, letting me realise what I’d just blurted about the general I’d been following. Was Bonaparte a Republican saviour? Or a potential tyrant? I’d seen hints of both in his character. How did one tell the difference between the two? Both required charm. Both required ambition. And maybe a feather on the scales of Thoth would tip a leader’s heart one way or the other. But of course it didn’t matter, did it? I had to decide for myself what I believed. Now Enoch had given me an anchor: believe in her.

‘My brother gave you help and look where it got him,’ Ashraf said bitterly. ‘You are no friend. I was wrong to have led you into Cairo. I should have died at Imbaba.’

I was desperate. ‘Then if you won’t help as a friend, I order you to help me as my captive and servant. I paid you!’

‘You dare lay claim to me after this?’ He took out a purse and hurled it at me. Coins exploded, rolling away on the stone floor. ‘I spit on your money! Go! Find your woman yourself! I must prepare the funeral of my brother!’

So I was alone. At least I had the integrity to leave his money where it had scattered, despite knowing how few coins I had of my own. I took what I had cached in an empty coffin: my longrifle and my Algonquin tomahawk. Then I stepped again over Mustafa’s body and went back into Cairo’s streets.

I wouldn’t be coming back.

The house of Yusuf al-Beni, where Astiza had been secreted in a harem, was more imposing than Enoch’s, a turreted fortress that shadowed its narrow street with brooding overhangs. Its windows were high on its face, where sun shone and swallows glided, but its door was shadowed by a heavy arch as thick as the entrance to a medieval castle. I stood before it in disguise. I’d wrapped my weapons in a cheap, hastily purchased carpet and dressed myself in Egyptian clothes in case the French might be looking to return me to Jomard at the pyramid. The loose-fitting riding trousers and galabiyya were infinitely lighter, more anonymous, and more sensible than European garb, and the head scarf provided welcome shelter from the sun.

Was I once more too late?

I pounded on Yusuf’s door and a doorman the size of Mustafa confronted me. Shaved, huge, and as pale as Enoch’s servant had been dark, he filled the entry like a bale of Egyptian cotton. Did every rich house have a human troll?

‘What do you want, rug merchant?’ I could understand the Arabic by now.

‘I’m no merchant. I need to see your master,’ I replied in French.

‘You’re a Frank?’ he asked in the same tongue.

‘American.’

He grunted. ‘Not here.’ He began to close the door.

I tried to bluff. ‘The sultan Bonaparte is looking for him.’ Now cotton bale paused. It was enough to make me believe Yusuf was somewhere in the house. ‘The general has business with the woman who is a guest here, the lady called Astiza.’

‘The general wants a slave?’ The tone was disbelief.

‘She’s no slave, she’s a savant. The sultan needs her expertise. If Yusuf is gone, then you must fetch the woman for the general.’

‘She is gone too.’

It was an answer I didn’t want to believe. ‘Do I have to bring a platoon of soldiers? The sultan Bonaparte is not a man who wants to be left waiting.’

The doorman shook his head in dismissal. ‘Go away, American. She is sold.’

‘Sold!’

‘To a Bedouin slave trader.’ He went to slam the door in my face, so I jammed the end of the carpet in it to stop him.

‘You can’t sell her, she’s mine!’

He grasped the end of my carpet with a hand that had the span of a frying pan. ‘Take your rug from my door or you will leave it here,’ he warned. ‘You have no business with us anymore.’

I rotated the carpet to aim at his midriff and slipped my hand up the other end of the roll, grasping my rifle. The click of its hammer being pulled back was clearly audible, and that checked his arrogance. ‘I want to know who bought her.’

We studied each other, wondering if either was quick enough to overcome the other. Finally he grunted. ‘Wait.’

He disappeared, leaving me feeling like a fool or a penitent. How dare the Egyptian sell Astiza? ‘Yusuf, come out here, you bastard!’ My cry echoed in the house. I stood for long minutes, wondering if they would simply ignore me. If they did, I’d go in shooting.

Finally I heard the heavy tread of the doorman returning. He filled the doorway. ‘It’s a message from the woman’s buyer, and is simple to relate. He says you know what is needed to buy her back.’ Then the door slammed shut.

That meant Silano and Bin Sadr had her. And it meant they didn’t have the medallion, and must not know I didn’t either.

Yet wouldn’t they keep her alive in hopes I’d bring it? She was a hostage, a kidnap victim.

I stepped back from the entryway, trying to think what to do. Where was the medallion? And with that something tiny fell past my ear, landing with a soft splat in the dust. I looked up. A grilled opening in an ornate screen far above was being closed by a feminine hand. I picked up what had been dropped.

It was a packet of paper. When I unrolled it I found Astiza’s golden eye of Horus and a message, this time in English in Astiza’s writing. My heart soared:

‘The south wall at midnight. Bring a rope.’