Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Once more the shaft seemed designed for the gliding of souls rather than the clambering of men. We half-slid, half-jammed our way down its slope. Why were there no steps? Had some kind of carts or sleds once ascended or descended here? Had the builders never expected to come this way? Or had these shafts been built for creatures or transport that we couldn’t imagine? In the first thirty metres we passed three voids in the shaft’s ceiling. When I lifted my torch I could see blocks of dark granite, suspended above. What were these ceiling pockets for?

We continued our descent. At length the man-made blocks gave way to walls of slick limestone, still perfectly straight and dressed. We’d passed beneath the pyramid proper and entered the bedrock of the limestone plateau it was built on. Down we went, deeper into the earth’s bowels, far below the descending passage I’d explored with Jomard and Napoleon. The passage began to twist. A hint of air left a curl of torch smoke behind us. The smell was dusty rock.

Suddenly the passageway levelled to a tunnel so low we had to crawl on hands and knees. Then it opened up. When we stood and lifted the torch, we found ourselves in a limestone cavern. A worn channel showed where water had once run. High above were the stumps of stalactites. While the ceiling was made by nature, the walls had been chiselled smooth and covered with hieroglyphics and inscribed drawings. Once again, we couldn’t read a word. The carvings were of squat, snarling creatures that obstructed twisting passageways filled with tongues of fire and drowning pools.

‘The underworld,’ Astiza whispered.

Standing like reassuring and protective sentinels along the wall were statues of gods and pharaohs, the faces proud, the eyes serene, the lips thick, the muscles powerful. Carved cobras marked the doorways. A line of baboons made a crown moulding near the stone roof. A statue of ibis-headed Thoth stood near the far doorway, his beak poised like the reed pen he held, his left hand holding a scale to weigh the human heart.

‘My god, what is this place?’ I murmured.

Astiza was tight to my side. It was cool in the cave, and she shivered in her diaphanous rags. ‘I think this is the real tomb. Not that bare room in the pyramid you described to me. The legends of Herodotus, that the true burial chamber is under the pyramid, may be true.’

I put my arm around her. ‘Then why build a whole mountain atop it?’

‘To hide it, to mark it, to seal, to mislead,’ she theorised. ‘This was a way to keep the tomb forever hidden, or to hide something else within it. Alternately, maybe the ancients always wanted to be able to find where the cave was by marking it with something so huge it could never be lost: the Great Pyramid.’

‘Because the cave was the real resting place of the pharaoh?’

‘Or something even more important.’

I looked at the ibis-headed statue. ‘You mean the prize everyone wants, this magical, all-knowing Book of Thoth.’

‘This may be where we find it, I think.’

I laughed. ‘Then all we have to do is find our way back out!’

She looked at the ceiling. ‘Do you think the ancients hollowed this space out?’

‘No. Our geologist Dolomieu said limestone gets carved by flowing water, and we know the Nile is close by. Sometime in the past, the river or a tributary probably flowed through this plateau. It may be sieved like a honeycomb. When the Egyptians discovered this, they had an ideal hiding place – but only if it could be kept secret. I think you’re right. Build a pyramid and everyone looks at it, not what’s underneath.’

She held my arm. ‘Perhaps the pyramid shafts Bonaparte explored were simply to convince the ordinary workers and architects that Pharaoh would be buried up there.’

‘Then some other group built the shaft we just came through and carved this writing. And they came down here and returned, right?’ I tried to sound confident.

Astiza pointed. ‘No, they did not.’

And ahead in the gloom, just past the feet of Thoth, I saw a carpet of bones and skulls, filling the cave from one side to the other. Death grins and blank sockets. With dread, we walked to inspect them. There were hundreds of human bodies, laid in neat rows. I saw no mark of weapons on their remains.

‘Slaves and priests,’ she said, ‘poisoned, or with their throats slit, so they couldn’t carry secrets out. This tomb was their last work.’

I toed a skull. ‘Let’s not make it ours. Come. I smell water.’

We picked our way across the bone chamber as best we could, the dead rattling, and passed to another cave chamber with a pit in the middle. Here a ledge skirted the pit, and when we gingerly looked down it, our torchlight caught the reflection of water. It was a well. Rising out of the well and into a narrow hole in the ceiling was a golden shaft identical to the one I’d seen when we entered the pyramid. Was it the same? The cave could have twisted to lead us directly under the secret door, so that this shaft was the one that controlled the weight of the block we had entered past.

I reached out and touched the shaft. It rocked gently up and down as if floating. I looked more carefully. Down in the well, the shaft stuck straight up from a floating golden ball the diameter of a man. The shaft would push up or drop down depending on the level of the water. On the side of the well was a chiselled water gauge. I grasped the cool, slick coating of the shaft and pushed. The ball bobbed. ‘Old Ben Franklin would have loved to guess what this is.’

‘The markings are similar to those on Nile metres used to measure the rise of the river,’ Astiza said. ‘The higher the rise, the richer that year’s crops, and the greater the tax assessment the pharaoh would impose. But why measure down here?’

I could hear running water somewhere ahead. ‘Because this is connected to an underground branch of the Nile,’ I guessed. ‘As the river floods, this well would rise, and with it the shaft.’

‘But why?’

‘Because it’s a seasonal gate,’ I reasoned. ‘A lock that is timed. Remember how the calendar pointed to Aquarius and today’s date, October 21 ^ st? Whoever created the stone door that we came through designed it so it could only be opened at the time of maximum flooding, by someone who understood the secret of the medallion. As the river rises, it lifts that globe, pushing this shaft upward. It must lift a mechanism above which can hold the weight of the stone block so that, with the medallion key, it can be opened. In the dry season this cavern is locked tight.’

‘But why must we enter only when the Nile is high?’

I jiggled the shaft uneasily. ‘Good question.’

We went on. The cave snaked so that I no longer knew what direction we were heading. Our first torches burnt to stubs and we lit the next. I’m not a man afraid of tight spaces, but I felt buried down here. Underworld of Osiris indeed! And then we came to a large room that dwarfed any we’d seen so far, an underground chamber so large that our torchlight could not illuminate the far side. Instead, it made a path on dark water.

We stood on the shore of an underground lake, opaque and still, roofed by stone. In its middle was a small island. A marble pavilion, just four pillars and a roof, occupied its centre. Heaped about its periphery were chests, statues, and shoals of smaller things that even at this distance gleamed and sparkled.

‘Treasure.’ I tried to say it casually, but it came out as a croak.

‘It’s as Herodotus described,’ Astiza breathed, as if she still did not quite believe it herself. ‘The lake, the island – this is Pharoah’s real resting place. Undiscovered, never robbed. What a gift to see this!’

‘We’re rich,’ I added, my state of spiritual enlightenment not quite a match for commonsense greed. I’m not proud of my commercial instincts, but by heaven I’d been through hell the last few months and a little money would be just compensation. I was as transfixed by the valuables as I’d been by the riches in the hold of L’Orient. Their value to history didn’t occur to me. I just wanted to get at the loot, bundle it up, and somehow sneak out of this sepulchre and past the French army.

Astiza squeezed my hand. ‘This is what the legends have been hinting at, Ethan. Eternal knowledge, so powerful that it had to be hidden until men and women were wise enough to use it. In that small temple, I suspect, we’ll find it.’

‘Find what?’ I was transfixed by the glint of gold.

‘The Book of Thoth. The core truth of existence.’

‘Ah, yes. And are we ready for its answers?’

‘We must safeguard it from heretics like the Egyptian Rite until we are.’

I touched the water with my boot. ‘Too bad we don’t have a spell to walk on water, because it looks like a cold swim.’

‘No, look. There’s a boat to take Pharaoh to the sky.’

Sitting beside the lake on a stone cradle, pretty as a schooner, was a narrow and graceful white boat with the high prow and stern of the type I’d seen in temple wall paintings. It was just big enough to float the two of us, and had a gilded oar to scull with. And why hadn’t it rotted? Because it was not built of wood at all, but rather of hollowed alabaster with ribs and thwarts of gold. The polished stone was translucent, its texture velvet.

‘Will rock float?’

‘A thin pot will,’ she said. Handling the craft carefully, the two of us dragged it down to the opaque water. Ripples fanned out across a lake as smooth as a mirror.

‘Do you think anything lives in this water?’ I asked uneasily.

She climbed aboard. ‘I’ll tell you when we get to the other side.’

I boarded, the boat delicate as glass, and pushed off with Bin Sadr’s staff. Then we glided toward the island, sculling and looking over the side for monsters.

It was not far – the temple was even smaller than I would have guessed. We grounded and got out to gape at a pharaoh’s horde. There was a golden chariot with silver spears, polished furniture set with ebony and jade, cedar chests, jewelled armour, dog-headed gods, and jars of oil and spices. The hummock sparkled with precious gems like emeralds and rubies. There was turquoise, feldspar, jasper, cornelian, malachite, amber, coral, and lapis lazuli. There was a red granite sarcophagus, solid as a bunker, with a rock lid too heavy to lift without a dozen men. Was anyone inside? I’d little interest in finding out. The idea of grubbing into a pharaoh’s grave didn’t appeal to me. Helping myself to treasure did.

Yet Astiza had eyes for none of this. She barely glanced at the spectacular jewellery, dazzling robes, canopic jars, or golden plate. Instead, as if in a trance, she walked up a path sheathed in silver toward the little temple, its pillars carved with baboon-headed Thoths. I followed.

There was a marble table under the marble roof. On it was a red granite box, open on one side, and inside this a golden cube with golden doors. All this for a book or, more accurately, rolls of parchment? I pulled the small door handle. It opened as if oiled.

I reached inside…

And found nothing.

I felt with my hand in all directions and touched only slick gold lining. I snorted. ‘So much for wisdom.’

‘It’s not there?’

‘The Egyptians had no more answers than we do. It’s all a myth, Astiza.’

She was stunned. ‘Then why this temple? Why this box? Why those legends?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe the library was the easy part. It was the book they never got around to writing.’

She looked around suspiciously. ‘No. It’s been stolen.’

‘I think it was never here.’

She shook her head. ‘No. They would not have built that granite-and-gold vault for nothing. Somebody’s been here before. Somebody high-ranking, with the knowledge of how to enter this place and yet the rage and pride not to respect the pyramid.’

‘And not take all this gold?’

‘This prophet didn’t care for gold. He was interested in the next world, not this one. Beside, gold is dross compared to the power of this book.’

‘A book of magic.’

‘Of power, wisdom, grace, serenity. A book of death and rebirth. A book of happiness. A book that inspired Egypt to become the world’s greatest nation, and then inspired another people to influence the world.’

‘What other people? Who took it?’

She pointed. ‘He left his identity behind.’

There, propped in one corner of the marble temple, was a shepherd’s crook, or staff. It had the practically curved end to snare a sheep’s neck. Its wood seemed marvellously preserved, and unlike a normal crook it was remarkable in its polish and tasteful carving, with a winged angel at the curved end and the blunt head of a serpent at the other. Midway down were two golden cherubim with wings extended to each other, a bracket holding them to the staff. Yet it was still a modest object in the midst of a pharaoh’s horde.

‘What the devil is that?’

‘The rod of the most famous magician in history,’ Astiza said.

‘Magician?’

‘The prince of Egypt who became a liberator.’

I stared at her. ‘You’re saying Moses was down here?’

‘Doesn’t that make sense?’

‘No. It’s impossible.’

‘Is it? A fugitive criminal, spoken to by God, comes out of the desert with the extraordinary demand to lead Hebrew slaves to freedom, and suddenly he has the power to work miracles – a skill he’s never shown before?’

‘Power given by God.’

‘Really? Or by the gods, under the guise of the one great God?’

‘He was fighting the Egyptian gods, the false idols.’

‘Ethan, it was men fighting with men.’

She sounded like a bloody French revolutionary. Or Ben Franklin.

‘The saviour of his people did not just take the enslaved Hebrews and destroy Pharaoh’s army,’ Astiza went on. ‘He took the most powerful talisman in all the world, so mighty that migrant slaves had the power to conquer the Promised Land.’

‘A book.’

‘A repository of wisdom. Recipes of power. When the Jews reached their Promised Land their armies swept all before them. Moses found food, healed the sick, and struck down the blasphemers. He lived past a normal span. Something kept the Hebrews alive in a wilderness for forty years. It was this book.’

Once more I tried to remember the old Bible stories. Moses had been a Hebrew slave baby rescued by a princess, raised as a prince, who killed a slave overseer in a fit of rage. He fled, came back decades later, and when Pharaoh refused to let his people go, Moses called down ten plagues upon Egypt. When Pharaoh lost his oldest son in the tenth and worst calamity, he gave up at last, releasing the Hebrew slaves from bondage. And that should have been the end of it except Pharaoh changed his mind yet again and chased Moses and the Hebrews with six hundred chariots. Why? Because he discovered that Moses had taken more than just the enslaved Hebrews. He had taken the core of Egypt’s power, its greatest secret, its most feared possession. He had taken it and…

Parted the sea.

Had they carried this book of power to Solomon’s temple, supposedly raised by the ancestors of my Freemasons?

‘This can’t be. How could he get in here and back out?’

‘He came to Pharaoh shortly before the Nile was at its height,’ Astiza said. ‘Don’t you see, Ethan? Moses had been an Egyptian prince. He knew sacred secrets. He knew how to get in here and back out, something no one else had dared. That year Egypt lost not just a nation of slaves, a pharaoh, and an army. It lost its heart, its soul, its wisdom. Its essence was taken by a nomadic tribe that after forty years transported it…’

‘To Israel.’ I sat on the empty pedestal, my mind reeling.

‘And Moses, thief as well as prophet, was never allowed by his own God to enter the Promised Land. Maybe he felt guilt at unleashing what was meant to remain hidden.’

I stared at nothing. This book, or scroll, had been missing for three thousand years. And here were Silano and me, chasing an empty vault.

‘We’ve been looking in the wrong place.’

‘It may have become part of the Ark of the Covenant,’ she said excitedly, ‘like the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The same knowledge and power that had raised the pyramids passed to the Jews, who rose from an obscure people to tribes whose traditions became the source of three great religions! It may have helped bring down the walls of Jericho!’

My mind was tumbling over itself. Heresy! ‘But why would the Egyptians bury such a book?’

‘Because knowledge always carries risk as well as reward. It can be used for evil as well as good. Our legends say the secrets of Egypt came from across the sea, from a people forgotten even when the pyramids were raised, and that Thoth realised such knowledge had to be safeguarded. People are creatures of emotion, cleverer than they are wise. Maybe the Hebrews realised that too, since the book has disappeared. Perhaps they learnt that to use the Book of Thoth was dangerous folly.’

I didn’t believe any of it, of course. This mixture of gods was patent blasphemy. And I’m a modern man, a man of science, an American sceptic in the Franklin mould. And yet was there some divine force that worked through all the wonders of the world? Was there a chapter to humankind’s story that our revolutionary age had forgotten?

And then there came an echoing boom, a long roll of thunder, stirring the air with distant wind. The rocky cavern quivered and rumbled. An explosion.

Silano had found his gunpowder.

As the sound reverberated through the subterranean chamber, I got up off the pedestal. ‘You didn’t answer my other question. How did Moses get back out?’

She smiled. ‘Maybe he never closed the door that we entered, and got out the way he came in. Or, more likely, there is more than one entrance. The medallion suggests there is more than one shaft – one west and one east – and he closed the western door behind him but exited the east. Certainly the good news is that we know he did. We found our way in, Ethan. We’ll find our way out, too. First step is to get off this island.’

‘Not until I help myself.’

‘We have no time for that!’

‘A pittance of this treasure, and we can buy all the time in the world.’

I had no proper sack or backpack. How can I describe the king’s ransom I tried to wear? I draped enough necklaces on my chest to give myself a backache and jammed on bracelets enough for a Babylonian whore. I belted gold around my waist, fastened anklets above my feet, and even took off Moses’ cherubim and jammed them in my drawers. Yet I barely scratched the treasure trove that lay under the Great Pyramid. Astiza, in contrast, touched nothing.

‘Stealing from the dead is no different than stealing from the living,’ she warned.

‘Except that the dead don’t need it anymore,’ I reasoned, torn between sheepishness at my own Western greed and the entrepreneurial instincts to not let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip by. ‘When we’re outside we’ll need money to finish finding this book,’ I reasoned. ‘For heaven’s sake, at least put a ring or two on your fingers.’

‘It’s bad luck. People die when they rob from tombs.’

‘It’s simply compensation for all we’ve been through.’

‘Ethan, I’m worried there is a curse.’

‘Savants don’t believe in curses, and Americans believe in opportunity when it is staring you in the face. I’m not going to leave until you take something for yourself.’

So she put a ring on with all the pleasure of a slave slipping on its manacle. I knew she would come around to my way of thinking once we were out of this catacomb. That ring alone, with a ruby the size of a cherry, was a life’s income. We jumped in the boat and quickly sculled to the main shore. Once on the ground we felt shudders in the grand structure above, and a continued creaking and groaning as an aftereffect of the explosion. I hoped that fool Silano hadn’t used so much gunpowder that he’d bring the ceiling down.

‘We have to assume Bin Sadr and his assassins are going to be coming in the same way we did, if that keg of gunpowder worked,’ I said. ‘But if the medallion showed a V with two shafts, the other path out must be the eastern shaft. With luck we can pop out that way, shut the eastern door, and be well on our way before the villains figure out where we’ve gone.’

‘They’ll be transfixed by the treasure too,’ Astiza predicted.

‘So much the better.’

The disquieting grinding continued, accompanied by a hiss, like a cascade of falling sand. Had the explosion triggered some kind of ancient mechanism? The building felt alive, and disapproving. I could hear distant shouts as Silano’s henchmen descended toward us.

Still holding Bin Sadr’s staff, I led Astiza to a portal on the eastern end of the lake. It had two tunnels, one going down and another up. We took the upper course. Sure enough, it soon led to an ascending shaft opposite the one we’d come down. This shaft rose at the same angle, aimed for the pyramid’s eastern face. Yet the higher we climbed, the louder the hiss and groan.

‘The air is feeling heavier,’ I said worriedly.

Soon we saw why. The overhead voids I’d noticed in the western shaft were repeated here, and from the mouth of each one a granite plug was descending like a dark molar from a stone gum. They were steadily sliding down to seal the passage and any escape. A second was coming down behind the first, and a third beyond that. Sand, somewhere in the pyramid’s workings, must have worked as a counterweight to balance these stones in place. Now, with Silano’s disturbance, it had been triggered to leak away. No doubt the portals were closing on the tunnel we’d entered through, as well. We might be trapped down here with Bin Sadr’s gang.

‘Hurry! Maybe we can slip beneath before they shut!’ I started to wriggle forward.

Astiza grabbed me. ‘No! You’ll be crushed!’

Even as I struggled against her grasp I knew she was right. I might make it past the nearest, and even the one beyond that. But the third would surely crush me, or more likely trap me for all eternity between it and its brother behind.

‘There has to be another way,’ I said with more hope than conviction.

‘The medallion showed only two shafts.’ She dragged me backward with my necklaces like a dog on its collar. ‘I told you all this was bad luck.’

‘No. There’s that descending tunnel we haven’t followed. They wouldn’t just cork this off for all time.’

We hurriedly descended back the way we came, coming out again to the underground lake with its island. As we neared we saw a glow of light and soon confirmed the worst. Several Arabs were on the isle of gold and silver, shouting with the same glee I’d felt, wrestling for the best pieces. Then they spotted our torches. ‘The American!’ Bin Sadr cried, his words echoing across the water. ‘The man who kills him gets a double share! Another double for giving me the woman!’

Where was Silano?

I couldn’t help but wave his staff at the bastard, like a cape at a bull.

Bin Sadr and two of the men leapt into the little alabaster boat, almost capsizing it but also sending it skittering toward us with their momentum. The other three leapt into the cold water and began swimming.

With no other choice, we ran down the descending tunnel. It too seemed to lead vaguely east, but deeper into the limestone bedrock. I dreaded a dead end, like the descending corridor we’d seen with Napoleon. Yet now another sound was growing, the deep, throaty roar of a running underground river.

Maybe that was the way out!

We came to a scene out of Dante. The tunnel ended on a stone landing that jutted into a new cave chamber, this one faintly lit by a lurid red glow. The source of the illumination was a pit so deep and foggy that I couldn’t make out its bottom, even though a glow like banked coals seemed to be coming from its depths. It was an unworldly light, dim yet pulsing, like a navel of Hades. Rock scree and sand sloped down the pit’s sides toward the light. Something mysterious was moving down there, ponderous and thick. A stone bridge, cracked, pockmarked, and without railings, arched across the pit. It was enameled blue and covered with yellow stars, like an upside-down temple roof. Slip from its course, and you’d never get back out.

At the far end of this chamber the bridge ended on a broad set of wet, glistening, granite stairs. A spilling sheet of water ran down them and into the pit, possibly the source of the swirling steam. It was from the direction of the stairs that I heard the roar of a river. While impossible to see, I guessed there was an underground diversion of the Nile there, running in a channel across the far side of the chamber like an irrigation canal. The channel must be at the top of the wet stairway, higher than the platform on which we stood, and was so brimming with water that some was spilling over.

‘That’s our exit,’ I said. ‘All we have to do is get there first.’ I could hear the Arabs coming behind as I trotted out on the bridge.

Suddenly a block bearing one of the inscribed stars gave way and my leg plunged down into the gap, almost toppling me off the archway and into the pit. Only with luck did I catch the edge of the bridge and regain my footing. The archway block made a bang when it hit, far below. I looked down into the reddish fog. What was writhing down there?

‘By the timber of Ticonderoga, I think there are snakes down there,’ I said shakily, pulling myself up and retreating. At the same time I could hear the shouts of the approaching Arabs.

‘It’s a test, Ethan, to punish those who enter without knowledge. There’s something wrong with this bridge.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Why would they paint the sky on the bridge deck? Because the world is upside down here, because… the medallion disc! Where is it?’

After Astiza had retrieved it from its fall down the face of the pyramid, I’d tucked it into my robes. Souvenir, after all this trouble. Now I pulled it out and gave it to her.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘the constellation Draco. It’s not just the north star, Ethan. It makes a pattern we have to follow.’ And before I could suggest we consider the matter, she hopped past me onto a particular stone in the archway. ‘Only touch the stars that are in the constellation!’

‘Wait! What if you’re wrong?’

There was the boom of a musket and a bullet whined into the chamber, bouncing off the rock walls. Bin Sadr was coming at full charge.

‘What choice do we have?’

I followed Astiza, using Bin Sadr’s staff for balance.

We’d barely started when the Arabs came boiling out of the tunnel and stopped at the lip of the pit as we had, awed by the peculiar menace of this place. Then one of them rushed forward. ‘I’ve got the woman!’ But he’d gone only yards when another star block gave way and he fell in surprise, not as lucky as me. He struck the bridge with his torso, bounced, screamed, scrabbled at the lip of the arch with his fingers, and fell, striking the side of the pit and sliding down into the gloom in a tumble of rock. The Arabs moved to the lip of the ledge to look. Something down there moved, quickly this time, and the victim’s scream was cut off.

‘Wait!’ Bin Sadr said. ‘Don’t shoot them! See? We must step where they do!’ He was watching me as carefully as I watched Astiza. Then he leapt, landing where I had. The bridge held firm. ‘Follow me!’

It was a bizarre, mincing dance, all of us mimicking the hops of the woman. Another Arab missed and fell shrieking as still another block gave way, transfixing us all for a moment. ‘No, no, that one!’ Bin Sadr shrieked, pointing. Then the deadly game commenced again.

At the centre of the span I couldn’t see a bottom at all. What kind of volcanic throat was this? Was it this navel that the pyramid had been built to seal?

‘Ethan, hurry,’ Astiza begged. She was waiting for me to make sure I stepped on the right star stones, even though it gave Bin Sadr time to spy them as well. Then she was finally at the wet stairs, swaying from the tension, and I made a final leap, landing on the polestar. With a triumphant stride I made the granite stairs and turned, holding Bin Sadr’s snake staff in readiness to stab him. Maybe he’d make a mistake!

But no, he came on implacably, eyes gleaming. ‘There’s nowhere left to run, American. If you give me my staff, I’ll save you to watch while we have the woman.’

He was only steps away, his three surviving men bunched behind him. If they rushed me, it was over.

The Arab stopped. ‘Are you going to surrender?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Then shoot him now,’ Bin Sadr ordered. ‘I remember the last stars to touch.’ Muskets and pistols began to be levelled.

‘Here then,’ I offered.

I threw the staff up in the air, high, but so he could catch it. His eyes widened, gleaming. Instinctively he stretched, leant, snatched it with the quickness of a reptile, and in the course of doing so unthinkingly moved his left foot for balance.

A keystone piece at the end of the bridge gave way.

The Arabs froze, listening to it smash as it ricocheted into the pit below.

Then there was a groan, a sound of rock splintering, and we looked down. The missing block had begun a disintegration. The bridge’s connection with the granite stairs was dissolving as blocks popped out, the untethered end beginning to dip remorselessly into the pit. Bin Sadr had made a fatal misstep. The Arab’s henchmen cried out and began to stampede back the way they had come. As they did, heedless of where their feet were, more stones gave way.

Bin Sadr leapt for the wet granite stairs.

Had he let go of his staff, he might have made it, or at least got a hand on me and dragged me down with him. But he held his favourite weapon too long. His other arm was still wounded and weak, his hand slipped on the wet rock, and he began sliding down into the abyss, trying to hold both himself and his staff. Finally he let go of the rod in time to grip a knob of stone to arrest his slide. The staff fell out of sight. He was dangling at the precipice, a skein of water streaming down past him to dissolve into steam, his legs kicking. Meanwhile his companions behind screeched in terror as the bridge rotated downward with a roar, collapsing toward hell, taking them with it. They plummeted, limbs flailing. I watched them disappear into the fog.

Bin Sadr hung grimly, looking at Astiza with hatred. ‘I wish I’d butchered this whore like I did the one in Paris,’ he hissed.

I took out my tomahawk and crept down toward his fingers. ‘This is for Talma, Enoch, Minette, and every other innocent you’ll meet on the other side.’ I lifted the hatchet.

He spat at me. ‘I’ll wait for you there.’ Then he let go.

He plunged down the side of the pit, struck a steep slope of sand, and tumbled, soundless, into the dim red mist below. Small rocks rattled with him, tracing his slide. Then there was silence.

‘Is he dead?’ Astiza whispered.

It was so quiet that I feared he’d somehow find a way to climb back out. I peered over. Something was moving down there, but for a while we could hear nothing but the roar of the water at the top of the wet stairs. Then there came, faint at first, the sounds of a man beginning to scream.

By this time I’d heard more than my share of screams, both in battle and among the wounded. There was something different about this sound, however, an unworldly scream of such absolute terror that my stomach clenched at whatever unseen thing or things were prompting it. The screams went on and on, rising in pitch, and I knew with grim certainty that it was the voice of Achmed bin Sadr. Despite my enmity for the man, I shuddered. He was experiencing the terror of the damned.

‘Apophis,’ Astiza said. ‘The snake god of the underworld. He is meeting what he worshipped.’

‘That’s a myth.’

‘Is it?’

After what seemed an eternity the screams sank to an insane gibbering. Then they stopped. We were alone.

I was shivering from terror and cold. We hugged each other, all retreat impossible, the pit’s red glow our only light. Finally we started up the wet staircase, its waterfall smelling of the Nile. What underworld test would we face next? I didn’t have the energy – the will, as Napoleon would say – to go much farther.

We reached a trough that ran across the top of the stairs. Nile water was racing from a pipe-like opening in the cave wall to fill the stone canal to the brim, and then disappearing in another tunnel at the other end of the stairway. The current was pouring out with such force that there was no possibility of ascending it. Our only exit would be to go the direction the water was running, into a dark drain.

There was no room, I saw, for air.

‘I don’t think Moses came this way.’