Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER FIVE

One month later, on May 19 ^ th, 1798, I stood on the quarterdeck of the French flagship L’Orient, 120 guns, not far from the shoulder of the most ambitious man in Europe. Together we and an assembly of officers and savants watched the majestic parade of 180 vessels putting out to sea. The Egyptian expedition was under way.

The blue Mediterranean was white with sail, the ships heeling in the face of a fresh breeze, and the decks still gleamed from the aftermath of a gale we hoped would keep a rumoured British squadron at bay. As the ships bit into the swell past the harbour entrance at Toulon, foam gave each bow a set of teeth. Military bands had assembled on the foredeck of the biggest ships, their brass instruments sparkling, and they competed with each other in noise as they sailed past, playing French patriotic tunes. Cannon from the city’s fortresses boomed a salute, and thirty-four thousand embarked soldiers and sailors gave thunderous cheers as their vessels scudded by Bonaparte’s flagship. He had issued a bulletin promising each of them enough spoils to buy six acres of land.

This was only the beginning. Smaller convoys from Genoa, Corsica’s Ajaccio, and Civitavecchia in Italy would add more French divisions to the Egyptian invasion force. By the time we mustered at Malta there would be four hundred ships and fifty-five thousand men, plus a thousand horses, hundreds of wagons and field artillery, more than three hundred certificated washerwomen expected to provide other morale-building services, and hundreds more smuggled wives and concubines. Aboard as well were four thousand bottles of wine for the officers as a whole and eight hundred choice ones from Joseph Bonaparte’s personal cellar, brought to help his brother entertain. Our commander had also packed a fine city carriage with double harness so he could survey Cairo in style.

‘We are a French army, not an English one,’ he’d told his staff. ‘We live better on campaign than they do in a castle.’

The remark would be remembered with bitterness in the months ahead.

I’d come to Toulon after a meandering gypsy journey on their slow wagons. It had been a pleasant interlude. The ‘priests of Egypt’ showed me simple card tricks, explained the Tarot, and told me more tales of treasure caves and temples of power. None had ever been in Egypt, of course, or knew if their stories had a grain of truth, but story spinning was one of their chief talents and sources of income. I watched them cast optimistic fortunes for milkmaids, gardeners, and constables. What they couldn’t earn with fantasy, they stole, and what they couldn’t steal, they did without. Accompanying the band to Toulon was a far more enjoyable way to complete my escape from Paris than the highway coach, despite knowing that my separation and delay would cause anxiety for Antoine Talma. It was a relief not to have to listen to the journalist’s Masonic theories, however, and I left the warmth of Sarylla with regret.

The port had been a madhouse of preparation and excitement, crammed with soldiers, sailors, military contractors, tavern keepers, and brothel madams. One could spot the famous savants in their top hats, excited and apprehensive, clumping in sturdy boots still stiff from newness. The officers were bright as peacocks in their resplendent uniforms, and ordinary soldiers were excited and cheerfully fatalistic about an expedition with no announced destination. I was reasonably anonymous in such a crowd, my clothes and green coat more stained and worn than ever, but to be safe I swiftly boarded L’Orient in order to stay out of the reach of bandits, antiquarians, gendarmes, lantern bearers, or anyone else who might offer me harm. It was on board that I was finally reunited with Talma.

‘I feared I was entering into peril and adventure in the East without a friend!’ he exclaimed. ‘Berthollet has been concerned as well! Mon dieu, what happened?’

‘I’m sorry I had no way to get word to you. It seemed best to travel quietly. I knew you’d be worried.’

He embraced me. ‘Where’s the medallion?’ I could feel his breath at my ear.

By this time I was cautious. ‘Safe enough, my friend. Safe enough.’

‘What’s that on your finger? A new ring?’ He was looking at the token from Sidney Smith.

‘A gift from gypsies.’

Talma and I briefed each other on our separate adventures. He said the surviving brigands had scattered in confusion after my escape from the coach. Then cavalry came, on the hunt for some other fugitive – ‘it was all bewildering in the dark’ – and the horsemen plunged into the woods. Meanwhile, the coachmen used their team to drag the blocking tree out of the way and the travelling party finally pushed on to an inn. Talma decided to wait for the next day’s stage in case I emerged from the forest. When I didn’t, he went on to Toulon, fearing me dead.

‘Gypsies!’ he now cried, looking at me in wonder. ‘You do have talent for finding mischief, Ethan Gage. And the way you just shot that man! I was astounded, exultant, frightened!’

‘He almost shot you.’

‘Of course you have been among the Red Indians.’

‘I’ve met a lot of people in my travels, Antoine, and learnt to keep one palm open in greeting and the other on a weapon.’ I paused. ‘Did he die?’

‘They carried him away bleeding.’

Well, one more thing to wonder about in the dark hours of the night.

‘Are the gypsies scoundrels, like their reputation?’ Talma asked.

‘Not in the least, if you watch your pockets. They saved my life. Their spicing awakens senses that their women satisfy. No home, no job, no ties…’

‘You found your own kind! I’m surprised you came back!’

‘They think they’re descended from the priests of Egypt.

They’ve heard legends of a lost medallion, saying it is a key to some ancient secret there.’

‘But of course, that would explain the interest of the Egyptian Rite! Cagliostro saw himself in competition with ordinary Freemasonry. Perhaps Silano believes this could give his branch an advantage. But to openly rob us? The secret must be potent indeed.’

‘And what word of Silano? Doesn’t he know Bonaparte?’

‘The word is that he’s gone to Italy – to look for clues to what you won, perhaps? Berthollet has told our general about the medallion and he seemed quite interested, but Bonaparte has also called Masons imbeciles, consumed by fairy tales. His brothers Joseph, Lucien, Jerome, and Louis, who are all in our fraternity, argue the point. Napoleon said he’s as interested in your opinions of Louisiana as your choice of jewellery, but I think he’s flattered an American is along. He appreciates your ties to Franklin. He hopes you may someday help explain his schemes to the United States.’

Talma introduced me as a celebrity fugitive to the fellow savants who had boarded the flagship. We were part of a group of 167 civilian professionals whom Bonaparte had invited to accompany his invasion. The number included nineteen civil engineers, sixteen cartographers, two artists, one poet, an orientalist, and a grand assortment of mathematicians, chemists, antiquarians, astronomers, mineralogists, and zoologists. I met Berthollet again, who had recruited most of this group, and in due course was introduced to our general. My nationality, my slim connection to the famed Franklin, and the story of how I’d escaped ambush all impressed the young conqueror. ‘Electricity!’ Bonaparte exclaimed. ‘Imagine if we could harness your mentor’s lightning bolts!’

I was impressed that Napoleon had won the leadership of so ambitious an expedition. The most famous general in Europe was lean, short, and disconcertingly young. At twenty-nine he was junior to all but four of his thirty-one generals, and while the difference between English and French measures meant that British propagandists had exaggerated his lack of height – he was actually a respectable five-six – still, there was so little to him in terms of breadth that he seemed swallowed by boots and dragging sword. The tittering ladies of Paris had nicknamed him ‘Puss-n-Boots’, a teasing he never forgot. Egypt would make this young man into the Napoleon who would take the world by storm, but on the decks of L’Orient he was not quite Napoleon yet; he was viewed as much more human, more flawed and striving, than the later marble titan. Historians invent an icon, but contemporaries live with a man. In fact, Napoleon’s rapid ascent during the Revolution was as annoying as it was breathtaking, and it made more than one of his seniors hope he would fail. Yet Bonaparte himself was confident to the point of vanity.

And why not? Here at Toulon, he had risen from captain of artillery to brigadier general in days after situating the cannon that drove the British and the royalists from the city. He had survived the Terror and a brief stint in prison, married a social climber named Josephine whose first husband had been guillotined, helped slaughter a counterrevolutionary mob in Paris, and led the ragtag French army to a series of astounding victories over the Austrians in Italy. His troops had warmed to him as if he were Caesar, and the Directory was delighted by the tribute he sent their bankrupt treasury. Napoleon wanted to emulate Alexander, and his civilian superiors wanted his restless ambition out of France. Egypt would serve both just fine.

What a hero he looked then, long before his days of palaces and cream! His hair was a shock of black across his forehead, his nose Roman, his lips pursed like a classical statue’s, his chin cleft, and his eyes a dark, excited grey. He had a flair for addressing troops, understanding the human thirst for glory and adventure, and carried himself in the way we all imagined heroes should stand: torso erect, head high, eyes on a mystic horizon. He was the kind of man whose manner, as much as his words, persuaded that he must know what he is doing.

I was impressed because he’d clearly risen by merit, not birth, which fit the American ideal. He was, after all, an immigrant like us, not really French, having come from the island of Corsica to the barracks of a French military school. He’d spent the early years of life wanting nothing more ambitious than his homeland’s independence. By all reports he was a middling student in all but mathematics, socially awkward, lonely, without a mentor or powerful patron, and faced upon graduation with the daunting upheaval of the Revolution. Yet while so many were bewildered by the turmoil, Bonaparte thrived on it. The intelligence that had been smothered by the rigidities of military school erupted when the need was for improvisation and imagination, when France was under siege. The prejudice he’d encountered, as a rustic islander from third-rate nobility, melted away when his competence at meeting crises was demonstrated. The diffidence and hopelessness of adolescence had been shed like a clumsy cloak, and he’d worked to turn awkwardness to charm. It was the unlikely Napoleon who’d come to embody the idealism of the Revolution, where rank was won by ability and there was no limit to ambition. Though conservatives like Sidney Smith couldn’t see it, this is where the two revolutions, American and French, were alike. Bonaparte was a self-made man.

Yet Napoleon’s relationship to individuals was one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. He’d developed undeniable charisma, but it was always practiced – shy, removed, wary, tense – as if he were an actor playing a role. When he looked at you it was with the brilliance of a chandelier, energy emanating from him like a horse radiates heat. He could focus with an intensity both flattering and overwhelming – he did it to me a dozen times. Yet a moment later he’d swing his entire attention to the next person and leave you feeling as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun, and seconds after that he might disappear into himself even in a crowded room, staring just as intently at the floor as he had at you, eyes downcast, lost in thought and a world of his own. One Parisian female had described his brooding countenance as the type one dreaded meeting in a dark alley. There was a thumb-stained copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther that he carried in his pocket, a novel of suicide and hopeless love that he’d read six times. I would see his dour passions play out at the Battle of the Pyramids, in triumph and in horror.

It took eight hours for the last ship to parade by, the tricolour streaming from every mast. We’d reviewed a dozen ships of the line, forty-two frigates, and hundreds of transports. The sun was already low when our flagship finally set out like a mother duck after her brood. The fleet covered two square miles of water, the larger warships shortening sails to let the smaller merchant tubs keep pace. When the other convoys joined us we covered four square miles, plodding at little more than three knots.

All but the veteran sailors were miserable. Bonaparte, knowing he was prone to seasickness, spent much of his time in a wooden bed suspended by ropes that stayed level during the ship’s rolls. The rest of us were queasy whether standing or trying to sleep. Talma finally didn’t have to imagine sickness, he had it, and confided several times that he was almost certainly near death. Soldiers didn’t have time to reach the upper deck and lee rail to heave out their guts, so buckets filled to overflowing, every ship reeking of vomit. L’Orient ’s five decks were crammed with two thousand soldiers, one thousand sailors, cattle, sheep, and so many supplies that we squeezed, rather than walked, from bow to stern. Ranking savants like Berthollet had cabins of red damask, but they were so small it was like occupying a coffin. We lesser intellectuals made do with closets of damp oak. When we ate, we were packed so tightly on benches we barely had room to raise hand to mouth. A dozen stabled horses stamped, whinnied, and pissed in the hold, and every bit of clothing was damp. The lower gun ports had to be closed against the swells, so it was dim below, making reading impossible. We preferred to stay topsides anyway, but the sailors working to drive the ship would periodically become exasperated at the crowding and order us back down. Within a day everyone was bored; within a week we all prayed for the desert.

Added to the discomfort was the anxiety of watching for British ships. A firebrand named Horatio Nelson, already missing an arm and an eye but no less enthusiastic for it, was reputed to be hunting us with his squadron. Since the Revolution had stripped the French navy of many of its best royalist officers, and since our lumbering transports and gun decks were jammed with army supplies, we dreaded any naval duel.

Our chief distraction was weather. A few days out we had a squall, complete with flashes of lightning. It set L’Orient rolling so badly that the cattle bawled in terror and anything unsecured became a slurry of debris. Within hours it was calm again, and a day later it was so hot and stifling that pitch bubbled from the deck seams. The wind was inconstant and the water stale. My memory of the voyage is of tedium, nausea, and apprehension.

As we sailed south, Bonaparte had the habit of inviting the scholars on board for after-supper discourses in his great cabin. The scientists found the rambling discussions a welcome diversion, while his officers used them as an excuse to nap. Napoleon fancied himself a savant, having used political connections to get himself elected to the National Institute, and liked to claim that if he were not a soldier he would be a scholar. The greatest immortality, he claimed, came from adding to human knowledge, not winning battles. No one believed his sincerity, but it was a nice sentiment to express.

So we met, in a low-beamed chamber with jutting stern cannon that waited on their carriages like patient hounds. The canvas-covered floor was a black-and-white checkerboard like that of a Freemason lodge, based on the old tracing board of the Dionysian architects. Was a French naval designer a member of the fraternity? Or had we Masons simply appropriated every common symbol and pattern we could find? I knew we had taken stars, moon, sun, scales, and geometric shapes, including the pyramid, from ancient times. And the borrowing could go two ways: I suspect Napoleon’s later adoption of the industrious bee as his symbol was inspired by the Masonic symbol of the hive that his brothers would have told him about.

It was here that I observed the scientific fellowship I’d enlisted in, and I couldn’t blame the brilliant assembly for regarding my own membership somewhat dubiously. Mystic secrets? Berthollet told the assembly I’d encountered an ‘artifact’ I hoped to compare to others in Egypt. Bonaparte announced I had theories about ancient Egyptian mastery of electricity. I said vaguely that I hoped to bring a fresh eye to the pyramids.

My colleagues were more accomplished. Berthollet I have already mentioned. In terms of prestige he was matched only by Gaspard Monge, the famed mathematician who, at fifty-two, was the oldest of our group. With his great shaggy brows that shaded large, bagged eyes, Monge had the look of a wise old dog. Founder of descriptive geometry, his scientific career was superseded by a ministerial one when he was asked by the Revolution to rescue the French cannon industry. He promptly had church bells melted down to make artillery and wrote The Art of Manufacturing Guns. He brought an analytical mind to everything he touched, from creating the metric system to advising Bonaparte on what art to steal from Italy. Sensing, perhaps, that my own mind was not as disciplined as his, he adopted me like a wayward nephew.

‘Silano!’ Monge exclaimed when I explained how I’d come to be on the expedition. ‘I crossed his path in Florence. He was on the way to the Vatican libraries, and muttered something about Constantinople and Jerusalem as well, if he could get leave from the Turks. Just why, he wouldn’t say.’

Also famed was our geologist, whose name, Deodat Guy Silvain Tancrede Gratet de Dolomieu, was longer than my rifle barrel. Renowned in sedate academic circles for having killed a rival in a duel at age eighteen when he was apprenticed to the Knights of Malta, Dolomieu at forty-seven had become independently wealthy, professor of the school of mines, and discoverer of the mineral dolomite. A devoted wanderer with a great mustache, he couldn’t wait to see the rocks of Egypt.

Etienne Louis Malus, a mathematician and expert in the optical properties of light, was a handsome army engineer of twenty-two. The sleepy-eyed, booming-voiced Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, thirty, was another famed mathematician. Our orientalist and interpreter was Jean-Michael de Venture, our economist was Jean-Baptiste Say, and our zoologist was Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, who had the peculiar idea that the characteristics of plants and animals could change over time.

The most raffish and mechanically ingenious of our group was the one-eyed balloonist, forty-three-year-old Nicolas-Jacques Conte, who wore a patch over the orb destroyed in a balloon explosion. He was the first man in history to use balloons in military reconnaissance, at the battle of Fleurus. He’d invented a new kind of writing instrument called a pencil that didn’t require an inkwell, and carried it around in his waistcoat to sketch out machines constantly occurring to his inventive mind. He had already established himself as the expedition’s tinkerer and inventor, and had brought along a supply of sulfuric acid that would react with iron to make hydrogen for his silk gasbags. This element, lighter than air, was proving far more practical than the earlier experiments of lifting balloons with heat.

‘If your plan to invade England by air had made sense, Nicky,’ Monge liked to joke, ‘I wouldn’t be vomiting my guts out on this rolling bucket today.’

‘All I needed were enough balloons,’ Conte would counter. ‘If you hadn’t hogged every sou for your cannon foundries, we’d both be having tea in London.’

The age was alive with ideas for warfare. I remembered that my own countryman, Robert Fulton, had just in December been turned down by French authorities after proposing an idea for an underwater warship. There were even proposals to dig a tunnel under the English Channel.

These learned gentlemen and staff officers would gather for what Napoleon called his instituts, in which he would pick a topic, assign the debaters, and lead us in rambling discussions of politics, society, military tactics, and science. We had a three-day debate on the merits and corrosive jealousies of private property, an evening discussion on the age of Earth, another on the interpretation of dreams, and several on the truth or utility of religion. Here Napoleon’s internal contradictions were plain; he would scoff at the existence of God one moment and anxiously cross himself with a Corsican’s instinct the next. No one knew what he believed, least of all he, but Bonaparte was a firm proponent of the usefulness of religion in regulating the masses. ‘If I could found my own religion I could rule Asia,’ he told us.

‘I think Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad got there before you,’ Berthollet said dryly.

‘This is my point,’ Bonaparte said. ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their origins to the same holy stories. They all worship the same monotheistic god. Except for a few trifling details as to which prophet had the last word, they are more alike than different. If we make plain to the Egyptians that the Revolution recognises the unity of faith, we should have no problem with religion. Both Alexander and the Romans had policies of tolerating the beliefs of the conquered.’

‘It’s the believers who are most alike who fight most fervently over differences,’ Conte warned. ‘Don’t forget the wars between Catholics and Protestants.’

‘Yet are we not at the dawn of reason, of the new scientific age?’ Fourier spoke up. ‘Perhaps mankind is on the verge of being rational.’

‘No subject people are rational at the point of a gun,’ the balloonist replied.

‘Alexander subdued Egypt by declaring himself a son of both Zeus the Greek and Amon the Egyptian,’ Napoleon said. ‘I intend to be as tolerant of Muhammad as of Jesus.’

‘While you cross yourself like the pope,’ Monge chided. ‘And what of the atheism of the Revolution?’

‘A stance doomed to fail, its biggest mistake. It is immaterial whether or not God exists. It simply is that whenever you bring religion, or even superstition, into conflict with liberty, the former will always win over the latter in the people’s mind.’ This was the kind of cynically perceptive political judgement Bonaparte enjoyed making to hold his intellectual weight against the learning of the scientists. He enjoyed provoking us. ‘Besides, religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.’

Napoleon was also fascinated in the truths behind myth.

‘Resurrection and virgin birth, for example,’ he told us one night as the rationalist Berthollet rolled his eyes. ‘This is a story not just of Christianity, but of countless ancient faiths. Like your Masonic Hiram Abiff, right, Talma?’ He liked to focus on my friend in hopes the writer would flatter him in newspaper articles he sent back to France.

‘It is so common a legend that one wonders if it was not frequently true,’ Talma agreed. ‘Is death an absolute end? Or can it be reversed, or postponed indefinitely? Why did the pharaohs devote so much attention to it?’

‘Certainly the earliest stories of resurrection go back to the legend of the Egyptian god Osiris and his sister and wife Isis,’ said de Venture, our scholar of the East. ‘Osiris was slain by his evil brother Seth, but Isis reassembled his dismembered parts to bring him back to life. Then he slept with his sister and sired her son, Horus. Death was but a prelude to birth.’

‘And now we go to the land where this was supposedly done,’ Bonaparte said. ‘Where did these stories come from, if not some grain of truth? And if they are somehow true, what powers did the Egyptians have to accomplish such feats? Imagine the advantages of immortality, of inexhaustible time! How much you could accomplish!’

‘Or at least benefit from compounding interest,’ Monge joked.

I stirred. Is this why we were really invading Egypt – not just because it could become a colony but because it was a source of everlasting life? Is this why so many were curious about my medallion?

‘It’s all myth and allegory,’ Berthollet scoffed. ‘What people doesn’t fear death, and dream of surmounting it? And yet they are all, including the Egyptians, dead.’

General Desaix peeked from his slumbers. ‘Christians believe in a different kind of everlasting life,’ he pointed out mildly.

‘But while Christians pray for it, the Egyptians actually packed for it,’ de Venture countered. ‘Like other early cultures, they put into their tombs what they’d need for the next journey. Nor did they necessarily pack light, and there lies opportunity. The tombs may be stuffed with treasures. “Please send us gold,” rival kings wrote the pharaohs, “because gold to you is more plentiful than dirt.”’

‘That’s the faith for me,’ General Dumas growled. ‘Faith you can grasp.’

‘Maybe they survived in another way, as gypsies,’ I spoke up.

‘What?’

‘Gypsies. Gyptians. They claim descent from the priests of Egypt.’

‘Or they are Saint-Germain or Cagliostro,’ added Talma. ‘Those men claimed to have lived for millennia, to have walked with Jesus and Cleopatra. Perhaps it was true.’

Berthollet scoffed. ‘What’s true is that Cagliostro is so dead that soldiers dug up his grave in a papal prison and toasted him by drinking wine out of his skull.’

‘If it was really his skull,’ Talma said stubbornly.

‘And the Egyptian Rite claims to be on the path to rediscovering these powers and miracles, is this not so?’ Napoleon asked.

‘It is the Egyptian Rite that seeks to corrupt the principles of Freemasonry,’ Talma responded. ‘Instead of pledging themselves to morality and the Great Architect, they look for dark power in the occult. Cagliostro invented a perversion of Freemasonry that admits women for sexual rites. They would use ancient powers for themselves, instead of for the good of mankind. It’s a shame they’ve become a fashion in Paris, and seduced men such as Count Silano. All true Freemasons repudiate them.’

Napoleon smiled. ‘So you and your American friend must find the secrets first!’

Talma nodded. ‘And put them to our uses, not theirs.’

I was reminded of Stefan the Gypsy’s legend that the Egyptians might be waiting for moral and scientific advancement before yielding their secrets. And here we came, a thousand cannon jutting from our hulls.

The conquest of the Mediterranean isle of Malta took one day, three French lives, and – before we arrived – four months of spying, negotiation, and bribery. The three hundred or so Knights of Malta were a medieval anachronism, half of them French, and more interested in pensions than dying for glory. After the formalities of brief resistance, they kissed their conqueror’s hands. Our geologist Dolomieu, who had been drummed out of the Knights in disgrace after his young duel, found himself welcomed back as a prodigal son who could help in the surrender negotiations. Malta was ceded to France, the grand master was pensioned to a principality in Germany, and Bonaparte set himself to looting the island’s treasures as thoroughly as he had sacked Italy.

He left to the Knights a splinter of the True Cross and a withered hand of John the Baptist. He kept for France five million francs of gold, a million of silver plate, and another million in the gem-encrusted treasures of St John. Most of this loot was transferred to the hold of L’Orient. Napoleon also abolished slavery and ordered all Maltese men to wear the tricolour cockade. The hospital and post office were reorganised, sixty boys from wealthy families were sent to be educated in Paris, a new school system was set up, and five thousand men were left to garrison the island. It was a preview of the combination of pillage and reform that he hoped to accomplish in Egypt.

It was at Malta that Talma came to me excited with his latest discovery. ‘Cagliostro was here!’ he exclaimed.

‘Where?’

‘This island! The Knights told me he visited a quarter-century ago, in the company of his Greek mentor Alhotas. Here he met Kolmer! These wise men conferred with the grand master and examined what the Knights Templar had brought from Jerusalem.’

‘So?’

‘This could be where he discovered the medallion, deep in the treasures of the Knights of Malta! Don’t you see, Ethan? It’s as if we’re following in its footsteps. Destiny is at work.’

Again I was reminded of Stefan’s tales of Caesar and Cleopatra, of crusaders and kings, and a quest that had consumed men through time. ‘Do any of these Knights remember the piece or know what it means?’

‘No. But we’re on the right path. Can I see it again?’

‘I’ve hidden it for safekeeping because it causes trouble when it’s out.’ I trusted Talma, and yet had become reluctant to show the medallion after Stefan’s dire tales of what happened to men through history who grasped it. The savants knew it existed, but I’d deflected requests to share it for examination.

‘But how are we to solve the secret when you keep it hidden?’

‘Let’s just get it to Egypt first.’

He looked disappointed.

After a little more than a week our armada set sail again, lumbering eastward toward Alexandria. Rumours flew that the British were still hunting us, but we saw no sign of them. Later we would learn that Nelson’s squadron had passed our armada in the dark, neither side spying the other.

It was on one of these evenings, the soldiers gambling for each other’s shoes to relieve the tedium of the passage, that Berthollet invited me to follow him to L’Orient ’s deepest decks. ‘It is time, Monsieur Gage, for us scholars to start earning our keep.’

We descended into murk, lanterns giving feeble light, men in hammocks swaying hip to hip like moths in cocoons, coughing and snoring and, in the case of the youngest and most homesick, weeping the night away. The ship’s timbers creaked. The sea hissed as it rushed past, water dripping from caulked hull seams as slowly as syrup. Marines guarded the magazine and treasure room with bayonets that gleamed like shards of ice. We stooped and entered Aladdin’s cave, the treasure hold. The mathematician Monge was waiting for us, seated on a brass-bound chest. Also present was another handsome officer who had listened to most of the philosophical discussions in silence, a young geographer and mapmaker named Edme Francois Jomard. It was Jomard who would become my guide to the mysteries of the pyramids. His dark eyes shone with a bright intelligence, and he had brought on board a trunk full of books by ancient authors.

My curiosity at his presence was distracted by what the cabin contained. Here was the treasure of Malta and much of the payroll of the French army. Boxes brimmed with coin like combs of honey. Sacks held centuries of jewelled religious relics. Bullion was stacked like logwood. A fistful could remake a man’s life.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ the chemist said.

‘ Mon dieu! If I were Bonaparte, I’d retire today.’

‘He doesn’t want money, he wants power,’ Monge said.

‘Well, he wants money, too,’ Berthollet amended. ‘He’s become one of the richest officers in the army. His wife and relatives spend it faster than he can steal it. He and his brothers make quite the Corsican clan.’

‘And what does he want of us?’ I asked.

‘Knowledge. Understanding. Decipherment. Right, Jomard?’

‘The general is particularly interested in mathematics,’ the young officer said.

‘Mathematics?’

‘Mathematics is the key to war,’ Jomard said. ‘Given proper training, courage does not vary much from nation to nation. What wins is superior numbers and firepower at the point of attack. That requires not just men, but supply, roads, transport animals, fodder, and gunpowder. You need precise amounts, moving in precise miles, to precise places. Napoleon has said that above all, he wants officers who can count.’

‘And in more ways than one,’ Monge added. ‘Jomard here is a student of the classics and Napoleon wants him to count in new ways. Ancient authors such as Diodorus of Sicily suggested that the Great Pyramid is a mathematical puzzle, right, Edme?’

‘Diodorus proposed that in its dimensions the Great Pyramid is somehow a map of the earth,’ Jomard explained. ‘After we liberate the country, we will measure the structure for proof of that contention. The Greeks and Romans were as puzzled by the purpose of the pyramids as we moderns, which is why Diodorus proposed his idea. Would men really slave so long on a mere tomb, particularly when no bodies or treasures have ever been found in it? Herodotus claims the pharaoh was actually entombed on an island in an underground river, far beneath the monument itself.’

‘So the pyramid is just a tombstone, a marker?’

‘Or a warning. Or, because of its dimensions and tunnels, a kind of machine.’ Jomard shrugged. ‘Who knows, when its builders left no records?’

‘Yet the Egyptians did scatter the world with clues that none of us can yet read,’ Monge said. ‘And this is where we come in. Look at this. Our troops captured it in Italy and Bonaparte has brought it along.’

The chemist whisked away an embroidered cloth, revealing a tablet of bronze the size of a large dinner platter, its surface coated with black enamel etched by silver. Incised were intricately beautiful depictions of Egyptian figures in the ancient style, spaced in a series of rooms atop one another. The gods, goddesses, and hieroglyphics were bound by a border of fantastic animals, flowers, and trees. ‘It’s the Tablet of Isis, once owned by Cardinal Bembo.’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

‘That’s what the general wants us to answer. For centuries, scholars have suspected there is some message in this tablet. Legend has it that Plato was initiated into the greater mysteries in some kind of chamber under Egypt’s biggest pyramid. Perhaps this is a plan, or map, of such chambers. Yet there is no report of such rooms. Could your medallion be a key to understanding?’

I doubted it. The markings on my neckpiece seemed crude compared to this work of art. The figures were stiff but graceful as angels. There were towering headdresses, seated baboons, and striding cattle. Women had wings on their arms like hawks. Men had the heads of dogs and birds. Thrones were supported by lions and crocodiles. ‘Mine is cruder.’

‘You’re to study this for clues before we reach the ruins outside Cairo. Many of the characters hold staffs, for example. Are they rods of power? Is there any connection to electricity? Could this advance the Revolution?’

The men asking these questions were eminent figures of science. I’d won my trinket in a card game. Yet solving such a puzzle might lead me to any number of commercial rewards, not to mention a pardon. As I counted the figures, I was struck that some seemed to have grander headdresses. ‘Here’s something,’ I offered. ‘The number of primary characters here, twenty-one, coincides with those of the Tarot that the gypsies showed me.’

‘Interesting,’ Monge said. ‘A tablet to forecast the future perhaps?’

I shrugged. ‘Or just a pretty platter.’

‘We’ve made an etching of it that you can take back to your cabin.’ He reached into another chest. ‘Another peculiarity is this, which our troops found in the same fortress where Cagliostro was imprisoned. I sent for it when Berthollet told me of you.’ It was a round disc the size of a dinner plate, its centre empty and its edge made by three rings, each fitting inside the other. The rings had symbols of suns, moons, stars, and signs of the zodiac. They rotated, so that symbols could be realigned with one another. Why, I had no idea.

‘We think it’s a calendar,’ Monge said. ‘The fact that you can align the symbols suggests it might show the future or indicate a certain date. But what date, and why? Some of us think it may refer to the precession of the equinoxes.’

‘The procession of what?’

‘Precession. Ancient religion was based on study of the sky,’ Jomard said. ‘The stars formed patterns, moved across the heavens in predictable ways, and were believed alive, in control of the fate of men. The Egyptians divided the vault of the sky into the twelve signs of the zodiac, extending each downward to twelve zones on the horizon. At the same time each year – say, March 21 ^ st, the spring equinox, when the length of day and night are equal – the sun rises under the same zodiacal sign.’

I decided not to point out that the officer had chosen to use the traditional Gregorian date, not the new revolutionary ones.

‘Yet not precisely where it started. Each year the zodiac falls just slightly short of making the full circuit, because the earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the axis making a circle in the sky over a period of twenty-six thousand years. Over long periods of time the position of the constellations seems to shift. On March 21 ^ st of this year, the sun rose in Pisces, as it has since Christ was born. Perhaps this is why early Christians chose the fish as their symbol. But before Jesus, the March 21 ^ st sunrise was in the constellation of the ram, an age which lasted 2,160 years. Before the ram was the bull, when the pyramids may have been built. Next to come, after the 2,160 years of Pisces, is the age of Aquarius.’

‘Aquarius had special meaning for the Egyptians,’ Monge added. ‘Many people think these signs were Greek, but they are really far older, some dating from Babylon and others from Egypt. The poured pitchers of water of Aquarius symbolised the annual rising of the Nile, vital for fertilising and watering Egypt’s annual crops. Man’s first civilisation rose in the strangest environment on earth: a Garden of Eden, a strip of green amid inhospitable desert, a place of constant sun and rare rain, watered by a river that rises from sources still unknown to this day. Isolated from enemies by the Sahara and Arabian Deserts, fed by a mysterious annual cycle, roofed with a cloudless canopy of stars, it was a stable land of extreme contrasts, an ideal place for religion to evolve.’

‘So this is a tool for calculating the cycle of the Nile?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it suggests a propitious time for different actions. That’s what we hope you will help decipher.’

‘Who made it?’

‘We don’t know,’ Monge said. ‘Its symbols are different from anything we have seen, and the Knights of Malta have no record of where it even came from. Is it Hebrew? Egyptian? Greek? Babylonian? Or something entirely different?’

‘Surely this is a puzzle for your mind, not mine, Dr Monge.

You’re a mathematician. I struggle to make change.’

‘Everyone struggles to make change. Listen, we don’t know what all this means yet, Gage. But the interest in your medallion suggests to me that your pendant is a piece of some momentous puzzle. As an American, you are privileged to be on a French expedition. Berthollet here has extended legal protection to you. But this is not an act of charity – it is a hire of your expertise. There are a dozen reasons Bonaparte wants to go to Egypt, but one of them is that there may be ancient secrets to be learnt: mystic secrets, technological secrets, electrical secrets. Then you, Franklin’s man, appear with this mysterious medallion. Is it a clue? Keep these artifacts in mind as we advance into the unknown. Bonaparte is seeking to conquer a country. All you must conquer is a riddle.’

‘But a riddle to what?’

‘To where we came from, perhaps. Or how we fell from grace.’

I returned to the cabin I shared with Talma and a lieutenant named Malraux, my mind both dazzled by treasure and stupefied by the mysteries I was to wrestle with. I could see no connection between the medallion and these new objects, and nobody seemed to have any idea what the puzzle was I was supposed to solve. For decades, charmers and charlatans like Cagliostro had toured the courts of Europe claiming to know great Egyptian secrets, without ever explaining precisely what those secrets were. They had started a craze for the occult. Sceptics had scoffed, but the idea that there must be something in the land of the pharaohs had taken root. Now I found myself in the middle of that mania. The more science advanced, the more people longed for magic.

At sea I’d adopted the sailor practice of going barefoot, given the summer’s heat. As I prepared to lie in my bunk, my mind swirling, I noticed that my boots were missing. This was disturbing, given how I’d used them as a hiding place.

I poked anxiously around. Malraux, already in bed, muttered something in his sleep and swore. I shook Talma.

‘Antoine, I can’t find my shoes!’

He came awake blearily. ‘Why do you need them?’

‘I just want to know where they are.’

He rolled over. ‘Maybe some bosun gambled them away.’

A quick search of late-night card and dice circles did not locate my boots. Had someone discovered the hollow compartment in my heel? Who would dare violate the possessions of the savants? Who could even have guessed my hiding place? Talma? He must have wondered about my calm when asked the whereabouts of the medallion, and probably speculated where I might be hiding it.

I came back to the cabin and looked across at my companion. Once more he slept like an innocent, which made me all the more suspicious. The more the medallion grew in importance, the less I trusted anyone. It was poisoning my faith in my friend.

I retreated to my hammock, depressed and uncertain. What had seemed a prize in the card salon was feeling like a burden. A good thing I hadn’t kept the medallion in my shoe! I put my hand on the touch-hole of the twelve-pounder next to my hammock. Since Bonaparte had forbidden target practice to conserve powder and keep our passage quiet, I’d wrapped my prize in an empty powder bag and used tar to stick it to the inside of the muzzle plug. The plug would be removed before combat, and my plan had been to retrieve the medallion before any sea battle, but meanwhile not risk having it stolen from my neck or boot. Now, with my shoes gone, my distance from the prize made me nervous. Come the morrow, when the others were on deck, I’d fish it from its hiding place and wear the thing. Curse or charm, I wanted it round my neck.

The next morning, my boots were back where I had left them. When I inspected them, I saw the sole and heel had been pried at.