Pyramid

EPILOGUE

Five days later Jack sat under an awning on the aft deck of Seaquest, gently easing his arm out of its sling and attempting to raise a water bottle to his lips. It was still too painful, and he let it down, gasping as he slid the arm back into the sling and sat back again. With his other hand he picked up his phone and looked at the picture that Rebecca had just sent him from Greece, showing Maria far above climbing a rope ladder to one of the monasteries on Mount Athos.

Jack suddenly remembered a promise he had made to himself. Maria. He made a mental note to contact her when he was back in action again. He put on his sunglasses, pulled down the peak of his cap, and looked disconsolately at the Mediterranean, wishing above all things that he could be diving into those crystal-clear waters right now. The hatch clanged behind him and Costas came sauntering out wearing a spectacular Hawaiian shirt and knee-length shorts, his feet bare. He sat down heavily on the deck chair beside Jack, cracked open a can of drink from the selection on the table, and put on his sunglasses, pushing aside a map of the world that Jack had been perusing. “How’s the world’s worst patient?” he said.

“Don’t ask,” Jack grumbled. “The doctors say three weeks until I can dive. Three weeks. I can make it one week, no more. It wasn’t even a compound fracture.”

“The small matter of a bullet hole.”

Jack looked scornfully at the dressing on his arm. “That’s nothing. Hardly even hurts.”

“Right.”

“Has Macalister said when we’re leaving?”

“He’s finishing the formalities with the Spanish authorities now. We should be under way within half an hour, course set for home. He wants to do a complete shakedown on the derrick and winch apparatus before she goes to sea again. He never wants to see an escapade like ours again.”

Costas leaned over and slapped the base of the derrick, the arm now secured to the deck in preparation for the voyage into the Atlantic. “It’s hard to believe our dive in the submersible was only ten days ago, isn’t it? I meant to say, Jack, I’m not sure if I said it properly, but—”

“Don’t mention it,” Jack replied, wincing as he shifted. “Don’t mention anything about diving at all. Now that really is painful.”

“Well, some other friends of yours have arrived to cheer you up.”

The hatch had opened again and Hiebermeyer, Aysha, and Lanowski came out, Hiebermeyer looking decidedly uncomfortable in a shirt and tie and Lanowski affecting an attempt at formality that looked like an ill-conceived safari suit. They all sat down around the table and Aysha opened her laptop, showing Jack a photo.

“That’s Maurice cutting the ribbon, with the mayor of Valencia and the Spanish minister of culture officiating,” she said. “There were about a hundred TV cameras behind me when I took this.”

Hiebermeyer loosened his tie, the sweat beading on his face. “Not my favorite way of spending an afternoon, but it was a good outcome.”

“Are they still planning to keep the sarcophagus on the waterfront?”

“They’re building a museum around it, with UNESCO and IMU providing the funding. They’ve taken up your idea of showing the sarcophagus within a virtual representation of the pyramid chamber as well as on the wreck, so the viewer can alternate from one to the other. The multibeam sonar data will allow a half-size model of the wreck, and there are plans for a permanent camera on the wreck site for live-stream imagery. That was an inspirational idea, Jack. To cap it all, Seaquest is due back next season to raise two of the bronze guns for the museum, one of them the cannon you spotted with the East India company markings.”

“I still hope that one day the sarcophagus can go back to Egypt,” Jack said.

“We all do,” Aysha said. “But it’s a pretty remote prospect now. Have you seen the news?”

“I’ve just been watching Al Jazeera. It looks like the apocalypse.”

“Our only hope now is military intervention. It can’t destabilize the region any more than it is already. Israel has just carried out a massive preemptive airstrike against extremist positions in Syria. The U.S. 6th Fleet is now within easy bombing and cruise-missile range of Cairo, and the president is due to make an emergency address at the White House within the hour. We all just hope that if there is an intervention, it’s on a big enough scale to destroy the extremists as a fighting force, and not result in a long-term insurgency war.”

“Have you managed to make contact with Sahirah’s parents?”

“They know she’s safe in England.”

“I just wish we could have gotten them out too.”

“I wish we could have gotten everyone out. But you have to draw the line somewhere. They’re hugely grateful to you and Costas and Jacob.”

Jack had a flashback to the final desperate minutes of their escape from Cairo. His ears were still ringing from the gunfire, but he felt nothing about those he had killed, men whose humanity was already long extinguished, only a surge of satisfaction that they had managed to get the girl out and had escaped themselves without fatality. He gave Aysha a penetrating look. “We arranged for her to go straight to Oxford, where she’s got an open-ended position at the institute funded by IMU to work on our Geniza finds. Jeremy thinks that she stands a very good chance of getting a place as a graduate student and that there could be a doctorate in it for her.”

“Ah. Speaking of Jeremy.” Aysha tapped the laptop. “While we were at the ceremony, he sent me an enhanced image from your film of the papyrus that Costas found on the dead caliph’s skeleton. He and Sahirah have been working on it day and night since they got to Oxford. Maurice and I brainstormed the translation in the Zodiac on the way back here from Valencia this afternoon, and we think we’ve nailed it. We have no doubt from the appearance of the hieroglyphs that it dates from the New Kingdom period, to the time of Akhenaten.”

Jack had forgotten his arm and stared at her. “I can’t wait.”

She opened a text file and began to read:

They were silent for a moment. “It’s Akhenaten’s manifesto, his creed for the City of Light,” Jack said. “He’s telling us that his library comes through the Aten, and that he bequeaths it to us. Those words could be inscribed above the entrance to any great library or university today, only here it was one built over three thousand years ago beneath the desert sands of the Giza plateau.”

“It’s even more incredible than that.” Lanowski’s voice was hoarse with emotion. “I’ve heard those words before, many times in my yeshiva as a boy, growing up studying the Talmud and the holy scriptures. Substitute Lord for Aten and those words are almost exactly the words of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom.”

“Hang on,” Costas said. “You’re telling me that a Jewish sacred book was originally an Egyptian text written in hieroglyphs?”

Aysha stared at him. “Some of the oldest fragments of the Ben Sira come from the Cairo Geniza, and it’s thought to have been first set down in Hebrew in Egypt, in Cairo or Alexandria, during the Hellenistic period. But this shows that its composition dates almost a thousand years earlier than that. They were one and the same. The revelation of the one god came at the same time to Akhenaten and to Moses, and their sacred texts spring from the same wellhead.”

“We’ve got another Geniza on our hands here,” Jack said quietly, shaking his head. “Thousands of papyrus scrolls. It’s going to take an army of scholars a lifetime even to begin to tackle it.”

“We’re ready, Jack,” Hiebermeyer said, eyeing him determinedly. “Aysha and her team are the best hieroglyphics people anywhere, and they’ll be training up more translators in preparation. The day that Egypt opens up again is the day that we’ll be down there.”

“And remember, there’s a guardian,” Costas said, his voice thick with emotion. “Little Joey’s in sleep mode, but he’s triggered by motion sensors, and I’ve programmed him to put the fear of God into anyone who tries to get in there. He’ll make the curse of King Tut’s tomb seem lame.”

“And meanwhile, mum’s the word,” Aysha said. “Nobody outside our group knows anything about it.”

Hiebermeyer nodded, looking serious. “One slip of the tongue, one inadvertent lapse online, and word of a discovery like this will spread across the Internet like wildfire, and before we know it the extremists will find it and torch the entire place.”

“One question,” Costas said. “Caliph Al-Hakim wouldn’t have been able to read hieroglyphs, right? Of all the thousands of papyrus documents lying around in that chamber, how come he chose the one that’s so significant?”

“Ah.” Aysha nodded to Hiebermeyer, who scrolled through a series of photos on the screen. “The answer lies in the memory chip that you so carefully,” she coughed, “concealed on your person.”

“Excellent. My treasure trove. I knew it would be useful.”

“These pictures are the most incredible I’ve ever seen, outstripping even those famous first images that Howard Carter took of Tutankhamun’s tomb,” Hiebermeyer said. “Without these pictures and that scrap of papyrus, we’d have nothing tangible to go on. I for one owe you a very large gin and tonic.”

“There it is,” Aysha said, pointing at the screen. The photo showed the huge golden sarcophagus, the lid slightly ajar where Jack had tried so hard to push it. Hiebermeyer zoomed in to the central part below the crossed arms holding the scepter and the ankh symbol. A curious black wood embellishment like a picture frame lay on the lid below, its interior edges jagged like the broken remains of a windowpane.

“I get it,” Costas exclaimed. “Al-Hakim found that papyrus inside that frame.”

Aysha nodded. “You can see where he tore it out. He couldn’t read it, but he guessed that it must be some kind of holy text. He held it close to him as he died.”

“There’s something else we want to show you, Jack,” Hiebermeyer said. “Something else to close the story.”

“Go on.”

Hiebermeyer tapped the laptop and an image of a stone slab covered with hieroglyphs came into view. “This is the so-called Israel Stele, set up in Thebes in the late thirteenth century BC to commemorate the conquests of the pharaoh Merenptah. It’s famous as the only known reference to Israel in an ancient Egyptian inscription. But it now takes second place to Rebecca’s find of the Israel cartouche under Temple Mount in Jerusalem dating at least a century earlier to the time of Akhenaten or shortly after. Here you can see the two cartouches side by side, showing how they contain identical hieroglyphs.”

“Tell them Rebecca’s theory,” Aysha said.

Hiebermeyer sat back in his chair and looked pensively at the image. “When Rebecca emailed me her photo of the Jerusalem find, she outlined a startling idea. The other conquered enemies listed in the Stele — Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoam, and Syria — were all city-states or confederations, whereas the determinative hieroglyph written in front of the word for Israel shows that Israel was regarded as a people, not a city. And yet at this date it seems hardly plausible that a nomadic people or a marauding band of warriors would have the strength to oppose an Egyptian army, to be considered opponents worthy enough to list in this fashion. Rebecca then pointed out one city that was missing from the list.”

“Mât Urusalim,” Jack said. “Jerusalem.”

“Exactly,” Hiebermeyer continued. “Jerusalem was a significant citadel, on a par with the coastal cities and a gateway for any Egyptian army intent on conquering farther north. Either the alliance revealed in the Amarna letters with Akhenaten still remained in force, or, more likely, Mât Urusalim actually is there in the list, only under a different name.”

“Israel,” Jack murmured.

Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. “Here’s a scenario. In the century or so between their arrival as refugees from Egypt and the campaigns of Merenptah, the Israelites had taken over and transformed Jerusalem, strengthening it with their knowledge of Egyptian engineering and winning over the people to their new religion. Rebecca thinks the origins of the Jewish state lie then, not several centuries later with the arrival of King David, as the Old Testament would seem to suggest.”

“So who exactly were the Israelites?” Costas asked.

“I think they may originally have been a tough hill people of Canaan, a large enough component of the prisoners captured by the Egyptians in earlier wars of conquest for the name to have stuck. But the migration from Egypt recounted in Exodus probably included peoples of diverse origins. Imagine the composition of a Roman slave revolt, for comparison. At certain periods it would be dominated by prisoners from the current wars, Gaulish, Spanish, or Macedonian, for example, but there would always be others from different parts of the ancient world, some very exotic. In the same way, you can imagine the followers of Moses predominantly claiming Canaanite origins but including a diversity of others whom the Egyptians had enslaved, from captured sailors of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Nubians and Saharan nomads. This ethnic diversity may well have been one of the strengths of the early Jewish state and religion.”

Lanowski pointed at the first hieroglyphs in the cartouche, the determinative of a throw stick, a sitting man and a woman. “That’s what does it for me. Israel was a people, not a land. A people is always restless, always wanting to be on the move, seeking a promised land that lies just out of reach. The refugees from Egypt may have settled in Jerusalem, but that yearning was always in their blood. You can see it in the history of the diaspora, in that tension between the lure of the Holy Land and the spiritual and creative strength that came from not quite getting there. You can see it in the life of a man like Yehuda Halevi. Would he have been such a great poet if he had reached the Holy Land as a younger man?” Lanowski turned to Jack. “Would you be such a great archaeologist, such a good storyteller, if your Holy Grail didn’t lie most of the time just over the horizon, just beyond your reach?”

“Speaking of horizons, I wonder what really did happen to Akhenaten,” Aysha said.

“The sun rises in the east, and sets in the west,” Costas murmured.

“What did you say?” Jack said.

“Well, if you’re going to worship the sun, you look east or you look west. It’s too bright in the middle.”

“Moses and the Israelites went east,” Lanowski said.

“So which way did Akhenaten go?” Jack tapped his pencil, staring at the image of the empty coffin, and then swivelled the map on the table so that his line of sight took him from Egypt across North Africa and beyond, due west.

“Uh-oh,” Costas said, peering at him. “It’s that look again.”

“You know all those theories about the origins of the pyramids in Mesomerica?” Jack said. “We need to look at every scrap of evidence, and I mean every scrap, for Egyptian exploration to the west. If Akhenaten set off in search for his own promised land, it could be anywhere west of Libya.”

“I’m on it,” Lanowski said, sliding the laptop in front of him, brushing his hair aside, and pushing up his little round glasses. “I’ll start with the fringe stuff first. I’m pretty good at working out which of those theories are crackpot and which have a modicum of sanity behind them. Some of those guys are alarmingly like me.”

“Maurice?” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer stared at the map and slowly nodded. “After finishing at the mummy necropolis, my new project was going to be an excavation near Mersa Matruh, a trading site on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt close to the Libyan border. Aysha and her team had already begun to evaluate all the known evidence for Egyptian trade farther west. One of the most intriguing reports comes from the early Phoenician outpost at Mogador, on the Atlantic coast of Mauretania, where surface finds have apparently included fragments of New Kingdom pottery.”

“Fourteenth century BC?” Jack said.

“It’s possible.”

“We have a standing invitation to excavate there,” Aysha said.

Costas slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. “There you go. Just say yes. Egyptology lives on.”

Jack turned to Costas and cracked a smile. “And you, my friend, have free rein to go and tinker with submersibles. There’s a possible Egyptian wreck off Sicily I’ve always been meaning to visit that might just need your expertise, and provide the stepping-stone we need to take this theory forward.”

Costas’ eyes lit up. “That’s even better than a beach holiday, Jack. Way better. With Maurice’s gin and tonic, of course. And you’ll be amazed at what my guys have come up with while we’ve been crawling down slimy tunnels under the desert. I can’t wait to show you.”

They began to disperse, and Jack sat back, exhausted but elated. The horizon had suddenly opened up for him again, and the possibilities seemed endless. He stared at the map, his eyes narrowing. He had that feeling again, the overwhelming instinct that he was onto something big, as big as any quest he had pursued before. He felt the ship’s engines begin to throb, and he looked out to sea, already planning the next few days, his mind racing.

Game on.