The Pharaoh Key

35

G​IDEON HAD NEVER seen a full moon as bright as the one that rose two nights later above the peak of Gebel Umm, the Mother of Mountains, casting a brilliant light into the valley. Outside, hunting parties were gathering in small groups and getting ready to venture into the rugged landscape. On this particular night, hunters stalked the curious nocturnal boar of southern Egypt, a reclusive animal that came out in small groups to root about for grubs and insects.

Gideon had an entirely different kind of hunt on his mind.

Although it was getting close to midnight, the fires were still lit, and the hunters gathered around them holding their spears, their long shadows flickering and wavering over the ground. There was a low murmur of conversation and the gentle clang and rasp of weapons being sharpened and assembled.

Garza, arriving from his tent with crossbow and bolts, came and stood next to him, silently contemplating the impressive scene. They had already worked out their plans; there was nothing left but to execute them. Imogen soon joined them. Each had a waterskin slung over a shoulder for the night hunt.

Soon the parties were departing in small groups, disappearing into the rugged ravines and ridges that surrounded the great grassy bowl of their encampment.

“Let’s go,” said Garza.

Gideon led the way. They had decided to head out in a different direction than the tomb, so as not to arouse suspicion, and then circle around to what they’d begun calling the Demon Valley. This proved more difficult than first anticipated: most paths they tried ended either in unclimbable rock faces or else abrupt, vertiginous cliffs. At last they found a barely discernible trail that wound its way up a rocky slope to a ridge, then down into a dry wash. Promisingly, the wash led northward, at a slight angle to the trail they’d taken on the earlier day but paralleling it. After a few miles they came to a headland, dropped down into an adjacent canyon, followed that at a different angle for another mile, and then paused to rest.

“All this circling around has wreaked hell with my dead reckoning,” said Gideon. “But I’m pretty sure the trail we want is just one canyon over.”

After a quick rest they climbed the next ridge, which topped out on a knife-edge of rock, sticking into the air like a broken blade. Picking their way through the vertical layers of stone, they at last reached an overlook down into the next canyon. Gideon paused to scan the landscape and check for other hunting parties, but they appeared to be alone. One again, there was no sign of leopards.

“Is that the canyon?” asked Garza.

“Hard to tell. I hope so.”

Another steep descent brought them to the gentle, gravelly bed of the canyon bottom, pale silver in the bright moonlight. Walking more quickly now, they continued down the canyon, which wound its way among dark walls of basalt.

“All these damn canyons look the same,” Garza muttered.

Just when it seemed to Gideon that he’d been mistaken and they must be on the wrong path, the defile widened and they reached the peculiar confluence of three canyons—and there, across a broad sandy wash, he could see the outline of the tomb door, illuminated by moonlight.

Garza stopped to stare. Then, with some difficulty, he swallowed. “Jesus.”

“We’ve no time to waste,” said Gideon. “Let’s go.”

They hurried across the canyon floor and within minutes stood in front of the door. It was about eight feet high and four across, carved of the same dark basalt, and recessed into the cliff face, which itself had been carved into a rectangular shape. Egyptian hieroglyphs decorated the lintels, and the leaden seals Gideon had only seen from a distance were affixed to the door, about head height, stamped with hieroglyphs.

Gideon reached out and touched one of them, pitted and whitened with oxidation. “You’re right,” he told Imogen. “It’s unbroken.”

Imogen scrutinized the seals. “Yes. And also cursed.”

“Naturally,” said Garza. “What’s a tomb without a curse?”

She ran her fingers along the embossed glyphs. “It says, You who enter here…” She paused. “Hmmm. It’s a little obscure. You who enter here, may Aten the One God…set your bowels afire.”

“Ouch,” said Garza.

“Lillaya’s cooking has accomplished that already,” said Gideon.

“It’s written in New Kingdom hieroglyphics of the Eighteenth Dynasty. And this—Aten the One God—means it comes from the reign of Akhenaten.” She took a step back. “More evidence this is Akhenaten’s tomb, and it’s intact…my God.” Then she took a sharp breath, as if thinking of something. “Wait a minute. It’s possible his wife is buried here, too.”

“Nefertiti?” Gideon asked.

Imogen nodded.

“The tomb of Akhenaten and Nefertiti,” Gideon said almost reverently.

“If we don’t get this door open,” said Garza, “we’ll never know who’s inside.” He turned to Imogen. “Got any tricks up your sleeve?”

A silence. “There is no trick,” she said. “No secret button, if that’s what you mean. It’s like I warned you: tomb doors were deliberately made out of massive stone slabs that could only be moved by many men.”

Gideon stared at the door. “It must weigh twenty tons. So how are we going to shift it?”

A long silence ensued as they stared at the ponderous slab before them.

Imogen finally spoke. “I hate to say I told you so, but it looks as if you fellows came thousands of miles only to be stopped by a door.”

Garza stepped forward, then crouched, running his fingers along the bottom edge and up the sides. “We can use leverage.” He pointed at a narrow fissure. “Wedge a lever in this crack, and if it’s long enough it’ll force the door ajar.”

“So where’s the lever?” Gideon asked.

Silence.

“And even if we did find a lever,” Gideon continued, “it wouldn’t be strong enough. It’ll break. Even our bronze spears will bend like putty trying to force open that thing.”

Garza examined the door more closely, this time going over it inch by inch. Minutes passed. Gideon stared up anxiously at the moon. Time was wasting. He racked his brains, but the answer seemed obvious: they were not going to move that stone slab without heavy machinery or explosives—and, as Imogen had pointed out a few nights earlier, they possessed neither.

“What are these parallel drill holes?” Garza pointed to a line of small openings that ran diagonally from one side of the slab to the other.

“You see those on almost any massive blocks moved by the ancient Egyptians,” Imogen told him. “They’d insert bronze pegs and attach ropes, pulled by a hundred slaves.”

Garza grunted as he continued to examine the door. He found a twig and probed inside one of the drilled holes, testing its depth.

“Face it,” said Imogen. “We’re not going to move that door.”

Gideon was growing increasingly frustrated. Here they were, mere feet away from the thing they’d been searching for at such great cost—and they were thwarted by a piece of stone. “You think this is funny,” he said to Imogen.

“It’s hilarious! Look, I’m just as curious as you to see what’s inside—probably more so. But I can’t say I’m sorry you won’t be getting your grubby hands on it.”

“Screw you.”

“Sod off.”

“Hey,” said Garza. “Put a sock in it.” He left off examining the door. Now he started wandering around the floor of the canyon, examining dead thornbushes. Taking out his dagger, he cut a slender branch off one of them. He stripped off the dead bark and began whittling it.

“What the heck is he doing?” Imogen asked.

Gideon, who’d been struggling mightily to push away the mounting feeling of defeat, shook his head. “Beats me.”

Now Garza cut the branch into several pieces, which he carefully whittled into sharpened pegs. He did this with another dead bush, then another, until he had a dozen seven- to eight-inch pegs. He carried them to the door and, hunting around for a rock, placed a peg in one of the drilled holes and used the rock to hammer it in. Six inches of the peg disappeared, leaving an inch of wood exposed. He repeated the process until the entire line of drilled holes was bristling with exposed peg ends.

Gideon, who’d been watching, shifted from one foot to the other. “Manuel, I hate to tell you, but those pegs aren’t going to hold—even if we had ropes to attach to them and those hundred slaves to pull.”

Garza glanced over and then—to Gideon’s vast surprise—flashed a grin. “Just watch.”

He took his headcloth, unwound it, and tore it into short pieces. Then he soaked each piece with the waterskin. Next, taking the sopping pieces of cloth, he wrapped each one around an exposed stub of wood. When this was done, he carefully poured a little water on each rag-bundled stub, soaking it further.

“What’s this?” said Gideon. “Magic?”

“In a way. The magic of capillary action. The dry wood takes the water in through the capillaries and the pegs swell up. Presto—the rock splits.”

“You’ve gone barmy,” Imogen said.

“Think so? This was a tried-and-true method of splitting rock for hundreds of years, in New England and elsewhere. It’s called water wedging. I estimate it will take two hours, maybe more.”

“Two hours?” Gideon asked, looking at the moon again. “We won’t have any time left for exploration!”

“O ye of little faith.”

“Even if this works,” said Imogen, “and the door splits open, you realize the guards or whoever keeps watch on the valley are going to see it’s been entered.”

“That assumes it’s actively patrolled,” Garza told her. “You speculated they’ve been protecting this tomb for thirty-five centuries—and that its location is probably sacred and secret, known only to a few. I’ll bet they only check up on it once or twice a year. Why else would they maintain that fiction about a Demon Valley? And just look at the sandy ground around here: if they were constantly patrolling, we’d see a trail, or at least footprints other than our own. I’ll bet at most only a few elders know about it—maybe just Lillaya and the chief. Otherwise, people would realize there’s a second way out of their valley.”

It was a reasonable argument, Gideon thought. “But that door is basalt. One of the hardest rocks there is.”

“Hard, yes. But brittle.”

They sat cross-legged in the sand and fell into silence. A distant owl began to hoot: a low, mournful sound that seemed to shift about in the maze of canyons. Every twenty minutes or so, Garza would rise and pour a little more water on the rags. An hour went by, then two.

Gideon again glanced skyward as the minutes crawled by. The full moon had been gradually making its way across the sky, the shadows moving with it. They’d left around midnight, and with the hike in they’d arrived here around two thirty AM. Now it had to be at least four thirty. The sun would rise at six.

He rose. “Forget the possibility of bagging any game. If we don’t leave now, we won’t even get back to camp before dawn. People are going to wonder where we are.”

In that moment, they heard a sudden kak! It wasn’t overly loud, but it cut through the stillness of the night air like the crack of a whip. A fresh diagonal split had formed across the door, running through the line of pegs. A moment later the abrupt cracking noise was followed by another, this time hollow and mysterious. The stone slab began shifting, its two halves grinding against each other, under the irresistible pressure of their own massive weight—and then they fell atop one another in a kind of slow motion, hitting the ground with a shuddering boom and raising a huge cloud of dust.

Gideon waited for the dust to settle and the boom to stop echoing across the canyon walls. He looked around to make sure the noise hadn’t been overheard, then he stared back into the dark maw of the tomb. Garza was already taking out three small pitch torches he had brought along. He pulled out a little fire drill he’d fashioned, produced a small flame, lit the torches, and passed them out.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They approached the door, the yellow lights faintly illuminating a long stone corridor.

“Are there likely to be booby traps?” Gideon asked Imogen.

“Only in the movies,” she said. “If there’s any trap here, it would be a well: a deep pit directly inside the door. But…” She advanced, holding her torch before her. “There doesn’t seem to be any well at all. How odd.”

The corridor, cut out of the living rock, sloped downward into the mountain at a gentle grade. They proceeded cautiously. Colorful paintings decorated the incised and plastered walls, a great procession of people in the Egyptian style, surrounded by panels of hieroglyphics.

A little farther along the corridor, Gideon saw that it came to an end in another door. But this was of wood, not stone, with a tiny second door built into it. The wood had once been gilded, and bits and pieces of gold leaf shone in the torchlight. The image of a golden chariot was carved into the door, with a pharaoh standing in it, holding the reins of four horses, surrounded by more hieroglyphics.

“What does all that say?” Gideon asked.

“I don’t want to wait to decipher it,” Imogen said breathlessly. Despite herself, she was tremendously excited. “Let’s see what’s inside first.”

Garza knelt and examined what appeared to be a bronze locking mechanism on the small wooden door. As he fiddled with it, the lock came apart in his hand, the wood crumbling to dust. With a low creak, the door inched ajar.

They all looked at each other.

“Who’s first?” asked Imogen.

“Garza,” said Gideon. “He got us in here.”

“No,” said Garza. “Imogen’s the Egyptologist. She should go first.”

There was no further discussion. Eyes shining, Imogen got down on her hands and knees and, holding the torch before her, crawled through the opening. The flickering light streamed back toward Gideon and Garza, wavering this way and that.

“What do you see?” Gideon asked.

There was a long silence. And then: “My God. Things. Amazing things.”

Gideon couldn’t stand it any longer. He dropped to his knees. “I’m coming in.”

He crawled through and Garza followed. They stood up and, in the flickering torchlight, found themselves in a surprisingly small chamber, perhaps fifteen by fifteen feet square. The walls were covered with paintings and hieroglyphics, and the barreled ceiling was painted a deep azure, decorated with golden stars and a silver moon. In the center of the chamber was a great granite plinth supporting an upright cabinet made entirely of chased and beaten gold. The cabinet doors were shut and sealed with lead tapes.

Gideon turned slowly, struck dumb, moving the torch this way and that in order to see better. Set on the stone floor surrounding the cabinet were a great many things, and it took Gideon several moments to take them in. There was an alabaster bowl, filled with heavy gold nuggets; a slate tray covered with polished pieces of lapis lazuli and turquoise; and another tray of gold amulets inlaid with precious stones. There were gorgeous hand-carved bowls and elaborate vases of snow-white alabaster; solid gold slippers; daggers of fine workmanship with handles of ivory and sheaths of gold; scepters and crooks of gold, silver, and lapis; an entire bowl filled with gold rings and necklaces…and another filled with cut gemstones—diamonds such as Gideon had never seen or even heard of before, the color of the golden sun. Nearby lay the head of a leopard in beaten silver, a jackal in ebony…the array of treasures went on and on.

And the walls. One held a magnificent, life-size painting of a pharaoh mounted in a golden chariot, whip in one hand and reins in the other, driving a team of richly caparisoned stallions across a landscape. The other wall depicted an immense battle scene.

Gideon finally tore his eyes away. Imogen was pale, her face a sheen of perspiration. For what seemed forever, no one spoke.

And then Imogen said: “It’s incredible. Almost unbelievable. But it’s not a tomb.”

Gideon stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“Where’s the sarcophagus? Where are the canopic jars and ushabtis? And it’s so small. Even King Tut’s tomb had half a dozen rooms.”

Gideon looked around. There were no other doors leading out. This was the only chamber.

“If it’s not a tomb, what is it?” Garza asked.

“I don’t know. These things on the ground—all these treasures—they look like…well, like offerings.”

“But to what?”

“I assume to whatever’s in that golden cabinet.”

Another silence ensued. Then Imogen slid out her dagger and touched one of the cabinet’s lead seals. “Should I?”

“Hell, yes,” said Gideon.

Gently, carefully, Imogen cut the lead tapes holding the gold doors of the cabinet closed: first one, then the other. She slid off the clasp and gently opened the doors.

Gideon stared at what lay within. Whatever he’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. The cabinet only held a black slab of stone, rough along the edges, with its polished face containing lines of hieroglyphic writing.

“A rock,” Garza said. “Amid all these riches, a piece of rock.”

Imogen stared at it, moving the torch closer, her eyes narrowing.

“What is it?” asked Gideon. “The pharaoh’s laundry list?”

“It’s what this tomb—this shrine—was built to contain.” She continued scrutinizing it. “Clearly, it must be of the greatest importance.”

“The secret rites of the Shriners?” Gideon asked.

“What does it say?” Garza pressed.

“Hang on a moment. It says: As I am everywhere and always…I am your only God. Reject others and take me as your one true God.”

She paused, brows contracting. “The second line reads: Though I am formless to eyes such as yours, do not make…a carving. No, that last bit’s not quite right. Make no carven image of me to worship.”

“Sounds like the Ten Commandments.” said Gideon.

“Yes—yes. Or maybe…a draft of them.” She stared, her brow furrowed in concentration as she puzzled through the symbols. And then she straightened up, looking at the two of them silently, inexpressible surprise in her eyes.