David Gibbins - Pharaoh

Jack snapped his visor shut and activated the intercom. ‘Good to go?’ He could hear Costas’ heavy breathing as he struggled with something underwater. He slipped under the surface, and saw that Costas was attempting to adjust the weight of a large object on his waist belt. The increasingly frayed boiler suit which he had worn for years as an outer layer had finally given up the ghost during their dive the year before into the volcano at the site of Atlantis, and the new one still looked startlingly white, in need of a really dirty dive into a hole in the ground to give it credibility. Costas had transferred all his tools and gadgets from the remains of the old suit to the new one, and had added a second belt to take more. He heaved it round, then gave the divers’ okay signal.

‘Good to go.’

They dropped a metre or so below the surface, and then turned in the direction of the channel. Jack checked the computer readout inside his visor, showing depth, available gas supply and suit temperature, and then looked around him. The water was clear but with a peculiar darkness to it, and he could not see the bottom. They had chosen to enter at a point some fifty metres upriver from the submerged rocks of the great gate of Semna, and to use the current that flowed through the narrow defile to take them into the pool below and then up to the location of the submerged channel that seemed to lead into the underground chamber. They knew that the flow near the riverbed was strong, and they were prepared for a rocky ride and the risk that the current might sweep them beyond their target; but there were no good entry points closer to the chamber, and this route was the better option.

A few minutes later they had descended to twenty metres and Jack could see the two massive rocks of the great gates below him, their surface worn smooth by millennia of flood waters, and between them the defile some twenty metres wide that had once channelled the entire flow of the Nile into the pool below. Costas swam vigorously ahead to position himself over the channel, and Jack followed, letting himself sink slowly into it. ‘Ready for a ride,’ Costas said. Jack looked down into the blurry flow of fast water and realised that he was being sucked in, and that his only choice was to go with it. Costas was suddenly drawn away from him at horrifying speed, spinning round as the current took him forward and down towards the rocky base of the channel. As Jack felt the water grip him, he instinctively resisted, and for a few moments felt a searing pain in his torso as the current dragged his body away from the calmer waters above. Then he relaxed, letting the current pull him under, sucking him along. He was at the mercy of the water, unable to control his movements, and could do nothing but watch as he came terrifyingly close to the rocky outcrops that loomed out of the side of the channel and disappeared as quickly behind him. The depth readout inside his visor plummeted from thirty to fifty metres in a matter of seconds, and he braced himself for the impact with calmer water beyond the channel that he knew would be like hitting the surface after jumping off a high board. He caught sight of Costas some ten metres in front of him, his headlamp beam spinning around crazily, and he sensed a darkness ahead in the deep water of the pool at the end of the channel. He checked his depth gauge again: almost sixty metres. The floor of rock below him was pocked with potholes but worn smooth by the water, devoid of visible life. It was as if they were being sucked into another world, the Protean darkness from which the Egyptians believed all creation sprang; the channel was like the passage through which escape could never be possible, dooming all who allowed themselves to be taken by it to an eternity of swirling round the pit of the underworld.

Suddenly he felt the wind knocked out of him, as hard as if he had been hit in a rugby tackle, and he heard Costas gasp as well. They had been thrown clear of the channel, and he sensed the flow of the water decrease and his fins begin to find purchase as he kicked himself upright. He saw nothing but darkness, and switched on his headlamp. The beam reflected off particles suspended in the water, dazzling him, and he switched it off again. The glowing red readout of his depth gauge showed seventy-two metres, well below the level of the channel. He felt himself sinking further, and injected a quick blast of air into his buoyancy compensator to stop his descent. His limbs felt heavier as he moved them, as if they were pushing against some resistance, and he realised why. He had sunk into the silt on the floor of the pool, an accumulation that had been suspended here since time immemorial, swirling and settling beneath the channel, its bottom somewhere in the ooze far below him.

Costas’ voice came over the intercom. ‘Jack. You there?’

‘Roger that,’ Jack replied. ‘I’m here, though I don’t know where that is.’

‘Try rising to sixty metres.’

Jack kicked, but his foot jammed into something. He reached down with his right hand and felt a smooth shape with undulations, perhaps an eroded rock that had broken free from the channel and come to rest in the pool. He must be closer to the bottom than he had thought. He pulled his foot again, but it was stuck. He reached down with his left hand and felt the other side. It was big, at least a metre wide. He put his hand into a hole on one side, feeling a hollow space within, and then found a similar hole on the other side. He realised that the object was symmetrical, with the same shapes on both sides. He moved his hands forward where the rock narrowed towards his trapped leg, and then reached further down, feeling sharp protuberances through his gloves. He tugged at his foot again, and then heaved. ‘Shit,’ he exclaimed.

‘What is it?’ Costas said.

‘I’ve been bitten.’

‘What? I haven’t seen anything living down here.’

‘You won’t believe it, but it’s a crocodile.’

‘ No way .’

‘Don’t worry, it’s not alive. It’s a giant crocodile skull, wedged into the rocks at the bottom of the pool. But I can’t get it to release me. My fin’s caught in its teeth.’

‘Don’t pull on it. I’ve been reading about these things. That only makes it clamp down harder. Try lifting the top jaw up.’

Jack reached down, found a place between the teeth to slot his fingers, and pulled with both hands. It came away surprisingly easily, and he kicked his trapped fin until it was free. He dropped the jaw, letting it fall slowly back into the silt, and then swam upwards, rising until he could just make out the glow from Costas’ headlamp beam and then his shadowy form a few metres away. He blasted air into his suit until he could see Costas clearly, his upper body poking out of the sediment into the clearer water above, and beyond that the turbulence of the current. ‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said. ‘I thought I was about to lose my foot.’

‘It gives me the jitters just thinking of that thing down there,’ Costas said. ‘You sure it was dead?’

‘Long dead. Pretty well fossilised. Probably even a dinosaur. It was big enough, huge.’

‘You sure? Everything looks bigger underwater. You know, refraction of light through your mask. Add a bit of adrenalin, a bit of nitrogen narcosis …’

Jack measured the breadth with his hands. ‘I didn’t see it. But it was this wide.’

‘Okay. That’s enough for me. The sooner we’re out of this primeval soup, the better.’ Costas pointed away behind them. ‘My terrain mapper’s showing the entrance to that rock-cut channel about forty metres away at bearing two hundred and seventy-three degrees, depth twenty-five metres. The underwater river created by the current seems to flow around the lower side of the pool, but we might be able to avoid it by swimming beneath and rising up the other side, close to the edge of the pool. You good with that?’