David Gibbins - Pharaoh

‘Sounds like a plan. You lead.’

Jack followed Costas as he rose slightly and swam over the sediment in an easterly direction. He dropped down again to avoid the swirling waters of the channel, his form skirting the billowing mass of sediment like an aircraft flying in and out of cloud. He stopped suddenly, raised his hand, and pointed at a jagged mass rising out of the silt. ‘Check this out,’ he said. ‘It’s machinery from a river steamer.’

Jack swam up beside him, close now to the rocky edge of the pool. Wedged into the mass of metal was a large upturned vessel like a rowing boat. ‘Amazing,’ he exclaimed. ‘The dimensions look bang-on. I’m guessing this is one of the whaleboats from the 1884 expedition.’ He stared for a moment at the wooden hull, as well preserved in the fresh water as if it had been sunk that day. He remembered the sangar with the evidence of the British soldiers, and for a moment it felt as if he would rise from the waters into the bustle of activity of those few days in 1884 when the expedition had passed overhead. He turned from the wreckage and looked at Costas. ‘Fantastic. This really brings history alive for me.’

‘How’s your air supply?’

Jack had been monitoring his gauges since dropping beyond their expected depth threshold in the pool. ‘More depleted than I’d like. I think I was breathing a lot trying to right myself in that channel.’

‘Me too. Let’s get going. At least from now on it’ll be shallower.’

They swam past the wreckage and up the rocky wall, its sides smoothed by the current but here and there covered with patches of green algae-like growth, the first signs of aquatic life Jack had seen since entering the water. A few minutes later they topped twenty-five metres depth and swam over the original surface of the riverbank beside the pool, as it had been at low water before the Aswan dam was constructed. They followed the drop-off until they came to the feature they had seen in the sonar profile readout that Ibrahim had provided; it was a rock-cut channel leading away from the submerged riverbank towards the cliff base and the underground chamber they knew lay some thirty metres to the east, still invisible in the murky gloom. Jack sank down into the channel, stretching his arms out to either side and dropping to the floor. ‘Just wide enough for a crocodile,’ he said.

‘Don’t,’ Costas said. ‘We’ve tempted fate enough as it is.’

‘The channel and the cliff face must have been buried in sand before the Aswan dam, explaining why none of the earlier archaeologists saw this,’ Jack said. ‘Everything must have been swept clean when the river rose and flooded through. It shows how much more you can see underwater. I really need to get Maurice diving.’

‘You’ve been saying that for years. You’ll never change him. And I dread to think where those shorts would end up if he dived in with them on.’

Jack swam up the channel, and moments later they were at the base of the cliff. The channel disappeared inside, a black cavity just large enough to fit his frame; its floor was carpeted with sand where it had evidently remained since the inundation, kept by the rock walls of the channel from being swept away. Jack sank down to the rocky floor, peering ahead through his headlamp beam as far as he could see. He noticed the sand slope upwards in a deeper accumulation until it seemed to fill the aperture some five metres ahead. He checked his pressure gauge. ‘I’ve got about twenty minutes left at this depth. We may not be able to get past that obstruction. But I’m going to try.’

‘I’m on your tail,’ Costas said. ‘Go for it.’

Jack swam forward using a gentle dolphin stroke with his fins, his arms by his sides. After five metres he came up against a bank of sand, and put his hands into it. The sand was coarse grained, easy to dig into, but there seemed little way of making progress. ‘I think we must be within a few metres of the chamber, but this could be as far as we go,’ he said.

‘Don’t give up so soon,’ Costas said. ‘Make way for Walter, and see what he can do.’

‘Walter?’

‘My very latest gadget. A miniature water pump. He sucks away sand and deposits it down an exhaust tube into the current. When I heard we were going to the Nile, I thought “sand”, and decided this would be a good dive to trial him.’

Jack heard a whirring and raised himself to let a little vehicle about the size of a small dog drive under him and bury itself in the sand, sucking it away and disgorging it out of a plastic tube somewhere behind. In a few moments it had burrowed deeper and disappeared. Jack followed, pulling himself through a hole in the sand just big enough for him to squeeze his way along. After about three metres the sand fell away to open water in front of him, and he saw Walter pause, leap out and then bury himself in the sediment again a few metres to the right, like a rodent digging a hole. Jack wriggled out of the sand and then turned to see Costas do the same, his head emerging beside Walter’s exhaust pipe. Costas quickly pulled himself along it and dived into the sediment after Walter until only his fins were sticking out. A moment later the whirring noise stopped and he re-emerged, holding the pump by the tube like a dog on a lead. ‘He’s got a mind of his own,’ he gasped, looking up. ‘So where are we?’

Jack increased the intensity of his headlamp and panned it around. They were inside a large rectilinear chamber at least ten metres high and fifteen metres across. The sand which had partly filled the channel formed a large sloping bank against the side of the chamber facing the cliff, evidently where it had fallen in from the sandbank outside before that had been swept away by the rising waters of the Nile. He watched as Costas swam slowly up to a dark form at the rear of the chamber, his beam playing on its surface, and then come to an abrupt stop where the form protruded at the top. There was a gasp, and a sound like a whimper, and then Costas spoke in a whisper. ‘ Holy cow .’

Jack swam up to him, and gasped himself as the image came into view. ‘Holy crocodile, more like,’ he exclaimed.

Maurice had been right. Only he could never have imagined anything like this. It was a statue of the ancient Egyptian god Sobek, half man, half crocodile, its snout flashing with jewels where their headlamp beams reflected off them. It faced directly towards the entrance to the temple to the west, towards the setting sun. Jack glanced at his air supply readout. ‘Fifteen minutes left: five for the chamber, five to get out, five to ascend, then pure oxygen for half an hour.’

‘Okay, Jack.’ Costas had pushed off and recovered his composure. ‘You take a quick look around. I’ll reactivate Walter and get him to dig us out again. If he’s got any battery left.’

‘I don’t want to hear about it. Let me guess. You’ve never tried him before.’

‘Has to be a first time for everything.’

Jack swam down to the centre of the chamber, and then panned his beam around the walls, starting at the buried entranceway and moving clockwise. He saw nothing but blank stone until he had passed the statue and was on the wall to his right, when an extraordinary scene came into view. It was a relief carving of an ancient battle, or rather its aftermath, with a wild-haired enemy executing and dismembering their prisoners, a jarring scene because the prisoners were unmistakably Egyptian. He panned the beam further on. A huge figure of a man came into view, the style different from the battle scene. He stared in amazement, barely able to think, memorising as much of the detail as possible, features of the carving that he would have time to ponder later. It was the same pharaoh he had seen two days before, fifteen hundred miles away at the bottom of the Mediterranean. He could scarcely register it. Akhenaten.