David Gibbins - Pharaoh

He stopped in the water, gave an okay sign and a thumbs-down to Costas, and then raised his arm to signal their descent to Ibrahim on the shore. He could see that the men were now ranged along the bank; he watched as two more Toyotas hurtled into the parking place, screeched around and disgorged their occupants, all of them carrying guns. Jack remembered the murder of Colonel Stewart and his party on that fateful day when the steamer had run ashore here in September 1884, when a duplicitous local official had offered them hospitality and they had all been killed. Ibrahim was right. This was definitely not a good place. He turned to Costas, who was still on the surface, watching the shoreline as well. He clicked on his intercom. ‘Let’s get this done as quickly as possible. I want out of here.’

‘Roger that.’

Jack dropped below the surface. Seeing that the water visibility was no more than three or four metres, he swam close to Costas so that they were within visual range. He bled his buoyancy compensator and they quickly descended almost twenty metres to the river bottom, a dark brown bed of mud and sludge. ‘Compass bearing fifty-two degrees,’ he said, monitoring the directional readout data inside his visor. ‘We’ll do one transit for twenty metres, swim five metres south-west, do another transit, and call it a day if we don’t find anything.’

‘Let’s hope we do,’ Costas said. ‘I want to make this worthwhile.’

They began to swim slowly forward, three to four metres apart, scanning the riverbed for any anomalies. Almost immediately Costas sank down and pointed at a feature poking out of the sludge. ‘I may be wrong, but I think that’s a gun mounting,’ he said.

Jack swam over to take a look, suddenly excited again. ‘Probably a four-pounder, a typical deck gun for a steamer. That’s promising.’

‘Look ahead, Jack.’

Out of the gloom a large section of wooden planking came into view, curving round to a rudder and up to a railing that had rusty metal slabs attached to it, evidently armour plating. ‘That’s got to be it,’ Jack enthused. ‘Gordon had all of his river steamers armoured to the point where they became top-heavy, but it kept them pretty well protected from the Mahdi’s guns. You can see the dents of bullet impacts all over the place. This thing has really been through the wars.’

They swam through a gap in the frame and over the deck of the vessel. A good deal of planking had been removed and the deckhouse superstructure was largely flattened, but the vessel was in surprisingly good condition considering that it had been exposed to salvage at low water. Jack had to remind himself that he was no longer in seawater; that unlike the Beatrice in the Mediterranean this was a wreck where much of the wooden and metal structure could survive in the fresh water of the Nile in a good state of preservation. In the middle of the collapsed deck structure they swam over the large rotund mass of one of the boilers, collapsed sideways but remarkably intact. Jack stared at it, remembering how they had been a mixed blessing in 1884, providing steam power that made the boats the only screw-propulsion vessels on the upper Nile, but requiring such quantities of wood that they quickly outstripped the meagre local supply, forcing crews to demolish houses and even shaduf devices in their insatiable demand for fuel.

Jack sank down to the silt, leaving Costas to explore the other side of the boiler, and looked around. It was immediately apparent that any attempt to discover smaller artefacts and spilled crates would require a major excavation project, with airlifts and dredges to remove the overburden of sludge that had buried much of the wreckage. If there were antiquities from Gordon’s collection here, they were unlikely to find them today. He tapped his intercom. ‘I think we’ve got the result we want. We found the wreck, it’s in good condition and it could be excavated.’

‘Jack, come round here.’ Costas had gone head first into a corroded hole in the deck below the boiler, leaving only his fins protruding. ‘There’s something wedged under the boiler plate. It’s a large slab of stone. I think it might have markings on it. Come down beside me and see if you can help me push it out.’

Jack swam round and squeezed through the hole, coming upright beside Costas. The slab looked perhaps a metre by a metre and a half in area, and about ten centimetres thick. He pulled himself past Costas, and inspected it as closely as he could. The edges were coarse and uneven, as if the slab had been hacked away from a larger piece. But the few centimetres of upper surface he could see were smooth and polished. He pushed his hand in further, and felt incised lines and a definite cartouche. There was no doubt about it. This was from an ancient Egyptian wall relief, far larger than any other that he knew of this far south in the Sudan, from a major temple or other monument. It looked as if it had been packed in multiple wrappings which had largely perished, leaving a compacted mass of burlap and cordage jamming the slab firmly beneath the boiler.

‘I don’t think we’re going to move it, Jack,’ Costas said. ‘I think this was deliberately wedged in here, by someone who wanted to hide it.’

‘That could only be Gordon,’ Jack said. ‘He might have been fearful of something this large being pilfered or damaged.’

‘It’s certainly kept it free from looting until now,’ Costas said.

‘Let me try to get closer,’ Jack said. ‘There’s a hieroglyphic cartouche in there, and I may be able to make it out.’ He wriggled past Costas and put his hand further into the gap over the slab, feeling more of it. He found the cartouche again, and felt it as if it were Braille, his eyes shut. His knowledge of hieroglyphics was not that of an Egyptologist, but he had learned to identify this one. ‘It’s our old friend Akhenaten,’ he murmured. ‘Now where does Gordon get a slab like this with Akhenaten’s name on it?’ He had a sudden hunch, and felt the lines that extended around the cartouche, imagining in his mind’s eye how they might cover the entire slab and a larger original depiction. He remembered the carving he had seen in that fleeting second in the wreck of the Beatrice , on the slab inside the sarcophagus. He was certain it was the same pattern. Then he remembered the depiction of Akhenaten in the crocodile temple, the missing slab in the centre that he was convinced was the key to understanding these images, to seeing them for what they really were. He pushed his hand in to a point where he felt the centre of the image might lie, but it was completely sealed beneath the packing material. ‘We’re going to have to come back,’ he said. ‘This is really important. As big as anything we’ve found yet.’ He withdrew his hand and pushed back from the wreckage, and then rose alongside Costas out of the hole. ‘I’m not saying anything about this to al’Ahmed. We’ll tell him about the wreck, which is supposed to be his main interest. If we talk about antiquities, then this site will be stripped bare before we’re back.’

‘If he sends down divers of his own, they’ll find this anyway,’ Costas said. ‘Keeping mum would just be staving off the inevitable.’

‘If we play our cards right, it’ll be us doing the excavation,’ Jack said. ‘Then we can reveal this find first to the Khartoum museum, and bring it up under controlled conditions so that nobody else walks away with it. Antiquities like this are worth millions and are used to lubricate drug deals. And we know al’Ahmed has a special interest in Akhenaten. He may even know about this slab and just be using us to find the wreck and establish its existence. We need to play a very careful game.’