David Gibbins - Pharaoh

‘It was in the entrance tunnel,’ Costas called down. ‘A giant stone slab dropped into it about five metres up from the burial chamber. It was deliberate, an ancient booby trap. One of those devices to deter tomb robbers. You must have triggered something on the way down.’

Jack tried to slow his swinging, and looked at the curious arrangement of stone slabs about five metres above him that stuck out of the sides of the shaft like the spokes of a wheel, leaving an aperture in the centre just big enough for him to drop through. He remembered feeling a slight give in the stones as he stood on them. He had studied the elaborate traps that the pyramid builders had set around the burial chambers; it was conceivable that those stones had triggered an alignment in the masonry that caused the slab to drop. But this trap was not simply to deter tomb robbers. He stared down, his headlamp beam reflecting off the smooth walls that dropped to a shimmering pool of water some ten metres below. It was to protect access to something infinitely more valuable, to a treasure that made the adrenalin course through Jack as it did when he knew he was on the brink of a great discovery.

He stared back up. ‘So we’re trapped?’ he yelled.

‘You got it. That slab must weigh ten tons. And the light shaft above the chamber isn’t even wide enough to let in a pigeon.’

‘At least nobody can follow us inside.’

‘That’s great, Jack. Really reassuring. Makes spending the rest of eternity entombed like a mummified pharaoh really worthwhile.’

‘Keep focused,’ Jack shouted back. ‘We’re doing what we came here to do. This shaft must lead to some other access point.’

He looked down again, searching for the glow from the chemical lightstick he had dropped into the water at the bottom of the shaft, but it was gone. He pulled another out of the thigh pocket on his e-suit, cracked it and dropped it, watching the green glow tumble down and then splash into the water, revealing the shimmering sides of the shaft and then disappearing too, somewhere far deeper. He looked at the electronic display inside his helmet, checking that the air supply in the streamlined console on his back was still full, and monitoring the temperature inside his suit. He had told Costas to focus, but he was the one who needed to focus more, and Costas knew it. The intercom had failed to work inside the shaft, and when he had shut his visor he had been sealed off completely. He realised how much he had come to rely on Costas beside him, his companion for more than twenty years on countless dives into caves and mine shafts and other enclosed spaces. But this time Jack would have to confront his greatest fear on his own, his fear of being closed in, of finding no way out.

He felt his heart pound, and his breathing quicken, and he stared down again into the water. There was nothing visible yet, nothing to confirm his hunch. All he had to go on was instinct born of years of luck and intuition. He had to summon up all of his determination and keep going down the shaft until he knew the truth. He concentrated on that objective as he looked down, feeling the belay clamp on his harness, jigging his body up and down to test his weight against the rope. As his beam played on the surface of the water, he saw something bubble up, like a ghostly exhalation from three thousand years before, a waft that made his nostrils tingle. It was a familiar odour, a recent one, but he could not pin it down.

Costas shouted from above. ‘You smell that?’

‘It’s come up through the water,’ Jack yelled back. ‘Must be some kind of natural gas, methane maybe. We should use our breathing gear.’

‘It smells just like the Nile,’ Costas yelled back.

Jack remembered. Of course . It was the distinctive smell of the Nile through Cairo, a river whose man-made canals had once lapped the pyramids, but which was now almost three kilometres distant. He suddenly remembered the story of the wild man who had appeared out of nowhere in the streets of Cairo in the 1890s, with hair and beard down to his chest like a holy man, showing everyone who would listen to him a Royal Engineers cap badge and a corporal’s chevrons, claiming that he had been a British soldier captured by the Mahdi; he said that he had escaped and come to Cairo with knowledge of an ancient underground city beneath the modern streets, but had become trapped there and survived for years eating scraps of ancient mummies and rats and fish from the river. Could it be true? Jack thought hard: fish from the river . Could the water below be an ancient channel from the Nile? If so, it was their way out. And it was the way to a discovery that would astonish the world.

He shouted up the shaft. ‘Oh, by the way. My aunt Margaret has a book for you. A copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur .’

‘I know,’ Costas bellowed down. ‘Rebecca gave it to me.’

‘You didn’t need to be worried, you know. About me, I mean. But I appreciate it.’

‘It’s what friends are for.’

Jack looked down, dazzled by the glare. ‘I’m not so sure now, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, about the quest. This looks like it might be a one-way ticket.’

‘Come on, Jack. It can’t be as bad as that crocodile pool. That was the entrance to the underworld. This is the City of Light. And you’re about to go diving again. You love it.’

Jack looked down, feeling his heart race with excitement. It was true. He loved it. He looked up at Costas. ‘Okay. I’m going in. Open the slab to let the light in.’

‘Close your visor,’ Costas boomed back. ‘It could be dazzling. Good to go?’

‘Good to go. See you on the other side.’

‘You better.’

Jack pulled down his visor and locked it shut, and then activated the polarising filter to reduce the brightness. On the way down he had seen a series of highly polished obsidian slabs built into the wall at alternating heights, and Costas had realised that one of the narrow sunlight shafts built into the side of the pyramid was angled into the burial chamber such that the light would strike the upper panel and reflect down to the pool below. A stone cover over the first panel pivoted back to expose it, but they had decided not to experiment in case the light dazzled Jack on his way down. But now, with only a few metres to go, it was time.

Jack heard the scraping of the stone cover being moved. Then it was as if he were staring into the flash of a camera, shocked and dazzled. The light from the sun was magnified by the panels and seemed to burn like fire at each stage down the shaft until it hit the water. The pool acted like a lens, focusing the light down on another mirror far underwater that reflected off into the unknown, in the direction of the Nile.

Jack suddenly realised what had happened. He was seeing what Akhenaten had seen, the light of the Aten; he was bathed in it, as Akhenaten had been. He remembered all the images that had brought him here, the clues in the carvings: the extraordinary image of the pharaoh and the labyrinth of channels and tunnels, the arms of the Aten spreading over it all. Akhenaten had not just built a new capital city at Amarna beside the Nile; he had come here, to the heart of Egypt, to the pyramids of Giza, to a place that all his energy and the light from the Aten would illuminate: a place where the wisdom of the ages and the knowledge of the world would be under his aegis, where he would reign for ever as one with the Aten, as king of kings.

There was a sudden jolt. The radiating slabs of rock above had snapped together, cutting Jack off from Costas and severing the rope. He fell, splayed out and spinning, managing to right himself so that he was falling feet first, and then he hit the water and fell far under, deep into another world, his eyes shut.