David Gibbins - Pyramid

“It is a good thing, then, that when I needed a diver for our enterprise, I was not obliged to employ these other gentlemen, and you were at hand.”

“A matter of good fortune that I had travelled to Alexandria intending to test my prototype, first in the ancient remains of the harbor and then on the wreck of the Oceanus in Aboukir Bay, where it blew up in 1798 during the Battle of the Nile. In these days of the British Empire, people have forgotten the role of Napoleon in opening up ancient Egypt to the world, and my discovery of the wreck would have been pour la France .”

“You mean it would have brought you the fortune in gold coin that is said to lie in her hold?”

Guerin shrugged theatrically. “An inventeur needs his income, monsieur. How else does he buy his matériel ?”

“So, you do not selflessly give your endeavors to la France , then?”

Guerin eyed Chaillé-Long. “Do you work for the United States of America, monsieur, or for yourself?”

The ghost of a smile passed Chaillé-Long’s lips. “It sounds as if you are embarked upon a profitable enterprise.”

“Now you understand how it is that I have not been able to test my equipment like this before. I could not risk prying eyes seeing it.”

Chaillé-Long gave the man a wry look. “I am grateful to you for answering my question in so direct a fashion.” He put his hands on his hips, surveying the shore that was just coming into view, a dark bank several boat lengths away. “Now, are we ready?”

Jones eyed Guerin. “Do you have your lamp?”

“Mais oui,” the Frenchman replied exuberantly, lifting an open-fronted metallic box the size of a kerosene lamp but containing an opaque glass ball. “Another one of my inventions. It contains a battery and an electrical filament. The opaque glass keeps the light from shining too strongly, as the glare off the suspended particles in the water would obscure my view. I have tested it myself to a depth of ten meters off the Marseilles docks.”

“You are indeed an entrepreneur,” Chaille-Long murmured. “If liberté, fraternité et égalité are in truth not your master, then you and I could do business.”

Guerin looked at Jones, his eyes glinting. “And you, monsieur, for your part, you have les explosifs ?”

Jones carefully lifted up an oiled tarpaulin beside the hatch and revealed a small wooden box attached by a coiled cable to a plunger. “Borrowed from the Royal Engineers depot in Cairo,” he said. “Security there is not what it used to be. The box contains eight one-pound sticks of dynamite, packed in petroleum jelly for waterproofing. The cable is two hundred feet long, and the charge should be waterproof down to a depth of thirty feet. If the captain can hold us at that distance from the riverbank, the boat should survive the detonation unscathed.”

Guerin stared hesitantly at the box. “That is, if I find what you are after, and have occasion to lay the charge.”

“I have spent weeks triangulating this exact position from the pyramids, transposing the ancient plan on the most up-to-date topographical maps prepared by the Ordnance Survey.”

The Frenchman tweaked his mustache. “More équipage liberated from the Royal Engineers, I surmise? And you found a theodolite too? You are a man of many skills.”

Jones coughed. “Let’s just say I’ve had some training.”

Guerin’s eyes twinkled. “Do you mean in larceny, mon ami , or in the military sciences?”

Jones pointed at the riverbank looming out of the darkness. It was held off by the captain’s boy with a pole. A cascade of bricks and mortar lay embedded in the bank, and above it they could make out the ruined walls and gun embrasure of the fort. “There it is,” Jones exclaimed, his voice hushed. “This was the feature that coincided precisely with my measurement, the place I told the captain to find. When I came here in daylight, I also measured the movement of water along the shore. It’s outside the main river current, but there are strong eddies, enough to keep river silt from accumulating or mud from building up too deeply. Monsieur Guerin, I believe you will be in with a very good chance.” He looked up at Chaillé-Long. “Are you up to getting your hands wet, Colonel?”

Chaillé-Long bristled. “I will have you know that I have survived pitiless rain, mud, misery, malaria, and the other dread fevers of the jungle in my years as an explorer of deepest Africa.” He pointed to a faint scar on his cheek. “This wound, as you will doubtless have wondered, I acquired fighting off the Bunyan warriors of Uganda, alone with my Reilly elephant gun, assisted only by two of my bearers with Snider rifles, together accounting for dozens of ’em.” He took off his silk gloves with a theatrical flourish. “I do believe, sir, that I am capable of dipping my hand in this river, however fetid and pestilential its waters may be.”

Jones glanced at Chaillé-Long as he squatted down beside him. He noted the silk top hat, the black cape with its crimson lining, the patent leather shoes. The war in Sudan had attracted all manner of mavericks, some of them genuinely capable, others charlatans, and had refracted their skills in the intensity of the struggle, sometimes brilliantly so. And then it had thrown them out at the other end, propelling some on to greater things and others back to the obscurity from which they had emerged. The American officers hired as mercenaries in the Khedive’s service had made the Egyptian army a force to be reckoned with, but it had included their share of tale spinners and egotists. Jones remembered one night by the Nile sitting with his officer, Major Mayne, and a group of other Royal Engineers officers and listening to them talk about Chaillé-Long and his exploits in equatorial Africa. He had been derided at the Royal Geographical Society for suggesting that Lake Victoria was only twelve miles across, having misidentified some islands as the opposite shore, and for trying to bribe a cartographer to make Lake Kyogo, on the Upper Nile, appear larger than it was, a blatant act of self-aggrandizement. It was also common knowledge that the wound on his face had not been caused by enemy fire but by his Sudanese cook, who had saved his life by shooting an attacking warrior with a revolver but in the process grazing Chaillé-Long on the face with the bullet.

Yet all the posturing and exaggeration was unnecessary. Chaillé-Long had indisputably gone farther south than any other foreigner in the Khedive’s service, showing the grit and determination so admired by the British and earning a letter of approbation from Gordon himself, published in the New York Herald . And he had no need to embellish his experience of fighting: Jones had respect for anyone who had been through the bloodbath of the American Civil War, and he knew that Chaillé-Long had been in at the sharp end. Beneath the foppery and affectation, he had seen the look in his eyes that he knew well from men who had faced death on the battlefield, and he had also seen the pearl-handled Colt revolver beneath the cape. Of one thing he was certain: Chaillé-Long was not a man to be trifled with, and Jones knew that, having made the decision to approach him in the first place, he was now committed to seeing this through with that man in the cape and top hat looming over him, whatever the outcome.

The captain of the boat whistled gently and pointed to the shore. Chaillé-Long waved back and drew himself up. “Now, Monsieur Guerin, if you will be so kind as to instruct us, Jones and I will assist you in donning your contraption. We have less than four hours until dawn, when we shall suddenly be conspicuous. We have no time to lose.”