David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jones kept his eyes glued on the waters below the riverbank. “Thoughts are for officers, Colonel. I’m just a lowly sapper.”

Chaillé-Long thought for a moment, shook his head, then flicked his butt into the river. He leaned back and smiled. “But not any longer, it seems. You say you’ve been associating with Arabs. Tell me, Jones, are you a deserter?”

Jones coughed. “Before Major Mayne left on his mission to Khartoum, he arranged for me to return to the railway construction unit that I’d been working with when I first arrived in Egypt after service in India. He thought railway construction would be safer and would see me through the campaign. He was probably right, but as far as I could see, neither the railway nor the river expedition were ever going to reach General Gordon in time, so I tossed a coin and stayed on the river. Everything was going swimmingly until the Mahdi’s boys finally caught up with us at a place called Kirkeban and there was a terrible twenty-minute battle. One moment I was bayoneting and bludgeoning dervishes, and the next thing I knew I was floating down the river all alone, with only the corpses of my mates for company. I fetched up at the same pool where the major had found the crocodile temple and the clue in the inscription that he gave me for safekeeping. I stayed there for days, weeks, living off abandoned supplies. I’d been knocked on the head and was half-crazed. We’d heard rumors of a giant crocodile in the pool, and I became obsessed with the idea of catching it, conceiving all manner of devices to do so. The Leviathan, we’d called it, after the biblical monster. Then Kitchener and his camel troops arrived, and seeing them put some sense into me. You know Kitchener?”

Chaillé-Long nodded. “Rising star of the Egyptian army. The man who has sworn to avenge Gordon.”

“I heard him say it. That he’d kill a dervish for every hair on Gordon’s head. But I knew that could only be a long time in the future. It was Kitchener himself who told me that Gordon had been killed and that the British force was retreating back to Egypt and abandoning the Sudan to the Mahdi. It was then that I knew that Major Mayne wouldn’t be coming back, that it was a forlorn hope for me to wait for him. Then just before we reached the British camp at Abu Halfa, on the Egyptian border, I gave Kitchener the slip. I remembered what had happened after the battle of Kirkeban, and how it would look with me having disappeared. An army recovering after defeat is always looking for scapegoats and is never generous to soldiers they think have done a runner. I’d been cashiered before, out in India, even made sergeant once before being reduced. I was too cocky for my own good, mostly, with too many opinions for certain officers to stomach. But this time it was more serious. I didn’t fancy having survived the dervishes at Kirkeban only to face a firing squad of my own mates at Abu Haifa.”

“That was more than eight years ago,” Chaillé-Long said. “What have you done since then?”

Jones peered at him and stroked his stubble. “Master of disguise, I am. That’s what Major Mayne used to call me. Within days of our reconnaissance missions behind dervish lines, I’d look the part, with a beard and a turban. My mother was Anglo-Indian, the daughter of a British soldier and a Madrassi woman, so I’m naturally dark skinned. I knew enough Madrassi to pass myself off as an Indian, and enough Arabic from Major Mayne and our time in the desert to get by. I learned to live like an Arab, to blend into the folds of the desert and the crowded souks of Cairo, to live without being noticed.”

“And you read books. You learned about the ancient Egyptians.”

“I joined with the fellahin, who are used as laborers on digs, and found work at Giza, clearing out the pyramids. I went to Amarna and became foreman of a French excavation there. No questions were ever asked; I looked the part of an Arab, and with my engineering skills I could do the job well. I spent days in the Cairo Museum, working from cabinet to cabinet, memorizing everything I saw. I learned to read hieroglyphics.” Jones lowered his voice. “I learned everything I could about him .”

“Him?”

Jones leaned forward, almost whispering. “Long-face. That’s what the Canadian Indians called him. We had them with us on the Nile expedition, you know, voyageurs, brought over from Canada by Lord Wolseley to navigate the boats. On the way up they’d stopped at Amarna and seen the crumbled statues of the pharaoh who had built the city, that strange face with the big lips. In the Mohawk language they called him Menakouhare, long-face. The name stuck with me.”

“You mean Akhenaten.”

“The Sun Pharaoh,” Jones said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Father of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. The one who went south to the desert as Amenhotep the fourth, high priest of the old religion, and came back as Akhenaten— He through whom the Light shone from the Aten, the Sun God . He went south with his wife, Nefertiti, and his companion Moses, the former slave who had the same revelation and took away his vision of the one god to his people. They were in the crocodile temple, the one Mayne found beside the pool on the Nile. I saw it myself, steeled myself to go inside in the weeks I spent there alone after the battle, when my mind was unbalanced. I saw the wall carving, with Menakouhare at the head of the procession, the Aten symbol before him. I saw the gap where Mayne had taken the plaque that I showed you. Akhenaten had his vision in the desert, but his City of Light was not to be there. It was to be here, out of sight and hidden in the heartland of ancient Egypt. And we will be the first in three thousand years to see it.”

Chaillé-Long put his hand on his hip and eyed Jones keenly. “When we have made our great discovery, you and I will be much in demand. We will be on the front page of the New York Herald and the Illustrated London News , and around the world. People still reeling from the death of General Gordon, from his neglect , I say neglect , will see our triumph as his apotheosis, as proof that he was in Khartoum for a higher purpose, not only to succor the people of Sudan but also to safeguard the clues to a discovery that will be for the enlightenment of mankind. I have little doubt that on my return I will be called to the House of Representatives, even the Senate. You should come with me, Jones. America is a place for a man like you. There are railways to be built, rivers to be dammed. With my connections and good word, I can propel you on a path to riches and fame, unfettered by the barriers of class and etiquette of your own country that keep men like you in the gutter.”

Jones turned to watch Guerin’s bubbles, the detonator cord still slack in his hands. The lofty intentions, the talk of taking the world by storm, of business collaborations with Guerin, could all be a smoke screen, a play by a man who when the time was right, when the discovery was certain, could as easily sweep others aside and take all the glory for himself. Jones did not know whether the style of the man in front of him was that of a true gentleman or merely a veneer of decency. He had seen what war did to men, and civil war was the worst, war that pitted brother against brother, men who after that could plumb no greater depths. The America that Chaillé-Long spoke of was a place where ambition might know no bounds, but only in the shattered morality that was the aftershock of the Civil War. He had heard stories of latter-day robber barons carving out fiefdoms for themselves in the West with the Colt and the Winchester. It would be an easy matter on a night like this when the time was right for a man like Chaillé-Long to use that revolver beneath his cloak to dispose of them all — a British army deserter long thought dead, an obscure French inventor who seemed intent on keeping his very existence secret, a Nile riverboat captain and his boy — adding a few more to the cargo of unidentifiable corpses swept down annually by the Nile into the swamplands of the delta.