David Gibbins - Pyramid

The hanging shroud on the upper floor parted, and Aysha stood at the balustrade of the balcony. “Okay, Jack. Maria’s nearly ready. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking how pleased I am that Solomon Schechter over a century ago arranged for the bulk of the archive to go to Cambridge University. I hate to think what the extremists would do to this place.”

“If they were true Muslims, they’d leave it alone. Moses was one of our prophets too, and to Muslims the Jews are People of the Book, those to whom scripture has been divinely revealed. Did you know that the baby Moses was supposedly found at this spot, in the reeds in a tributary of the Nile that ran just behind this place?”

Jack walked toward the stairs. “Nice story, but it was two thousand — odd years between the Exodus and the reemergence of the Jewish community in medieval Cairo. It’s hard to believe that anyone would have remembered the exact spot. Also there’s a lot of uncertainty about what was going on in the New Kingdom period where Fustat now lies, and whether there was a settlement or perhaps some kind of temple establishment. The site for the story is more likely somewhere north in the marshlands of the Nile Delta, good papyrus country.”

Aysha stood with her hands on her hips. “What about that famous Jack Howard leap of faith? Maurice says that’s your biggest asset.”

“Faith in my instinct, not in every old legend,” Jack said, mounting the stairs and grinning at her. “Anyway, I’m being Lanowski. Where’s the hard data?”

“Well, here’s something fascinating for you. You remember the diary of Captain Edmondson, the archaeologist-turned — intelligence officer whose notes led you to the Gulf of Suez? A year before that botched arms shipment, he was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in Cairo, working in the same cipher office as his friend T. E. Lawrence, both of them bored out of their minds. Things perked up one day when high command detailed him to act as a discreet escort for a very important visitor who wanted to come incognito to visit the synagogue. Well, the VIP rumbled that Edmondson was following him, and when he reached the synagogue he let him catch up and invited him inside. The VIP was none other than Lord Kitchener, newly appointed secretary of state for war, visiting Egypt only months before he went down with the cruiser Hampshire in the North Sea. It turns out that there were half a dozen other men waiting in the synagogue, all of them getting on a bit in years. Kitchener told Edmondson that they were all in some way associated with General Gordon of Khartoum and came together every few years in the synagogue to celebrate his memory. One of the other men present was an American, Colonel Chaillé-Long.”

Jack stopped on the stairs. “How extraordinary. Gordon’s former chief of staff, the explorer of Lake Victoria?”

“By now an elderly man, and a famous author.”

“Of lavishly embellished tales, as I recall. Something of a dandy.”

“And Edmondson mentioned someone else. I’ve been itching to tell you, Jack, but I wanted to wait until we were here. It was a Royal Engineers colonel well known to you: John Howard.”

Jack stopped in his tracks, staring at her. “My great-great-grandfather? Incredible.” He looked down, thinking hard. “He’d retired by then, but he traveled several times to the Holy Land. He was a friend of Kitchener’s and had known Gordon. They were all Royal Engineers together. It makes sense.” He stared back at the floor of the synagogue, suddenly seeing those men standing there in his mind’s eye. “Amazing.”

“They came here to the synagogue because they believed in the Moses story. But, being engineers and practical men, they decided to find proof. Apparently, one night almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1890, they had gathered together here for the first time, intent on excavating beneath the synagogue: Chaillé-Long, the then Colonel Kitchener, Captain Howard, and a Colonel Wilson, who had died since.”

“That would be Colonel Sir Charles Wilson,” Jack murmured. “Intelligence chief on the Gordon relief expedition, but before that a surveyor in Palestine who had discovered ancient structures beneath medieval Jerusalem. I prepped Rebecca on him before she went out there, as well as on Gordon and Kitchener. All of them were linked by their archaeological work in Palestine. In 1883 Gordon took a kind of sabbatical there, dispirited by his lack of progress in the Sudan and more interested in seeking proof of the Bible in the archaeology of Jerusalem.”

Aysha nodded enthusiastically. “They brought surveying equipment and digging tools and went out into the synagogue precinct. They’d been led to the spot by another of the colorful characters in Egypt at the period, Riamo d’Hulst, a self-styled count and subject of Luxembourg who was probably a German deserter from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and something of a shape-shifter. In 1890 while the synagogue was being restored and refurbished, he took advantage of the construction work to dig around the precinct. Following his lead, the British officers discovered indisputable evidence of a silted-up river channel. That doesn’t prove the Moses story, of course, but they did also find the plinth of an ancient structure. According to Edmondson, it contained the worn remains of a hieroglyphic cartouche. Finding something of a Pharaonic date was enough to convince them that they were at the right spot. Edmondson himself might have been able to decipher the hieroglyphs with his archaeological background, but he wasn’t able to see the inscription because the stone block had been removed in secret to England for safekeeping by Lieutenant Howard.”

“By Howard?” Jack exclaimed. “By my great-great-grandfather?”

“Do you remember any Egyptian antiquities on the Howard estate?”

Jack was stunned. Of course . “Yes, I do. On the edge of the fireplace in the drawing room. My father found it in a storeroom and didn’t know what to do with it. Egyptian red granite?”

“That’s what Edmondson said.”

“Does Maurice know about this?”

“Not yet. He has enough on his plate for the time being.”

“Well, it might just cheer him up. When I first brought him home for holiday from boarding school, he became obsessed with that thing. He used to spend hours with it, staring at it, sketching it. It was what really spurred him into Egyptology. We thought it was a relic of someone’s grand tour of the nineteenth century with no known provenance, the kind of thing that wealthy Europeans brought back to adorn their stately homes. But Maurice constructed all kinds of theories for where it might have come from in Egypt. And of course he translated it.”

“And?”

“It was Akhenaten. The royal cartouche of Akhenaten. The pharaoh of the Old Testament. The pharaoh of the time of Moses.”

The shroud parted, and a slim, dark-haired woman of about forty stepped out, reading glasses dangling from her neck and a pair of conservator’s gloves in her hands. “Evening, Jack. You look a little flushed. Excited to see me?”

Jack stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ve just had a revelation, Maria. In fact, a really big revelation. Out of the blue.”

“Sounds like Jack Howard,” she said, her Spanish accent giving the words added emphasis. “You can tell me once we’ve finished in here.”

Jack nodded toward the shroud. “This brings it back, doesn’t it?” He turned to Aysha. “Maria and I first met in the coffee room of Cambridge University Library after discovering that we were both there to study the Geniza documents. We haven’t looked back, have we, Maria?”

“Or forward,” Aysha added, eyeing him.

Maria put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Well, Jack Howard just wouldn’t be the man I know and love if he wasn’t always disappearing on adventures, would he? But before you disappear yet again, you need to come in here and see what I’ve got.”