David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack was already staring past her into the gap beyond the shroud, seeing the ladder and hole at the top of the wall that he knew led to the geniza chamber. “You lead, Maria. I can’t wait.”

Jack parted the hanging shroud and followed Maria and Aysha into the enclosed section they had created at the end of the gallery. Within the shroud the air was noticeably warmer, the heat emanating from two portable angle-poise lamps bent low over a wooden table set up in the center of the space. Two briefcases were open on the floor, and the table was covered with Maria’s tools of the trade as a paleographer: protective plastic sheeting for manuscript fragments, tweezers, a magnifying glass, gloves, and a laptop. Its screen showed a blown-up section of text that Jack recognized as Hebrew by the serifs on top of the letters. Beyond the table the stepladder that he had seen from outside rose to a rectangular opening in the wall some three meters above them just below the ceiling. An electrical extension cable snaked over the rim into the darkness beyond.

Jack leaned over and stared at a black-and-white photograph propped up on the table. “That’s Solomon Schechter,” he said, pointing at the bearded man in a black suit hunched over what looked like a pile of old rags. “I know the famous picture of him surrounded by the boxes and piles of Geniza fragments in Cambridge University Library, but I haven’t seen this one before.”

“That’s because Jeremy’s just unearthed it,” Maria said. “He’s become quite a sleuth, you know. For a long time it was thought that no photos survived of Schechter’s time here in the synagogue in 1896, when the full contents of the Geniza were pulled out of that hole above us and laid in piles all over the floor for him to inspect. In fact, the Scottish twin sisters who had led him here, the widows Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, had brought a box camera with them and took some snaps. Jeremy trawled through all the surviving family he could find in the search for old photo albums and eventually came up trumps. Geniza scholarship has for so long been a man’s world, but this photo really reinforces the role of those two women in setting the whole thing in train. It was their search in Egypt for old manuscripts that led them to show fragments from the Geniza to their friend Schechter in Cambridge.”

Jack glanced at her and at Aysha. “With you two here, it looks as if that role of women in Geniza scholarship has come full circle.”

“There at the beginning, and there at the end,” Maria said. “I feel as if we’re closing one of the most incredible chapters of historical discovery ever.”

Jack peered at the figure in the photo. “He looks a little overwhelmed.”

“You’d be too, faced with almost two hundred thousand fragments of manuscript. Overwhelmed, but overjoyed. It became his life’s work at Cambridge, where as you know the Geniza archive is one of the university’s prized collections, studied by scholars of Jewish history from around the world.”

Jack looked at her shrewdly. “I thought the Geniza chamber had been completely emptied. What exactly are you doing here, Maria?”

She glanced at Aysha. “Put it this way. One thing I learned years ago from your husband, Aysha, before you’d even met him. When I was a student I worked on one of Maurice’s projects in the Valley of the Kings. I was collecting papyrus debris still lying in a storage chamber that had not only been robbed in antiquity but also cleared out by Howard Carter’s team in the lead-up to the discovery of Tut’s tomb. That is, never assume that earlier archaeologists have picked up everything.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

“Do you remember our project in England a few years ago at Hereford Cathedral, where Jeremy and I found the Vinland map showing Viking exploration in the Americas? Everyone thought the famous chained library contained all there was to be found in the cathedral, but then we discovered that sealed-up stairwell with its trove of manuscripts.” She reached over and tapped the wall beside the desk below the opening, producing a hollow sound that evidently came from the Geniza chamber beyond. “It’s what Jeremy and I always tell our new students at the institute. Never forget to tap the walls. Sahirah al-Hadeen, one of Aysha’s friends who’s studying the architecture of the synagogue, a graduate student who spent a term with us in Oxford, got into the chamber and did what I just did, on the opposite wall that forms the exterior of the synagogue. As soon as she realized that there was some kind of space beyond, she contacted Aysha and then me.”

“Is she with us now?”

Aysha gave Jack a grim look. “Earlier this afternoon she was arrested and imprisoned. One of my contacts still employed in the antiquities service got a message through to Maria just before we arrived. That’s what we were talking about while you were waiting below in the synagogue. She’s in the Ministry of Culture, which now has a security wing with cells and interrogation rooms where there used to be conservation labs. She was arrested on a trumped-up charge of dealing in antiquities without a license, because when she was detained they found a fragment of manuscript in her briefcase that she was in fact taking to Alexandria for conservation in the institute, there no longer being any facility in Cairo. But the reality is far worse. Sahirah is from one of the oldest Cairo Jewish families, and the truth is that she’s a victim of anti-Semitism. Have you seen the extremists with the black headbands, Jack? They’re terrifying. We watched them beat up a man outside the synagogue last night just after I arrived, and it was like those images of SS thugs laying into Jews on the streets of Germany in the 1930s. Did you see the posters plastered all over the precinct wall? Some of them came and did that last night. They’re calling for all Jews to leave Egypt or face being asset-stripped and imprisoned. Even the worst of the caliphs didn’t go that far.”

“We should be getting her out,” Jack said. “Not digging around in here.”

Maria put her hand on his arm. “The best possible thing we can do for her is to finish up here. The manuscript she was carrying when she was arrested was a scrap she managed to reach in the hole she made in the wall of the chamber where she heard the hollow sound. If they torture her and threaten to arrest her family, she might reveal where she found it, and the last thing she’d want would be to provide the thugs with an excuse to descend on this place. She’d want us to be here now, getting out everything we can before that happens. It’s become personal for me too, Jack. When I lock up here later tonight, this synagogue will be empty and perhaps doomed to destruction, but we don’t want it to be as if a thousand years of history were closing down. Removing these last shreds of the Geniza is not an ending, but a thread of continuity. The history represented here has survived darkness before, and we must not let these people get their way. That’s why, when Sahirah contacted me, I wanted to come out here to help in any way I could, in the eye of yet another storm of ignorance and destruction.”

Jack paused thinking hard. “We didn’t bring a satellite phone from Alexandria in case we were searched at a checkpoint and had it confiscated, potentially compromising the IMU secure line.” He took out his cell phone and looked at the network indicator. “What’s mobile reception like?”

Aysha shook her head. “Pretty well nonexistent outside Cairo. I can’t raise the institute or Maurice, who’s in his Land Rover heading toward the Faiyum excavation as we speak. The extremists have been sabotaging the transmitters across the country.”

Jack pocketed his phone. “Okay. This is what I’m going to do. First thing tomorrow when I’m back on Seaquest , I’ll get the IMU board of directors to rescind our offer to return the sarcophagus of Menkaure to Egypt unless they release Sahirah, immediately. That should put some fire under the antiquities director while he still has any power. The return of the sarcophagus was going to be the big event of his probably very short career. We just have to hope that we can still play him before the extremists take over.”