David Gibbins - Pyramid

The first few times it had happened after she had recovered consciousness, she had managed to look around, above the terrified faces and twisted bodies, and had seen the cupboards filled with chemicals and the half-torn posters on the walls advertising forthcoming exhibitions in the museum. She had been here before. She knew she was in the archaeological conservation labs of the ministry, now used as detention cells by the extremists who had been the driving force behind the new regime. She was only a short walk away from the Old City and the synagogue where they had snatched her, only a stone’s throw from family and friends. Yet she knew she may as well be a world away, beyond rescue. Only a few weeks before, these labs had been a hive of activity, filled with colleagues of hers in the archaeological service. The people around her now had been smartly dressed politicians and civil servants. Those torn posters and soiled clothes might just as well be archaeological relics themselves of a time before Egypt had begun to fall before the forces of darkness and the people began to stare into the void.

The light shone hot against her face, and she knew it was her turn. A hand pulled her head and jerked it upright, the fingers smelling of khat. A man spoke harshly in English. “Open your eyes.”

“Turn away the light,” she said hoarsely. “And speak to me in Arabic.”

“You are a Jew. We will not speak to you in the language of the Prophet.”

“My family has lived in Cairo for two thousand years. Arabic is the language we speak.”

She heard the man talk to another in the distinctive dialect of Sudanese Arabic, and the light moved away. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two bearded men in front of her wearing black headbands, both with handguns and one carrying a powerful torch. The closest man waved a tattered piece of paper in front of her face. “What is this?” he said, still speaking in English.

She squinted at it. “It’s a twelfth-century document from the archive in the synagogue,” she said. “I was taking it away for study when I was brought here.”

The man leaned forward and spat a stream of khat juice into the face of a woman on the floor, and then turned back. “You’re a liar. Our informant told us you were stealing holy documents of Islam, and he was right. This is written in Arabic. Even the stupidest of my men can see that. This is a page of the holy Qur’ān.”

She looked at him defiantly. “It’s true that there are pages of the Qur’ān in the archive. They’re one of its greatest treasures. But there are also thousands of other documents in Arabic. If you and your fighters are as holy as you’d like to think you are, then you’d have memorized the Qur’ān and you’d see that this is not a holy page. In fact, it’s a letter from a wealthy Jewish matriarch to one of her three lovers, encouraging him to keep his Muslim faith because she knows that for him it is the true route to God.”

The man spat again, dropped the fragment of paper, and held her by the chin, coming close to her face. “We know who you work for. You are a spy for the Zionists. We have seen you go into the synagogue with that woman from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria.”

She said nothing. The man raised his pistol and cocked it beside her ear. “Answer one question, and I will make this easy for you. There is a man we want, a so-called archaeologist who spied in my country when he was supposedly hunting for relics, and who is now on the trail of something we want in Egypt.” He let go of her chin, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled page from a magazine. He straightened it and then held it in front of her. It showed a picture of two men in diving gear on the side of a boat, one of them tall with graying dark hair and the other shorter and stouter. He pointed with the butt of his pistol at the taller one. “Where is this man?” he demanded.

She pursed her lips defiantly, saying nothing. He rolled up the page, tossed it aside, and then aimed his pistol at the woman he had spat on. There was a deafening crack and her head exploded, brains and blood spraying their legs. He turned back to her, held her chin again, and brought the pistol close enough that she could smell the smoke. “I will ask only one more time,” he snarled. “Where is Jack Howard?”

She continued to say nothing, sitting as upright as she could and staring defiantly ahead. The man waited for a moment longer, raised his pistol, and then swung the butt at her head, hitting her and throwing her violently sideways. For a brief moment she saw the fragment of ancient text lying on the floor beside the dead woman, and then she saw a terrifying rushing blackness.

And then nothing.

Twenty minutes after leaving Maria, Jack was crouched at the bottom of the Geniza chamber looking up at the aperture in the wall leading back into the synagogue. The space was cramped, an arm’s breadth across each way and some six meters high; it was like being inside a large chimney well in a medieval castle. He watched Maria follow him carefully down the rope ladder they had dropped from the aperture, her white protective suit shimmering in the light from the single bulb they had suspended from the top of the chamber. Jack’s own suit felt strangely insubstantial after the countless hours he had spent underwater in a Kevlar-reinforced E-suit, and he had to move and hear the crinkle of the plastic to convince himself that he was wearing anything above his own clothes. He shifted the respirator and clear plastic visor to get a more comfortable view, and then looked at his exposed right hand, already smeared with dirt, where he had cut off the glove and sealed the wrist with a rubber band. They had brought mini Maglites with them, but what he was about to do was going to be a matter of touch and feel, with bare fingers essential for the sensitivity needed to prize out what might remain of the ancient vellum letter in the hole in the wall.

Maria landed beside him and looked at the smear on his hand. “Solomon Schechter called it Genizaschmutz,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her respirator. “Dust, insects, decayed manuscripts, flecks of whitewash from the ceiling, desert sand, the residue of all those human hands sweating and smudging as they wrote, and of course mouse goo, stuck together with a gummy ooze from the vellum. It’s like pine resin when you get it on your hands. Almost impossible to get off.”

Jack looked up at the aperture, lit by the single stark bulb, their route out. “So this was filled up to the brim with manuscripts?”

“Virtually overflowing. They say the opening is up there so that the holy words in Hebrew go directly to heaven, like the soul. In reality it was the only practical place they could put the opening, like a giant rubbish bin. Even though the manuscripts were removed over a century ago, I still feel as if I’m diving into a well of history when I come inside here. Aysha is only a few meters away on the other side of this wall, but it’s as if we’re halfway back to the world of the Geniza, in a kind of shadowy netherland with all those faces and voices about to spring to life. I’ve never felt quite like this before in a medieval manuscript repository. In most cases, like the Hereford Library, the manuscripts were part of a scholarly library, so in your mind’s eye you walk back into a candlelit scriptorium or a monk’s study. Here, you walk back into a bustling Cairo street scene of the eleventh or twelfth century, filled with all the color and vibrancy that life can offer.”

Jack spied a fleck of lighter colored material sticking to the wall beside his face and put his forefinger on it, peeling it away with his thumb. It was a tiny piece of paper with a letter on it, a serif just visible. Maria opened up a small plastic box that she had taken from a pouch on her belt and Jack gently flicked the fragment into it. She closed the box and replaced it carefully in her pocket. “This is real archaeology, Jack. Creating a huge mosaic from the tiniest of tiny details. That single letter may float through history by itself forever, or it might just form the crucial piece in a jigsaw puzzle. With the Geniza, you never know.”