David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack looked at her with concern. “Will you be all right here alone?”

Aysha turned to him. “That beggar you gave money to at the entrance to the synagogue precinct? He’s ex-Egyptian special forces, a cousin of mine, Ahmed. He has a Glock 17 concealed in those rags. He won’t let Maria out of his sight until she’s sitting on the plane for Heathrow tomorrow morning.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to be coming back here to rescue Maria.”

“You wouldn’t need to. I’d be here first.”

Maria paused, and then quickly kissed him on the cheek. “See you in Oxford when this is over.”

Aysha gave them both a wry smile. “Inshallah.”

Half an hour later Jack ducked out of the Land Rover into a back street and followed Aysha quickly down a passageway behind the museum. While they had been in the synagogue, Cairo had erupted again, the low cloud over the city reflecting the orange glow of fires and the roar of the traffic punctuated by the wail of sirens and bursts of gunfire. Aysha spoke to the two armed guards at the entrance, showed her pass, and waited as one of them unlocked the door. Moments later they were in a long, ill-lit corridor and then ascending a staircase that came out at the rear of the ground-floor exhibits hall. The entire museum seemed sepulchral, with many of the cases shrouded with sheets.

“The last antiquities director ordered this, the last archaeologist , that is, before he was ousted by the new regime,” Aysha said as they hurried on. “Everyone here was fearful of a repeat of what had happened to the museums in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covering the exhibits at least buys some time, keeping them out of the eye of the extremists, who see virtually everything in here as un-Islamic. Here we are, Room Three, the Amarna Room. The sculpture you want is in the far left corner under the shroud. I’ll wait here in case a guard comes by and I have to explain what we’re doing. You’ve got ten minutes, maximum.”

She switched on the light, and Jack left her pacing the entrance to the room. The air smelled musty, tomblike, and Jack had the chilling sensation of being at the end of an era, with the mummies and sculptures and other priceless artifacts celebrated the world over about to be entombed again, swallowed into the ground or smashed to pieces within the ruins of this place. He passed the famous unfinished sculpture of Nefertiti, her beautiful face looming out of the darkness, and then he saw her again in a relief sculpture, no longer so beautiful, with the same elongated profile and same bulbous features as her husband. He stopped at the far corner in front of a shrouded form that towered over the rest of the room, and he carefully pulled off the sheet. The sculpture rose above him just as he had remembered it in the travelling exhibition in London, only here the features were even more deeply accentuated by the shadows. It was a representation utterly unlike that of any other pharaoh from ancient Egypt, with the extended chin, the thick, half-smiling lips, and the bulbous eyes, as if it were from another place and another time altogether.

He had not known for certain why he wanted to see this statue again, but now he realized why. Before she had left for Jerusalem, Rebecca had talked to him about Baldwin the Fourth, the Crusader king who had ruled the city with his Frankish barons in the twelfth century, soon after the Geniza poet Halevi had met his end there. Together they had watched the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven , in which Baldwin is portrayed in a golden mask, concealing the leprosy that had ravaged his face and would eventually kill him. Jack had remembered the wooden Burundi face masks with their hooded eyes that he had seen in Sudan, ceremonial masks with a history that may have extended back thousands of years to the time when the pharaohs had tried to conquer the desert. It was there that Akhenaten had experienced his revelation of the Aten, had cast off his priestly role and pushed aside the old religion. Had the tribesmen seen his extraordinary features and created their masks in his image? Or had he seen their masks, the masks of those who lived under the radiance of the Aten, and then had he and Nefertiti adopted them for their own, symbols of their own allegiance to the new religion? How else to explain the transformation of Nefertiti in the sculptures? Instead of signs of illness, as many had suspected, was Akhenaten instead portraying himself like the Burundi, seeking the anonymity that a mask gave him in the light of God?

Jack looked up one last time at the sculpture. He did not know whether he had just experienced a blinding revelation, or whether the idea of the mask just pushed Akhenaten further back into mystery. It was as if the pharaoh himself were playing games with him, tempting him to take one step further into the unknown, then showing him that the trail was an illusion. It seemed to reflect everything that had happened over the last few months, of tottering on a knife-edge between success and failure, between unlocking a mystery that Jack knew lay somewhere beneath their feet and having to walk away with that ambiguity in Akhenaten’s face, that mask over reality, seared into his mind.

His phone hummed. It was a text from Costas. He quickly read it, and suddenly coursed with excitement. The dive from Seaquest to raise the sarcophagus was on for tomorrow afternoon. The IMU Embraer jet was due at Alexandria at dawn tomorrow, and the Lynx helicopter was already waiting at Seville airport in Spain to transfer them to the ship. Rebecca would understand his trip to Jerusalem being postponed, and Maria had been right; it would have been wrong for him to jump on the first plane to Tel Aviv after receiving Rebecca’s text, as if he had been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to watch out for her. And she was used to the last-minute change in priorities that often took place when Jack was following too many leads at once.

As he put away his phone, he smelled the Geniza on his hand. He remembered Maria at the bottom of the chamber, eyes ablaze, voicing her passion for the project, for Jack to hold on to his vision of what might lie ahead. He felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, and swallowed hard. After reading the letter of Yehuda Halevi, he had begun to understand what it was that had overwhelmed Solomon Schechter and the other Geniza scholars, not so much the sheer quantity of material but the humanity it represented, preserved with breathtaking immediacy. It had been as if Halevi had been writing the letter to him, brimming with curiosity and a fascination with the world around him that struck right to the core of Jack’s being. He felt revitalized, more determined than ever to pursue his own quest. He remembered those last lines of Halevi, the extraordinary account of the tunnel, and he felt a burning excitement. But meanwhile he had another priority, to do all he could to secure the release of the Egyptian student who had been the first to make the discovery. The sarcophagus might give him only a small amount of leverage, but he would use it to his utmost. He needed to make contact with the outside world as soon as possible.

He turned and walked quickly back to the entrance to the room. Aysha already had her finger on the light switch. “Seen what you wanted to see?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Right. Twenty minutes to midnight curfew. We need to get out of here.”

Jack sat back in the passenger seat of the Lynx helicopter, glanced at the helmeted figure of Costas asleep in the seat opposite, and stared out at the shimmering blue of the sea below. At Valencia airport he had turned down the pilot’s offer to take over the controls, relishing instead the half hour of downtime before they hit the bustle of Seaquest and all the demands of the day ahead. Jack knew that he would be walking off the helipad into a teleconference to discuss the imprisoned Egyptian girl, and Costas would be straight down into the engineering lab to make sure that all the equipment was as ready as it could be for the dive that afternoon.