David Gibbins - Pyramid

The program allowed a virtual fly-around of the site, and Jack swept his fingers across the screen to get as many angles as possible. The wreckage had been rendered in metallic gray to distinguish it from the sediment in which it had been partly buried. He could clearly see the lines of protruding frames and the regular mounds that were all that was left of her iron deck knees, the results of a refit that provided the only concession to modernity in a hull otherwise built in time-honored fashion using timbers and copper nails. The sarcophagus and the ship’s sixteen guns had been rendered in white, highlighting the elements with the greatest inert weight that might have affected the ship’s freeboard and stability. In a way that Jack had not appreciated on the seabed, the visualization showed how all the starboard guns had shifted to the port side and how the sarcophagus was also off center, as if straining on the cordage that must once have held it in place.

There was little doubt in Jack’s mind what had caused the wreck. Lanoswki’s simulation had shown that even with extra compensating ballast, she would have been dangerously unstable with the sarcophagus on deck, three tons of granite that would have unbalanced a ship of little more than 200 tons deadweight. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine the sea as it must have looked on that winter’s day when the ship had come to grief in the bay. Her last known ports of call had been Valetta in Malta and then Leghorn, modern Livorno, far up the Italian coast. At that time of year, Wichelo may have encountered strong northeasterlies all the way from Alexandria, and decided to claw his way up the western shore of Italy rather than attempting to sail due west from Malta with the risk of being blown into the North African shore and any awaiting corsairs. From Leghorn it would have been plain sailing with a northeasterly mistral behind him across the Gulf of Lyons, an exhilarating run when all went well, with the hope of rounding the southern coast of Spain into the Strait of Gibraltar. For some reason, perhaps because the wind became a gale, perhaps because the recent refit had given the vessel more leeway than the captain had been used to, perhaps because the lading of his cargo had made the ship less maneuverable — probably a combination of all these factors — his course and the coast of Spain converged just north of Valencia. Had they rounded the next headland, they might have made Valencia. As it was, the bay where they came to grief offered no shelter and only a jagged rocky shore dropping off to great depth, so there was little hope of grounding the ship or saving its cargo.

The sarcophagus had been lashed down and wedged with beams but would still have been vulnerable to a sudden roll. The captain would have done his best to avoid broaching to — coming beam-on to the waves — knowing that a roll could cause the sarcophagus to strain against its lashings and break free. Although the ship’s guns were only lightweight six- and nine-pounders, they still weighed over half a ton apiece and must have been part of the problem in her final moments. The eight guns on her starboard side broke free of their carriages and crashed to port as the ship heeled over, adding to the displaced weight of the sarcophagus and making recovery impossible. But then as the port gunwale became submerged, she took on such a weight of water so quickly that she came upright again as she sank, keeping the sarcophagus from tumbling overboard and providing enough cushioning in the hull structure to protect it from damage when the ship hit the seafloor.

The sudden swamping had been fortunate for the preservation of the sarcophagus, but less so for the crew. As always Jack reflected on the human cost, on the terror of those final moments. It probably took only seconds for the ship to sink, taking with it anyone belowdecks and sucking down the others in the vortex. It was a minor miracle that anyone should have survived, and more so that it should have been Captain Wichelo himself, a man assumed to have gone down with the ship but whose pencilled note years later on the back of the watercolor had shown otherwise. Jack felt certain that his survival was an accident of fate; there would have been no time for anyone deliberately to abandon ship. He remembered the time he had spent in the crow’s nest of a cadet training ship when he had learned to sail, and imagined that Wichelo might have scrambled up to the maintop in the search for a safe anchorage and then been thrown clear when the ship heeled over and the masts dipped into the waves.

Wichelo’s disappearance after coming ashore was not difficult to fathom. He was an experienced captain who had taken Beatrice many times across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, who must have looked death in the face before. He would have been bound by the immemorial custom of the sea that a captain is always the last to leave his ship. That custom was so deeply embedded in the seafarers’ code that even a hint of suspicion among friends and colleagues that he had put his own life before others might have been too much for him to bear. He might also have been doing a favor to his beneficiaries, knowing that the insurance claim would stand a better chance of succeeding if he were not there to give evidence of unsafe lading that as an honest man he might have been unable to conceal. He would have known that he had taken a risk in accepting the cargo, and that the price of failure was absolute.

Jack imagined the scene with Colonel Vyse on the docks at Alexandria, a stone’s throw from Qaitbey Fortress and the place where the Geniza poet Halevi had landed from Spain in the twelfth century. Wichelo would have been a good captain for Vyse to approach, one with an established reputation who perhaps had taken antiquities before for clients to England. Vyse might have been less concerned with the suitability of the ship itself for his particular cargo, his blunderings in the pyramid suggesting that he lacked a good eye for the logistics of transport. But he was a wealthy man who would have offered Wichelo a handsome remuneration, perhaps enough to secure a comfortable retirement capped by the small fame of being the man who had brought the centerpiece of the British Museum’s collection safely from Egypt. If Wichelo had declined, there would have been others eager to accept. He would have known that his ship was not ideal and that the summer sailing season was coming to an end, but he was swayed by the rewards. It was always a precarious business being a ship’s captain, with the lion’s share of the glory if a venture succeeded but a quick fall to ignominy if things went wrong.

Jack touched the screen to bring up Lanowski’s second CGI, an animation that he had not wanted to see until he had worked it through in his own mind. He smiled as he saw the ghostly image of the ship, exact in every particular of a brig’s standing and running rigging. The attention to detail was just like Lanowski. He had shown Wichelo gambling on a full spread of canvas, with the rudder hard over to port in an attempt to steer parallel with the coast. As the bay loomed, the topsails were furled and the ship suddenly broached on to the waves, heeling over and swamping. As if in an X-ray through the hull, he could see the sarcophagus shift and the starboard guns break free and tumble to port, and then the ship submerging, coming upright again, and hitting the seabed almost a thousand meters below in a cloud of silt before sliding to a rest.

Jack stared at the screen. “Bingo,” he said quietly. He now felt fully prepped for what lay ahead. He took the iPad apart and slotted it into his backpack, and then brought his mind back to the present and to Captain Macalister on Seaquest . He was as embedded in nautical tradition as Wichelo had been. As captain he had final say on all operations carried out on board, not just navigation but also diving and exploration.