David Gibbins - Pyramid

“But like Ptolemy’s library, it could have acted as a magnet for other collections, an accumulator,” Jack said, his mind racing. “I’m thinking about something else, Maurice, about the Minoan queen of Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, about your theory of her legacy in the bloodline that led to Akhenaten and the other great New Kingdom pharaohs. Maybe the Minoan legacy in Egypt wasn’t just about a dynasty and a mercenary army of amazons. Maybe it was far more profound than that, a legacy of preserved knowledge that passed to Egypt after the volcano of Thera destroyed Cretan civilization and the priests fled over the sea to the south from their ruined palaces.”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “Palaces, but not palaces. People have wondered about the function of the Minoan palaces ever since they were discovered, about the complexes of storerooms, about the labyrinth.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment. “Imagine what that might contain.”

“But then it was all lost,” Costas said.

Hiebermeyer tapped the screen where the image showed the empty limestone plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s still there. Maybe it went underground .”

Jack stared, his mind racing. Of course . “Ahkenaten’s City of Light,” he exclaimed. “It’s exactly what Akhenaten would do. He’s a pharaoh who’s created a whole new religion, who has built himself a new capital at Amarna, who has dedicated massive new temples at Luxor and Heliopolis. Refounding the library at Giza, removing it to a more secure location from that old mud-brick complex, bringing it under the aegis of his new cult center to the Aten and putting it underground would be completely in keeping with his vision. Jacob, can we see your plan again?”

Lanowski tapped a key, and the image transformed to the Aten symbol from the plaques with the pyramids behind, transposed on the actual topography of the plateau. “It fits exactly,” Jack said. “The central sun symbol falls exactly on the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, the place from which the rays emanate. That’s got to be it.” He glanced at Costas. “That must be what we saw down in the tunnel under the pyramid.”

Costas nodded. “Lit up by sunlight coming through those air shafts in the pyramid, reflected off polished basalt mirrors that magnified it somewhere deep beneath the plateau.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Now for the egress point of that tunnel on the Nile.”

Lanowski reeled off a twelve-figure set of coordinates. “That pinpoints it to within twenty meters. I simply superimposed the image of the plaque on a modern map, maintaining the exact alignments of the pyramids.”

Costas peered at the map dubiously. “You really think it can be that accurate?”

Hiebermeyer and Lanowski both turned and stared at him. Jack put a hand on his shoulder, grinning. “You want to watch what you say. We’re outnumbered by Egyptologists here.”

“I think,” said Lanowski slowly, eyeing Costas, “given that the ancient Egyptians were able to align a pyramid with geometrical precision, if they really intended this to be a map, then we can trust them.”

Costas raised his hands. “I was only asking. Mea culpa.”

Lanowski tapped a key, and a satellite image of Lower Egypt came into view. The Nile Delta and Cairo were clearly visible above the belt of green that marked the course of the river through the desert. He tapped repeatedly, coming closer and closer to a point on the Nile to the south of Cairo. “Google Maps is still down for Egypt, but I kept open the link to Landsat that my friend at Langley sent me when I was researching the Red Sea chariots site. Take a look at this. My coordinates come out almost exactly on this ruined structure half fallen into the Nile. Aysha?”

“My research shows that it’s early nineteenth century, thought to have been built by Napoleon’s forces when they took Egypt,” she said. “It would have been a ruin by the time Corporal Jones and Chaillé-Long and the French diver undertook their foray in 1892. There’s nothing else like it on that stretch of the west bank of the Nile. There’s no doubt that this is the fort they saw and that Howard Carter mentioned in his diary entry. The entrance to Akhenaten’s tunnel should lie somewhere very close to that spot.”

“Bingo,” Lanowski said quietly.

Jack’s excitement was mounting. “Good work, Jacob. Now let’s do some geomorphology on this. We need to be thinking about the water level.”

“I’m already there,” Lanowski replied, his eyes gleaming. “Obviously, there’s the issue of changes in the course of the Nile over three thousand years. But this is one of those places where the position of the bank has been almost static, as we can infer from the discovery of the tunnel entrance apparently below the modern bank of the river.”

“It might not have been chance,” Costas said thoughtfully. “Akhenaten’s engineers must have known their river intimately. If they were going to build a tunnel entrance, they’d have chosen somewhere stable.” He glanced at Jacob. “After all, these were the guys who built the pyramids. You said it.”

Lanowski turned to Costas, his face suffused with pleasure. “ Very good, Costas. You’re learning.”

“What about the river level?” Jack asked.

“The latest sedimentological research suggests that the New Kingdom floodplain was lower than has generally been believed, though of course we have to factor in the annual flooding and lowering of the Nile that’s now controlled by the Aswan Dam. My calculations suggest that a tunnel built into the bedrock at that point could have been dry for part of the year, and partly flooded for the remaining months when it might have been navigable.”

“You mean an underground canal,” Jack said. “Something that would have allowed barges to be poled or wall-walked right up to the pyramid plateau.”

“Exactly. We’ve already seen a precedent for it in the canals and artificial harbors dug for each of the pyramids when they were constructed, only they were aboveground.”

“But our tunnel doesn’t lead to a mortuary temple,” Hiebermeyer added.

“What about the present water level?” Jack asked.

“My model suggests that the tunnel will be completely submerged, though it may well rise once it reaches the plateau. It will connect with passageways and chambers that have always been above the water level and remain dry today. Ground-penetrating radar survey in the past has revealed nothing like this under the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, but that may only reflect the limitations of the technology. It would be possible for the roof of the chambers to be many meters deep, beyond the range of the radar, but for the chambers still to be above the water table. And there’s no doubt that they exist. You and Costas saw through to some kind of space when you were under the pyramid.”

“I just hope you can break through from the Nile,” Lanowski said. “When that French diver blew his way in over a hundred years ago, he may have caused a rock slide.”

“We can’t know that until we get there,” Jack said, squinting at Costas. “And my colleague usually has a few bits and pieces up his sleeve.”

“C5,” Costas said. “A diver’s best friend. I used it to liberate a few slabs from Sea Venture ’s armaments store.”

Hiebermeyer was still staring at the screen. “Do you really think you can make it? I mean, more than three kilometers through that tunnel, completely underwater?”

Costas nodded. “Physically, yes. As long as the tunnel is clear beyond the entrance, as long as our scooters work, and as long as our rebreathers hold out.”

“But?”