David Gibbins - Pyramid

He steadied himself, injecting a small blast of air into his stabilizer jacket. “What is it?”

“Found something.”

Jack shook his head, staring back down the slope. The coral heads were shimmering with schools of fish, and in the distance he saw the flash of a whitetip reef shark. “Not yet. But I want to look at those outcrops down there. It means going a bit deeper, and I know we can’t risk extending our no-stop time with the boat having no recompression chamber. But even if we only have five minutes, that might be enough.”

“No. I mean I found something.”

Jack turned to him and caught his breath. Costas was kneeling on the sand holding an object in front of his camera. It was a rusty old rifle, the stock riddled with shipworms and the metal receiver caked with marine growth. Jack lifted it from him, staring at the distinctive magazine and bolt. “Lee-Enfield Mark III,” he said, turning it over, seeing the magazine cutoff and long-range volley sights. “First World War issue, early on, before 1916.”

Costas held up a rusted charger clip containing five staggered cartridges with rimmed bases. “There’s more where this comes from, Jack. Strewn down the slope behind me. It looks like the remains of several crates.”

“You sure?”

“All the same. Lee-Enfield rifles and .303 ammunition.”

Jack’s heart began to pound. Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Egyptian wife, Aysha, had been researching old archaeological reports in the Cairo Museum and had come across a diary written by an archaeologist friend of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had served alongside him as an intelligence officer during the First World War and had assisted with the Arab Revolt. Aysha had nearly put the diary aside when her eye was caught by a remarkable sketch, and she had read the accompanying entry. While loading arms from shore at a clandestine transit point in the Gulf of Suez, the dhow carrying the arms had capsized, and in the scrabble to recover what they could, the officer had pulled up something else from the shallows, something much older.

Jack had been at the institute in Alexandria when Aysha had shown Hiebermeyer the sketch, and had seen his jaw drop. With its curved shape, the object could have been medieval, perhaps Saracen, but there was one particular feature that had convinced Hiebermeyer that it was ancient Egyptian, dating no later than the end of the New Kingdom in the late second millennium BC; if so, it was a prestige object owned by someone of wealth and high rank. Jack had pinpointed the stretch of coast to within a few kilometers and was pondering how such an object could have been lost there, so far from the heartland of Egypt, when Costas had looked up from the submersibles manual he had been studying in a corner of the room and had recited a passage from the Old Testament Book of Exodus. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gone electric. For a few moments all Jack’s frustration at their unresolved pyramid quest had gone out the window. Any lingering sense that this new quest was deflecting his attention from the bigger prize, from what lay beneath the pyramid, was overcome as soon as he dropped off the boat for the first dive. Over the past three days, since discovering the site where the officer had reported the artifact, and then finding more evidence of that astonishing biblical event, the possibility of what lay buried in the seabed below them had eclipsed all other thoughts.

Jack stared ahead. The words that had been running through his head all through the dive surfaced again, and he spoke them slowly. “ ‘We bade Moses strike the sea with his staff, and the sea was cleft asunder, each part as high as a massive mountain. In between we made the others follow. We delivered Moses and all who were with him, and drowned the rest.’ ”

Costas swam alongside him. “Come again, Jack?”

“Do you remember in Alexandria quoting the Book of Exodus on pharaoh and the Egyptian chariots chasing the Israelites?”

“Advantage of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing. I know a lot about submersibles, and a lot about the Bible.”

“Well, my quote was from the Qur’ān, Al-Shu’Arā,’ The Poets.”

“Huh,” Costas replied. “Same prophet, same God.”

“And same pharaoh,” Jack replied. “That’s who ‘the others’ means in the quote. ‘Lord of the East and West, and all between.’ I don’t know about the parting of the sea, but we’re about to find out if the nub of the story is historical reality.”

“You think that pharaoh’s our guy? The one we were chasing in the desert? Akhenaten?”

Jack checked his contents gauge. He had only ten minutes of air left. He pointed ahead to the cluster of coral heads. “There’s only one way to find out. Let’s move.”

Jack powered ahead of Costas, finning hard as he dropped down to thirty-five meters depth, then forty. It was deeper than he had thought it would be, and they were going to have less time. The diffused light at this depth meant that the brilliant colors of the coral heads closer to shore had now been reduced to dark shades of blue, making it more difficult to distinguish any unusual features. With only a few minutes remaining, Jack’s thinking automatically switched to free-diving mode, as if he had taken a single breath of air on the surface and had to maximize every moment on the seabed. He reached a central point above the coral heads and sank to the sand. There was no question that the heads were unusual, almost as if they were lined in ranks extending down the slope, more densely concentrated than on the surrounding seabed. He began to look between them, finning quickly over the gaps, scrutinizing the sand for artifacts. Nothing .

He glanced back at Costas, who was a few meters upslope and shining the torch on his strobe array at one of the coral heads as he floated slowly around it. “I’ve drawn a blank,” Jack said. “There could be material under the sand, but it could be meters deep. I’m going to ascend slowly just in case a wider view gets anything, and then we’ve got to go.”

“Wrong, Jack.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“I mean, wrong . It’s not buried. It was once buried, but now it’s all around us. Get over here.”

Costas began taking photos, the strobes flashing as fast as they could recharge. Jack glanced at the warning light on his dive computer, and then finned over toward him. “I see coral,” he said. “An unusual amount at this depth, but that’s it.”

Costas switched off the torch on his strobe array, and the brilliant colors that had been lit up in the artificial light were reduced to blue. He pointed to a complex growth of coral at the base of the head. “Now look.”

Jack stared hard, dropping down in front of a jumble of coral that extended out in front of the head. It reminded him of marine growth on the decayed iron structure of modern wrecks, preserving shapes that would otherwise have disintegrated. He remembered the clandestine First World War shipment at this spot; they might be looking at other material that had fallen off the dhow and become encased in coral after a century underwater.

He shifted slightly sideways, and then he saw it. “A wheel,” he exclaimed. “I can see the spokes of a wheel, and the curved line of the rim.”

“Not just one wheel, Jack. There’s another one on the opposite side. And there’s a curved surface in between them, and a shape like a coral-encrusted pole sticking out front.”

Costas dropped behind Jack, taking pictures of him in front of the head. Jack stared in astonishment. “My God.”

There was no doubt about it . He was looking at the preserved form of a chariot encased in coral. “The wheel,” he said hoarsely. “The spacing of the spokes suggests a six-spoke wheel, typical of the New Kingdom. I think we just hit pay dirt.”