David Gibbins - Pyramid

“See what I mean?” Costas said, standing beside him. “Looks like old Menkaure took a whole fleet with him to the afterlife.”

Jack shook his head. “This isn’t Menkaure. This vessel is characteristically Late Bronze Age, dating more than a thousand years later. And it’s not a river barge. This is a full-blown seagoing ship.”

“No kidding.” Costas stood on a stone block beside Jack, allowing him to see in at Jack’s level. “My God. I see what you mean. Deckhouse at the back rather than the center, wide beam, deck planking. And that’s a mast, stepped down, and stern steering oars. A cargo ship?”

“Do you remember first seeing the timbers of our Minoan wreck off the north coast of Crete ten years ago, where we were excavating when Maurice found the Atlantis papyrus? It’s taken most of the last decade to conserve and record the timbers, but I reviewed the final report just before coming out here. This boat is astonishingly similar in almost every detail. This isn’t an Egyptian ship. It’s a Minoan ship, or at least one built to Aegean specifications or by a Minoan shipwright.”

“How do you know the date?”

“See the row of empty jars in the hold?”

Costas peered over. “Aha. Early amphoras. Like on our Minoan wreck.”

“Canaanite jars,” Jack said. “Second half of the second millennium BC, fifteenth, maybe fourteenth century BC. And I can see a so-called pilgrim flask beside the deckhouse, a typical Aegean pottery oil container you see on Egyptian wall paintings depicting trade with Aegean merchants.”

Costas stepped off the block, eased his way around Jack, and came to the prow of the hull. “Take a look at this. It’s got an evil eye.”

Jack dropped down and moved alongside Costas, then stepped back against the wall for a better view. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “That clinches it. Fantastic.”

“Talk to me, Jack.”

“Look closely. That’s not an evil eye. It’s the Aten, the sun symbol. If you look really closely, you can see it’s even got the radiating lines etched into the planks.”

“Akhenaten?”

“It could only be. It’s the first certain evidence we’ve had of him since that hieroglyphic cartouche at the entrance to the tunnel on the Nile.”

“What’s the Aegean connection?”

“You remember Maurice showing us the Aegean mercenaries he identified on the tomb painting from the mummy necropolis?”

“Who could forget it. The bare-breasted amazons.”

“Well, I think that dynastic marriage in the fifteenth century BC with a Minoan queen brought the Egyptians more than just a ready army of mercenaries. One of the few technologies the Egyptians lacked was seagoing ships, apart from vessels used on the Red Sea that look more like strengthened river craft.”

“Was this a war harbor?” Costas suggested. “A secret naval base?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack murmured. “Not exactly. These aren’t warships; they’re not galleys. They’re also not deep-bellied merchantmen. They’re more like passenger transport vessels, definitely designed for deep-sea sailing with room for plenty of provisions.”

“Ships of exploration?” Costas suggested.

Jack stared, his mind racing. It was possible . “This boat looks as if it was abandoned hastily in the middle of a refit, with tools still left lying around.”

Costas had moved out of sight beyond the prow. “Take a look around the corner, Jack. There’s an empty berth, and in front of it a ramp leading down to where we think the artificial harbor must have abutted this part of the plateau, the exit now completely sealed in.” Jack followed him through and stared at the open space, at the wooden formers that looked as if they had been hastily cast aside. He shook his head, astonished. “One pharaoh goes in dead, another one comes out alive.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just another hypothesis. A best-fit scenario. We know that Menkaure came here dead, probably already embalmed, ready for the rituals of the mortuary temple and then interment in his sarcophagus in the pyramid. What we don’t know yet for sure is how this place figured in Akhenaten’s journey over a thousand years later. Nobody has ever conclusively identified his tomb or his mummy. One possibility is that he may be buried here, and that was what this underground construction was really all about, but my instinct says no. I see this, whatever he built here under the plateau, his City of Light, as something that he saw through to completion and then sealed up before departing.”

“Maybe he mocked it up for any suspicious observers as if he were constructing a funerary complex, a pretty normal thing for a pharaoh to do, when in reality he was planning to do a runner,” Costas suggested. “Maybe that was his final opt out. Come up here as if dead, in a funerary barge like the pharaohs of old, but instead of going to the afterlife he leaves very much alive on a vessel equipped for a long sea voyage.”

“It’s possible. The ship that’s still here was abandoned in the middle of refitting, as if it too had been intended for departure but there was no time to make both vessels ready. Akhenaten must have known his life was in danger. A man like the caliph Al-Hakim, who had done beneficent things, had perhaps endowed some kind of library or seminary at this spot, but had made mortal enemies in the old priesthood for his desecration of their temples and banning of their rituals. Maybe departure was his only option once he had achieved his ambitions and seen the Israelites safely resettled in Canaan.”

“Have you voiced this idea to Maurice?”

“He says that for a man who founded a new religion, created a new capital city, and seems to have engineered the destruction of his entire chariot army to let the Israelites escape, anything is possible. Akhenaten was ancient Egypt’s wild card.”

“Just as long as he took Nefertiti with him too.”

Jack looked at the ship again, making sure his camera took in as much as it could of the astonishing sights around him. It was as if they had walked into an ancient Egyptian shipyard while the workers were out on a lunch break. He turned back to Costas. “Okay. Definitely worth it. Where do we go from here?”

Costas nodded back the way they had come. “The passageway from the wharf carried on beyond the point where I broke through into these chambers. There might once have been entrances from these sheds into a complex under the plateau, but if so they’ve been sealed up. We could spend hours sounding out the plaster on the walls and not find them. Every entrance seems to have been sealed up, as if this whole place had been mothballed. That might fit in with your theory.”

Jack followed Costas back through the ship chambers and clambered up the jumble of fallen masonry where they had entered. He heaved Costas up on his shoulders and then strained as he took Costas’ outstretched arm and hauled himself into the passageway. He suddenly felt exhausted and woozy, as if he had experienced a rapid loss of blood pressure, and he leaned against the wall of the passageway and took a drink from his hydration pack. He realized that he had not drunk anything since they had passed beyond Cairo, and he made a mental note to keep hydrated.

He pushed off and followed, his unsteadiness having passed. Ahead beyond the western limit of the boat chambers he could see Costas’ beam waver, and then stop. As he neared he could see that the passageway had ended, carrying on only as an aperture at head level about half a meter high and a meter wide that extended into the darkness as far as their beams could penetrate. He remembered three months before, staring down a similar slit from under the pyramid, looking in exactly the opposite direction to their position now. Somewhere between the two was the space that had been lit up so brilliantly by the light that had come down through the pyramid.