David Gibbins - Pyramid

“Bingo,” Costas said. “Congratulations, Jack.”

“You spotted it.” Jack twisted around, staring. There were dozens of them, hundreds, a cascade of chariots down the slope. He turned back to the one in front of him. The flash of the strobe revealed an unusual color, a shimmer of pale gold emerging from the sand at the base of the head. “Good God,” he exclaimed.

“What is it?”

“Get close up and photograph it. There’s about a ten-centimeter-square section of gold there, maybe electrum.”

“I can see a wing,” Costas muttered, the strobe flashing. “The end of a wing.”

“It’s the falcon-god Horus,” Jack exclaimed. “Wait till Maurice sees that. The symbol of a pharaoh.”

“It can’t get much better than this, Jack.”

Jack pushed off, rose above the coral head, and scanned the others. “I’m trying to understand how this happened. How these chariots were preserved like this.”

“I’ve got it. Think bodies at Pompeii, Jack. Bodies preserved as hollow casts in the volcanic ash as it solidified over them. Check out the base of that coral head: You can still see traces of the mud that once encased the chariots, now rock-hard. You remember this morning we were scanning the cliff from the dive boat, thinking how unstable it looked? I think those chariots came hurtling over the cliff and caused a massive landslide, enveloping them in earth and debris as they fell to the seafloor. The material in that cliff may contain a volcanic dust like the pozzolana of the Vesuvius area, something that caused the mud to solidify underwater.”

“Got you,” Jack said. “Like hydraulic concrete.”

“Exactly. The hardened masses were buried in sand, but as that shifted with the current over the centuries the masses were exposed, some of them resisting erosion long enough for coral to form and preserve them in the way we see them today. That one with the gold fronting happened to be eroded in such a way that the coral formed over those features just as the mud casing was about to wash away completely, so the features of the wheels and pole are preserved in the shape of the coral. The other masses we can see are probably shapeless lumps now, but raise them to the surface, fill them with plaster, break them open, and hey, presto, you’ve got a pharaoh’s chariot army reborn.”

Jack remembered the lines of the Book of Exodus that Costas had quoted a few days before: and the Egyptians pursued, and were in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horsemen, his chariots and his horsemen…and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea…And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them . He felt a huge rush of excitement, and punched the water. His dive computer began beeping, indicating that he was now at his no-stop limit. “Time to go. We’ve done all we can here. A fantastic result.”

“A few more pictures, Jack. Be with you in a moment.”

Jack glanced at his contents gauge. He was well into the red, with only twenty bar remaining. He knew that if he breathed hard now, he would soon feel the resistance of an emptying tank. He needed to relax, to moderate his breathing but keep it at a normal rate in order to expel as much nitrogen as possible as he ascended. He finned off the seabed, his hand ready on the vent on his stabilizer jacket in order to expel air as it expanded, to keep his rate of ascent no faster than the speed of his exhaust bubbles. The one thing they could not afford was a decompression incident, with the nearest chamber hours away. He looked up, aiming at the metal bar suspended ten meters below the boat as a decompression safety stop. He saw the two hanging regulators from cylinders of pure oxygen on the boat that would help to flush the nitrogen further. With Costas now having exceeded the no-stop time for his depth, they had all the more need of the oxygen now.

Jack looked down as he rose and saw the repeated flash from Costas’ strobes as he took as many photographs as he could, finning quickly between the outcrops and dropping deeper to get the best angles. Along with the video from the GoPro camera on his forehead, the images should give them all they needed for a press release that would astonish the world. Jack was already running through the timing; the release could be only after Maurice had wound up his Faiyum excavation, as even with the euphoria of discovery and Egyptian archaeology once again at center stage, the new antiquities director would be bound to pick at the fact that he and Costas appeared to have carried out an archaeological project without his authorization. The fact that they left the site undisturbed and had been within their legal rights as recreational divers, with even the dive boat under surveillance from the Egyptian navy, would carry little weight. Jack knew that he would have to ensure that all IMU assets were out of Egypt before the storm broke.

By then Hiebermeyer’s institute would probably have been forcibly closed anyway, and a fresh outburst from the antiquities director would have no effect on the prognosis for future excavation permits, which were already as bleak as they could be. Better by far that Jack give the board of directors what they needed to ensure that IMU’s departure from Egypt was accompanied by a major archaeological revelation, and not overshadowed by a political firestorm. It would be better still if Maurice was able to add to it with a last-minute discovery of his own from the mummy necropolis, something that Jack now hoped for fervently as he looked ahead to the next hours and days.

Jack’s mind returned to the past, to the trail of discovery that he had come out here to follow. He thought of the pioneers of archaeology — amateurs, surveyors, soldiers, those who had traveled to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century seeking what he and Costas had just found, proof beyond reasonable doubt of the reality behind the Bible. Yet he had begun to feel that history had judged those men wrongly, had focused too much on their Christian zeal and their role as imperialists rather than their wider humanity. He thought of the group of officers he had been shadowing as he followed the trail of Akhenaten through the desert of Sudan to the pyramids at Giza, and he remembered what Costas had said: one prophet, one god . Perhaps for those men, the story of Akhenaten, of his conversion to the worship of the one god, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was about more than just biblical reality. These were men who in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan had come up against the terrifying rise of jihad, and who also knew the extremism that could be preached by followers of their own religion, not least among the zealots and missionaries they had seen in Africa. Perhaps their true zeal had been to reveal the single unifying truth behind both traditions. Perhaps their quest had been fuelled by the burning desire for discovery that drove Jack, but also by an extraordinary idealism. Then, as now, anything that could throw the spotlight on the similarities, on the common tradition, might push the world back to reason, might strengthen the common ground and force the extremists to the margins. Jack stared back down at the receding forms of the chariots on the seabed, and he felt another surge of adrenaline. He was back on track again, taking up where those men had left off. Archaeology had more to offer than just the thrill of discovery, far more, and the dark cloud over Egypt and the Middle East made it all the more imperative that he do everything in his power to see this one through. He would not let it go .

Costas’ voice crackled through the intercom. “A wing and a prayer, Jack.” He came up alongside, showing where his contents gauge was nearly at the bottom of the red. “Are we done here now? I mean in Egypt? We can’t do better than this.”