David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack looked scornfully at the dressing on his arm. “That’s nothing. Hardly even hurts.”

“Right.”

“Has Macalister said when we’re leaving?”

“He’s finishing the formalities with the Spanish authorities now. We should be under way within half an hour, course set for home. He wants to do a complete shakedown on the derrick and winch apparatus before she goes to sea again. He never wants to see an escapade like ours again.”

Costas leaned over and slapped the base of the derrick, the arm now secured to the deck in preparation for the voyage into the Atlantic. “It’s hard to believe our dive in the submersible was only ten days ago, isn’t it? I meant to say, Jack, I’m not sure if I said it properly, but—”

“Don’t mention it,” Jack replied, wincing as he shifted. “Don’t mention anything about diving at all. Now that really is painful.”

“Well, some other friends of yours have arrived to cheer you up.”

The hatch had opened again and Hiebermeyer, Aysha, and Lanowski came out, Hiebermeyer looking decidedly uncomfortable in a shirt and tie and Lanowski affecting an attempt at formality that looked like an ill-conceived safari suit. They all sat down around the table and Aysha opened her laptop, showing Jack a photo.

“That’s Maurice cutting the ribbon, with the mayor of Valencia and the Spanish minister of culture officiating,” she said. “There were about a hundred TV cameras behind me when I took this.”

Hiebermeyer loosened his tie, the sweat beading on his face. “Not my favorite way of spending an afternoon, but it was a good outcome.”

“Are they still planning to keep the sarcophagus on the waterfront?”

“They’re building a museum around it, with UNESCO and IMU providing the funding. They’ve taken up your idea of showing the sarcophagus within a virtual representation of the pyramid chamber as well as on the wreck, so the viewer can alternate from one to the other. The multibeam sonar data will allow a half-size model of the wreck, and there are plans for a permanent camera on the wreck site for live-stream imagery. That was an inspirational idea, Jack. To cap it all, Seaquest is due back next season to raise two of the bronze guns for the museum, one of them the cannon you spotted with the East India company markings.”

“I still hope that one day the sarcophagus can go back to Egypt,” Jack said.

“We all do,” Aysha said. “But it’s a pretty remote prospect now. Have you seen the news?”

“I’ve just been watching Al Jazeera. It looks like the apocalypse.”

“Our only hope now is military intervention. It can’t destabilize the region any more than it is already. Israel has just carried out a massive preemptive airstrike against extremist positions in Syria. The U.S. 6th Fleet is now within easy bombing and cruise-missile range of Cairo, and the president is due to make an emergency address at the White House within the hour. We all just hope that if there is an intervention, it’s on a big enough scale to destroy the extremists as a fighting force, and not result in a long-term insurgency war.”

“Have you managed to make contact with Sahirah’s parents?”

“They know she’s safe in England.”

“I just wish we could have gotten them out too.”

“I wish we could have gotten everyone out. But you have to draw the line somewhere. They’re hugely grateful to you and Costas and Jacob.”

Jack had a flashback to the final desperate minutes of their escape from Cairo. His ears were still ringing from the gunfire, but he felt nothing about those he had killed, men whose humanity was already long extinguished, only a surge of satisfaction that they had managed to get the girl out and had escaped themselves without fatality. He gave Aysha a penetrating look. “We arranged for her to go straight to Oxford, where she’s got an open-ended position at the institute funded by IMU to work on our Geniza finds. Jeremy thinks that she stands a very good chance of getting a place as a graduate student and that there could be a doctorate in it for her.”

“Ah. Speaking of Jeremy.” Aysha tapped the laptop. “While we were at the ceremony, he sent me an enhanced image from your film of the papyrus that Costas found on the dead caliph’s skeleton. He and Sahirah have been working on it day and night since they got to Oxford. Maurice and I brainstormed the translation in the Zodiac on the way back here from Valencia this afternoon, and we think we’ve nailed it. We have no doubt from the appearance of the hieroglyphs that it dates from the New Kingdom period, to the time of Akhenaten.”

Jack had forgotten his arm and stared at her. “I can’t wait.”

She opened a text file and began to read:

All wisdom comes from the Aten and is with him forever.

Who can count the grains of sand in the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of existence?

Who can discover the dimensions of heaven, and the width of the earth, and the depths of the sea, and the entirety of wisdom?

I come to you like a stream into a river, like a water-channel into a field.

I said, I will water my orchard and drench my garden;

And lo, my stream became a river, and my river became a sea.

I will make wisdom shine like the dawn,

And leave it for future generations.

They were silent for a moment. “It’s Akhenaten’s manifesto, his creed for the City of Light,” Jack said. “He’s telling us that his library comes through the Aten, and that he bequeaths it to us. Those words could be inscribed above the entrance to any great library or university today, only here it was one built over three thousand years ago beneath the desert sands of the Giza plateau.”

“It’s even more incredible than that.” Lanowski’s voice was hoarse with emotion. “I’ve heard those words before, many times in my yeshiva as a boy, growing up studying the Talmud and the holy scriptures. Substitute Lord for Aten and those words are almost exactly the words of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom.”

“Hang on,” Costas said. “You’re telling me that a Jewish sacred book was originally an Egyptian text written in hieroglyphs?”

Aysha stared at him. “Some of the oldest fragments of the Ben Sira come from the Cairo Geniza, and it’s thought to have been first set down in Hebrew in Egypt, in Cairo or Alexandria, during the Hellenistic period. But this shows that its composition dates almost a thousand years earlier than that. They were one and the same. The revelation of the one god came at the same time to Akhenaten and to Moses, and their sacred texts spring from the same wellhead.”

“We’ve got another Geniza on our hands here,” Jack said quietly, shaking his head. “Thousands of papyrus scrolls. It’s going to take an army of scholars a lifetime even to begin to tackle it.”

“We’re ready, Jack,” Hiebermeyer said, eyeing him determinedly. “Aysha and her team are the best hieroglyphics people anywhere, and they’ll be training up more translators in preparation. The day that Egypt opens up again is the day that we’ll be down there.”

“And remember, there’s a guardian,” Costas said, his voice thick with emotion. “Little Joey’s in sleep mode, but he’s triggered by motion sensors, and I’ve programmed him to put the fear of God into anyone who tries to get in there. He’ll make the curse of King Tut’s tomb seem lame.”

“And meanwhile, mum’s the word,” Aysha said. “Nobody outside our group knows anything about it.”

Hiebermeyer nodded, looking serious. “One slip of the tongue, one inadvertent lapse online, and word of a discovery like this will spread across the Internet like wildfire, and before we know it the extremists will find it and torch the entire place.”