Decipher (17 page)

Read Decipher Online

Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
7.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
“The Sphinx was known by many names. Abul-Hol was its Arabic name,” Scott said down the phone. “It means Father of Terror. When the Canaanites in the second millennium B.C.E. journeyed from Harran, in southern Turkey, and worshipped at the Sphinx they called it HWL. BW meant ‘place' so ‘Abul-Hol' might be a corrupted form of ‘BW-HWL.' Making its name: The Place of HWL. But what on earth ‘HWL' means I don't know. ‘Hor-em-Akhet' was another name, meaning ‘Horus on the horizon.' ‘Seshep-ankh Atum' means ‘The living image of Atum.' It was the Greeks who shortened Seshepankh and gave it the form we still use today:
The Sphinx.”
There was a prolonged silence from the other end of the line. Scott pressed the phone in closer to his ear as he pulled himself up to the table. He wasn't sure if the line had gone dead. “Hello … ?”
“That's great, Dr. Scott,” the barely restrained voice of Sarah Kelsey replied, “but it doesn't actually help me.”
“I'm sorry. It's just—well, shit! You're digging under the Sphinx!” Scott said enthusiastically.
There had been few pleasantries when the call was connected. This Sarah Kelsey sounded like one single-minded, determined woman. Since she was hard at work and probably stifled by the oppressive desert heat, Scott could forgive her most things. But her abrupt nature made her telephone
manner seem rude. It was grating. “What
do
you need?” he asked quickly.
“For a start, how do I get inside this tunnel? Is there a precedent for this type of thing? Y'know, building a tunnel and then filling it in for no real reason?”
“Oh, sure,” Scott said warmly. He eyed everyone else around the table. They were all on tenterhooks, listening in on the speakerphone. Matheson had a pad and pencil at the ready and sketched everything Sarah said about the site in a valiant effort to make up for the fact there was no picture. Gant had gone off to try and kick some butt into getting a vid-phone link up and running, but so far, no luck.
“In A.D. 820 when Abdullah Al-Mamun, Caliph of Baghdad, explored the Great Pyramid, he smashed his way through the eight-foot casing to see what was inside,” Scott recalled. “What he found was a passageway, but his way was blocked by a succession of six-foot-long granite plugs that were inserted during the building of the Pyramid.”
“Did you say during the
building
of the Pyramid?”
“Yup.”
“Why?” Sarah snapped, irritated. “What's the point?”
“Beats me,” Scott replied. He fielded questioning eyes from around the table, Hackett's most notably of all. How the hell should he know? He didn't. know everything.
“What did he do, this Al-Mamun?”
“He tunneled his way past the plugs through the softer limestone that the Pyramid was made out of.”
Sarah groaned. There was some kind of noise, like she was inspecting something. Then they heard: “Oh, well, that's no good. I'm not sure the ground above it could take that. We're gonna have to try and drag it out.”
“What exactly have you got there?” Ralph asked quickly.
“Who is this?” Sarah demanded defensively.
“Ralph Matheson, engineer.”
“Is there anyone else on the line I should know about?” the geologist asked suspiciously.
Reluctantly everyone else around the table let out low, deflated greetings. Like kids who'd been caught in a game of hide and seek.
“Thank God I wasn't talking dirty,” Sarah said. “Okay, I
got a granite plug. Four feet across. I have to assume, based on Richard's detail about the Pyramid that it's six feet long. I hope to God there's only one of these things. And around the rim of the plug there seems to be a layer of what I can only describe as … salt.”
“Salt?”
Scott was intrigued. “When Al-Mamun finally did get into the chamber after tunneling past the plugs, he found it encrusted with half an inch of salt. No one knows why.”
Sarah continued: “Okay, the tunnel seems to have been originally hewn out of the bedrock, then it was faced with huge limestone rings each weighing in the region of, I'd say, a hundred tons. The workmanship is identical to that of the Sphinx's two temples, only the blocks over there are about two hundred tons each.”
“That's incredible,” Matheson said, amazed. But no one else seemed to appreciate that. “Even today,” he pointed out, “there are only four cranes in the world capable of lifting that kind of weight.”
“And that's
above
ground,” Sarah chipped in on her end of the line. “How were these hundred-ton stone rings moved below ground?”
It was a fair question.
Scott thought on this as he handled one of the Carbon 60 crystals from the myriad laid out before him across the table. Now that he had it in his hand one thing was clear. The writing wasn't cuneiform. It had wedges, that was true. And certainly many of the forms could be called pictograms and they were reminiscent of hieroglyphics. But there was a subtlety and a sweeping curvature to much of the writing which could only be described as acinaciform—the writing was scimitar-shaped. Crescented. Like great arcs leading from point A to point B with minute details crammed under the arching banners as if whole themes and ideas were being expressed in as concise and compact a way as possible. Though quite what those ideas might be frankly eluded him.
What Scott needed to do was catalog and group the characters while assembling the debris and trying to make out a coherent text from the pieces. He stood the crystal on end, and that was when the idea struck him.
“A standing stone …” he announced.
Hackett was intrigued. “A what?”
“Archeologists call them
stele,
or standing stones. There's one in front of the Sphinx. In any case, they have information inscribed on them that sometimes can prove useful to an excavation. A lot of the monuments at Giza are notorious for their complete absence of writing. This tunnel sounds like no exception. But sometimes a standing stone was erected at its entrance.” He raised his voice. “Sarah, you said you're still clearing out the rubble?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful with your pick-axes. There might be a stone laid out on the ground somewhere—”
“About five feet tall?” she interrupted. “Needle-shaped?”
Scott hesitated. “Yes …”
“Oh, we already found that.”
“Well, there's probably writing all over it.”
“There's a little.”
Scott was quick. “Can you send it through?”
Suddenly there was a beeping on the line. “I got a call on the other line. Can you hold? Thanks.”
The line went dead. Scott eyed the rest of the team. Thumb-twiddling seemed to be the only option until—
“Hi, you still there?”
“Yes, Sarah, could you—”
“Listen, I gotta take this call.” She sounded flustered. “That'll have to do for the brief tour of the site. I'll have someone take a photo of this inscription and fax it through. Nice talking to you. Bye.”
The dial tone moaned at them next. Hackett set his phone down first. Stood and rubbed his back. “Wonderful woman,” he noted sourly.
 
As cables and wires were trailed in with halogen lamps, stands and assorted gear, Douglas scratched his head in utter frustration and bellowed down from his vantage point at the top of the well: “Where's this fucking Carbon 60, Sarah?”
Sarah shrugged. “Pull out the plug and see.”
“That could take all goddamn night.”
“Better get to it then,” she said simply. “Call me when it's done.” She tied on a rope and climbed the ladder to the surface. Took her phone back out and tentatively stepped away
from the frenetic activity. Nervously, she asked: “Hello? Rip, you still there?”
“Sarah!” came the distant reply.
It was a strong voice. Familiar, though Sarah had taken a moment to recognize it. It was deep. Somehow soothing. Yet experience had already taught her that it was also the voice of a man who was dangerous. Some nights they had lain awake and talked for hours, in bed, after making love. Her ear pressed against his chest. Listening to the reverberations throughout his body as he spoke. Listening to him breathe. She had been bracing herself for the vision. That moment when she would see him again.
She hadn't expected to talk to Rip Thorne by phone.
“How are you?”
She was standing in a circus. There was a new archeological find behind her. A startling new form of carbon somewhere beneath her. An eminent linguistic anthropologist tearing his hair out in Geneva. Men wielding guns. Protests. And that was just everything she was clinging to right now to stop herself from thinking about him. The man who had torn out her heart and danced a jig on it. How did he expect her to feel?
“I'm fine,” she said simply. Asshole! she snarled in her mind. “How long have you been here?” she probed. “You are here, in Cairo, aren't you?”
“Yes, I'm here,” he replied smoothly. “I'm down at the AOI headquarters—brokering a deal.”
Brokering? That meant someone else was involved. Aside from Rola Corp. and the Egyptian government … Who?
“I thought you were coming out to the site.” She hadn't intended to sound hopeful.
“Business, honey. You know what business is like.”
Yes. She knew what business was like. Especially where it concerned Thorne. And even more so the AOI, the Arab Organization for Industrialization. The place where gleaming army APCs and fighter planes sat ominously floodlit late at night. The place that gave an actual physical manifestation to the phrase: a military-industrial complex.
“Hey, listen, Sarah,” Thorne said. “Why don't we catch up?”
“I don't think that's a good idea.”
“Sure it is. I'm all finished up here. What do you say to dinner?”
“Dinner?” She checked her watch. Six-thirty.
“You're staying at the Nile Hilton, aren't you? I'll pick you up say, eight o'clock?”
“Okay.”
“I'll meet you in the foyer.”
“Fine.” It wasn't.
“And Sarah … I'm glad you're here.”
She could feel the blood rushing in her ears. The sensation that so effectively blocked out all other noises. Why could she not just say no to him? It was like falling into a trance. She felt so foolish. So helpless.
She hung up. Stepped out of the blue marquee to witness the ruddy red glow of the day's dying embers. On the ancient plateau of Giza, once known as Rostau, the Sphinx was king—and guardian to something buried deep underground.
Sarah eyed the man-lion stiffly. So preliminary indications showed this thing was thousands of years older than they had first thought. Stone-faced, it was like looking at Thorne. What were they both hiding?
 
They waited by the fax machine. And waited.
The Sphinx was 240 feet long, 38 feet wide across the shoulders and 66 feet high, Scott told all present in an attempt to fill the vacuum of expectation. It had the worn and battered visage of a man. The body of a lion. It had seen a lot of action. Its nose had been shot off a few hundred years ago by the Mamelukes who used it for target practice. Facing stones had been placed to rebuild eroded sections of the monument. When the Islamic fundamentalists caused a virtual civil war in 2005, the structure fell into further disrepair. The earthquake in 2007 hadn't helped matters, but reports stated how well the Sphinx had weathered earthquakes through the ages. It seemed it had been built to last. And last it had, for millennia.
It was a fact that in 10,500 B.C., at dawn, had any of the monuments at Giza officially existed then, the constellation of Leo would be seen rising on the horizon, directly between the front paws of the Sphinx, itself a giant lion. While Orion
would have been at the highest point in the sky, appearing directly above the three pyramids. It was a cyclical event that was not destined to be repeated until A.D. 2500.
And therein lay more of the mystery.
For from the air, the three Giza pyramids were laid out in exactly the same arrangement as the three stars that made up the “belt” in the constellation of Orion. Construction of the Great Pyramid, Cheops's Pyramid, was so precise that a cigarette paper couldn't be slotted between the stone blocks. This was made all the more confounding by the fact that the larger 10- to 15-ton blocks were at the top and the more manageable 6-ton blocks were at the bottom. Every side was 755 feet along each length. It was 461 feet high, which gave the same ratio as the circumference of a circle to its radius. Some said it represented a scale model of the northern hemisphere of the earth. Some disagreed.

Other books

Camellia by Diane T. Ashley
Close Your Eyes by Robotham, Michael
A Girl Undone by Catherine Linka
Love Lessons by Harmon, Kari Lee
Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark