The Alignment Ingress (5 page)

Conrad climbed out of his jeep, slipped on his pack and looked around the dead graveyard of pharaohs under the stars. The cool desert air made him shiver.

Forty generations of Nubian royalty were buried here, and every royal Nubian tomb was housed within—or rather beneath—a pyramid. The problem was that the tombs were built and buried first, independent from the pyramids on top of them later. Some alignments were so off that the tombs weren’t even under their associated pyramid. Often the entrance to the tomb was a good way beyond the pyramid and chapel.

Indeed, everything was so poorly aligned that Conrad could only wonder if the effect was intentional.

Which was why the stars were a far better guide here than the eye.

Conrad took out his phone and held it up to the night sky. He clicked his modified Google Sky app icon. His screen now framed the stars like a window through the camera lens while a GPS readout fixed his location in time and space. He moved his thumb in a circular motion to “dial back” the stars to their positions around 950 BCE.

Eureka.

Based on his own celestial map, he was standing out in the open over the Queen of Sheba’s tomb, which had no pyramid, landmark or monument to speak of. That being the case, he had to find the stairway entrance.

His contrarian gut told him that since many of these Nubian tomb entrances were found outside their pyramids, it stood to reason that the stairway entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s tomb, which had no landmark, was actually beneath and sealed off by another tomb.

It made a wild kind of sense. It took a few calculations based on the alignments of his position, but he found the axis he was looking for. It pointed him forty meters away—to one of the cemetery’s several “anonymous queen” pyramids.

The pyramid was imposing enough, belonging to a Nubian queen and all. It was about 20 meters tall, made of solid sandstone and a cultural treasure. It was also, if his celestial calculations were correct, directly on top of the entrance to the lost tomb of the Queen of Sheba.

The stairway entrance to the surface pyramid was east of the surrounding wall and north of the pyramid’s central axis. Above the stairway was an offering chapel decorated with various reliefs, but nothing to suggest the identity of the anonymous Nubian queen it honored, let alone any secret Queen of Sheba tomb deep below it.

Conrad strapped on a small headlight and tiny camera around his head, slipped his pack over his shoulders and started down. He descended 19 steps to a passageway cut into the bedrock beneath the pyramid. He followed the long tunnel east to the burial chamber, like many archaeologists and tomb raiders before him.

Nothing new here.

The framed doorway opened to another tunnel, which grew wider and taller the further Conrad walked until he found himself in a cavernous antechamber with a barrel-vaulted ceiling.

Again, so far he was hardly the first to set foot here.

Eight massive pillars carved from some kind of green alabaster divided the burial chamber into two side aisles and a central nave. It almost looked like the kind of set-up he’d expect to find around one of Hank Johnson’s multidimensional portals, as the alabaster pillars seemed to almost glow.

In the middle of the floor was a massive pile of skulls and bones. And not just human bones either. Conrad could pick out horse, camel and dog bones, as well as some other bizarre shapes from creatures he’d rather not imagine.

The Nubians, he knew, had a fine and longstanding tradition of sacrificing or ritually slaughtering humans and animals upon the death of a ruler or important personage. But this anonymous queen didn’t seem to warrant such a fine display. Unless of course the priests understood from their centuries-old religion that there was another, greater queen buried below.

Conrad kicked the bones away with his boots to find a solid granite slab.

The slab had no identifiable seal or engravings that he could see, but it looked like it could well be hiding a vertical shaft or stairway to another passageway below. The only problem was that it looked like it weighed a couple of tons. He’d never be able to pry it open by himself, and if this was indeed one of Hank’s multidimensional portals, he didn’t have the tech to turn on the so-called resonators.

He’d have to open it the old-fashioned way.

Conrad reached into his pack and pulled out a roll of primasheet explosive. He got down on his hands and knees and began to apply it to the granite, molding it into shape. Properly done, the blast would be directed in one direction—down to the passageway on the other side of the slab. Of course, if there were no passage below and only bedrock, the blast would blow up into this burial chamber and probably bury him alive.

He laid a special cardboard backing on top of the primasheet to direct the blast, stabbed a remote fuse into it and stepped behind one of the eight massive pillars. He pulled out his phone, which he used as a remote detonator, and on the virtual keypad pressed the number six button once, twice, and then paused.

Conrad Yeats, what the hell are you doing?

This was a World Heritage Archaeological Site. What he was about to do was technically and morally criminal. It would only solidify his reputation as a post-modern archaeologist whose quest for knowledge about a site was more important than the integrity of the site itself, and that once obtained the relics and ruins were basically rocks to be discarded. Serena Serghetti would have a field day with this, accusing him of being a modern-day Ferlini.

On the other hand, Ferlini and others before him had already had their way with these pyramids, leaving nothing more to be found as far as the world was concerned. For all he knew, Serena was already aware of what could be down here and had persuaded her fellow preservationists at UNESCO to list this as a World Heritage site to hide what he was about to unearth. After all, these pyramid fields had certainly yielded no tourism dollars to speak of.

He could almost hear the Queen of Sheba herself whispering from the Great Beyond into his ear with a faint hiss:
Great adventurers have been doing this for centuries, Conrad. Nobody will hear the blast. It’s just you and me here. You’ll never be caught, only credited with the find of the ages. The hidden knowledge of King Solomon, lo, the secrets of the gods, can be yours for the taking. Your virgin wants to see what you find more than anybody else. She wants you to do it. You have to do it, for her....

Unable to resist, Conrad pressed the number six key one more time.

Boom!

The explosion ripped through the quaking burial chamber, spewing shards of granite like a cluster bomb and taking out chunks of the eight massive pillars. For a few seconds Conrad thought the barrel-vaulted ceiling would come crashing down on him. But the pillars held, shielding him from the worst of the blast.

Coughing from the debris, Conrad put on his night-vision goggles and covered his mouth, cursing himself for not doing so before he pressed the detonator button. Slowly he made his way around a battered pillar to the center of the nave and saw the gaping hole.

He peered through the dust into the vertical shaft and beheld stone steps descending deep into the netherworld.

It’s here. It’s real.

At the bottom of the long flight of steps was a passageway. Conrad stepped through the veil of debris, removed his goggles and switched on his headlight. The air was cool and damp, not stale as he expected.

As he started down the passageway, he aimed his light at a life-size relief on the wall. The vivid, striking mural depicted the comforting scene of a long line of bound prisoners marching into a big black hole in the earth.

Conrad could only hope he wasn’t following in their footsteps.

The passageway ended not in a hole but at a wall with an elaborate relief of the Queen of Sheba sitting on the Lion throne under the protection of a winged figure of Isis who stood behind. Carved above Isis was the star pattern for Virgo.

But it was the two obelisks on either side of the queen that took Conrad’s breath away, and he felt his knees give way in awe.

Besides the Bible, Conrad had found some of his best clues regarding the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon from the Freemasons. The Bible said that Solomon’s father, King David, loved his masons. And to modern Masons the most sacred pillars of all were the twin columns that originally stood in the porchway of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, which the twin obelisks here could well represent.

But even Solomon’s columns were but pale imitations of the original columns of Masonic lore, which even many Freemasons had never heard of. Fewer still knew that another figure in Freemasonry was associated with the Mysteries even longer than Solomon.

And that figure was Noah.

According to the Regius and Cooke manuscripts of 1390 and 1410, collectively known as the Old Charges, the four children of Lamech in the Book of Genesis made the two earliest pillars in readiness for the destruction by the Great Flood.

Knowing that God would destroy the world because of the sins of the people, and being desirous of preserving their knowledge for future generations, Lamech’s children erected a pillar of “marble” and a pillar of “brick,” although Conrad suspected the materials were symbols of some other elements. Indeed, marble was symbolic of a god-given or natural element, and brick was symbolic of a man-made or artificial element.

Both pillars were said to be indestructible in order to survive the Great Flood and inscribed with the priceless knowledge of the crafts and sciences founded since Creation.

Science possibly more advanced than ours today.

One of the pillars was allegedly found after the Flood by a great-grandson of Noah and its inscribed knowledge allegedly imparted to mankind. But the other one appeared to be lost forever.

A major reason Conrad suspected that either the “found” or “lost” pillar lay buried in the tomb of the Queen of Sheba here in Meroe was the mystery of Meroetic language itself. It was indecipherable. The Meroetic alphabet consisted of twenty-three letters derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. But no one knows for sure what their language sounded like or what their writing represented.

What if it was the language inscribed on the lost Pillars of Creation?

Conrad took a closer look at the obelisks in the painting, but the squiggles that represented engravings on them were intentionally illegible.

Solomon’s pillars, Conrad long believed, were commemorative of the original pillars, and ceremoniously appropriate for the “wisest” king who ever ruled. Which suddenly made the nature of Solomon’s discussions with the Queen of Sheba and her presents of gold all the more interesting.

Was it possible that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba knew the resting places of the Pillars of Creation? Were the pillars the actual source of Solomon’s and the Queen of Sheba’s wisdom, wealth and power? Did he show her his, and she showed him hers? And what “lost science,” exactly, was carved upon these two pillars—or obelisks?

Answering these questions was what drove him here to Meroe and the lost tomb of the Queen of Sheba, and not to the mines Hank was after. Because if there was any place on Earth that Conrad might find one of the two Pillars of Creation, and all the hidden knowledge they represented, then surely it was right here, right now, behind this wall.

If he blew this wall open, however, he’d destroy any relief on the opposite side of the one he was staring at, possibly obliterating the very information he might need to unlock the rest of the tomb.

He reached into his pack again, pulled out his phone and slid into a slot what looked like a special memory card. A thermal-like image of red and yellow splotches filled a green screen. This was his pocket imaging radar originally developed by DARPA and modified by MIT researchers for Special Forces to locate underground cave hideouts for terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.

He aimed the radar at the Queen of Sheba on the wall, and a moment later he heard a ping. The imaging indeed revealed another chamber on the other side, rectangular in size. He could feel his heart pounding now. He was so close. But he had to have a look before he blew the wall.

Once again he reached into his pack, this time taking out his pocket microwave drill. Developed by the Israelis, the needle-thin drill bit emitted intense microwaves that Conrad now used to bore a small hole through the wall. The microwaves softened the rock enough for the glowing bit to push all the way through.

Conrad then snaked a fiber-optic line through the hole and watched the screen on his phone. The hair-thin cable emitted its own light and gave him a view inside the chamber on the other side.

What he saw looked like the antechamber of a true Egyptian tomb like King Tut’s, something that would predate by centuries anything else here built by the Nubians. There was an alabaster statuette of the goddess Isis to the far right of the room. She was wearing some kind of black amulet around her green neck and was most likely guarding the burial and treasure chambers beyond the antechamber.

So close and yet so far.

Conrad pulled out his fiber-optic camera and paused before the great wall relief in front of him, staring at the Queen of Sheba on her throne, standing in his way.

Sorry, babe.

He snapped a few pictures of the relief while it was still in one piece, then slapped on some primasheet. He stuck in a ten-second timer, held his breath and blew the wall open.

He waited only a few seconds for the dust to settle before making his way into the antechamber.

The rectangular room was bigger than he expected, as was the statue of Isis at the far end. The fiery-black medallion around her neck seemed to glow as he approached. He discovered the effect came from several cutouts in the mysterious metal that were filled with gemstones. He felt a tingling in his fingers as he rubbed them against the surface of the metal. It was almost…electric.

The engraved symbol was of an Egyptian pyramid with sun rays shooting out. In some ways it resembled a few of the Masonic symbols and the reverse seal of the United States, although it obviously predated them all.