Chapter Nine
AUGUSTIN WAS RIGHT about getting into the site the next morning. It proved a breeze. He was right, too, about the excitement Knox felt at being part of a proper excavation again. It had been too long. Far too long. Just being there made him happy: the noise, the smells, the banter. Up top, a generator was roaring away, powering a winch lift hauling an almost nonstop stream of excavation baskets cut from old truck tires, filled with rubble to be sifted in sunlight, then sent either to the museum or to landfill; lamps and ventilator fans were spread throughout the necropolis on miles of white power cables; and excavators in breathing masks and white gloves knelt in the confined tombs, carefully removing artifacts and human remains.
Augustin had brought down all the diving equipment before collecting Knox. They didn’t waste any time sightseeing but hurried straight down to the water table and suited up, inspecting each other’s gear with great care. People who had dived as often as they had were sometimes cursory with their safety checks. But in an enclosed labyrinth like this, you couldn’t simply dump your weight belt and kick for the surface if things went wrong. There was no surface.
Augustin held up a reel of red nylon cord, borrowing a trick from Theseus. But there was nothing to anchor it to. “Stay here,” he said, and vanished briefly, returning with an excavation basket weighted with rubble. He tied the cord to it and gave it a couple of tugs. They hooked themselves together with a lifeline, turned on their dive lamps, and made their way down into the water, Augustin feeding out the cord behind him. Neither man wore fins. They had weighted themselves to walk. They kicked up more sediment that way, but it made it easier to keep one’s bearings. Almost at once, they found the entrance to a chamber, most of its loculi still sealed. On one of them, Augustin’s underwater flashlight picked out a haunting portrait of a large-eyed man staring directly back at them. The mouth of the neighboring loculus had rotted away, and their flashlights glinted on something metallic inside. Augustin carefully pulled out a funerary lamp, which he tucked into his pouch.
They visited three more chambers, the connecting corridor kinking this way and that. The cord snagged on something, and Augustin had to tug it loose. The water grew murkier and murkier, sometimes swirling so badly they could barely see each other. Knox checked his air: down to just a 130 bar. They had agreed to dive in thirds: one-third out, one-third back, one-third for safety. He showed Augustin, who nodded and pointed back the way they had come. There was evidently some slack in the cord, for he began to reel it in and kept on reeling. He turned to Knox with a look of alarm perceptible even inside his mask. Knox frowned and spread his hands, and Augustin held up the loose end of the red cord, which should have been tied around the handles of the excavation basket, but which had somehow come free.
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CHILDREN MADE IBRAHIM UNCOMFORTABLE. An only child himself, he had neither nieces nor nephews, nor any prospects of fatherhood. But Mohammed had bent over backward to accommodate him and his team on this excavation, so Ibrahim could scarcely refuse his daughter a tour, though he thought it crazy to bring a sick child into such a dusty, death-filled place.
One of Mohammed’s construction crew tracked them down in a tomb chamber. “A call for you,” he grunted. “Head office.”
Mohammed pulled a face. “Forgive me,” he told Ibrahim. “I must deal with this. But I’ll be straight back. Could you hold Layla a minute?”
“Of course.” Ibrahim braced himself as Mohammed passed him the bundle of blankets and swaddling, but the poor girl, ravaged by her disease, was light as air. He smiled nervously down. She smiled back. She looked terrified of him, painfully aware that he must consider her a nuisance. She pointed to the skull in the loculus: “This man was not Egyptian, then?” Mouth ulcers made her slurp and wince with every word.
Ibrahim winced with her. “That’s right,” he replied. “He was Greek, from north across the sea. Your father is a very clever man; he knew this man was Greek, because he found a coin called an obol in his mouth. The Greeks believed that spirits needed this to pay a ferryman called Charon to row them across the River Styx into the next world.”
“The next world?” asked Layla. Her eyes were large with wonder, as though her skin had been pulled back around them. Ibrahim swallowed and looked away. For a moment, he felt the threat of tears. So young a girl; so harsh a fate.
His arms were aching badly by the time Mohammed finally returned. He beamed at Layla with such affection as he took her back that Ibrahim felt lost, shamed, as though he had no right to his place in the world, to the air and space he consumed, to his easy life. He felt overcome by the need to do something to help Layla. “Those tests we were able to help you with,” he murmured to Mohammed. “Where might I get one done myself?”
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KNOX AND AUGUSTIN looked at each other with concern, but they were experienced divers; they didn’t panic. They checked their air; they each had twenty minutes, twenty-five if they didn’t waste it. Augustin pointed ahead, and Knox nodded. They needed to find their way out, or at least a pocket of air where they could wait until the sediment resettled and they could see again.
They reached a dead end. Knox brought his gauge up to his goggles to check air pressure, which was dropping relentlessly. They kept their hands to the walls to steer through the blinding haze. On night dives in Sharm, his colleagues had talked glibly of zero visibility, but with all the muck he and Augustin had stirred, this was indescribably worse. Knox could barely see his gauges even when he held them in front of his mask. They hit another dead end, maybe the same one. They could all too easily be going around in circles. Fifteen bar. They began swimming, completely turned around now, their sense of direction gone, the fear building, breathing faster, burning up their precious air, so little of it left—just five bar, deep into the red hazard zone—and then Augustin seizing his shoulder and thrusting his face into his, tearing out his regulator, pointing desperately at his mouth. Knox passed him his spare, but he was down to the last few gasps himself. They reached another fork; Augustin pointed right, but Knox was sure they had gone right last time, so he tugged left, fighting over it. Augustin insisted on going right, however, and Knox decided to trust him, both men now swimming flat out, hitting and kicking each other, scraping rough wall and ceiling, Knox gagging as his tank ran dry, pressure on his lungs, hitting another wall, Augustin wrenching him upward against steps and then bursting up into open air.
Knox spat out his regulator and breathed in gratefully, lying alongside Augustin, their chests pumping like frantic bellows. Augustin laid his head sideways to look at Knox, a glint already in his eye, as though he’d thought of something funny but couldn’t yet get it out. “There are old divers,” he panted finally. “There are bold divers.”
Laughter hurt Knox’s lungs. “I reckon you should get a pump, mate.”
“I think you’re right,” agreed Augustin. “And we tell no one about this, okay? Not for a year or two, anyway. I’m supposed to be professional.”
“Mum’s the word,” nodded Knox. He pushed himself tiredly up, unbuckled his BCD, and dropped it and the empty tank onto the stone floor.
“Look!” said Augustin. “The basket’s disappeared.”
Knox frowned. Augustin was right. In his relief at getting out alive, he had forgotten what triggered the trouble in the first place. “What the hell?” He crouched down where the excavation basket had been. He had assumed that Augustin’s knot had just come loose. “You don’t think this was Hassan’s doing, do you?”
A rueful expression spread over Augustin’s face. “No,” he said. “I fear it was simpler than that.”
“What?”
“It was an excavation basket full of rubble,” observed Augustin. “And what is Mansoor’s number one priority?”
Knox winced and closed his eyes. “Clearing the site of rubble.”
“This is our lucky day, my friend.”
Soft footsteps approached down the corridor. Knox looked up as a slender, dark-haired, attractive young woman appeared out of the shadows, a digital camera on a strap around her neck. “Your lucky day?” she asked. “Have you found something?”
Augustin jumped up and walked over, interposing himself between her and Knox. “Look!” he said, taking out his funerary lamp, waving a hand at the water. “Chamber after chamber of sealed loculi!”
“Fantastic.” She glanced past Augustin at Knox. “I’m Gaille,” she said.
He had no option but to stand. “Mark,” he replied.
“Nice to meet you, Mark.”
“Likewise.”
“How’s the photography going?” Augustin asked her, touching her shoulder.
“Fine,” said Gaille. “Mansoor’s brought down all his lighting from the museum so I can photograph the antechamber, but it gets too hot to keep on long. The plaster, you know—we don’t want it cracking.”
“Indeed no.” He put an arm around her shoulder, tried to turn her away from Knox. “Listen,” he said. “I understand you’re alone in town, yes? Perhaps we could have dinner together? I can show you old Alexandria.”
Her eyes lit up. “That would be great, yes.” She sounded so enthusiastic, she blushed and felt compelled to explain herself. “It’s just, there’s nowhere to eat in my hotel, and they won’t let guests take food back to their rooms, and I really hate eating alone in restaurants. I feel so conspicuous, you know. As though everyone’s watching.”
“And why wouldn’t they watch?” asked Augustin gallantly. “A pretty girl like you. Which hotel are you staying at?”
“The Vicomte.”
“That terrible place! But why?”
She shrugged sheepishly. “I asked my taxi driver for somewhere central and cheap.”
“He took you at your word, then,” laughed Augustin. “Tonight, then. Eight o’clock, yes? I’ll pick you up.”
“Great.” She looked past him to Knox, standing in the shadows. “You’ll come, too, yes?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll be able to make it, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” She patted her hips and made a shrugging kind of face. “Well, then,” she nodded. “Until later.” And she retreated up the corridor away from them with a slightly stilted walk, as though she sensed—quite correctly—that she was being watched.