Napoleon's Pyramids (20 page)

“We don’t know, because none of us are entirely sure what it is we seek.” She hesitated. “There are legends of great treasures and, more importantly, great powers, the kind of power that shakes empires. What, exactly, it is too early to say. Let Enoch study some more. Just be aware that many men have heard these stories throughout history and have wondered at the truth behind them.

“You mean Napoleon?”

“I suspect that he understands least of all, but hopes someone will find it so he can seize it for himself. Why, he isn’t sure, but he’s heard the legends of Alexander. All of us are in a fog of myth and legend, except perhaps Bin Sadr—and whoever Bin Sadr’s true master is.”

I
began with one of the expedition’s astronomers, Nicholas-Antoine Nouet. While most of the French had cursed the desert for its enervating heat and scuttling vermin, Nouet had been delighted, saying the dry air made it unusually easy to chart the heavens. “It’s an astronomer’s paradise, Gage! A country without clouds!” I found him crouched at the new institute, coat off and sleeves rolled up, sorting through a stack of calibrated rods used to measure the position of the stars against the horizon.

“Nouet,” I addressed, “is the sky constant?”

He looked up with irritation since I’d broken his chain of thought. “Constant?”

“I mean, do the stars move?”

“Well.” He straightened, looking outside to the shaded garden that the scientists had expropriated. “The earth rotates, which is why the stars seem to rise and set like the sun. They make a wheel around our northern axis, the polestar.”

“But the stars themselves don’t move?”

“That is still under debate.”

“So thousands of years ago,” I pressed, “when the pyramids were built, the sky would have looked like it does now?”

“Ah, now I see what you’re driving at. The answer is yes—and no. The constellations would basically be unchanged, but the earth’s axis wobbles on a twenty-six-thousand-year cycle.”

“Doctor Monge told me about that, on
L’Orient.
He said the position of the zodiac, relative to the rising sun on a particular date, changes. Would anything else?”

“One difference over many millennia would be the polestar. Because the earth’s axis wobbles, it pointed to a different North Star thousands of years ago.”

“Is there any chance that star might have been Draco?”

“Why, yes, I believe so. Why do you ask?”

“You’ve heard I have an artifact of the past. My preliminary investigations here in Cairo suggest it may represent the constellation of Draconis, the dragon. If Draco was the polestar…”

“It tells you to orient your artifact north, perhaps.”

“Precisely. But why?”

“Monsieur, it is
your
fragment of antiquity, not mine.”

“Monge showed me something else in the hold of
L’Orient.
It was a circular device with signs of the zodiac. He thought it was some kind of calendar, perhaps to predict future dates.”

“That wouldn’t be unusual among ancient cultures. Ancient priests exhibited great power if they could predict how the heavens would look in advance. They could forecast the rising of the Nile and optimum dates for sowing and reaping. The power of nations and the rise and fall of kings hinged on such knowledge. To them, religion and science were one. Do you have this device? Perhaps I could help decipher it.”

“We left it aboard
L’Orient
with the Maltese treasure.”

“Bah! So it could be melted down and spent by the next batch of rascals to seize control of the Directory? Why are such treasures on a warship that might go into battle? These are tools we need here in Egypt! Get Bonaparte to let you fetch it, Gage. These things are usually simple, once you puzzle them out.”

I
needed something more substantial before going to our general.

Enoch was still ensconced with the medallion in his library when I learned, two days later, that the geographer Jomard whom I’d met in the hold of
L’Orient
was going to cross the Nile to Giza and make the first preliminary measurements of the pyramids. I volunteered my services and those of Ashraf as guide. Talma came too while Astiza, now subject to the customs of Cairo, stayed behind to help Enoch.

The four of us enjoyed the morning breeze as we ferried across. The river ran close to the mammoth structures, along a sand-and-limestone bluff that led up to the plateau where they were built. We beached and began climbing.

As remarkable as it had been to fight in sight of these famed structures, they’d been too distant from Imbaba to impress us with their size. It had been their geometric purity, set against the stark desert, which caught the eye. Now, as we labored up a trail from the great river, their immensity became apparent. The pyramids first peeked above the brow of the slope like perfect deltas, their design as harmonious as it was simple. The volume of their mass against the sky lifted the eye to their apex, beckoning us to heaven. Then, as they came into fuller view, their titanic dimensions were at last apparent, stone mountains ordained by mathematics. How had primitive Egypt built something so vast? And why? The very air seemed crystalline around them, and their majesty carried a strange aura, like the curious smell and prickling I sometimes feel when demonstrating electricity. It was very quiet here after the clamor of Cairo.

Adding to the pyramid’s daunting effect was their famed guardian who stared due east. The gigantic stone head called the Sphinx, as remarkable as we’d imagined from written descriptions, guarded the slope a short distance below the pyramids. Its neck was a dune of sand, its leonine body buried beneath the desert. The statue’s nose had been damaged years ago by Mameluke cannon practice, but its serene gaze, full African lips, and pharaoh’s headdress created a visage so eternal as if to deny the toll of time. Its eroded and damaged features made it seem older than the pyramids beyond, and made me wonder if it had perhaps been built before them. Was there something sacred about this site? What kind of people had made such a colossus, and why? Was it a sentinel? A guardian? A god? Or mere vanity to one man, tyrant and master? I couldn’t help but think of Napoleon. Would our republican revolutionary, liberator and common man, ever be tempted to commission a head like this?

Beyond were dunes strewn with scraps of rubble, broken walls, and the crumbled tips of smaller pyramids. The trio of major pyramids that dominated Giza made a diagonal line, northeast to southwest. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, called Cheops by the Greeks, was the closest to Cairo. A second, slightly smaller one beyond had been attributed by the Greeks to the pharaoh Khafre, or Khephren, and a third even smaller one to the southwest had been built by a Menkaure.

“One of the interesting things about the Great Pyramid is that it is aligned precisely with the cardinal directions and not just magnetic north,” Jomard told us as we rested a moment. “It is so precise that its priests and engineers must have had a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and surveying. Also, notice how you can judge the direction you face by the way the pyramids relate to each other. The pattern of shadow works as a kind of compass. You could use the relation of their apexes and shadows to orient a surveying tool.”

“You think they are a kind of geodetic landmark?” I asked.

“That’s one theory. The others depend on measurement. Come.” He and Ashraf strode ahead, carrying reels of measuring tape. Talma and I, hot and winded from the climb, lagged a little behind.

“Not a scrap of green,” Talma muttered. “A place of the dead, all right.”

“But what tombs, eh, Antoine?” I looked back at the head of the Sphinx, the river below us, the pyramids above.

“Yes, and you without your magic key to get inside.”

“I don’t think I need the medallion for that. Jomard said they were opened centuries ago by Arab treasure hunters. I suppose we’ll go in ourselves, eventually.”

“Still, doesn’t it bother you not to have the medallion?”

I shrugged. “It’s cooler not to carry it, frankly.”

He looked at the brown triangles above us, dissatisfied. “Why do you trust the woman more than me?” The hurt in his voice surprised me.

“But I don’t.”

“When I’ve asked you where the necklace is, you’ve been coy. But she persuades you to give it to an old Egyptian we barely know.”

“Loan it, for study. I didn’t give it to her, I loaned it to him. I trust Enoch. He’s a savant, like us.”

“I don’t trust her.”

“Antoine, you’re jealous.”

“Yes, and why? Not just because she’s a woman, and you run after females like a dog after a bone. No, because she’s not telling us everything she knows. She has her own agenda, and it’s not necessarily ours.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because she’s a woman.”

“A priestess, she said, trying to help us.”

“A witch.”

“Trusting Egyptians is the only way we’re going to solve the mystery, Antoine.”

“Why? They haven’t solved it in five thousand years. Then we come along with some trinket and suddenly we have more friends than we know what to do with? It’s all too convenient for me.”

“You’re too suspicious.”

“You’re too naïve.”

And with that we went on, neither satisfied.

As I trudged up the slippery sand toward the largest pyramid, sweating in the heat, I felt increasingly small. Even when I turned away the monument’s bulk seemed omnipresent, looming over us. Everywhere around us was the sand-strewn wreckage of time. We threaded past rubble that must once have been the walls of causeways and courtyards. The great desert rolled beyond. Dark birds wheeled in the brassy air. At last we stopped before the highest and greatest of all structures on earth, dunes undulating along its base. The blocks it was built from looked like the bricks of giants, massive and heavy.

“And here, perhaps, is a map of the world,” Jomard announced.

With his sharp features, the French savant reminded me of some of the carved stone falcons I had seen in Enoch’s house: Horus. He was looking up at the triangular face of the pyramid with happy awe.

“A map of the world?” Talma asked skeptically.

“So said Diodorus and other ancient scholars. Or, rather, a map of its northern hemisphere.”

The journalist, flushed and cranky from the heat, sat down on an upended block. “I thought the world was round.”

“It is.”

“I know you savants are cleverer than I, Jomard, but unless I’m hallucinating, I believe the structure before me comes to a rather noticeable point.”

“An astute observation, Monsieur Talma. You have the makings of a savant yourself, perhaps. The idea is that the apex represents the Pole, the base the equator, and each side a quarter of the northern half-sphere. As if you had sliced an orange first in half, horizontally, and then into four vertical pieces.”

“None of them flat triangles,” Talma said, fanning himself. “Why not just build a mound, like a loaf, if you want to model half our planet?

“My maps of Egypt and the world are flat, and yet they represent something round,” the savant replied. “Our question is, did the Egyptians, in an abstract way, design the pyramid with a precise angle and area to mathematically mirror our globe? The ancients tell us its dimensions correspond to a fraction of the 360 degrees in which we divide the earth. This is a sacred number that came from the Egyptians and Babylonians, based on the days of the year. So did they, in fact, choose proportions to demonstrate how to accurately translate a curved earth to a flat plane, like the face of a pyramid? Herodotus tells us that the area of the face of the pyramid is equal to the square of its height. It just so happens that such a proportion is an ideal way to calculate the surface area of a circle, like our planet, from a square, and translate the points of one to the other.”

“Why would they do so?” the journalist asked.

“To boast, perhaps, that they knew how.”

“But, Jomard,” I objected, “People believed the world was flat until Columbus.”

“Not so, my American friend. The moon is round. The sun is round. It occurred to the ancients that the earth, too, is round, and the Greeks used careful measurements to calculate the circumference. My idea is that the Egyptians preceded them.”

“How could they know how big our planet is?”

“It is child’s play if you understand basic geometry and astronomy, measuring fixed points against the shadow of the sun or the declination the stars.”

“Ah, yes,” said Talma. “As a babe I did it before my naps.”

Jomard refused to be goaded. “Anyone who has seen the shadow the earth casts on the moon or watched a ship disappear below the horizon would suspect our planet is a sphere. We know the Greek Eratosthenes used the differing length of shadows cast by the noon sun at the summer solstice at two different points in Egypt to get within 320 kilometers of the correct answer in 250 B.C. This pyramid was nearly three thousand years old when he made his measurement. Yet what was to prevent its ancient builders from doing the same, or measuring relative star height at points north and south along the Nile to again calculate the angles and, by implication, the size of our planet? If you travel along the river the height of stars above the horizon changes by several degrees, and Egyptian mariners would surely have noticed that. Tycho Brahe did such star measurements with his naked eye to sufficient accuracy to calculate the size of the earth, so why not the ancients? We attribute the birth of knowledge to the Greeks, but they attributed it to the Egyptians.”

I knew Jomard had read more of the ancient texts than any of us, so I regarded the great mass before me with new curiosity. Its outer sheathing of smooth limestone had been robbed centuries ago to build Muslim palaces and mosques in Cairo, so only the core blocks remained. Yet each piece of that was colossal, set in endless rows. I began to count the tiers of masonry and gave up after a hundred. “But the Egyptians had no ships to circle the globe, so why would they care what size the planet was?” I objected. “And build a mountain to contain a calculation? It makes no sense.”

“As baffling as building St. Peter’s to a being none but saints and lunatics can claim to see,” Jomard retorted. “What makes no sense to one man is life’s purpose to another. Can we even explain ourselves? For example, what is the point of your Freemasonry, Talma?”

“Well…” He had to think a moment. “To live harmoniously and rationally, instead of killing each other over religion and politics, I think.”

“And here we are, a few miles from the offal of a battlefield produced by an army filled with Masons. Who is to say who is the lunatic? Who knows why the Egyptians would do such a thing?”