The Alexander Cipher Page 0,38
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.
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