Free Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) by David Gibbins

retreating back to Egypt and abandoning the Sudan to the Mahdi. It was then that I knew that Major Mayne wouldn’t be coming back, that it was a forlorn hope for me to wait for him. Then just before we reached the British camp at Abu Halfa, on the Egyptian border, I gave Kitchener the slip. I remembered what had happened after the battle of Kirkeban, and how it would look with me having disappeared. An army recovering after defeat is always looking for scapegoats and is never generous to soldiers they think have done a runner. I’d been cashiered before, out in India, even made sergeant once before being reduced. I was too cocky for my own good, mostly, with too many opinions for certain officers to stomach. But this time it was more serious. I didn’t fancy having survived the dervishes at Kirkebanonly to face a firing squad of my own mates at Abu Haifa.”
    “That was more than eight years ago,” Chaillé-Long said. “What have you done since then?”
    Jones peered at him and stroked his stubble. “Master of disguise, I am. That’s what Major Mayne used to call me. Within days of our reconnaissance missions behind dervish lines, I’d look the part, with a beard and a turban. My mother was Anglo-Indian, the daughter of a British soldier and a Madrassi woman, so I’m naturally dark skinned. I knew enough Madrassi to pass myself off as an Indian, and enough Arabic from Major Mayne and our time in the desert to get by. I learned to live like an Arab, to blend into the folds of the desert and the crowded souks of Cairo, to live without being noticed.”
    “And you read books. You learned about the ancient Egyptians.”
    “I joined with the fellahin, who are used as laborers on digs, and found work at Giza, clearing out the pyramids. I went to Amarna and became foreman of a French excavation there. No questions were ever asked; I looked the part of an Arab, and with my engineering skills I could do the job well. I spent days in the Cairo Museum, working from cabinet to cabinet, memorizing everything I saw. I learned to read hieroglyphics.” Jones lowered his voice. “I learned everything I could about
him
.”
    “Him?”
    Jones leaned forward, almost whispering. “Long-face. That’s what the Canadian Indians called him. We had them with us on the Nile expedition, you know, voyageurs, brought over from Canada by Lord Wolseley to navigate the boats. On the way up they’d stopped at Amarna and seen the crumbled statues of the pharaoh who had built the city, that strange face with the big lips. In the Mohawk language they called him Menakouhare, long-face. The name stuck with me.”
    “You mean Akhenaten.”
    “The Sun Pharaoh,” Jones said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Father of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. Theone who went south to the desert as Amenhotep the fourth, high priest of the old religion, and came back as Akhenaten—
He through whom the Light shone from the Aten, the Sun God
. He went south with his wife, Nefertiti, and his companion Moses, the former slave who had the same revelation and took away his vision of the one god to his people. They were in the crocodile temple, the one Mayne found beside the pool on the Nile. I saw it myself, steeled myself to go inside in the weeks I spent there alone after the battle, when my mind was unbalanced. I saw the wall carving, with Menakouhare at the head of the procession, the Aten symbol before him. I saw the gap where Mayne had taken the plaque that I showed you. Akhenaten had his vision in the desert, but his City of Light was not to be there. It was to be here, out of sight and hidden in the heartland of ancient Egypt. And we will be the first in three thousand years to see it.”
    Chaillé-Long put his hand on his hip and eyed Jones keenly. “When we have made our great discovery, you and I will be much in demand. We will be on the front page of the
New York Herald
and the
Illustrated London News
, and around the world. People still reeling from the