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

Charrière would be beholden to him, and was someone who would disappear back to the forests of Canada as silently as he had crossed the desert from Khartoum, trusted never to tell anyone what he had done.
    And there was something else that Jones had not told Chaillé-Long. It was not only the plaque from the crocodile temple that had given him the clue to this place. That night at Wadi Halfa he had risked all and crept into Charrière’s tent while he was with Wolseley. In Charrière’s bag he had found Gordon’s journal of his final days in Khartoum, something that he must have entrusted to Mayne, that Charrière must then have taken from him but clearly decided not to show to Wolseley. In the frantic few seconds in the tent, he had seen an incredible drawing inside the back cover of the journal, something that had etched itself on his mind. It was another clue to Akhenaten that Gordon himself had uncovered, a more detailed version of the plan on the plaque. It too showed the Aten sun symbol, the lines radiating off from the center with the cluster of threesquares showing the Giza pyramids at one corner. Jones had hastily copied down a series of hieroglyphic cartouches that Gordon had inscribed at the bottom of the page, and then packed the diary away in the bag and fled into the night.
    It was Gordon’s sketch that had been his biggest revelation and had allowed him to understand the plaque. One day several years later while working with the fellahin at Giza, he realized that the three small squares exactly mapped the relationship of the pyramids on the plateau. He was then able to use the sketch and the plaque to triangulate their position at the river from the pyramids by following one of the radiating lines from the sun symbol that he believed represented underground passageways. Finding what lay beneath became an obsession for him, not because he was drawn by a promise of ancient riches but because it was about discovering a truth that seemed to give a nobility of purpose to their enterprise in the desert, something that could exonerate Mayne, even Gordon, that would stand in stark contrast to the grim reality of failure and dishonor in their avowed reason for being there. In his fevered imagination, gripped once again by the same mania that had enveloped him at the crocodile pool, he had even felt himself on the same elevated mission as Gordon in Khartoum, as someone who had thrown away all the shackles to the outside world and his past life in order to devote himself to a higher purpose.
    He was barely out of this state, in the grips of the deep melancholia that followed, when he had been begging near Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and had overheard guests mentioning Chaillé-Long and his law practice in Alexandria. Jones had already realized that he was going to have to enlist the help of others with money if he were ever going to get to the bottom of the mystery. Then, less than a month ago, he had experienced another astonishing revelation. He had learned hieroglyphics specifically to translate the cartouches that he had copied from Gordon’s journal. He had learned to recognize the royal cartoucheof Akhenaten, one of the three in the journal, but the other two had defeated him. And then he had a blinding revelation. The symbols for the Aten, for sun and light, did not mean sunlight after all but something more down to earth and far more astonishing. This place he was searching for was not just a holy sanctum of a new religion; it was a treasure-house, yet a treasure that few Egyptologists would ever have imagined possible even in their wildest dreams.
    Jones had not yet told Chaillé-Long because he could not calculate the effect that such a revelation might have on the man—and the actions he might take as a consequence. He was fearful also of word leaking out. Cairo eight years after the war was seething with men of loose purpose drawn by tales of ancient riches to be discovered; they had subverted their