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

hanging with one hand on the bar, putting his other hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Before we deactivate the intercom, there’s something I want to pass on. Maurice mentioned it to me just before we left, but we decided not to tell you straightaway, as we thought it would just fuel your frustration about not being able to get back under the pyramid. Apparently, when Aysha was rummaging in the museum, she also found a news clipping from before the First World War about some mad old mystic in Cairo who appeared from nowhere, claiming he was a former British soldier who had been sucked from the Nile into an underworld of mummies and the living dead. Something like that, anyway. Maurice thinks it’s a typical story made up at the time for credulous tourists, but Aysha thinks it’s so far out that there must be something to it. I think it’s that husband-wife rivalry thing again, and as you know, Aysha usually wins. Anyway, she’s following it up. There may be another entrance into our pyramid underworld, that’s all.”
    Jack stared at him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He took one of the regulators hanging down from the dive boat, pressed the purge valve to see that the oxygen was on, and then took a final breath from his own regulator, sucking on empty. He pulled off the full-face mask, put the oxygen regulator in his mouth, and reached down to the front of his stabilizer jacket for his backup mask. He put it on and cleared it, and then watched Costas do the same. He breathed in deeply, feeling his entire body tingling, relishing the sudden lift that pure oxygen always gave him, as if it were cleansing his soul. He set the timer on his computer, beginning his countdown to surfacing and getting back on the trail they had left off under the pyramid.
    He could hardly wait.

C HAPTER 3
O N THE N ILE SOUTH OF C AIRO , E GYPT, 1893
    T he man in the dark cape struck a match and raised it to his cigar, cupping his hand to prevent the flame from being seen by anyone who might be passing along the riverbank. Around him the waters of the river were barely discernible, a swirling miasma veiled by a thin mist; the abandoned fort on the embankment was still invisible despite the captain of the boat jabbing his finger into the darkness and assuring them that it was a mere stone’s throw away. They had deliberately chosen a moonless night for their venture, and without a navigating lantern their voyage upriver had seemed a blind man’s gamble at best. But the captain had raised the huge triangular sail of the felucca and brought them unerringly past the city, using the northerly breeze to sail against the current and bring them to the narrow strip of cultivated floodplain beyond the southern outskirts that fronted the desert. They had left the putrid odor of the Cairo waterfront behind, and now the river smelled musty, like an old camel. The captain had bent the tiller while his boy ran along the spar and furled the sail. For what seemed an age now, they had drifted silently, letting the eddies push them slowly into the river shore.
    The man strained his eyes into the darkness, still seeing nothing, having no recourse other than to trust theskill and knowledge of the captain. He took a deep draw on his cigar, clenching it in his teeth while he exhaled the sweet smoke into the darkness, trying to calm his excitement. In daylight, if they were in the correct position, he would be able to see the pyramids of Giza just above the horizon to the west, and in front of him the ruined river fort that they had visited on foot the day before. Somewhere below, somewhere under the riverbank, lay the key to the greatest undiscovered prize in Egyptology, greater even than the lost city of Amarna or the tombs of the Valley of the Kings; something that would cap his years of adventure in Africa and allow him to return home in triumph across the Atlantic to the destiny that had seemed marked out for him, the highest offices in the land now surely