Kieran made himself comfortable. “Sure, I never turn down a story.”
“The Victorians figured life as a progression from primitive beginnings through steady improvement all the way to the ultimate expression of excellence in the form of eminent Victorians—which was obviously the purpose of the exercise,” Trevany said. “That meant there couldn’t have been any advanced cultures earlier—and especially not if they weren’t white. Ergo, these structures we’re talking about must have been built during the Dynastic Period.”
“Even though the technology was obviously from a different time?”
Trevany waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. We’re defending a dogma here. Did you think this was science or something? But they could never produce any actual evidence to prove it, which kind of embarrassed some people. According to the orthodox line, the pyramids were built as tombs, and only as tombs. Yet never once was a body or a mummy actually found in one—except for a few bones in the smaller Menkaure Pyramid that were later shown to be from the early Christian era. Intrusive burial of that kind was a fairly common practice. None of the burial treasures or artifacts that Egyptians reveled in, either. All completely bare. The official explanation has always attributed it to tomb robbers, at the latest around 2000 B.C. But again it was only an answer invented to fit the assumptions. And not a very credible one, really, when you take a hard look at it.”
Trevany got up from the seat and selected a marker pen from the tray beneath a white board fixed to the wall above one end of the table—it seemed scientists became uncomfortable when they were not close to something to scribble on. He drew a triangle representing the cross section of a pyramid and then a passage descending from low on one face to a point deep in the bedrock below the center. While he was doing this, Juanita Anavarez came through from the lab at the rear holding a printed list in her hand, and stopped to listen. She was dark-skinned, with straight hair that she tried futilely to induce into waves, and large, brown, questioning eyes. Kieran had found her to be precise and businesslike in the way she went about her work.
Trevany went on, “The mystery begins in the ninth century A.D. A Muslim governor of Cairo organized a team of quarriers to tunnel into the north face of the Khufu Pyramid, telling them they’d find treasure.”
“That’s the big one, right?” Kieran said.
Trevany nodded, then added the letters DC to the passageway he had sketched. “As luck would have it, they joined up with the `descending corridor,’ which had been known in Roman times but later forgotten. Their work dislodged a granite plug from the opening to another corridor ascending in the same general direction.” He added this and denoted it with AC. “But there was a problem. The lower end was blocked by a series of solid granite plugs that had clearly been there since the time of construction, so they were forced to tunnel around to rejoin the ascending corridor higher up—through the softer limestone that the main structure was built from. But you see the point. They had to bypass an obstacle that had never before been breached! They continued up through a wider section called the Grand Gallery—which in itself presents enough engineering impossibilities—and reached the so-called King’s Chamber, in the heart of the pyramid. They uncovered other corridors and chambers too, but the upshot was that they found absolutely nothing in them, apart from a granite coffer in the King’s Chamber, which was later decided, on not very strong grounds, to be a sarcophagus.” Trevany showed an empty hand. “So was the place emptied of all the treasures and things that were supposed to be there, as the Egyptologists claimed? But nobody had ever gotten past the granite plugs. Or was it more probable that it had been empty all along, since the time it was sealed?”
“Unless there was another way in,” Kieran offered.
Trevany regarded him curiously for a second or two, as if weighing up something that might confuse the issue. “As a matter of fact, there was,” he said finally. He drew in a narrow connection from a point farther down the descending corridor, rising to the base of the Grand Gallery, and labeled it WS. “It’s called a well shaft for want of anything better—not discovered until the nineteenth century. It rises almost vertically a hundred-sixty feet through bedrock, and then more than twenty limestone courses of the pyramid itself. Yes, it’s a bypass around the granite plugs. . . . But the upper end had been found before the connection to the descending corridor. It was choked with debris, sealed at the lower end, and only three feet across, with some awkward vertical sections. Is it really feasible that this could have been the way for getting out the treasures of Khufu, the greatest pharaoh of the magnificent Fourth Dynasty? Surely not things like the statues and shrines that were found filling the places that we know really were tombs—mostly in the Valley of the Kings. But nothing? None of the litter that robbers typically leave? Not a shard of a broken pot, not a scrap of cloth or a piece of a tool?” Trevany shook his head. “It’s just not credible.”