courtyards. The great desert rolled beyond. Dark birds wheeled in the brassy air. At last we stopped before the highest and greatest of all structures on earth, dunes undulating along its base. The blocks it was built from looked like the bricks of giants, massive and heavy.
‘And here, perhaps, is a map of the world,’ Jomard announced.
With his sharp features, the French savant reminded me of some of the carved stone falcons I had seen in Enoch’s house: Horus. He was looking up at the triangular face of the pyramid with happy awe.
‘A map of the world?’ Talma asked sceptically.
‘So said Diodorus and other ancient scholars. Or, rather, a map of its northern hemisphere.’
The journalist, flushed and cranky from the heat, sat down on an upended block. ‘I thought the world was round.’
‘It is.’
‘I know you savants are cleverer than I, Jomard, but unless I’m hallucinating, I believe the structure before me comes to a rather noticeable point.’
‘An astute observation, Monsieur Talma. You have the makings of a savant yourself, perhaps. The idea is that the apex represents the Pole, the base the equator, and each side a quarter of the northern half-sphere. As if you had sliced an orange first in half, horizontally, and then into four vertical pieces.’
‘None of them flat triangles,’ Talma said, fanning himself. ‘Why not just build a mound, like a loaf, if you want to model half our planet?
‘My maps of Egypt and the world are flat, and yet they represent something round,’ the savant replied. ‘Our question is, did the Egyptians, in an abstract way, design the pyramid with a precise angle and area to mathematically mirror our globe? The ancients tell us its dimensions correspond to a fraction of the 360 degrees in which we divide the earth. This is a sacred number that came from the Egyptians and Babylonians, based on the days of the year. So did they, in fact, choose proportions to demonstrate how to accurately translate a curved earth to a flat plane, like the face of a pyramid? Herodotus tells us that the area of the face of the pyramid is equal to the square of its height. It just so happens that such a proportion is an ideal way to calculate the surface area of a circle, like our planet, from a square, and translate the points of one to the other.’
‘Why would they do so?’ the journalist asked.
‘To boast, perhaps, that they knew how.’
‘But, Jomard,’ I objected, ‘People believed the world was flat until Columbus.’
‘Not so, my American friend. The moon is round. The sun is round. It occurred to the ancients that the earth, too, is round, and the Greeks used careful measurements to calculate the circumference. My idea is that the Egyptians preceded them.’
‘How could they know how big our planet is?’
‘It is child’s play if you understand basic geometry and astronomy, measuring fixed points against the shadow of the sun or the declination of the stars.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Talma. ‘As a babe I did it before my naps.’
Jomard refused to be goaded. ‘Anyone who has seen the shadow the earth casts on the moon or watched a ship disappear below the horizon would suspect our planet is a sphere. We know the Greek Eratosthenes used the differing length of shadows cast by the noon sun at the summer solstice at two different points in Egypt to get within 320 kilometres of the correct answer in 250 B.C. This pyramid was nearly three thousand years old when he made his measurement. Yet what was to prevent its ancient builders from doing the same, or measuring relative star height at points north and south along the Nile to again calculate the angles and, by implication, the size of our planet? If you travel along the river the height of stars above the horizon changes by several degrees, and Egyptian mariners would surely have noticed that. Tycho Brahe did such star measurements with his naked eye to sufficient accuracy to calculate the size of the earth, so why not the ancients? We attribute the birth of knowledge to the Greeks, but they attributed it to the Egyptians.’
I knew Jomard had read more of the ancient texts than any of us, so I regarded the great mass before me with new curiosity. Its outer sheathing of smooth limestone had been robbed centuries ago to build Muslim palaces and mosques in Cairo, so only the core blocks remained. Yet each piece of that was colossal, set in endless rows. I began to count the tiers of masonry and gave up after a hundred. ‘But the Egyptians had no ships to circle the globe, so why would they care what size the planet was?’ I objected. ‘And build a mountain to contain a calculation? It makes no sense.’
‘As baffling as building St Peter’s to a being none but saints and lunatics can claim to see,’ Jomard retorted. ‘What makes no sense to one man is life’s purpose to another. Can we even explain ourselves? For example, what is the point of your Freemasonry, Talma?’
‘Well…’ He had to think a moment. ‘To live harmoniously and rationally, instead of killing each other over religion and politics, I think.’
‘And here we are, a few miles from the offal of a battlefield produced by an army filled with Masons. Who is to say who is the lunatic? Who knows why the Egyptians would do such a thing?’
‘I thought this was the tomb of the pharaoh,’ Talma said.
‘A tomb with no occupant. When Arab treasure hunters broke in centuries ago and tunnelled around granite plugs meant to seal the entrance forever, they found not a sign that any king, queen, or commoner had ever been laid to rest here. The sarcophagus was lidless and empty. There was no writing, and not a scrap of treasure or worldly goods to commemorate who it was built for. The greatest structure on the face of the earth, taller than the highest cathedrals, and empty as a peasant’s cupboard! It is one thing to be a megalomaniac, harnessing tens of thousands of men to build your final resting place. It is quite another to do so and not rest there.’
I looked as Ashraf, who had not followed our French. ‘What’s the pyramid for?’ I asked in English.
He shrugged, less in awe of the monument than we were. Of course, he’d lived in Cairo all his life. ‘To hold up the sky.’
I sighed and turned back to Jomard. ‘So you think it’s a map?’
‘That is one hypothesis. Another is that its dimensions signify the divine. For thousands of years, architects and engineers have recognised that some proportions and shapes are more pleasing than others. They correspond to each other in interesting mathematical ways. Some feel such sublime relationships reveal fundamental and universal truths. When our own ancestors built the great Gothic cathedrals, they tried to use their dimensions and geometric proportions to express religious ideas and ideals, to in effect make the building itself holy by its very design. “What is God?” Saint Bernard once asked. “He is length, width, height, and depth.”’
I remembered Astiza’s excitement over Pythagoras.
‘So?’ Talma challenged.
‘So this pyramid may have been, to the ancients who built it, not a picture of the world, but a picture of God.’
I stared uneasily at the vast structure, the hair prickling on my neck. It was utterly silent, and yet from nowhere I sensed a low, background hum, like the sound of a seashell pressed to the ear. Was God a number, a dimension? There was something godlike in the perfect simplicity before me.
‘Unfortunately,’ Jomard went on, ‘all these ideas are difficult to verify until measurements are made to confirm whether height and perimeter match in scale the dimensions of our earth. That will be impossible to do until we excavate enough to find the pyramid’s true base and corners. I’ll need a small army of Arab workmen.’
‘I suppose we can go back then,’ Talma said hopefully.
‘No,’ said Jomard. ‘We can at least begin to measure its height from the lowest course of stone we can see. Gage, you will help with the tape. Talma, you must take the utmost care to write down each stone height we give you.’
My friend looked dubiously upward. ‘All that way?’
‘The sun is declining. By the time we reach the top, it will be cooler.’
Ashraf chose to remain below, clearly believing such a climb was something only sun-addled Europeans would do. And indeed, it wasn’t easy. The pyramid seemed far steeper once we began to mount it.
‘An optical illusion makes it appear squatter than it is, when viewed head on,’ Jomard explained.
‘You didn’t tell us that before we started up,’ Talma grumbled.
It took the three of us more than half an hour of careful ascent to get halfway. It was like climbing titanic children’s blocks, a giant’s staircase, with each step averaging two and a half feet in height. There was a real possibility of a nasty fall. We carefully measured each course of interior stone as we climbed, Talma keeping a
