Pyramids Page 8

  Another thing he meant to take along to pyramid-land on his next trip was a notebook and some pencils—no problem there.

  And how about a camera? Scheffler had started thinking now. His brain seemed to be working a little better away from the apartment. He knew that Becky had a Polaroid, and he supposed she'd let him borrow it. The trouble, of course, was that she would be curious. Maybe he'd be able to come up with some kind of a story to satisfy her. Probably he wouldn't, though. He'd never been very good at lying.

  Gazing around the store and its wild assortment of junk and valuables, Scheffler briefly pondered the possibility of bringing a video camera along. He decided that the possibility was not a strong one. He didn't know offhand where he might borrow such a machine, and certainly he wasn't going to lay out the cash to buy one. A Polaroid, just possibly. All right, yes. He still had almost all of Uncle Monty's five hundred. He'd stop at another store on the way home and buy himself a camera,

  And when he went to look at the pyramid again he ought to bring along some food. Yes, he would put a few supplies into his pack before he left. Candy bars, trail mix, that kind of thing. Again, he wasn't planning an overnighter. But you never knew.

  Walking back to the apartment from his shopping trip, squinting his eyes into the freezing rain again�whichever way you walked it seemed to catch you right in the face—Scheffler kept wondering if Mrs. White might, after all, know something about the elevator. It just didn't seem reasonable to him that she could have cleaned the rest of the apartment for decades and not have at least some suspicions regarding the supposed false door.

  Whether or not that monstrous, incredible mass of stone up on the hill was the original Great Pyramid of Giza, it was still there when Scheffler went back again to take a look at it through heat and sunlight. Still there, in the broad daylight of what was either midmorning or midafternoon, though it had been dusk in Illinois when he pulled the tapestry-curtain back into place and closed himself into the elevator once more.

  Standing in the savage sun-glare on the lip of the rocky fissure, he pulled the cheap compass out of his shirt pocket and established to his own satisfaction that here it was midafternoon and not midmorning. For this purpose he was going to be daring and assume that, whatever else might happen to the world, the sun still came up in the east.

  So the river was east of him, and the pyramid about the same distance to his west and a little south. Last night Scheffler had done a little reading on the geography of Giza, the district of the Pyramids just east of modern Cairo, and he had to admit that the situation he was looking at here seemed to correspond exactly. Everything he could see indicated to him that he was standing on the west bank of the Nile.

  The hardest part of that to deal with was that if Khufu, or Cheops as the Greeks came to call him, was still building his great tomb, the year ought to be somewhere near three thousand BC.

  Whatever, and whenever, here he was.

  Scheffler drew a deep breath, then almost matter-of-factly put the compass away again and got his borrowed binoculars out of their leather case hanging around his neck. As it turned out he hadn't had to break into Uncle Monty's gun cabinet to get at the glasses; the back of one of the drawers in the old man's dresser had given up a set of keys, one of which fit.

  With the glasses raised to his eyes, under the broad brim of his new Aussie hat, Scheffler stood in one place for what felt to him like a long time, looking things over in detail.

  He started with the pyramid itself. Now he could see many details of the stonework, and of the construction of the ramps that lined its sides. The stone was pale and new-looking, and glared at him. The heat-shimmer continued to make observation difficult, but he thought that with the binoculars he would have been able to see people moving about on the pyramid if anyone were there. It was hard to be sure, though, because there was nothing on the monument or near it to give him a good grasp of its scale.

  At last he looked away from the pyramid, and swept the landscape around him with the lenses. No one in sight at all. Had he caught everyone at siesta time again?

  Turning around, Scheffler aimed the glasses downhill at the city—or ruin, or whatever it was—where the canal split off from the river. The distance was about the same as that of the pyramid, and this view was equally quivery and unrewarding. The whole world looked dead with heat. But as soon as he looked away from buildings, and began to examine the cultivated land that lay in green strips along both sides of the river, he started to find nonhuman life in plenty. There were many irrigated fields in sight, and in some of those fields Scheffler could observe four-footed animals, evidently some kind of cattle, moving about and grazing. But there was still not a human worker to be seen.

  Birds, as before, wheeled in the sky, and skimmed the brown surface of the distant river. At one place close to the near bank Scheffler spotted a log-like object that appeared to be drifting upstream. But if it was a boat, no one was in it.

  Along the more distant reaches of riverbank, where the land appeared to be flatter and less rocky, the binoculars could resolve the irrigated fields into neat rectangles and lozenges, separated by mud walls and punctuated with clusters of huts. But even in the villages no one was moving.

  He tried the nearby canal, but the binoculars could not penetrate the palm trees and other growth that covered the banks. Presently he put the glasses back into their case that still hung around his neck, and started to walk down the rocky slope toward the canal.

  He had not gone more than a few yards when he came upon a collection of artifacts. There was quite an armful of stuff, including pottery, jewelry, textiles and carvings of white and black stone. All of it had been left, jumbled together, in a bushel-sized depression in the rock. Down in the hole the objects would be almost impossible to see from any distance, but otherwise no trouble had been taken to conceal them. They were simply there. As if, perhaps, they were waiting to be collected.

  Scheffler left the things where they were and walked on. Sand crunched under the soles of his high-topped gym shoes, and heat radiated at him from all directions. He made his way cautiously in under the palm trees on the near bank of the canal.

  It was indeed a narrow waterway, no more than eight or ten yards wide, and here where the canal was deeply dug the earthen banks of it were high. A footpath followed closely along the top of each bank. The waterway itself, as far as Scheffler could see along its length in either direction, was almost clogged with stalled sailboats and narrow barges or rafts. Some of the boats appeared to be made of nothing but bundles of reeds, but still each of the vessels lined up along the near bank carried at least one massive squared-off block of stone. Each pale stone block had at least one of its surfaces highly polished, almost enough to mirror the sun. In contrast the boats along the far bank were all unloaded, and riding much higher in the water. Loaded or unloaded, none of the vessels were manned, or tied up. All appeared to be drifting freely in the muddy, practically currentless water. One or two of the loaded craft had sunk; one of these remained partially above the surface of the shallow water, and moss was growing on its stone cargo.

  As far as he could see, none of the boats were equipped with outboard motors. Here and there a small, brown sail hung in rags.

  The trail running under Scheffler's feet, right along the top of the bank, had been trodden deeply by many feet. But a long time had passed since there was heavy traffic, and now it was becoming overgrown by grass.

  After a minute of looking to right and left, up and down the canal, and still failing to discover any sign of human life, he turned and followed the trail in the direction of the pyramid. He did not forget to memorize some minor landmarks first, so he would know where to leave the waterway again on his way back.

  Before he had walked for many yards along the path he was startled by a sudden scurrying movement ahead of him. An object his eyes had told him was a log had abruptly grown short legs and a long tail, and was in motion. With a chill down his spine Scheffler
recognized the crocodile for what it was before it splashed into the water.

  After a thoughtful pause, in which he tried and failed to follow the creature's progress among the drifting and sunken boats, he continued on his way. Belatedly it now occurred to Scheffler that his Uncle Monty's gun cabinet might represent something more than an extravagant hobby of the old man's youth.

  Birds rose crying from the trees ahead of Scheffler as he moved along, to settle down again as soon as he had passed. After the incident of the crocodile they made him start. A fish—or something—splashed nearby in the water. If there were any human beings ahead of Scheffler on this path, these sounds might warn them of his approach. But his boyhood experience with squirrels and crows and rabbits suggested that the birds here, at least, were behaving as if they had not been disturbed by people for many hours, perhaps for days.

  Scheffler moved on. At least here in the shade of the palm trees he was spared the very worst of the heat. The path along the far side of the canal was totally empty. Both paths looked as if at one time armies had marched on them and worn them into the banks; perhaps men had walked on them, towing the boats along.

  On beginning his walk Scheffler had estimated that the pyramid was approximately a mile away. As he moved along he began to revise this distance upward. The structure grew and grew, becoming more unbelievable as he approached it, and it was obvious that he still had a considerable way to go. How high was it from base to peak? Twenty stories? Thirty? More? He had read some numbers concerning the Great Pyramid in the book last night but he couldn't recall them now. Certainly the monument he was approaching was massive beyond any building that Scheffler had ever seen before.

  The skyscrapers of Chicago, or any other city, would be mere splinters of stone and steel if they were set down beside it, though a few of them would be taller. The base of the pyramid must occupy acres and acres of ground space. And the really unbelievable part was that every block of that tremendous mass had been quarried by hand, then brought to the construction on these boats, dragged and lifted into place with human sweat and muscle…

  But where was the army of workers now? It was time, thought Scheffler, for him to take that question seriously. Maybe he ought to cut short his exploration efforts until he had it figured out. The appearance of the boats, and the fact that some of them had sunk, suggested that the project had been abandoned. The job of putting up the pyramid certainly wasn't finished, though the bulk of the structure had been completed. The ramps for the construction were still in place along the massive sides. And these stones in the boats looked like components of the outer casing, of which only a small portion had actually been installed.

  Presently Scheffler reached the end of the canal. It was a large circular pool with no other outlet, occupied by more boats and rafts, some of them loaded, some not, all deserted. Again a few had been dragged to the shallow bottom by their loads. Here, at a broad dock, began a double roadway, leading overland to the pyramid. The trail of stone blocks continued along one of the roads, leaving the rafts and the brown-sailed riverboats behind, and advancing from here on by means of a line of wooden sledges. Load-bearing sledges were on the roadway to Scheffler's right, while the empty ones had been coming back along the left. The sledges, loaded and unloaded alike, were as motionless and deserted by their owners as the boats. All was silence and stillness in the heat. Sand had drifted over some of the wooden runners.

  The pyramid, built on slightly higher ground, was now so close ahead that Scheffler had to tilt his head back to get a good look at it. He moved on toward it, along the road that bore the blocks.

  SEVEN

  Reluctantly, but feeling a compulsion to do so, Scheffler left the shade of the canal-side palms and trudged on up the barren hillside, squinting into unrelenting heat.

  When he had reached the top of the first rise he was able to see the remainder of the roads that stretched between him and the pyramid. They were occupied by hundreds more of the sledges. After passing through an area of barrack-like huts, the roads blurred into a great terminal area of ground rendered flat and barren by the traffic of construction, that appeared to surround the base of the pyramid. From each corner of the base that he could see, a ramp went up, bearing stones and sledges with it.

  Scheffler stopped beside the nearest sledge to examine it more closely. Two ropes of strange-looking fiber had been attached at the front end. The ropes were lying loosely on the ground, as if the men who must have been pulling on them had simply dropped them and walked away. It must have been men who had hauled the stones, for these were not harnesses for animals. These were simply ropes, long ropes, made to be gripped and pulled by many hands. Scheffler paused to pick up one of the lines. It felt rough and strange. The unfamiliar fiber, whatever it was, was uneven in thickness, not put together by a machine. In contrast the sides and edges of the stones themselves appeared incredibly smooth and straight.

  And there were the two ruts, slick-surfaced, in each roadway, made by the runners of the sledges, or perhaps made for them. The ruts looked as if someone had worked on them to make them smooth.

  Belatedly Scheffler recalled the Polaroid slung at his side. He stopped now and got the camera out of its case and used it, several times. He was unfamiliar with it and worked slowly, but to good effect. He caught the pyramid itself, still in the middle distance, and took a couple of good shots of the blocks of polished stone on their sledges in the foreground. He decided that he would pause on his way back and get some pictures of the canal. What he'd do with the photos when he got them home he didn't know yet. But it seemed to him there ought to be something that could be done. Eventually someone was going to have to know about all this.

  The sun, he thought, was already noticeably lower in the sky than it had been on his arrival. He was approaching the pyramid from an angle that would soon allow him to take advantage of its slowly lengthening shadow. All right, he would go on, for a little while longer anyway. But he mustn't fail, no matter what, to get back to his elevator before dark. Once night fell it would be all too easy to miss the way. He could imagine falling into that canal, or stepping on a crocodile invisible in darkness.

  Scheffler moved on, setting a fairly good pace but stopping at short intervals to look around, and pausing frequently to sip from one of his canteens. It was a good thing he'd brought two—already he'd gone through almost a quart of water, he realized. Coming into this heat directly from winter was just too much.

  Now he began to notice that here and there along the trail were pottery jugs, some smashed, many still intact. Most of them were large vessels, twenty-gallon size or bigger. Probably they were meant to be carried by two men, because each pot was complete with its own long shoulder-pole and sling. Scheffler paused to move one of the intact big jugs with his foot. No water left in it now. How long would water take to evaporate in this dry heat?

  Shadow was darkening the pyramid on its north and east faces—the great building seemed to be aligned precisely with the compass, just as Uncle Monty had said—and the shade was stretching out with tantalizing slowness to meet Scheffler as he advanced. Everything else around him was jumping and quivering in the energy of this desert furnace. He tried the binoculars again, but now the more he looked through them the less he saw. The heat appeared to be increasing—if it weren't for his hat and his long sleeves, he thought, he'd be dead by now, fried to a crisp. Next time he'd bring the other pair of glasses—those, as he recalled, were only seven-power. Maybe less magnification would be better in this shimmering glare.

  The watch he wore on his left wrist, showing just slightly beyond the end of his long shirtsleeve, looked strange and out of place. He'd forgotten again to look at it when he arrived, so it wasn't going to help him any. Next time maybe he'd just leave it home.

  Scheffler was beginning to be frightened. He was suffering from the heat. And at the same time he realized that in a strange and almost unfamiliar way he was enjoying himself.

  At last he ste
pped into the shadow of the pyramid, and stopped to wipe his forehead. Shade helped enormously against the heat.

  Now, just ahead of him, between him and the base itself, stretched the rows of mudbrick huts. Their gray walls were indistinguishable one from another, and their roofs were of reed bundles or dried palm leaves. These shacks, as he passed among them, looked just as unpopulated as the rest of the surrounding world.

  Then he was startled again, as a dog, a little gray-brown mutt without a collar, ran out from somewhere and barked at him. It came within a few yards of Scheffler, then circled away. It looked scrawny and sounded vicious, and its eyes were those of a wild animal. Scheffler, who generally liked dogs and did well managing them, called to the beast but it would not come to him.

  Eventually the dog got tired of making noise and disappeared. Scheffler pushed on toward the pyramid, pausing several times to look in the doorless openings of the nearest huts. The shadowed interiors contained a few more pottery jars, and rags of cloth, scattered about or hanging on simple racks. He thought that he could detect, very faint, the musty smell of crowded humanity, blended with odors of smoke and spice, hanging in the air inside the huts. But no fires had burned for some time in the small hearths, and no one was there.

  As Scheffler gained yet higher ground, and was able to see over most of the huts, he came in sight of stone buildings in the middle distance. These were much larger and more substantial than the huts, though insignificant in comparison with the pyramid itself. They stood within a stone's throw of its northern flank. Again Scheffler paused to look, but no one moved among those buildings either.

  There were no other pyramids anywhere in sight. Khufu's was the first to be built here, Uncle Monty had said.

  And now, at last, Scheffler had reached the base of the artificial mountain itself.