They were on the eastern side of the step pyramid sprinting alongside the heb sed court... 'The God Dig'

The step pyramid, designed by Imhotep

Chapter 1

Egyptian tour guides will tell you that it’s good luck to walk in a complete circle around the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.

It’s even luckier if you’re able to run, Anson Hunter thought after two bullets in quick succession spat dust from the ground at his feet.

The independent Egyptologist felt his skin tingling in shock like the effects of a close lightning strike.

“What was that?” the girl said.

“Gunshots.”

He swept the courtyard and sandy perimeter of the monument. The pagan mass in stone was already twisting in the early morning heat.

The place was empty of visitors today, except for the girl. It looked like an abandoned building site with scaffolding clinging in places to the pyramid’s sides, evidence of uncompleted restoration work on the crumbling outer blocks, but somebody unseen was out there and had fired at them.

A guard? Why? It made no sense. Besides there were no guards in evidence today.

Some extremist taking pot shots at visitors?

The shots had been a little too carefully placed perhaps.

The question in his mind: was it meant to send them running? Or was it an instruction to stop?

He grabbed the girl’s hand and broke into a zigzag run, tugging her after him.

They were on the eastern side of the pyramid sprinting alongside the heb sed court.

A dark irony, he thought.

The heb sed court was a ceremonial running course that by tradition the reigning pharaoh had to complete at a Jubilee held every thirty years in order to prove his agility and his continued fitness for office. In an earlier epoch, failure to complete the run successfully saw the old king murdered.

Now they were running a circuit of survival too, not around a course with pre-set stone markers, but around the world’s first stone pyramid, a protest against death and a monumental stake in the sand for the belief in an eternal afterlife.

He flicked a glance at the girl he’d only met minutes earlier.

Her dark hair was flying and the anger in her face said: ‘it’s happening again…’

Persephone. Named after the daughter of Zeus and the Greek queen of the underworld by her Greek-Egyptian father.

“Per-seph-o-ne.” He’d toyed with the syllables of her name on hearing it. 

She came as a complete surprise. He had no idea that the Alexandrian scholar had a daughter and assistant researcher.

But then Anson had only shared theory with Philip Kalliris, not Facebook status.

“My father was a great admirer of your work, Anson,” she had said at the beginning of this arranged meeting following her phone call. “Your support was everything to him. His work was totally ignored before you.”

“He deserved more recognition.”

“It was a conspiracy of silence.”

“Probably just neglect by the archaeological fraternity.”

She fired up.

“No, it was a conspiracy to deny him his place in the world of scholarship.”

“Scholars are comfortable with the status quo. Any new theory has a very distracting ripple effect on their elaborate constructions. Like an unwanted extra piece in a jigsaw puzzle.”

“It’s more than that. They closed ranks against him. Egyptology. Historians. Religions. Intelligence services. The Egyptian government. What if they all conspired to be rid of him?”

He shrugged.

“Interesting theory. I’m just sad that I did him no favours by drawing attention to his work. He attracted the wrong kind of interest in the end.”

“After years of being ignored, attention was what he craved. He was excited about the documentary being planned, about receiving recognition at last. Even an Al Jazeera journalist came to interview him before he died. Then this. His enemies murdered him!”

Anson had felt relieved that she was directing her fire at others and not him. But it did little to assuage his sense of guilt.

With the shock attack on her father, the young woman had gone to ground in Alexandria, not emerging until this hastily arranged meeting with Anson today at Saqqara.

The six-stepped superstructure of the pyramid erupted into the sky beside them, built by the first and greatest known architect in ancient history, the genius Imhotep, who later became a god.

The girl’s father, radical scholar Philip Kalliris, believed that all three book-based religions had their roots in ancient Egypt, also that Abraham and Imhotep were one and the same and that Abraham brought the idea of its shape from the ziggurat in Mesopotamian Ur, a structure with three levels and temple on top, but which he transformed into the idea of a sublime mortuary monument, influenced by Egypt’s powerful ideas on the afterlife.

And the rest was alternative history…

Maybe…

Kalliris wasn’t right about everything.

A stairway to the heavens for his pharaoh Djoser, but this mound was no escape for them. Unless they clambered up the scaffolding.

The tiered mountain turned abstract eternity into the monumentality of stone, and yet the niched outer walls of the complex were designed in the shape of delicate woven mats hanging from wooden frames, and inner courts had elegant engaged columns that echoed the perishable shapes of bundled plant stems and papyrus stalks with blossom capitals.

Were they better off out here in the open, or in there? They’d strolled past the entrance colonnade earlier.

Better to be out here and see what was coming. They risked being trapped inside the structure.

Keep going.

Ancient builders had built fourteen doors into the outer walls of the pyramid complex, but only one real door. The rest were false doors.

False hopes. Built to allow the king’s ka to come and go in the afterlife. They offered no escape, yet lying beneath the pyramid was an underworld maze of galleries and chambers six miles in length that could hide an army.

Their running footfalls pounded the sand as they fled along the east side of the structure.

Were the attackers the same ones who had killed her father?

They reached the northern corner and the serdab court.

Inside a walled vault, punctured by two eyeholes, sat the stone image of king Djoser, his face partly smashed, giving him a frightening aspect. It wasn’t the original statue of Djoser behind the peepholes, but a replica. The original sat in the Cairo museum.

Through the peepholes Djoser could see the imperishable northern stars in the sky and could also observe the daily ceremonies and offerings of the priests, as well as inhale the fragrance of burning incense from the land of Punt.

The peepholes made Anson think of rifle sights. Someone had taken a long shot at them, several. That could mean they were too far off to give chase.

Are we safe now?

Or are there others closer, on foot?

As if in answer to his question, three men stepped out from behind a low, sand-strewn stone wall and brought the two running figures to a halt.

They had been herded into a trap.

Excerpt from "The God Dig" - adventure fiction with a mysterious ancient Egyptian theme on Amazon Kindle