‘I am trying, General.’
‘Succeed. Because the moment you are of no use to me, I can have you jailed.’ He looked past me, the admonition given. ‘Ah. They are big, aren’t they?’
The same awe that I’d felt on my initial visit was experienced by others as they came within view of the Sphinx and the pyramids behind. Customary chatter went silent as we clustered on the sand like ants, the depth of time palpable. Their shadows on the sand were as distinct as the pyramids themselves. It was not the ghosts of the long-vanished workmen and pharaohs I experienced, but rather the serene spirit of the structures themselves.
Napoleon, however, scrutinised the monuments like a quartermaster. ‘As simple as a child might build, but they certainly have size. Look at that volume of stone, Monge! Building this big one here would be like marshalling an army. What are the dimensions, Jomard?’
‘We’re still digging, trying to find the base and the corners,’ the officer replied. ‘The Great Pyramid is at least seven hundred and fifty feet on each side and more than four hundred and fifty feet high. The base covers thirteen acres, and while the building stones are huge, I calculate there are at least two and a half million of them. The volume is large enough to easily contain any of the cathedrals in Europe. It is the largest structure in the world.’
‘So much stone,’ Napoleon murmured. He asked the dimensions of the other two pyramids as well and, using a Conte pencil, began jotting calculations of his own. He played with mathematics in the way other men might doodle. ‘Where do you think they got the stone, Dolomieu?’ he asked as he worked.
‘Somewhere nearby,’ the geologist replied. ‘Those blocks are limestone, the same as the bedrock of the plateau. That’s why they appear eroded. Limestone isn’t very hard, and wears easily from water. In fact, formations of limestone are frequently perforated with caves. We might expect caves here, but I must assume this plateau is solid, given the aridity. Reportedly there is also granite inside the pyramid, and that must have come from many miles away. I suspect the facing limestone also came from a separate quarry of finer rock.’
Napoleon displayed his calculations. ‘Look, it is absurd. With the stone in these pyramids you could build a wall two metres high and one metre thick around all of France.’
‘I hope you don’t expect us to do so, General,’ Monge joked. ‘It would weigh millions of tons to take home.’
‘Indeed.’ He laughed. ‘At last I have found a ruler who eclipses my own ambition! Khufu, you dwarf me! Yet why not simply tunnel into a mountain? Is it true the Arab tomb robbers didn’t find a corpse inside?’
‘There is no evidence anyone was ever buried here,’ Jomard said. ‘The main passage was blocked by enormous granite plugs that seem to have guarded… nothing.’
‘So we are presented with another mystery.’
‘Perhaps. Or perhaps the pyramids serve some other purposes, which is my own theory. For example, the pyramid’s placement, near the thirtieth parallel, is intriguing. It is almost exactly one-third of the way from the equator to the North Pole. As I was explaining to Gage here, the ancients hint that the Egyptians might have understood the nature and size of our planet.’
‘If so, they are ahead of half the officers in my army,’ Bonaparte said.
‘Equally striking, the Great Pyramid and its companions are oriented in the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west more precisely than modern surveyors typically achieve. If you draw a line from the pyramid’s centre to the Mediterranean, it exactly bisects the Nile Delta. If you draw diagonal lines from one pyramid corner to the opposite and extend those, one going northeastward and one northwestward, they form a triangle that perfectly encloses the delta. This location was no accident, General.’
‘Intriguing. A symbolic location to tie upper and lower Egypt together, perhaps. The pyramid is a political statement, do you think?’
Jomard was encouraged by this attention to his theories, which other officers had jeered at. ‘It is also interesting to consider the pyramid’s apothem,’ he said enthusiastically.
‘What’s an apothem?’ I interrupted.
‘If you drew a line down the middle of one face of the pyramid,’ the mathematician Monge explained, ‘from point to base, so that you divide its triangle in two, that line is the apothem.’
‘Ah.’
‘The apothem,’ Jomard went on, ‘appears to be exactly six hundred feet, or the length of the Greek stadia. That’s a common measurement found throughout the ancient world. Could the pyramid be a standard of measurement, or be built to a standard that long predates the Greeks?’
‘Possibly,’ Bonaparte said. ‘Yet using this as a measuring stick seems an even more absurd excuse for such a monument than a tomb.’
‘As you know, General, there are sixty minutes in each degree of latitude or longitude. That apothem also happens to be one-tenth of one minute of one degree. Is this mere coincidence? Even odder, the perimeter of the pyramid’s base equals half a minute, and two circuits a full minute. Moreover, the perimeter of the pyramid’s base appears to be equal to the circumference of a circle whose radius is the pyramid’s height. It’s as if the pyramid was sized to encode the dimensions of our planet.’
‘But dividing the earth into three hundred sixty degrees is a modern convention, is it not?’
‘On the contrary, that number can be traced to Babylon and Egypt. The ancients picked three hundred sixty because it signifies the days of the year.’
‘But the year is three hundred sixty-five,’ I objected. ‘And a quarter.’
‘The Egyptians added five holy days when that became apparent,’ Jomard said, ‘just as we revolutionaries have added holidays to our thirty-six ten-day weeks. My theory is that the people who built this structure knew the size and shape of the earth and incorporated those dimensions into this structure so they’d not be lost, should learning decline in the future. They anticipated, perhaps, the Dark Ages.’
Napoleon looked impatient. ‘But why?’
Jomard shrugged. ‘Perhaps to re-educate mankind. Perhaps simply to prove that they knew. We build monuments to God and military victory. Perhaps they built monuments to mathematics and science.’
It seemed improbable to me that people so long ago could know so much, and yet again there was something fundamentally right about the pyramid, as if it were trying to convey eternal truths. Franklin had mentioned a similar rightness to the dimensions of Greek temples, and I remember that Jomard had tied everything to that strange Fibonacci number sequence. Again I wondered if these games of arithmetic had anything to do with the secret of my medallion. Mathematics made my mind fog.
Bonaparte turned to me. ‘And what does our American friend think? What is the view from the New World?’
‘Americans believe things should be done for a purpose,’ I said, trying to sound wiser than I was. ‘We’re practical, as you said. So what is the practical use of this monument? Perhaps Jomard has a point that this is more than a tomb.’
Napoleon was not fooled by my rambling. ‘Well, the pyramid has a point, at least.’ We dutifully laughed. ‘Come. I want to look inside.’
While most of our party was content to picnic, a handful of us entered the dark hole on the pyramid’s north face. There was a limestone portal marking the pyramid’s original entrance that had been constructed by the ancient Egyptians. This entry, Jomard explained, was only revealed when Muslims stripped off the pyramid’s casing for stone to build Cairo; in ancient times it had been disguised by a cleverly hidden hinged door of stone. No one had known precisely where it lay. So before it was revealed, medieval Arabs made an attempt to plunder the pyramid by simply starting their own entry. In 820, Caliph Abdullah al-Mamun, knowing that historians recorded a northern entrance, had a band of engineers and stone masons chew their own tunnel into the pyramid in hopes of striking the structure’s corridors and shafts. As luck would have it, he began below the earlier door. It was this excavation we entered.