Denibus Ar by Chris Turner

Author:Chris Turner [Turner, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

The bloated sun peered over the desert. At last the site’s burnt-ochre hills felt the first full rage of heat. Crimson rays limned the seven uncovered columns of Aesgis, firm in their bed of ancient bleached sand, proud in their clockwork oval.

A great pit, four metres deep, 450 metres long and 110 metres wide, yawned before the bright white columns. It had been dug painstakingly and meticulously, excavated by the effort of forty-five dedicated hands over a period of five months. The crater was impressive—akin to some spooky Indiana Jones setting.

At the far western end of the pit loomed the 17M high pyramid, past the six columns of Aesgis arranged in a tight oval. The enigma was built of huge limestone blocks. Its front face, stepped and ridged, was crumbled, brittle and strangely darkened with age. Tilted as it was to the rising sun, it now glinted like a sullen, slumbering beast, taking seven months to move the 35,000 tons of earth to uncover the pyramid alone. Heavy machinery, airlifted from Luxor, had done the bull work. Now that the main, gruelling task of clearing was complete, the same machines lay limp as derelicts, beyond the military compound: bulldozers, dump trucks, a group of backhoes, a caterpillar and a grader.

A force of 20 trained soldiers guarded the site—night and day—for the Egyptian government was protective of her treasures. She made no secret that hers was one of the greatest finds in the Mediterranean world. There had in the past been terrorist attempts to undermine sites and even destroy them—of course, many European and North American nations were always trying to sneak objects of value out of the country.

Four years ago, the pyramid had been just a nondescript hill, covered with sand, very cleverly hidden for many ages until a freak plane crash had left Emmet Herlios, an American Greek, stranded on one side of a great dune. The soft sands had saved his life, protecting him with only minor injuries. His Cessna had plummeted earthward, spun out with a ruptured fuel line, and had skidded sideways and lodged itself wing-deep into the sand.

A dazed Herlios had emerged from his crumpled craft, realizing that the soft, sandy slopes of the hill had slowed his impact, shielded him from a much more fatal impact with the crags not too far away. He had sunk down on his knees in gratitude, marvelling at the providence of fate. The hill’s perfect conic proportions and its shallower-than-usual slopes caused him to blink in curiosity. Such slopes were coated with a fine, but peculiar golden-reddish sand. Herlios sensed that this was no ordinary hill…

In this area of the desert nothing of marked significance existed. Nobody lived within miles of here; only faraway ridges, sunburnt hills, endless vistas of rolling dunes, sculpted into fantastic shapes by timeless winds. The pilot, harbouring only a single canteen of water and a half of a falafel in his stomach, grit his teeth and began to march east, away from the ruthless sun that had killed many before him which beat incessantly on his head.

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