The Buried Pyramid (Imhotep Book 2) by Dubs Jerry

Author:Dubs, Jerry [Dubs, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Imhotep Literary LLC
Published: 2013-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

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Re rose and Re set, the harvest was completed and the end of the year was celebrated with five days of feasts and drunken parties to mark the miraculous births of Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephtys.

King Sekhemkhet, comfortable wearing the double crown now, led the celebrations with a regal abandon that endeared him to the populace. His popularity increased even more when on the third day of the festivals, Queen Djeseretnebi gave birth to a daughter.

The festivals ended, the flood arrived and Khaba took the army across the Great Green to inspect the Terraces of Turquoise and to patrol the eastern trade routes. And farmers throughout the Two Lands migrated to Saqqara to work on the new king’s tomb.

In a workshop built near the eastern wall of the funeral complex Imhotep and Paneb built models of a larger pyramid, experimenting with ways to make the sides smooth and playing with arrangements to cantilever the blocks to allow a larger interior chamber.

Soon workers swarmed the Saqqara plateau. Army engineers supervised the cutting of tunnel shafts and the digging of a canal to serve as a delivery system for quarry stones. Some of the workers were sent across the river to join the stone cutters. Others were assigned to erect a tent city for the laborers, still others were sent to the river to man the fleet of boats that would sail up and down the river gathering food for the army of builders.

When an outbreak of intestinal illness struck the camp and then spread to nearby Ineb-Hedj, Imhotep asked Paneb to take on all supervision of the clearing and leveling of the construction site just east of the boundary wall of Djoser’s funeral complex.

Imhotep took Hapu, Paneb’s youngest daughter, as an assistant and together they spent an exhausting month teaching the workers and the villagers to boil water before using it, explaining the importance of keeping sewage drains clean. They supervised the digging of new latrines farther away from the town and from community wells.

All too quickly and with too little work accomplished on the pyramid, the river returned to its banks and the army of laborers left the Saqqara plateau to return to their farms.

The summer months passed with Imhotep fretting about progress on the tomb. Paneb reassured him that he had had the same worries with Djoser’s pyramid, yet they had completed that.

Imhotep was not reassured.

He was worried about Meryt. Her stomach seemed too small for the number of months she had been pregnant. She assured him that she felt life within, holding his hand to her stomach to feel their baby kick, but still he worried.

He was worried about the new pyramid. He had no memory from his earlier life of another pyramid, especially one larger than the Step Pyramid, standing on the Saqqara plateau. He believed that his appearance in ancient Egypt was somehow fulfilling history, not creating a new timeline, and he was sure that in the future there was no pyramid large standing beside the Step Pyramid.

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