Firebird by Michael Asher Page A

weren’t known for being backward at coming forwards, and believe me they usually laid it on with a trowel. But this guy’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere on the pyramid, inside or out. In fact, there isn’t a single piece of sound evidence that links Khufu with it.’
    ‘Isn’t the Sphinx supposed to have the face of Khufu’s son, Khafre?’
    ‘Tell you what, you look at the Sphinx’s face and then swear to me you can make positive ID of anybody at all. A couple of years back a New York Police Department artist who was an expert at doing facial reconstructions did a job on the Sphinx comparing the face to a statue known to be Khafre. His conclusion was that there was no resemblance at all.’
    ‘OK, Mister Smart Aleck, if Khufu didn’t build the Great Pyramid, who did?’
    ‘I don’t know, but I just have this feeling that it’s older than they say and that it couldn’t have been a tomb. The ancient Egyptians built tombs to a pattern, and it doesn’t fit. It’s an oopart . ’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘An oopart — “out of place artefact” — what they used to call an anachronism.’
    ‘Hey, look, what difference does it make, anyway? I mean what’s so all fired important whether this thing is a tomb or not?’
    ‘Flip the question round the other way. Why is the establishment so goddamn insistent that it was a tomb, and that it was built by Khufu? Why do they assert that they know all the answers, when there isn’t one real shred of evidence to support their case?’
    ‘Where did you get all this stuff from, Sammy? I don’t believe they taught you this on any antiquities police course.’
    She was watching me speculatively now, and I knew I had to make some sort of response, no matter how lame. ‘Like I said, somebody I once knew told me that there’s a lot more to ancient Egyptian history than the so called experts want to believe.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. Just somebody I knew and respected. Why? Can’t a cop have views different from the establishment?’
    ‘Cops exist to support the status quo. I just can’t work out why a guy like you is a cop.’
    ‘What about you? Oh, I forgot. Duty to the Star Spangled Banner wasn’t it?’
    We walked around to the southern side of the pyramid, from where we could see the second and third pyramids bathed in light, and beyond them the desert, flowing on and on until it merged with a smoky horizon. Daisy gazed around, her blue eyes shining, entranced. ‘Can we go inside?’ she asked.
    ‘Why not? Wouldn’t be much fun if we didn’t.’
    We walked along the base of the pyramid, our hands skimming the great hewn stones that were visibly warped by time. A muffled woman sitting in the lee of one massive block offered us bottles of cola from a steel bucket. There was a sudden buffet of wind, which sent a flurry of wrappers, crushed cardboard packets and flimsy plastic bags across our vision, and a waft of unexpected cold. Daisy shivered.
    ‘Sandstorm coming,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t be here for an hour or so, though, and we’ll be long gone.’
    ‘How does a street rat like you get to be an expert on sandstorms?’ Daisy asked, holding her head to one side in mock suspicion.
    ‘I’m not an expert,’ I said, ‘I just have intuition.’
    I pointed to the broken aperture, about twenty feet up the pyramid’s wall, where a lone black jacket stood on guard with an automatic slung round his neck. Thirty feet higher there was an even larger orifice through which giant corbelled blocks could be seen. ‘The higher one’s the main entrance,’ I said. ‘There probably always was a door there, right back to when the place was built, but when the Arabs tried to smash their way into the place in the ninth century they missed it, which suggests it was invisible to the outside. The lower, smaller entrance is the place they forced their way in. They only found the real door later when they stumbled on the passage that led away from it. Now, why would