The Engine of Khufu
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1922, Giza. You tune cathedral organs for a living, and somebody has finally asked what the Great Pyramid sounds like.
November 1922. Four hundred miles south, Mr Howard Carter has gone down a step at Thebes and every reporter, photographer and idle Egyptologist between here and Cairo has gone after him. Nobody is watching Giza. It has not happened in a hundred years.
You are Thomas Ardley, organ builder, of Lincoln. You have never been further from England than Rouen. You are here because Miss Hester Vane read eleven pages you wrote in 1913 about why the nave at Lincoln does a particular thing at a particular pitch, and because her reis, Ibrahim Sabri, has been telling people since 1907 that he was in the second chamber above the King's Chamber during a tremor and the building sang five notes in an order — and every single person he told wrote him down as charming.
You can see, or you can hear
This is the only game in the collection where the light is the puzzle. An acetylene lamp burns for eleven hours and puts a hard shadow of your own hand on the wall, and it hisses — broadband noise sitting exactly on top of the fundamental you came here for.
Strike a granite beam by lamplight and it will give you a note, and it will be the second partial, an octave and a fifth too high, and you will write it down in perfectly good faith the way four gentlemen before you wrote down nothing at all. Douse the lamp and you cannot examine anything, cannot read a mark, cannot cross a chamber you have not already walked and counted — and you can hear four rooms at once, through two hundred feet of limestone, and tell which is which.
The map is not the instrument
strike, listen, hum and damp are first-class
verbs. Rooms have pitches. Some rooms are deaf, and a deaf room is not an absence of information —
somebody made a hundred feet of the descending passage deaf on purpose, and packed the joints to do
it. And rooms are coupled: strike a beam here and it is answered four chambers away
and nowhere in between, so the acoustic map and the map of the passages are two different documents
and only one of them is any use.
Five acts
Act I — The Survey Camp. Above ground, in daylight, with four people: the woman who holds the concession, the reis who heard it, his daughter who has drawn this building more accurately than anybody living and is not allowed to sign it, and a rival who is delighted to see you and is going to make the best argument against you that anybody makes all week.
Act II — The Descending Passage. One corridor, one chamber, one pit, and the two facts the rest of the game runs on.
Act III — The Relieving Chambers. Five stacked chambers, five notes, one order — and the order is fifteen years old and lives in the memory of a man nobody believed. Also one cracked beam, and one written warning about it.
Act IV — The Water Machine. No deaths and nothing that runs out: four stone vessels, three bronze sluices, a canvas bucket, and four shafts that the books call ventilators. Water shortens a pipe and raises its note. Tune it.
Act V — The Apex. What it was measuring, why somebody cut a line through eight hundred and eleven years of it and walked away, and three things you can do about that.
Roughly two to three hours. Autosaves every turn, checkpoints at every act.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.