The Engine of Khufu — hints

Talk to all four of them, and get one specific thing out of one specific person. Ibrahim Sabri heard five notes in an order in 1907 and has been telling people for fifteen years, and nobody has ever asked him to sing it. ask ibrahim about 1907, and then ask ibrahim to sing it.

All four, and none of them is a waste of a turn. Nafisa Sabri has the beam lengths and a written warning about a cracked one; Ibrahim has the sequence and has put his hand in a shaft in August; Miss Vane has the story of 1907; and Professor Dietrich, who thinks you are wrong, will hand you the two facts that turn out to matter most.

Because you have not got the sequence, or because there is somebody on this plateau you have not spoken to. The game names them.

The canvas bucket at the well head, which is the least remarkable object in Egypt and which Act IV cannot be finished without. And Nafisa's section, from the drafting tent.

strike wall in a room that has a note, and then listen. A struck room rings for several turns, and while it is ringing you can hear it from the rooms it is coupled to — which are not the rooms next door.

Yes. That is the whole game. The lamp hisses, and a hissing lamp buries the fundamental and leaves you the second partial — an octave and a fifth up. douse lamp and strike it again, and watch your own book correct itself. The game will not let you go up until it has.

Some rooms are deaf, and being deaf is a fact about a room and not an absence of one. The upper hundred feet of the descending passage is lined and its joints are packed, and somebody did that on purpose so that the top of the passage could not talk to the bottom.

Everything, with the lamp out. The subterranean chamber's "unfinished" floor, the pit's west recess, the grotto, and the foot of the well shaft — and in two of those you will hear something slow, from a long way below, at about one every four seconds.

Walk the whole stack once with the lamp lit — you cannot cross a chamber in the dark that you have not already counted. Then douse it and strike each one. Longest beam, lowest note: Davison's at the bottom is the low one and Campbell's at the top is the high one.

Check the lamp. With it lit you are giving the building the second partial, and it is waiting for a fundamental and has been for four and a half thousand years.

The one Ibrahim Sabri sang to you in the camp. Type notes to read it back. Then play the five chambers in that order, lamp out, one strike each. A wrong one lets the whole thing go and you begin again.

You were warned in writing. The third beam from the east is cracked and has opened three-sixteenths since 1837. Do not strike anything in that chamber while another chamber is still ringing — wait until it has gone quiet, or damp what you can reach. It is the only way to die in this game.

Go down to the King's Chamber and look at the coffer.

Four vessels, four shafts. Water shortens the air column and raises the note, so level 1 is a G, 3 is a C, 4 is a D and 5 is an E. The machine wants 1, 3, 4, 5 down the cascade. examine machine shows the state and the rules.

It fills the lowest one it can reach, the way water does. So fill from the bottom up: five measures for the fourth vessel, then four for the third — and then shut the second sluice so the water stops going below it, three for the second, shut the first sluice, and one for the first.

Nothing here is lost. Shut the sluice above whatever you want to keep and drain, which takes from the lowest vessel still connected to the cock. The well is a hundred and ten feet deep and has been full since the Old Kingdom.

No. There is nothing in Act IV that can kill you and nothing that runs out. It is the one act in the collection built that way on purpose.

Read the column in the gauge chamber, twice. It is fed from the water table, and the water table follows the whole catchment and follows it late. It does not record the flood. It forecasts it, four years out.

Then you are relying on one sense and this act is built for two. Light is silence and sound is blindness — you have known that since Act II, and the apex is where it costs the most.

Read it. Two hundred pages — On the Structural Necessity of the Superimposed Chambers — sixty of them crossed through in ink at two o’clock this morning by the man who wrote them, and he has not thrown a page away. The margin of page eighty-one is the whole of what this act is about.

Three answers, all real: leave it running, stop it, or publish. Go up to the summit first — Miss Vane is up there and the valley is worth four hundred and fifty feet of climbing.

None. A four-year forecast in the hands of the people who own the land is not the same instrument as a four-year forecast in the hands of the people who farm it, and the machine does not care which it is.