Keystone (3 page)

For all their
similarities, two more physically distinct people could not be found on the
entire campus: while Gail was athletic and dressed in fashionable jeans and
blouse, with smartly-combed chestnut hair tied back in a short ponytail, Ellie was
plump and round, wore baggy combats and a loose t-shirt, and her hair was a
mess of long dreadlocks.

“What I need
is something different, something –”

“What you need
is another coffee, maybe Irish it up a little this time though!” interrupted
Ellie.

“Isn’t 11am a
little early for that?” she grinned.

She knocked on
David’s door and they both entered before waiting for a response.

“Ah, my
favourite future doctorates!” he said rubbing his hands together. “Ellie,
you’re welcome to stay.”

She nodded,
though she hadn’t really offered to leave.

“Gail, I have
just been speaking to an old friend of mine. I happened to mention your lack of
inspiration for your thesis, and it just so happens that he is leading some
expeditions this winter that you might find interesting. He’s short a couple of
spaces, and I persuaded him he could do with a PhD student on the books,” he
tapped his tablet a couple of times. “I’ve sent you some details. I told him
that you are one of the brightest students here, and as such he would be a fool
not to offer you a place immediately. I’m sorry I lied, but needs must,” he
winked.

Gail flipped
open her tablet and the brief summary from David flashed up.

“Egypt?” she
gasped.

Ellie looked
at the small, colourful, slightly amateurish summary brochure on her screen.
 
She looked at her friend’s face, then back
again at the screen.
 
“Egypt, for a
month?
 
You can’t do a thesis on Egypt!”

David shook
his head. “The Department doesn’t specialise in Egyptology, for sure. But I
think your Social Archaeology master’s sets you up perfectly, Gail.”

“It looks
interesting, different,” Gail was nodding enthusiastically. “Besides, we’ve
touched on Egypt before, in ‘Classical Mediterranean’ and I’m sure there was a
first year course that covered it.”

David grinned.
“One of mine in fact: ‘The Emergence of Civilisation’.”

“And the cost?”
Ellie continued. “It’s for volunteers, Gail. They even underlined that bit, so
they’re not going to pay for a free holiday to Egypt for you; you’ll probably
even have to fork out for the accommodation and food yourself!”

They looked up
at David, who sat on the corner of his desk and put his tablet down. “You’ve
both been on digs before, and this is no different: they will have some
reasonable accommodation and catering on site. From what I’ve heard it’s in the
middle of the desert, so everyone will be in the same situation. As for
flights, I can’t imagine they’re too expensive.”

Gail grinned.
“I’m sure I can persuade George that it’s a good idea.” She knew she was probably
going to have to soften him up a bit beforehand, though.

“Speaking of which,
what about George?” Ellie replied.
 
“You
can’t just leave him on his own for a month,” she sounded almost sorry for him,
“and over Christmas!”

Gail knew this
would hardly be a bar: she had no living relatives, her parents having died in
a car crash while on holiday in France when she was nine. Her foster parents
had younger children to care for now, so they rarely imposed on them for
anything more than a coffee and an exchange of presents. For his part, George’s
family were spread across three continents and his parents had moved to Canada
the year before.
 
Christmas was going to
be a quiet affair.

Gail thought
about this for a moment and checked her calendar. She looked up at David and
smiled. “I’ll think of something, don’t worry.”

“Great!” David
clapped. “Look, you still have to apply for a place, but I’ll put in as good a
word as I can. In the meantime do some brushing up, I’ve sent you a reading
list so you should have some documents waiting for you.” The University library
had digital copies of all its textbooks, and free access to most other digital
libraries in the academic network. As her master’s supervisor, David was able
to select any texts from these resources and assign them to her automatically,
at which point they would become available in her tablet’s digital library. “If
you want to do this, you need to send me your thoughts on your proposal by the
end of next week, that way I can help you to make sure it’s perfect in time for
your PhD application deadline.”

Gail thanked
him and turned to go, leaving Ellie standing next to David.
 
“Well, are you coming?” she asked her. “We’ve
got another study-group in five minutes.”

Ellie looked
at David and then laughed. “My God, that Egypt thing really has affected her,
hasn’t it?”

“What do you
mean?”

“Gail Turner:
on time!”

George was in the living room
when Gail got home, stretched out on the settee. His bare feet were resting on
a small chair in front of him and his t-shirt was riding up, exposing what had
recently become a slightly podgy belly. His short, dark hair was a mess and his
face was covered in what he called ‘designer stubble,’ but what Gail called the
result of working from home for a whole week. She often joked that as George
worked from home, it was as if she was doing the studying and he was living the
life of a student.

His career as
a marine biologist often meant that he had to go on extended field-trips,
though he had so far failed to be sent any further than the freezing waters of
the Baltic. In between trips, he spent most of his time building simulation
models for micro-organism behaviour.

He was facing the
video wall, their latest toy. It had been installed the previous week, and was
literally a normal everyday wall, which at the flick of a switch could display
from any one of a number of multimedia sources, or even all of them
simultaneously.
 
George’s favourite setup
was watching the football on eighty per-cent of the wall, with the remaining
fifth split between browsing the internet and social feeds.
 
Having just splashed out on such a big gadget,
she knew she had leverage for some flights to Egypt if she needed it.

 
As she sat down beside him she gave him a peck
on the cheek, at the same time leaning over and grabbing the remote. Before he
could complain she had changed the channel.

“Good day
then?” he laughed.

“Not bad, not
bad.” She continued to look at the video wall intently. “You?” she asked
nonchalantly.

He looked at
the wall and smiled: the History channel. When Gail wasn’t watching programs on
archaeology she was watching history, and she preferred to view it full screen.
She claimed that you simply couldn’t concentrate on more than one source at the
same time; anyone who said they could was obviously trying to impress someone.
George had thought this to be slightly out of character, considering how she
tended to jump from topic to topic at the drop of a hat.

“OK, I
suppose,” he sat up and shifted his body to face her on the settee. “I couldn’t
do much today because most of our data from Latvia was corrupted, again. Apart
from that, just the usual.”

“Corrupted?”

He sighed.
“The data from another one of the sensors we put on the seabed came through all
garbled, missing half the packet information. It might just be the data
transfer, but they’re organising a dive team to go and replace it. Then they’ll
send us the memory chips to see if we can salvage anything.”

“That’s the
fourth one, isn’t it?”

“Yup,” he said
with a sigh. “It’ll push that trip back by a few weeks now, probably at least a
month.”

“Pushed back a
month, eh? When was that supposed to happen?” she asked, still looking at the
wall.

It was a
loaded question and he knew it.
 
She had
sent him a strange email that afternoon, asking him how much holiday he had
left for the year.
 
He only had a couple
of weeks. “Late December, early next year. Doesn’t matter now.”

Gail turned to
face him with a huge smile on her face. Although she was eager to go to Egypt, going
to such an amazing place with George by her side would make it extra special.

“Oh, no. What
are you planning?” he asked.

“What do you
think of going to Egypt this Christmas?” She could barely contain her
excitement.
 

George took a moment
to react. When he did, Gail was reminded why she had married him two years
earlier: his smile turned into a grin, and he leant forward to kiss her. “Tell
me all about it, honey.”

She had
immediately been interested in the idea of going to Egypt for a dig. But as the
hours had gone by and she looked ever deeper into the background of the
excavations, that interest had turned into raving enthusiasm. She had completed
her application form for the dig online and had spent the rest of the afternoon
surfing the Internet for more information.

It turned out
that the story of Tell el-Amarna was very simple, which was what made it so
captivating. For over seven hundred years, the financial and political capital
of ancient Egypt had been at Thebes in the south of the country. Royal palaces,
temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor, commercial centres, agriculture,
everything was within convenient reach.
 
By the reign of Amenhotep III in 1382BC it was the centre of an
expanding, powerful and ambitious kingdom. The international influence of the Egyptians
was unquestionable, and their armies were fast becoming unbeatable on foreign
soil. The kingdom was enjoying a period of unprecedented wealth and power.
 

Then, at the
start of his reign, the young pharaoh Amenhotep IV started work on a new capital,
far away from Thebes to the north, on the edge of the Eastern Desert and the
banks of the Nile. Shortly afterwards, Amenhotep IV changed his name to
Akhenaten. The Aten suffix was derived from the name of a newly promoted god of
the sun, suddenly the primary deity of the Egyptian people. Within four years,
the seat of government had been moved to the new capital, named Akhetaten.
 

Akhenaten himself
moved to this new capital with his wives and children and at the height of his
reign, the city of Akhetaten boasted a population of over twenty thousand
people.
 

Nine years
later, Akhenaten died and power quickly shifted back towards Thebes. After
barely twenty-five years of occupation, Akhetaten was abandoned.
 
There was evidence that the tombs of the
later Aten kings, such as Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen, who even changed his name
from Tutankhaten to distance himself from his father’s legacy, were
purposefully tampered with so that their occupants never found eternal peace. The
succeeding pharaohs ensured that no record of the city or its heretic kings
remained intact.
 
Engravings were
chiselled and scratched from stone and plaster, written records were buried or
destroyed, and the city was razed to the ground and abandoned.
 

So thorough
was their work that it was not until 1887, over three thousand years later, that
Egyptologists became aware of the ancient city, when a woman from the modern
village of Tell el-Amarna came across a hoard of clay tablets.
 

For Gail, the
most enigmatic of all this was Akhenaten’s famous queen, Nefertiti; with an
imposing appearance in artwork, most notably her bust in the Berlin Museum, it
was difficult to imagine that she had not played an important role in
Akhenaten’s kingdom. And yet to date, her burial place and remains had never
been identified and in all likelihood were yet to be discovered.

As Gail
finished telling George all of this, he had little doubt that she had indeed
found the mystery she had so been longing for. That the capital city of a great
kingdom moved from one place to another was important enough, without the
Egyptians having changed from polytheism to quasi-monotheism at the same time.
But it was what happened afterwards that really made the story intriguing: the
Egyptians had made every effort to erase Akhetaten and everyone involved in it
from their history.

Gail was so
excited that they stayed up until the early hours of the morning talking about
the mystery of the site, searching her textbooks on her tablet and surfing the
Internet. Over half a million websites made some mention of it and after
several hours George would have sworn that they had looked at most of them.

“Are you sure
this is the sort of thing you’re looking for?” he asked her as he looked at a page
on the video wall. He gestured with the remote to scroll down and read more.

“What do you
mean? It’s perfect!” she answered.

“This website
here looks a bit far out, to be honest, talking about aliens and the pyramids
and all that.”

Gail looked up
from one of her own hardcopy textbooks from her undergraduate years: it turned
out that there was a whole chapter on Tell el-Amarna that she had never noticed
before. “There’s always going to be at least one, isn’t there? I mean there are
still people who think that we didn’t land on the Moon!”

“Did we?” her
husband joked. In the last ten years, man and woman had landed on the Moon no
fewer than three times. The most recent of these, a joint Sino-Russian mission,
had visited the historic Apollo 11 landing site and transmitted live video
footage to Earth. The conspiracy theories continued, unabated.

“Whatever,”
she laughed and continued to look through her book.

George touched
her arm. “Gail, isn’t this the sort of thing you wanted to steer clear of, you
know, conspiracy theories and cover-ups? Isn’t this what David Hunt goes on
about?”

“No, not at
all!” She put her book down and took the remote from George, motioning back
several pages to a website they had looked at earlier. “This is history,” she
gestured with the remote and highlighted a paragraph in yellow. She turned
towards George and smiled. “You see, David likes to pick up on where people
have made mistakes, trying to find bad dating and conveniently ignored
evidence. He’s made a career out of it, and he’s certainly not the only one.”

“And for every
piece of evidence in favour of one of his theories, I bet there’s a whole ton
of evidence
he
ignores,” George
commented.

Gail smiled. “A
bit harsh; he’s a scientist just like you and I, a damn good one at that. He
does love going against the flow, and that’s not always the easiest path, but this
is the brilliant thing: Amarna isn’t some twentieth century cover-up,” her eyes
lit up. “it’s a cover-up made nearly three and a half thousand years ago, by
the Egyptians themselves, and that’s what archaeology is all about. We’re just
like police at a crime scene, except that we take a really long time to turn
up.
 
And no one has yet been able to
fully solve the mystery of Tell el-Amarna.”

“Until you
showed up, obviously,” he poked her in the ribs and grabbed the remote back
from her.

She ignored
him and carried on. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’m going for it. I sent
off my application already.” Gail looked at George and put her hand on his arm
caringly. “I don’t imagine many people want to spend the whole of Christmas
holidays away from home, do they?”

“Or pay for
the privilege,” he snorted. “Well, I guess it’s lucky my Baltic sensors are all
messed up so I can go with you then, isn’t it?” He looked at her with mock
suspicion. “Which talking of conspiracy theories certainly is a remarkable
coincidence, don’t you think?”

Gail laughed
and pulled him towards her. “I planned everything,” she told him, before
kissing him passionately.