Keystone (5 page)

The car
stopped and Gail jumped out, followed by George on the other side.
 
To his amusement, he noticed the spring in
her step as they approached the gazebo.
  

“Which one’s
the Professor?” George whispered.

Before Gail could
answer, the tall thin man turned, removed his hat, and ran his fingers through
his short grey hair. Seeing them he grinned, displaying his impeccable white
teeth that stood out in contrast to his dark skin. He placed his straw hat back
on his head gingerly and started towards them.
 

“
Assalaam aleikum!
The beautiful one has
come!” His English was perfect, tinged with an American accent that betrayed
his time at Harvard over thirty years earlier. “The beautiful one has come!” he
repeated.

George looked
at Gail quizzically and she laughed. “Nefertiti,” she said looking back at him.
He raised an eyebrow and looked back at the Professor who laughed at his
reaction.

“Welcome to
Amarna,” he exclaimed throwing his left arm out behind him to show the site
while thrusting his right hand out to shake their hands.
 
“I am Professor Mamdouh al-Misri, but please,
call me Mamdouh!” he grinned at Gail. “You have arrived at just the right time:
come and see what we have found!”

They shook his
hand and he turned to lead them to the trench, where the group of people were
now laughing and patting each other on the back. A young man in his early
twenties climbed out of the hole in the ground, grinning widely.
 

“Nefertiti?”
George asked under his breath.

Gail squeezed
his hand tightly. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what her name means.”

“I must have
missed something. What’s what her name means?”

Gail detected
a hint of jealousy in her husband’s voice and looked up at him. “George, don’t
be upset, it’s just a joke.” She smiled and looked back at the Professor, who
was now getting down into the trench.
 
Some of the group had turned towards them and were getting ready to
introduce themselves.
 
“That’s what
Nefertiti’s name means,” she looked at him again and grinned, feeling happy
that the Professor had paid her the compliment. “Nefertiti means The Beautiful
One Has Come.”

Since the late nineteenth
century, the ancient city of Akhetaten at Tell el-Amarna had captured the
imagination of historians and archaeologists across the world. But by the
twenty-first century the site had still failed to gain the popularity and
renown that other discoveries, such as the tomb of Tutankhamen, had
enjoyed.
 
The remains of Akhetaten were
by no means spectacular in comparison to those of Thebes and the Valley of the
Kings; characterised by short walls and foundations, most buildings were mere
outlines in the sand.
 
In effect it was
difficult to see, in the dusty plain sandwiched between the Nile to the west
and the cliffs to the east, that Akhetaten had at least briefly been one of the
most impressive cities of the Egyptian world.

Imagination
alone could take the rare visitors on fantastic journeys to the time of
Akhenaten and his most famous wife, Nefertiti, walking through bustling streets
past grandiose temples and towering public buildings. For that, and because
site access to tourists had traditionally been made difficult by the Egyptian
authorities, the finds at Amarna went mostly unnoticed to the world at large.
 
Now, one hundred and fifty years after its
discovery, Akhetaten was at risk of being consumed once more by the shifting
sands.

Despite this
the mystery lived on. Every now and then, the sands would reveal a surprise to
the delight of the persistent archaeologists. A collection of clay tablets
documenting sales of livestock and grain had in recent years sparked interest
far away in Cairo, mainly because it had been found in a previously unexcavated
part of the city, close to where Professor Mamdouh al-Misri was now basing his
expedition.

Gail and
George had arrived in the middle of one of those rare moments of discovery.
Three days of digging had uncovered countless pottery sherds and dozens of
crumbling clay bricks, and all the evidence had been pointing to the fact that
they were excavating a pile of rubble and rubbish.
 
As unromantic as it sounded, that was exactly
the sort of place the best archaeological finds were made, and just as George
had been driving their car off the ferry, one of the young Egyptian students
had lifted what he had thought to be just another clay brick.
 

“It’s
incredible,” enthused the Professor as Gail peered down into the trench, the
bottom of which was by now quite obscure in the fading light. “We have been
here for little over half a week, and already we have found more than we could
possibly have hoped for.”

She squinted
to see, and the Professor passed her a torch.
 
Its powerful beam threw the shadows back, and she could now make out in
more detail the rectangular tablets, each approximately the same dimensions as
a hardback novel.
 
She counted ten of
them in the bottom of the trench, plus the one that the Professor was holding
out to her.
 
Taking the tablet, she cast
the torch over its surface. “It’s not hieroglyphs,” she muttered. “More like
cuneiform?” she said tentatively. Behind her, George raised an eyebrow and
looked at the Professor with interest.

“Absolutely,
Gail, I see you have done your homework! The writing is cuneiform, and the
language it is written in is in fact Akkadian. You can see from the first lines
that the letter is probably addressing Akhenaten, as it starts with the phrase
‘To the king, my lord, my god and my sun’. It is the formal address of a letter
destined for the pharaoh himself. Akkadian was the most widespread language of
the time, like English is today. As such it was the accepted diplomatic
language in the city of Akhetaten. It will be interesting to decipher further
to see if we can date it precisely to Akhenaten’s rule or not.”

He took the
tablet back from Gail and entering the nearest tent placed it in one of many
plastic find trays on a trestle table.
 
Covering it in bubble-wrap, he turned his head to them and smiled.
 
“Like me, most of the team speak English, so
you should have no need to worry during your stay. However, I expect you to
learn some basic phrases by the end of the week.”

“Of course,” Gail
nodded seriously.

“Let us start
with greetings: next time I say
assalaam
aleikum
, you should reply
waleikum
salaam
.”

“Waleykoom
salum?”

The Professor
smiled. “Not bad. People aren’t saying hello, they are saying ‘peace be with
you.’ That is why you should always reply ‘and also with you.’”

He finished
protecting the tablet and turned to George. “And I understand you will be
leaving us tomorrow to do a bit of sightseeing?”

It seemed
almost too touristy to be visiting Thebes after having been introduced to the
excavation at Amarna, almost as if to say ‘I’ve seen this, but I’d much rather
take a look at some towering temples and impressive tombs!’ Conscious of this,
George simply nodded and agreed.
 
Mamdouh
did not seem to mind though, and as they walked back outside he proceeded to
give George a rundown of all the best things to see in the other ancient
capital.
 
As they approached the back of
the tents, they saw the other dig members gathering around a freshly-lit
campfire, drinking from bottles and clearly in high spirits.
 
Gail and George had arrived just at the onset
of dusk; with the departure of the sun, a lot of the heat had already left the
barren landscape and Gail looked at the fire longingly.
  

“Mamdouh,”
Gail said cautiously. It was obvious she felt uncomfortable using his first
name, but he had already insisted twice. “What will I be doing on site?”

The Professor
laughed and patted her on the back. “Gail, don’t worry about that, I have a
very interesting job for you for the next couple of days, which I am sure you
will find very useful.” He gestured for them to sit down next to the fire and
they were given bottles of Coca Cola by a young student, who had
enthusiastically introduced himself to them as Ben on the edge of the trench
earlier.

“Thanks,” Gail
said to him.

“
Shukran
,” the Professor corrected.

“Shoe-cram,”
George said with a grin.

Ben laughed
and clinked the side of his bottle against theirs. “
Shukran
.”

For the next
hour, conversation centred predictably on their finds.
 
Ben seemed to be the centre of attention, and
the running joke was that had the Professor not been watching over him, the
priceless artefact would have found itself at the bottom of a pile of worthless
clay bricks on the other side of the trench.
 
For his own part, Ben seemed more interested in getting to know Gail and
George.
 
In his early twenties, he was
fairly short and of medium build, his long hair held back by a baseball cap he
wore backwards.
 
His English was good,
though heavily accented, and before long George was in the middle of a
fascinating debate about football, religion and whether or not Indemnity translated
well into Arabic.

Looking at her
watch, Gail realised with shock that they were about to miss their ferry; they
were the only two people not staying at the dig that night, as everyone else
was camping onsite. So they excused themselves and left the group of
archaeologists celebrating around their campfire.
 

“I feel bad,
leaving so soon.” Gail mused as their car laboured along the track back to the
river.

“We can always
go back,” her husband replied quickly, putting his hand on her knee. “There is
a later ferry, we’re only getting this one so we can eat back at the hotel.”

Gail thought
for a moment then shook her head. “No, it’s better if we eat at the hotel, I
wouldn’t want to impose on them tonight, and I’ll be camping there tomorrow
anyway.” She looked out of the passenger window and across the sands, the black
silhouettes of swaying palm trees catching her eye.
 
Dusk had now given way to early night and the
moon had yet to rise. The car was bathed in the silvery-blue light of a million
stars.
 

A smile grew
on her face as she looked over to George in the driving seat; his hand was
still on her knee and she covered it with hers and held it tightly. “Besides, I
think that as this is our last night together until Christmas Eve, we should
get an early night, don’t you?”

George looked
back at her and grinned. “Hotel it is!” he exclaimed and accelerated towards
the ferry.

The next day, George set off
towards southern Egypt, dropping Gail and her luggage off at the dig and
briefly saying goodbye to Ben, the Professor and the other students at the
site.
 

Gail was used
to seeing her husband leave on work trips, and sometimes even enjoyed the time
alone. But the foreign setting made this feel different, like more of a
separation, a parting of ways, than a ‘see you later.’ As she watched George
drive away in their little rental car, his arm waving out of the window, she knew
she would miss him enormously, despite being busy. But there was also a feeling
of jealousy, that George would see the incredible temples of Karnak and Luxor
without her.

Professor
Mamdouh al-Misri coughed gently to get her attention, and she hurriedly wiped
her eyes before turning round with a smile.

“It looks like
we’ve come across the remains of an ancient filing cabinet,” he explained to
Gail as they walked towards the trench where the tablets had been found the
previous evening. “The letter we found yesterday is from Shuwardata of Keilah,
a Canaanite town under Egyptian influence.”

Gail looked
down into the trench, a rectangular hole twelve feet long by six feet wide.
 
At its deepest it was about four feet down,
where Ben had found the tablets. Carefully balanced over the tablets was a
measuring grid: a square wooden frame with pieces of string stretched across
like a tennis racket. It was exactly one metre square, each piece of string ten
centimetres apart.
 

One of the
younger students stood over the apparatus, and through its one hundred small
windows meticulously translated the finds onto a large piece of graph paper, periodically
flicking her long hair out of her eyes.

 
“Canaanite. Ancient Palestine, right?” she
tested herself.

 
“Absolutely, as much a source of tension three
and a half thousand years ago as it remains today. In the letter,
Shuwardata
is complaining of another ruler, Abdu-heba,
who has reportedly occupied some of his land by force.” Mamdouh peered down
into the excavation, holding his hat to his head. “This mass of clay is the
remains of the exterior walls of the building. The rest of the office should be
over there,” he gestured beyond the edge of the trench, where three other
archaeologists were already clearing away the top-sand ready to extend the
excavation.

“Most of the
buildings at Amarna were built in a hurry.
 
They used a combination of smaller limestone blocks that were faster to
transport and build with than the larger blocks used in older sites to the
south, and these poor quality clay bricks. The outside walls were then
plastered and painted so that their outward appearance would have been no
different.” He pointed to a particular brick, thickly coated along one edge
with plaster. “Have you ever been to the old Soviet Union or one of its
satellite states?”

The USSR had
disappeared over ten years before Gail had even been born, in another century.
She had never heard anyone refer to it before as if it had actually
existed.
 
It was as if someone had just
asked her if she had ever visited the old Roman Empire. She shook her head in
reply and looked at Mamdouh curiously.

“At the end of
the Second World War, the Russians occupied many countries on its western
front,” he explained, “a buffer-zone between it and capitalism, more
specifically the Americans. Many of these countries had been at the very centre
of European politics and economics for hundreds of years, countries like
Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania. This was replaced with Communism, a
harsh, unforgiving regime controlled by Stalin in Moscow.” He was now walking
towards where the new trench was being started, Gail followed. “You can’t take
everything away from people and give them nothing in return. You have to win
hearts and minds, you have to make them believe that everything is alright,
while at the same time re-asserting your power and authority. They tried to
achieve this partly by constructing huge ostentatious buildings, government
offices, and monuments.
 
They built them
quickly and poorly, weak concrete blocks covered in cheap plaster.”

As he said
this, he pointed behind him, towards the pile of clay bricks next to the first
trench. “I went to Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria, many years ago at the
end of the last century. As I arrived at the main train station, I was
awestruck by the sheer scale of the platforms, as wide as motorways and
stretching far away into the distance.
 
Leaving the station’s huge main building, you could see whole sections
of plaster that had simply peeled away, leaving the rough concrete visible
beneath, and breaking the illusion of a monumental stone block structure. ”

Gail looked
around at the barren terrain they were in: the sun was already high in the
morning sky and the temperature was rising rapidly. She tried to imagine a city
of elaborate buildings dominating the skyline, but found it quite
difficult.
 
It was hard even to imagine
the fertile plains on the other side of the Nile that had been there barely
twenty years earlier.

“Do you think
that Akhenaten was like Stalin?”

Mamdouh
laughed and gave her a friendly pat on the back. “There are parallels,
certainly. Akhenaten didn’t run a democracy, that’s for sure, but all evidence
points to his rule being above all peaceful and happy.” He looked across the
sands at a group of palm trees, motionless in the still air. “It’s almost as if
this were a twenty-year vacation away from normality, ignoring duties such as
pleas for help from other kings, including Shuwardata.”

“So he was a
pacifist?” she asked.

“Or an
idealist, or a religious fanatic, or a lunatic, take your pick.”

Gail thought
about this for a moment. “That would be a good thesis title: ‘Akhenaten:
Idealist or Lunatic?’” she laughed. “By the way,” as if joking around had
jolted her memory, “David sends his regards.”

“Ah, yes. He
had good things to say about you, Gail,” he said looking at her with interest.
“He said you were struggling for inspiration, that you wanted something exciting:
a good mystery to sink your teeth into,” he laughed. “And he did mention that
you didn’t fancy classifying pottery sherds.”

She blushed.

“There are
many questions you can ask yourself about this place, many mysteries that have
no answers yet, and only some of them have established theories. Why did
Akhenaten change religion? Why did Akhenaten change the site of Egypt’s capital
city? Why did Akhenaten remove himself from the outside world?” he looked at
Gail and smiled. “But I think the question you are most interested in is not
regarding Akhenaten, is it?”

“No,” she
replied.

“Social archaeology
is about people, not events.
 
So if it
isn’t about him, it must be about –” he left the sentence hanging in the hot
air for her to finish.

“Nefertiti,” she
looked Mamdouh in the eyes. “They say that behind every successful man there is
a woman.” Pushing him out of bed and nagging him, George would have added.
“I’ve been reading about Akhenaten ever since I heard about this dig, and I
don’t know why but I feel that all of the changes he made were linked to her.
We don’t know where she is from and we don’t even know where she is now. To me,
she is the mystery.”

Mamdouh
laughed heartily and put his hand on Gail’s shoulder. He led her away from the
trenches and towards the tents. “Come with me and I will show you what I think
you should do this week.”

Gail’s heart
sank as they approached the large square tents: she was going to be cataloguing
finds. “In here?” she asked. She could hear Ellie giggling childishly in the
back of her mind.
 

“Yes, in
here.” He smiled as he led her under the white canvas, towards a trestle table
covered with paperwork and laptop computers.

She approached
the table and looked down at the mess of forms and maps and computer hardware.
An A3 pad of fresh graph paper sat on top.
 
The Professor put it to one side and uncovered a map of the area, the
Nile running up the left hand side. Gail’s hopes rose slightly as she saw this:
cataloguing finds should involve diagrams of the trenches, not larger scale
maps like this.

“I feel the
same as you do about Nefertiti,” he started. He was looking at her intently, as
if what he was about to say was of utmost importance. “I feel that she was at
the heart of Akhetaten.” He paused and looked down at the map before
continuing. “And I believe she still is.”

“You think she
is buried here?”

“I do.”

Gail looked
down at the map. It was covered with spidery writing, Arabic shorthand, with
crosses and circles highlighting what she assumed were archaeological finds.

 
“Gail, whatever the subject of your thesis, I
am thrilled that it will be centred on this great, ancient city and its people.
But before you can write even one sentence, you have to feel Akhetaten. You
have to know this place, its air, its soil and its mountains, before you can
come close to understanding the people who lived and died here, and that
includes Nefertiti.” Pointing to several large circles on the map, he
continued. “There are many famous excavations around here, a palace here, some
small dwellings there, the tombs in the cliffs. There are even some columns
that stand out from the sand, which you will have noticed on your way here.”

Gail nodded.
The previous evening it had been too dark to see them in the dying light. But
in the morning, she and George had easily picked out the low lying remains.

“This is your
first visit to Amarna, and I do not want to throw you in a trench or hide you
in a tent for the whole of your four weeks.” Gail’s sigh of relief was
noticeable, and he laughed. “Your enthusiasm for this excavation has been
apparent from your constant emails and has yet to be matched by any one of my
students.”

Gail blushed.
She had not been aware of having sent constant emails, but on reflection she
had probably become a little too chatty over the past few weeks as her
excitement for the upcoming dig grew.

“I was once
like you, though not quite as attractive,” he smiled, “a young Sherlock Holmes
of the ancient world wanting to find mysteries and solve them.”

He studied the
map for several seconds, during which time she wanted to say something but
couldn’t find the right words.
 
It seemed
to her that Mamdouh was opening up on quite a personal level, possibly a result
of the rapport built between them by the constant emailing, possibly as a
result of something more sinister.

“And did you?”
she finally managed to say, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

“I wanted
mysteries too and I got one,” he said. “Amarna found me nearly thirty years
ago, and I have been obsessed ever since.” He was looking deep into the map,
beyond the writing and the marks, toward something else.

Gail waited
almost a minute before breaking the awkward silence that followed. “So how can
I help?” she said quietly.

Her voice
pulled him back to the present and he jerked his head up and away from the map
with a smile. “I would like you to spend the next couple of days getting to
know Amarna, the sands, the cliffs, the ruins.
 
There are two reasons for me giving you this task. Firstly, I know that
Nefertiti is here somewhere, but I have looked for so long I am blinded by
experience. I need fresh, excited, idealistic eyes, and I trust David when he
tells me that you’re the person for that.

“I would
recommend that you head to these plateaus to the north. From there you will get
a great panoramic view of the valley, and it’s a good place to start before
heading to the tombs to the east.” He folded the map up and passed it to her,
along with the keys to a Land Rover. “There is a 4x4 outside, which I prepared
this morning with everything you will need. And after two days, there will
still be plenty left to do here, such as cataloguing finds,” he said with a
wink and a grin.

Gail took the
keys and the map. “Shoocran,” she said.

“You’re
getting better!” he grinned. “
Shukran
,”
he corrected, shortening the u and rolling the r.

She couldn’t
quite believe her luck: four months ago she was floundering, without even a
research proposal or any idea of where to find one. Now, she was in Egypt with
the keys to a 4x4 and an open road to discovery.
 

“What’s the
second reason?” she asked.

He laughed.
“Ben will be coming with you for safety. Not yours, but archaeology’s. I need
to get him offsite for a while: he’s a complete liability with these fragile
tablets in the trench!”

Half an hour
later Ben started the engine of the Land Rover and pushed it into first gear,
moving slowly forwards in the sand, he turned towards the main track and found
second with a screech of the clutch. Gail poked her head out of the passenger
window and grimaced at the Professor, who laughed silently and waved
goodbye.
 

As they
accelerated into the distance, he stopped waving and removed his hat.
 
He pulled a mobile phone from his trouser
pocket and hit the call button twice.
 

A telephone on
the other side of the world began to ring.