Keystone (6 page)

“My God, it’s hot!” Gail exclaimed
as she scanned the rocks ahead for a foothold. Seeing a suitably flat one, she
shot her foot forwards and hopped on to it, holding her arms out to maintain
balance.
 
“And it’s only eleven!”

“The sun, it
is heating the rocks. The rocks are,” Ben paused thoughtfully for a second
before continuing. “Cooking us?” He glanced at Gail and she looked up at him
and smiled.

“The rocks are
absorbing the heat,” she corrected, although she wasn’t entirely sure herself
whether absorbed was the correct term for it either.
 
Kneeling down, she touched the surface
beneath her feet and pulled her hand away quickly. “Ouch!” she said, standing
up again.

Ben mentally
repeated the word absorbing to himself several times, before shrugging and
jumping across a deep hole onto another rock.
 
“There is nothing up here,” he shouted back as he reached a ledge in the
cliff face. “This is just a cliff.”

Gail reached
his side and looked around them.
 
The
cliff rose at least another twelve feet above them, while the ledge they were
standing on jutted two feet out at its base.
 
They had just crossed at least ten yards of tightly-packed rocks of
varying sizes. She knew nothing about geology, but guessed that they had, until
sometime in the past, been part of the cliff.
 
“You’re right,” she conceded eventually.

“Unless you
like rocks?” Ben had intended this to be a joke, but it had clearly not
translated well.

She didn’t
particularly like rocks. But something had drawn her to this specific cliff,
and now she was determined to get to the top of it and look back out over the
ancient city of Akhetaten.

“How do we get
up there?” she asked, pointing to the top.

“By
helicopter?” Ben suggested.
 
This time he
was rewarded with a short laugh from Gail, which boosted his confidence.
 
“Or we can use the lift?”

“Don’t be
silly, we’ll take the escalator.” She looked at him and laughed. “Stairs that
move, Ben, stairs that move.”

“Ah! Escalator!”
he said, accentuating the first syllable to suggest that he knew the word but
she had pronounced it incorrectly.
 
They
both laughed as they made their way along the ledge.
 

Farid ‘Ben’
Limam was not the worst archaeologist in Egypt, but he wasn’t far off. It was
his last year at university, and the Amarna dig was earning him valuable
credits towards his bachelor’s degree, so he wasn’t so upset that Mamdouh had
seen fit to get him out of the way just as the exciting finds had started to
emerge.
 

Truth be told,
he was actually enjoying himself, climbing over rocks looking for something
that wasn’t there.
 

And in any
case, he thought as he looked up at Gail, who had shot ahead and was nearing
the top already, the view was pretty good.
 
He looked down again and cursed himself.
 
He had immediately clicked with George the previous evening, and felt
bad for staring at Gail’s rear. He looked up again just in time to see her legs
disappearing over the top.
 
Ben stopped
climbing and looked down. It wasn’t as steep as he had imagined, but it was
higher. He had already climbed a good twenty feet up from the Land Rover and had
another ten feet to go before he joined her.

Hearing Gail’s
voice from beyond the cliff-top, he shouted up at her.
 
There was no response. Again, he heard her
voice and hurried to reach the top.
 
He
was just about to clamber over and reveal himself when he heard her again, but
this time much clearer.

“No, not yet,
just climbing around some cliffs with Ben,” she said. There was a short pause
before she laughed and added: “No, of course not! He’s helping me. The Professor
sent me away for two days to search the desert for Nefertiti! Can you believe
that?”

George, Ben
thought.
 
As he realised this was a
personal call, he crouched down just below the cliff top and decided to wait;
he didn’t want to disturb Gail while she was talking to her husband.

“When do you
arrive? So you’ll have lunch there then?”

At this point
it occurred to Ben that he was in actual fact eavesdropping, which was far
worse than interrupting a private conversation.
 
Debating what to do, he pulled out his own phone and opened the
directory.
 
He contemplated calling his
father, to avoid the awkward situation of him standing there waiting while Gail
struggled to say her goodbyes. But then he shook his head, realising that should
his conversation take longer than Gail’s, she would be in the same
situation.
 
Suddenly he thought of the
solution.

“Hi!” he
exclaimed as he popped his head over the edge of the cliff and waved, a huge
grin spread across his face.

Gail was
sitting on a small rock, about six feet away, with her back to him. Turning
round, she waved and smiled, then gestured at her phone and made an apologetic
shrug.
 

Smooth, Ben
thought to himself as he pulled himself up and walked along the cliff’s edge.
Very smooth.

“See,” he complained
sitting down on a large, flat stone about thirty yards from the edge of the
cliff. “Nothing but sand and rocks. And over there, a palm tree!” he pointed at
the lonesome palm swaying gently in the breeze that had made its way up from
the valley below. “Welcome to Egypt!”

“But no
camels?” Gail laughed.

He shrugged
and pointed to the valley and where the Professor’s expedition was based.
 
“Probably doing a better job than me over
there in the trench,” he half-joked.

Gail looked
over at him and grinned. “Why do you call yourself Ben?” she asked.

“My real name
is Farid, the same as my father.
 
For as
long as I can remember, people have called me Ben, I was even called that by my
teachers at school!” He looked down at the sand and laughed. “I have no idea
where it came from,” he said.

Gail
contemplated this for a second before responding. “When I was a child, I could
never understand why my parents had named me after the wind. A gale is like a
hurricane,” she explained to him. “Names are funny old things, don’t you
think?”

“Yes?” he
answered cautiously.

“Like Nefertiti,”
she continued. “’The Beautiful One Has Come’. What a strange thing to call
someone. Where could she have come from, and where could she be now?”

“I imagine she
is dead, Gail,” he joked. “And she is certainly not around here.”

Gail stood up
and walked towards the lone palm tree, away from the cliff’s edge and the stone
on which Ben sat, looking out towards the desert. “She has to be somewhere!”
she said. Despite the fact that they had seen nothing all day with the
exception of a couple of landslides and a few lizards, she was filled with
happiness at simply being in Egypt, in the desert, with ancient ruins barely
half an hour’s drive away.
 

Reaching the
base of the palm, she turned and looked at Ben. He was still sitting on the stone
about twenty yards away, but had shifted round to see what she was doing. She
looked at him and started to wave, then stopped.

“What is it?”
he shouted. He got up and jogged over to her. “Gail, what’s wrong?”

She pointed to
the stone they had been sitting on, and began walking towards it. “Look!”

Ben turned
back to the rock and froze. Even he knew what it meant.
 
The flat stone they had been sitting on was
about eight feet long by at least six feet wide.
 
It stood about eight inches high, almost
buried in the sand, and was perfectly flat. There were many flat stones dotted
around the landscape, a natural by-product of the stratified rock formation
caused by millions of years of sedimentation, and this one had seemed no
different as they had approached it from the cliff and sat down to rest.
 
But it was obvious, seeing it from the other
side, that it had once been shaped by man.
 

Whereas on the
other side it was rough and ragged, this side was perfectly smooth and flat,
the vertical face at right angles with the top.
 
From where Gail and Ben were now standing, it looked like a giant stone
building block that had simply fallen from the sky and landed in the middle of
a barren cliff-top.
 
Naturally occurring
geological marvels were not unheard of: Gail had seen pictures of the Giant’s
Causeway and plenty of underwater sites around the world where natural rock
formations had been wrongly attributed to man. And if it had only been for the right
angles and the smoothness of the surfaces, Gail could have doubted her
judgement. But it was not just this that made her heart swell with
excitement.
 

Engraved on
the stone, just poking out from beneath the sand, were the unmistakable lines,
loops and curves of hieroglyphs.

They started
clearing the loose sand at its base until an area approximately two feet high
by eight long had been exposed.

On her knees,
Gail ran her hand over the engravings, following the outline of what they could
now see was a cartouche with her fingers. She looked up at Ben.

A cartouche is
an oblong shape containing some hieroglyphic symbols. Both ends of the cartouche
are always rounded, and if a straight line runs along the bottom edge, then the
characters within the oblong typically represent the name of a royal figure.
The term
cartouche
comes from the
French word for cartridge, as French soldiers in Egypt during Napoleonic times
noted their likeness to their ammunition casing.

This cartouche
was definitely for someone important.

“Ben?” Gail
asked.

Ben was
rummaging in his backpack and brought out a well-thumbed textbook.

“Hieroglyphs,
my favourite,” he smiled. Running his finger along the symbols, he read out
loud. “The four symbols at the top are
Ra
,
e
,
t
and
n.
The god Aten.
The symbol at the bottom of the cartouche, of a woman, means a queen.”

“Ben,” she
started. “Is that Nefertiti?”

He looked
between the cartouche and his textbook. “What looks like a church steeple is
actually the heart with a windpipe attached. One on its own,
nfr
, means beautiful. He skimmed through
the pages quickly.

“I was never
good at this,” he complained, rubbing his forehead.

“You’re doing
brilliantly,” Gail encouraged him. “Better than I could!”

 
He smiled and pointed to the next three hearts
and windpipes.

“These three
together, are
nfrw
, similar to the
first, but meaning beauty. Ah, OK!” He pointed to a page in his book. “Beautiful
is the beauty of Aten. It’s like a part of the name, but not the name, if you
see, like saying long live the queen.”

Gail was
disappointed. “So, it’s not
the beautiful
one has come
? It’s not Nefertiti?”

“Be patient! OK,
the next bit is another heart and windpipe followed by
neb
, the basket. This is
nfr-t
,
a beautiful woman, or simply a beauty. The last bit, I have no idea. Wait, let
me try something.”

 
She looked at the cartouche and the
surrounding symbols. “Beautiful is the beauty of Aten, A beauty
something
something
. It’s pretty close! What do you think, Ben?”

Ben was
flicking through the pages of his textbook and jotting down some notes,
muttering to himself in Arabic. Finally, he showed them to Gail.

“OK, I did it
backwards. You want this last bit to be has come. The verb to come is tall reed
with two legs that you see here in the cartouche, but followed by two man legs
walking. It is pronounced
ii
. The two
vertical bars in the cartouche are a short form of two walking legs. The
problem is the symbols are in the wrong order. They should be, reed, then
walking legs, then the last one, which you can see here next to the sitting
queen, which is pestle, from mortar and pestle for mixing herbs,” he made a
mixing motion with his hands. “The pestle makes a soft
t
sound, and it makes the feminine of the past of the verb
come
.”

Gail read
through the scribbled notes then took his pen. She jotted down the phonemes one
by one:
Nfr-t
, a beauty,
ii-t
, has come.

“
Nfr-t-ii-t
,” she whispered in wonder.

“Finally,” Ben
said with a grin. “Now you pronounce it like a true Egyptian!”

They both sat
back on the sand, looking at their find with a mixture of disbelief and
excitement.

And Gail
thought to herself:
a beauty has come
.