Keystone (7 page)

George edged the rental car down
the track and cursed the sand as he looked enviously at the 4x4s parked a
hundred yards ahead of where he was going to have to stop.
 
Getting out, he donned an old fashioned
explorer’s hat that had been thrust upon him by an eager salesman in Luxor. He
checked his backpack for his camera and took a swig from a plastic bottle of
water before setting off.
  

As he rounded
the bend in the road ahead, he was surprised to see the number of cars lined up
at the foot of the small cliff.
 
On top
of the white 4x4s he had seen a few days earlier at the archaeological dig
there were three luxury off-roaders, more used to driving in cities but clearly
enjoying their trip in the country.
 
On
the side of one was a logo for the Al Jazeera news network.

It had been
four days since he had left Amarna. Christmas Eve back in England, he thought
to himself in wonder as the heat from the midday sun beat down on his
shoulders. Back home, people would be doing their last minute shopping and
panicking about whether there were enough sprouts for everyone; here, a
procession of people had gathered in the desert around something his wife had
found. “What on earth could it be?” he wondered, images of a surreal modern day
Nativity playing out in his mind.

“
Assalaam aleikum,
George!” a shout came
from above him. “Nice hat!”

Looking up he
saw Ben’s huge grin and waved. “
Waleikum
salaam
! How do I get up?” he shouted.

“Keep going,
you’ll see a path in front of you!”

“George!” Gail
shouted as she joined Ben.

He laughed and
made his way to the path. “Hello honey. Been having fun, I hear?”

The stone
stood six feet tall from the bottom of the excavation. A crowd of people stood
looking at the other side of it. George thought he recognised three of the
students from the dig, but there were five men with them he had not seen
before. A photographer circled the stone taking pictures.
 
A tall man in his early thirties, he was
wearing khaki shorts and a blue sleeveless jacket covered in pockets, a camera
bag slung over his shoulder. He assumed that this had to be the reporter from
Al Jazeera.

At one end of
the excavation was a massive pile of sand and rock rising nearly five feet
high.

Gail took
George’s arm and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I missed you,” she whispered in
his ear.

“You found
this
?” he replied in disbelief. “On your
own?”

“I was with
her!” Ben complained with a grin.

Gail laughed.
“It was just sitting here,” she explained. “And now it’s been excavated, it
looks like there’s a lot more to it.”

George stood
at the edge of the trench and looked at the stone.
 
The two sides he could see from where he was
were rough stone, in contrast to the flat, smooth top. From this angle, it
looked totally unremarkable.

“We thought
that there may have been hieroglyphs under the sand on this side,” Gail said,
“but we were wrong.
 
It simply goes down
to the base like that. It also looks like it was buried deliberately, judging from
the deposits we excavated.”

George walked
round to the back of the trench and was met by the Professor, who shook his
hand and asked him how his trip south had been.

“Not as
exciting as this,” he gestured towards the stone. “What is it?”

“It’s covering
something, but we don’t know what yet.”
 

“And what does
that
say?” he pointed to the
hieroglyphs. Compared to those that he had seen elsewhere in Egypt that week,
the engravings looked sloppy, almost
rushed
.
The top half were noticeably more worn from where they had been exposed to the
elements.

“Basically,”
Gail said from behind them, “it says Nefertiti.”

He glanced
over his shoulder at her and raised an eyebrow. She grinned from ear to ear. “So
how do you know there’s something underneath it?” he asked, looking at the Professor.

Mamdouh
climbed into the trench and stood at the end of the rectangular block. “Because
of these.” He pointed with his index finger at a series of rough, straight
lines scratched into the bedrock and ending at the edge of the stone. Where the
Professor was standing, the trench had been lengthened by at least fifteen
feet. The lines stopped just before the end of the trench.

“It was pushed
into place, and it now sits a couple of centimetres deep on what we assume must
be a small sill that runs around the edge of a hole beneath it,” Mamdouh said. “If
it was not covering anything, why would it have been pushed nearly five metres
along these grooves and placed so carefully at this precise point.” He put his
hands on his hips and looked up at George. “That was a clue, Mr Turner.” He
nodded towards three people standing next to what looked like a water cylinder
connected to a personal computer. “That and the fact that their X-ray shows
that there is a large open space beneath my feet.”

“You got here just
in time,” Gail said. “The Professor received the authorisation a while ago to
go ahead with the excavation and remove the block.”

George
grinned. “I would like to see that.”

“See it?”
Mamdouh raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t mind, you can help us by pulling on
one of the ropes!”

 
One end of the stone was to be lifted from its
seat using a large industrial jack. It looked like a scaled down forklift truck
about two feet high, and was being operated by three engineers from Cairo. Two
small indents had been drilled into the bedrock against the end of the engraved
stone, to allow the jack’s small metal feet to be wedged underneath it.
Compressed air was forced into the machine’s pistons, and the stone rose slowly.
As its base crept above the bedrock, a long metal rod, flat on one side, barely
an inch thick but made of high density carbon steel, was slipped under from one
side and pushed through until it protruded out on both sides like an axel.
 
Its flat edge was facing down, stopping it
from rolling out from under the heavy stone.

One of the
engineers crouched down and shone a torch underneath the stone to verify that
the lip on which the stone sat ran uninterrupted around the perimeter of the
hole.
 

“If the ledge
is only partial, or damaged, then when we pull on the stone it may fall into
the hole, which would make things rather complicated.” Mamdouh had told them.

After several
seconds the engineer stood up nodding and said one word in Arabic to his
captive audience. “He saw steps in the hole,” Ben translated for Gail and
George.

Air began to
escape from the jack’s piston as the engineer gently lowered the stone to sit
comfortably on the carbon steel rod.
 
The
engineer who had positioned the rod gave a thumbs up signal to his colleagues,
and they proceeded to remove their machinery.

A hundred foot
synthetic rope was then wrapped twice round the stone. The two loose ends, one
coming from either side, were passed through a steel ring three inches in
diameter positioned at the raised end. The two ropes were then given to two
groups of three people wearing gloves and standing a foot above the bedrock,
outside the trench.
 
From above, the two
groups, rope and stone looked like a giant letter Y; they would be pulling it
back to where it had first stood, thousands of years earlier.

Ben and George
positioned themselves at the back of one of the groups.

“Pull gently,”
Mamdouh ordered as he watched from inside the trench.

The two ropes
became taught and the loops around the stone creaked as the six people
nervously applied their weight. It gently shifted towards them, uncovering six
inches of the stairway beneath.

The engineer
who had shone the torch under the stone proceeded to spray its path with a
water-based lubricant, to facilitate its passage.
 
The Professor walked to and fro around the
stone as it slid slowly away, until after barely five minutes of pulling it was
clear.

He held his
hand up to stop the eager Al Jazeera photographer from approaching the hole and
shouted out in Arabic.
 
The photographer
backed off, pushed up the rim of his baseball cap and shook his head in
confusion before taking several dozen photos from a short distance, outside the
trench.

“We must
catalogue the finds first, for archaeology, before letting Al Jazeera in.” Ben
explained in English.

“Is it just
me, or does Mamdouh look a little nervous?” Gail quizzed him. “More nervous
than excited?”

Ben thought
about this for a while before responding. “I cannot say what the difference
between nervous and excited is, Gail. If it were me, I would be running down
the steps already,” he paused. “But then that is probably why he is a Professor
of Egyptology and I am almost failing my degree.”

“Whatever he
is,” George interrupted them. “I think he’s calling you.”

The Professor
got out of the trench and met Gail half way.

“I am certain,
Gail, that you have seen or heard stories of archaeologists entering tombs and
crypts over a hundred years ago, haven’t you?” he started.

“Like Howard
Carter in the Valley of the Kings, you mean?” she asked.

“Yes,
absolutely. Well, we have come a long way in science, in methods and in
practice since then, but no matter how much technology we have and how many
studies we undertake, the basics of what we are about to do remain the same now
as they were when Carter first took his pick to the mortar that sealed
Tutankhamen inside his tomb.”
 
He paused
for her reaction, one of mild surprise, before continuing. “I think that with
what has happened over the past few days, you have more than enough material to
start your thesis.”

She laughed
and looked to her left, at the steps leading down into the depths of the rock.
“I think so,” she said.

His eyes
followed hers and he looked up at her, smiling. “Your enthusiasm, not to
mention lots of luck, has helped to find something very special in Amarna,
Gail. Some of the most incredible finds in archaeology have been found by luck,
and mostly not by archaeologists. But you have the benefit of not only being
lucky, but also an archaeologist, and as a reward you will be the first student
to enter this tomb.”

“Thank you,
Mamdouh, but Ben found the site with me and translated the hieroglyphs.” Gail
liked Ben a lot, and thought it unfair to remove any credit from him for the
discovery.

 
“This is true, but would Ben have reached this
cliff top were it not for you?” he smiled and looked over at Ben, who was
having an animated discussion with George. “And he is not an archaeologist at
heart, he will find passion in something else. You on the other hand, are an
archaeologist, and always will be no matter what you do.
 
What lies beneath our feet at this very
moment may be the biggest find you ever make.”

She looked
over to her Egyptian friend and smiled.
 
“I will ask Ben, and offer to go down the steps with him,” she decided.
“If that’s alright with you, Mamdouh?” she added quickly.

Mamdouh
grinned. “Whatever you think is best, Gail, the choice is yours.”
 
He took a step past her and raised his voice
to get everyone’s attention.
 

  
The students, engineers, photographer and
George had all been biding their time following the uncovering of the steps
several minutes earlier. The thrill of the unknown, coupled with the Professor’s
desire to control the descent into the tomb, had fuelled their impatience, and
it had been hard for everyone to content themselves with a simple glance or two
into the hole.

He lifted his
head and addressed the crowd in Arabic as the Al Jazeera photographer took a
flurry of shots. “I will descend the steps first, along with an engineer who
will ensure that the structure is safe.
 
I will then come back up and we will discuss what to do next. OK?”

They all
nodded, and watched as he descended with a powerful hand torch, followed by an
engineer with a large black case that presumably held instruments with which they
would assess the structure.

Gail looked at
George and Ben, who were standing on the edge of the trench, and grinned from
ear to ear.

Almost ten
minutes passed before anything was heard from the hole. Suddenly, the engineer suddenly
hopped up the steps, out of the trench and over to his two colleagues with
their X-ray system.
 

After a brief
exchange of words, the men gathered their equipment together and carried it
over to the steps. Within two minutes they had all disappeared underground,
much to the frustration of the Al Jazeera photographer, who returned from
relieving himself just in time to see the engineer’s head vanish down the hole.

“Is this
normal?” George said out loud to no one in particular.

“The last tomb
to be excavated in Egypt was over thirty years ago.
 
And the last before that was over a hundred
years ago.” Gail answered. “With that track record,
normal
probably means breaking in, stealing all the gold and taking
the finds out of the country. So no, this isn’t normal.”

George looked
at his wife and shook his head. “That’s not quite what I meant, honey.”

“I do not know
if it is normal,” Ben said. “But it is annoying. I want to know what is down
there!”