Paulo continued the introductions.
‘Ruby, this is Doctor Berger. He is the pathologist who will work on those bones.’
Dr Berger smiled at Ruby. She found him somehow unnerving. In his late forties, he sported a thick beard which she was glad not to have to kiss. She proffered her hand, which he shook vigorously, holding on just a fraction too long. No first name was forthcoming, and Ruby was happy to leave it at that.
‘Finally we have our atomic specialist, Professor Philipe Eyzies.’ She swung round to find herself confronted by an unexpectedly young man, almost a youth. Despite his glittering credentials, he was still in his twenties, and would be tutoring people close to his own age at whatever university he came from. Must be one of those nauseating child prodigies, she thought, finding him more than a little irritating. Why was his hair so long? For such an intellectual star he seemed oddly keen on being cool. And why was he here at all? Ruby recalled telling Lorenzo on their first meeting that the artefact emitted radiation, but in truth the radiation detected was minimal and was not much above the kinds of levels that can occur naturally.
‘Pleased to meet you, Philipe,’ Ruby said with a smile.
Philipe merely gave her a curt nod then turned away.
With the introductions over, she boiled more water to make coffee for everyone, hoping they saw her as a hostess rather than a maid. They sat on stools in a tight circle, sipping the liquid stimulant appreciatively. Ruby felt cautiously optimistic to be in the presence of these civilised and, at least in some cases, friendly faces. It was like all those first meetings of new colleagues on a major expedition or dig – a gathering of people with differing skills and backgrounds, all of whom were vital parts of the overall mission. Half of this particular group had expertise that was irrelevant to this mission, but Ruby was confident she could quickly train them to be useful as low-level assistants. Normally a team would be larger, but under these aberrant circumstances she had to be grateful for what she could get.
‘Most of us have worked together before,’ explained Lorenzo, ‘but Doctor Towers is new to the team. She studied Archaeology at Cambridge, and has worked all over the world at high profile archaeological sites. She now work for the Guatemalan Government, appointed by our great President himself!’
There was a smattering of embarrassed applause from Michel, Jean and Dr Berger. Philipe just stared at her impassively. Ruby wondered whether she should explain to the assembled company that she was a political prisoner, but Lorenzo’s next words appeared to make blatant her status.
‘You are all aware that research into this artefact must be quick. You have five days, and that time can no be extended. Ruby is Project Director, and she will catalogue all findings on the computer, but she is no allowed to use Internet. Paulo will video and photograph each stage of the work, and he can provide Wi-Fi dongle for those who need it – apart from Ruby. The usual secrecy measures apply. Ruby is to remain on site, there will be two guards at the entrance to this airstrip at all times, and the rest of you will all be staying at the Hotel Villa Maya at Flores. Now, if you will excuse me, I have another project to oversee.’
Lorenzo left the building.
‘My dear,’ said Paulo, ‘the men would appreciate some more coffee before we get started.’
‘Make it yourself.’
A chorus of ‘ooh-la-la’ erupted from the Frenchmen, but her point had been made. Paulo sorted the refreshments and then activated two video cameras that would record, from different angles, everything that occurred. From his personal bag he picked out a small digital camera and began taking close-up shots.
Dr Berger silently set to work inside the artefact’s top compartment where the bodies had been found. He took stills, followed by a few seconds of digital video, before lowering himself inside completely to examine the context and arrangement of the bones.
Paulo moved quickly around the exterior because he knew the others would soon need to burn into the golden bodywork with fine-tipped oxyacetylene torches to gain access to the interior.
Jean Lantier, the metallurgist, was making a detailed examination of the sections that appeared to be deformed, some of which damage, he realised immediately, was due to the rough and ready excavation. He took measurements from one side, then compared them to the other side. Like Paulo and Dr Berger, he used his own photographic equipment to record a detailed study.
This pleased Ruby. The vast quantity of photographic evidence, much of which was duplicated, would be a valuable future resource. She sat down at the computer. The first thing to do, she figured, was to familiarise herself with the software on the machine and create new files to log every action of each member of the team, noting the modus operandi, any problems and, of course, the all-important results. She was pleased to find a copy of Word on the hard drive, and opened a new file in which she would summarise the proceedings so far in the examination of this ancient, curvaceous sarcophagus containing a switch-shaped feature. If she could find evidence of a rudimentary understanding of electricity in the culture that built this thing, the implications could be enormous. This was going to evolve into a classic archive, she told herself – a thorough analysis, from various scientific perspectives, of the greatest archaeological discovery ever made. It would be read by the entire academic community. She felt proud, despite the extreme circumstances, that she had been chosen to oversee this extraordinary find. If only Matt had been around to see it.
While the others worked at clearing out the mud from the indented rear of the artefact, Ruby clicked on the e-mail icon. No freshly-despatched digital missives would arrive without the dongle, but she was keen to know if any correspondence was stored on the laptop itself. Rather naïve of Lorenzo to leave his computer in her hands with all his personal stuff, she thought. Perhaps he assumed she would be completely computer illiterate, being a woman, and so wouldn’t know how to find his private files.
A list of archived messages appeared before her. One thing struck her as interesting: many of the messages were from French names and .fr e-mail addresses. She clicked the program’s ‘close’ button and returned to her Word file.
Ruby initially paid little attention to the men’s manual work going on behind her. She tapped away furiously at the keyboard, speedily deluging the computer with information. Faster the better. That way she could spend quality time training each of the members of her team who lacked archaeological experience, ensuring they followed correct procedures. She was also keen to be around at critical times, whenever historic breakthroughs occurred, but she was busy typing when the first one happened.
‘Ruby, come and see this!’ called Professor Lantier.
The men had already cleaned out a large quantity of compacted dirt from a bell-shaped cavity at the rear, which had revealed a new type of surface material that was certainly not gold. They had then created a great deal of noise while removing a small section of gold panelling from the base of the artefact. This small inspection hole had been Ruby’s suggestion – it would indicate whether the thing was really a multi-layered sarcophagus, as she strongly suspected.
Ducking under the timber supports, she bobbed up beside Professor Lantier.
‘You see this?’ he asked, shining a lamp inside the hole. Ruby peered in, expecting to see a cavity similar to the one at the top containing the bones. But this was no cavity. The hole they had cut was only one square foot, enough to test the settings on their cutting apparatus to ensure there would be no damage to whatever was behind the wafer-thin gold outer layer. Behind the hole were parallel lines of narrow gauge pipes, wrapped in a dull, faded substance. She climbed out from beneath the artefact and stood up.
‘It’s just as I expected,’ said Professor Lantier, ‘but in far better condition. The minimal amount of corrosion is extraordinary given the timescale.’
‘What do you mean, “as you expected”?’ asked Ruby. ‘We’ve just opened up the belly of a sarcophagus and we’ve found what looks like pipes. This is insa
ne. Nothing like it has ever been found. It’s like some kind of giant coffin with underfloor heating.’
‘Mmm, I think heating would not be appropriate, Ruby.’
‘Appropriate for what? Why do I get the feeling that everyone here knows a lot more about this than I do? Has one of these turned up in France, too?’
Ignoring her questions, Professor Lantier murmured, ‘What you have seen is a cooling system. Gold doesn’t corrode, being generally a non-reactive element, which is why the thin outer shell is so impressive even after all this time. The really clever bit is inside. The superstructure isn’t made of gold. That would make it too heavy. There’s a small part exposed just to the side of the hole we made, and as I expected it’s an advanced alloy.’
‘There you go again,’ protested Ruby, ‘you keep saying this is as you expected. What do you mean, “expected”? How on earth can you have expected this?’
Professor Lantier glanced at Philipe, who shook his head.
Paulo took Ruby to one side for a quiet chat.
‘Ruby, my dear, come and sit with me.’
‘I am not your dear.’
‘There have been other finds.’
‘Where? What other finds? Nothing has been published in journals.’
‘There isn’t time,’ said Paulo. ‘The world can’t wait.’
* * *
After an hour of searching Chichester’s mediaeval cathedral, Ratty paused and stood still. It was good to be back in England, but this kind of thing didn’t suit his new image. He felt like one of those tourists on a Da Vinci Code trail, desperately looking for clues that weren’t really there. What made his task so fiddly was that the stonework on the floor was worn smooth by centuries of pious shuffling feet, rendering most of the inscriptions illegible. Those on the walls were fine, but many were too high for him to read and he found his opera glasses of only limited benefit in the half-light.
‘Time has transfigured them into Untruth.’ Ruby’s words had been so enigmatic they were nonsensical to Otto, but Ratty had recognised the reference to a poem by Philip Larkin. It was also a reference to a disastrous undergraduate date Ratty had shared with Ruby. For this romantic occasion they had journeyed for three hours in Ratty’s Bristol Blenheim from Cambridge to England’s south coast. He had parked next to the toilets in a nondescript car park on Selsey beach, facing the choppy grey waters of the English Channel. They sat, saying nothing, just like the elderly couple in the adjacent car who were drinking coffee from a flask and wordlessly watching the waves.
Eventually Ratty had turned to Ruby and told her that they were looking at the spot where an ancient cathedral once existed. The sea had gradually encroached on the land until it was lost for ever under the English Channel, another slice of history vanished beneath the waves. Not wearing her archaeologist’s hat, which would have caused her to question the validity of that legend, but instead wearing her bored, pissed-off would-be lover’s hat, Ruby had toyed in her mind with the words ‘deal’ and ‘big’ before Ratty had suddenly said, ‘Chip-chop. Let’s take a look at the new one they replaced it with.’
Thirty minutes later they were standing inside Chichester Cathedral next to a dingy hole in the floor which was covered with a protective layer of glass. Ratty had put a coin into a box on the wall and lights began to flicker in the hole, revealing a section of Roman mosaic tiling four feet below the ground.
‘This cathedral is almost a thousand years old,’ he had told Ruby, as if she hadn’t known already, ‘but the mason chaps who threw up this Norman monstrosity built it upon the ruins of an earlier civilisation. Completely covered up all traces of the fellows that had lived and worshipped here a thousand years before them. And yet, when one thinks about it, in many ways the civilisation that was here first was far more advanced than the later one. They had hypocaustic heating, sanitation, slaves ...’
With a solenoidal clunk, the lights had gone out in the Roman hole, and Ratty had guided his date over to the other side of the building, pausing at a mediaeval tomb. The top of the tomb was decorated with two life-sized stone effigies – one was a knight with a large round chest wearing full Monty Python and the Holy Grail-style battle costume, and the other was a woman dressed in long flowing robes. Her feet rested on a pet dog, his rested recklessly on a disproportionately small lion, crouched in a sphinx-like position. Rather sweetly, they were holding hands.
‘An ancestor,’ Ratty had proclaimed. This had not been what Ruby had expected from a promise to meet some of his family in Sussex. He had then intertwined his arm with hers. Physically, they weren’t an obvious couple. Her face exuded an unconventional beauty, bronzed by regular field work. Suitors who gazed into her eyes would joyously drown in wide pools of molten chocolate. The only person who had ever gazed into Ratty’s eyes was his private ophthalmologist. An unkind observer might have commented that on Ratty’s pallid arm, Ruby appeared not so much his lover as his carer.
The pair of effigies was the subject of a famous poem by Philip Larkin, An Arundel Tomb. Ratty wasn’t sure if it was the way he had read the Larkin poem in its entirety out loud, or the fact that he had then suggested how nice it would be for the two of them to spend eternity together like the people in the effigy, but for some reason Ruby had then disappeared and wasn’t seen by him again until he returned to Cambridge. One day he would unravel the mysteries of womanhood, he had told himself. One day.
Right now he was preoccupied with a more important mystery. The line of Larkin’s poem had been quoted to him in Guatemala, entirely out of context. He really had no idea what she was on about, but the power of her words was enough for him not only to risk his life, but to change it. He now looked back on that meeting with Otto and Ruby as a significant juncture in his existence. At that moment he had transfigured. How could a small chunk of poetry do that to him? What subconscious connection had those words made within the dark, labyrinthine culverts of his mind?
A party of schoolchildren filed past, forcing Ratty to step aside. Time has transfigured them into Untruth, he told himself once more, returning to his thorough perlustration of the stone effigies. The years had not been kind to this tomb. Ratty began to pick out the lines where repair work had been carried out. The knight’s feet were clearly glued on. The top of his head showed faint repair seams. His nose was black, awkwardly glued on to grey stone, giving him an oddly comical Bacchanalian appearance. Ratty wondered if his ancestor’s bones still lay beneath the effigies, or whether they had become separated during the tomb’s less than restful history.
‘Time has transfigured them into Untruth,’ he said, out loud this time. Heads briefly turned his way, then once again he was left to his ponderings. Did the line from the poem mean that the repairs carried out to the stonework rendered it no longer genuine in some way? Was the original purpose and meaning of the tomb utterly unlike that which was currently assumed to be its raison d’être?
With Ruby apparently in a permanently incommunicado state there was no one to answer his questions. He waited beside the effigies for a flash of inspiration. Nothing happened. He looked up, hoping for a divine beam of enlightenment to blaze through the stained glass windows above him in a manner that he recalled seeing in a scene from The Blues Brothers. Nothing penetrated the blanket of cloud above the cathedral, however.
Reluctantly he returned to the poem itself, handwritten in red and black calligraphy and stuck to a stone pillar next to the tomb. He read it slowly, carefully. The words Ruby had quoted formed the beginning of the final stanza. And the line that followed them suddenly jumped out at him. A connection had been made, not with her quotation but with the subsequent line. Ratty felt a shiver of excitement pass through him.
He mouthed the words quietly: ‘The stone fidelity They hardly meant’.
Could it be that elementary?
* * *
Nachos provided little gastronomic satisfaction for the French contingent in the Tikal hangar, feeding only their desire to discuss, during lunch
, the failings of Guatemalan cuisine. Even the reticent Dr Berger voiced an opinion or two about corn. Michel produced a bottle of Côtes du Rhône from his bag and shared it among them. Ruby was not a keen lunchtime drinker, especially in humid climates, but one bottle between six was hardly decadent. She held out her paper cup and asked a question that had been burning inside her.
‘If those pipes were for cooling,’ she began, ‘does anyone think it might be a form of cryogenics, a mummification technique to preserve bodies in low temperatures?’
Everyone stared at her as if she was nuts.
‘What?’ she blurted in confusion, taking a grateful slug of wine into her throat.
‘It is a cooling system, but not for people,’ explained Michel, without really explaining anything at all.
Ruby was fed up with being the ignorant one in the group. She gestured for him to elaborate.
‘The cooling is for the propulsion system,’ explained Michel.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The propulsion system. The engine.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! This thing is thousands of years old!’
‘Have you really not been told?’ Michel looked around to see if he had overstepped the mark. It didn’t seem to him to be a breach of secrecy if Ruby was told more about this project than she appeared to know so far. She was going to find out soon enough, in any case. ‘Ruby, this artefact is a machine. A very ancient mechanical device.’
‘A machine to do what?’
‘Do you not see from its shape?’
She looked up at its partially crushed and mangled form, but could not discern any kind of mechanical shape.
‘It is a flying machine, Ruby.’
She looked away from the artefact into the eyes of her companions, slowly reading each pair. She saw, in turn, compassion, impatience, surprise and disdain in those eyes, but there was no indication of joviality, falsehood or dishonour. Finally, she spoke.
‘You’re kidding, right?’
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 15
