Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  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.

  Chapter 3

  The corridors of the Peabody Museum were eerily quiet as Seth Mallus worked his way to the research labs on the first floor. A small group of Mayan figurines watched him go up the ornate late-nineteenth century staircase, past a large pop-up stand advertising an exposition of indigenous identities in the twenty-first century.

  He had been to Harvard University’s Anthropology Department many times over the past few years, though this was his first visit to the Peabody Museum after normal opening hours.

  Dr Patterson was waiting for him.

  “Great to see you, Dr Patterson,” Mallus said going in hand first.

  Patterson shook his hand and smiled nervously; he had his agenda and he was going to stick to it. He didn’t want this calculating businessman catching him off-guard.

  “Mr Mallus, good to see you too. I expect you will want to see the fruits of our labour first?”

  Mallus looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “First?”

  Patterson bit his lip. He was better at his day job and barely a heartbeat after shaking hands was already at risk of slipping up. He chose not to say anything else and led Mallus into a small room off the main corridor. Its walls were sterile-white with a long work bench along one side. On it was a strange machine that looked like a cross between an old-fashioned mangle and a newspaper press, enclosed in an acrylic glass box

  “Here it is,” he said unceremoniously.

  Mallus walked up to the machine and looked inside; the beautifully intricate red and black symbols can’t have been any more vivid the day they were inked. Patterson had done a superb job. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “Is it safe to touch?”

  “No, it will never be safe to touch. The oils of your skin would cause lasting damage. It will also need to be kept inside a pressurised, acclimatised container to ensure that it doesn’t deteriorate. It will need to be kept out of direct sunlight.”

  Mallus turned towards him and smiled. “I know what you are about to say, Dr Patterson. Henry,” he emphasised the more personal touch. “We’ve been working together now for almost five years and I’ve been waiting for this exact conversation, so trust me when I say you do not need to skirt around the subject.”

  “It should remain here,” Patterson said frankly. “At your request, and thanks to your generous donations thus far, I have been able to keep this project relatively quiet. But I’m already coming under some pressure from my peers, those that I have had to involve, to secure this artefact for the Museum.”

  Mallus shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. I will be taking the document with me this evening, and a final donation to the Anthropology Department will be made in the morning. I’m quite prepared to make a personal donation to you, too.”

  It was Patterson’s chance to shake his head.

  “I won’t be bribed, Mallus.” It had taken considerable effort to setup the laboratory environment required to open the ancient papyrus, and he wasn’t about to give it up without a fight. Even more so considering the level of secrecy he had been forced to keep during the long years it had taken for the document to finally be laid bare. “This papyrus is perhaps one of the most finely preserved outside of Egypt, and it does not belong in your private collection.”

  Mallus walked up and down the room before standing to face the nervous-looking scientist. “I’m going to be completely honest with you, Henry. You know this isn’t about the papyrus; it’s about where it leads. I want to start planning excavations in Egypt; dozens of people digging up the desert to find it. That’s the prize, and that’s what I’m interested in. Now, I’ve got a feeling that when they do find it, there’ll be a lot more work, and what we’ll be looking at then will be far more interesting than some ancient treasure map.”

  “So this is all about money?”

  Mallus looked down at the floor, for the first time in Patterson’s eyes looking lost for words. “No,” he said quietly. “No, I have a feeling there’s something more important here. Something that could change everything.”

  Patterson looked at him with interest. “Like?”

  He looked up, the confident businessman Mallus gone, replaced with an anxious Seth. “I just have a feeling,” he said. “We can work on this together, Henry. I’m not bribing you. Just let me take my papyrus back and I promise I’ll bring you something so big you’ll forget the damn thing ever existed in the first place.”

  Chapter 4

  Gail woke with a start.

  What a strange dream, she thought. She had been standing on the top of a cliff overlooking a vast plain. Running through the middle of it was the river Nile. Suddenly, the ground had shaken beneath her and a huge glass tower erupted into the sunlight. Up, up it had risen until it must have touched the very edge of the atmosphere. Its base filled the plain, bridging the gap between the Nile and the cliff on which she had been standing.

  The smooth walls of the tower had reflected the surrounding cliff-top and the rising sun behind her in perfect detail. It had however been unsettling that the only thing they didn’t reflect was her.

  Awake now, she fancied she could still feel the humid air of the desert on her skin, and touching the sheets realised they were damp with sweat. She rubbed her eyes and checked her tablet sitting on the bedside table: three minutes to six. Barely dawn.

  George lay sleeping beside her, his pyjama top was twisted round so that half the buttons were on his back. In her still-sleepy state she couldn’t quite work out how that was possible, so she decided to think it through while she went downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

  On her way back she stopped in front of the video wall. It was certainly good fun to play with, and the novelty had not yet worn off. She picked up the remote from the coffee table and shook it. The wall came to life and she quickly pressed the mute button; the system came with an incredibly powerful speaker setup that Gail could not see a use for in her normal-size home. Unlike George whose exact words were “It’s like being at Wembley!” to which Gail had shouted “What did you say?”

  She tilted the remote on its side, and an Internet browser appeared next to the news presenter. Her thumbprint on the remote automatically logged her in to her social feed, which came to life with pictures and videos from her friends and family. She focussed her attention on direct messages and emails.

  The first was from Ellie. She had sent it barely half an hour earlier, and from the way it was written she must have been drunk. Gail almost laughed out loud as she realised about halfway down that Ellie obviously thought she was writing to her mother. Closing the message she scrolled down, ignoring several general emails from the University
until she reached the previous day’s auto-reply message from Professor Mamdouh al-Misri of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, regarding her application form. She sighed and scrolled back up to the top.

  Rotating the remote lazily she refreshed the feed. It was only six in the morning, but you never knew who might be up sending funny things. Her heart missed a beat as she saw the new email appear: ‘RE: Tell el-Amarna dig.’ She quickly opened the message and read it, her eyes resting on the last line: ‘Look forward to seeing you soon! Mamdouh.’

  Within seconds she was shaking George. “Honey! I got the place!” she screamed, her voice so high-pitched it was almost unintelligible. “We’re going to Amarna!”

  George broke into a huge sleepy grin and tried to reach out to hug her. His twisted pyjama top stopped him from lifting his arms, and he spent several frantic seconds freeing himself from it. “Well done,” he said eventually. “I knew you would. Now all you have to do is write your research proposal.”

  But she had already left the bedroom, and was taking the steps back down to the living room two by two. “I know,” she shouted back up the stairs. “I know!”

  Chapter 5

  The hot tarmac of the road gleamed in the late-afternoon sun as their car moved slowly south. The encroaching desert threw tentative fingers of light yellow sand across both carriageways from their right. In the distance, mostly hidden behind the low mounds of sand, the tops of a group of palm trees could just be seen, swaying gently in the light breeze.

  Gail looked above the desert at the deep blue sky. It seemed almost alien to her, having arrived the previous evening from the cold and wet winter climate of England. On top of that, she could not remember the last sunny day in Southampton. One, perhaps two weeks of sunshine over the summer months, but the relentless clouds mostly won the battle for the skies of northern Europe. Here, it seemed the other way round; a small, cotton-like cloud, devoid of rain, glided slowly across the horizon to their left, but it was totally alone against the azure background.

  For thousands of years, the Sahara desert had fought an ongoing battle with the fertile banks of the river Nile. In the time of the most ancient pharaohs, the Great Pyramid on the Giza plateau had overlooked a landscape of fields and palm groves, which had helped to feed a young and expanding kingdom. Every year, the Nile would spill over into the surrounding fields, bringing with it the necessary nutrients that made the area so welcoming to farmers and their animals. And every year, the sands of the desert would fight back. The incessant tug of war between the desert and the river meant that for a great deal of its length, only a narrow band of cultivated land separated the Nile from the sands.

  Better irrigation and modern technology during the twentieth century had meant that the land could be used all year round with less reliance on seasonal flooding. However, the beginning of the twenty-first century had already seen a rapid change in climate, and for the past twenty years the desert had been steadily gaining ground.

  On their left, the sand quickly turned to grass, which within ten yards had developed to a rich variety of trees and other plants, their green leaves a welcome break from the yellows and blues of the desert and sky to their right. George slowed down to give way to an oncoming van. The road was barely wide enough for both of them to fit, but the driver seemed unconcerned as he smiled at them and nodded his thanks. Since they had left the motorway fifteen minutes earlier, this was the first human they had seen. Gail was increasingly excited as she looked between the car’s satnav screen and the road, scanning the horizon for something familiar that she would recognise from the hours spent online looking at satellite images. They were less than three kilometres away from their destination, and she knew it wouldn’t be long before something familiar cropped up.

  “There!” she exclaimed, moments later. “Over there, those houses!”

  George had just taken the car around a blind corner, revealing a group of flat-roofed houses a hundred yards in front of them. It was almost dreamlike, the scene so typical of a postcard of Egypt that Gail laughed; a couple of children ran across the street chasing a football, a lone chicken stood proudly on a low stone wall. George let a large black sedan pass them, its rear windows obscured, the stone-faced driver barely nodding at them in return.

  “Are you sure?” George said glancing at the satnav, which still claimed another two kilometres to go.

  “Absolutely! Just past here on our left is a turning, which you take to cross the canal. Ignore the satnav, it’s wrong.” Gail bounced in her seat as they drove past the two children, who now appeared to be arguing about whether or not the street lamp was the goalpost or not. “Just after that house,” she was almost shouting now, and George couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “Now! Turn here!”

  George indicated left and turned onto a small side street, sandwiched between two rows of houses; telephone and electricity wires criss-crossed the street, like the intertwined branches of trees meeting above an English country lane. “Are you sure? This looks like a bit of an alleyway.”

  “Yes, I’m certain. Just keep going along this street, it widens out!” As the road did indeed widen she slapped George’s leg and held it firmly with her right hand. “See?”

  The rows of houses on both sides ended abruptly, and the street gave onto the concrete banks of a canal. A few hundred yards to their right, a flat bridge crossed the calm black water ten feet below. Along its edge ran a series of short concrete blocks designed to stop cars falling whilst also letting water and debris pass unhindered over the bridge in times of flood. The precaution seemed very optimistic, as currently the water couldn’t be more than a few feet deep at most. There were a few cars and people on the roads, but Gail had expected to see many more. Indeed, this was far from the bustling small town full of activity that the satellite images had shown her.

  “It’s not very busy,” she said with a disappointed tone.

  George changed gear and brought the car to a halt at a traffic light. The left indicator flashed patiently as the engine ticked over, the fan from the air conditioning whining in the heat. “They’re probably all watching Indemnity,” he said. They had watched the dubbed American sitcom in amusement for half an hour in their hotel room the previous night. From the frequent commercial breaks, they guessed it must have been a very popular show in Egypt, too.

  The light changed to green, missing amber completely. George had grown used to this by now, it seemed that the middle light was there purely as a spacer. He moved the car forward and turned onto the bridge across the canal.

  “Where to now?” he asked.

  “Carry on straight, we should be entering Beni Amran soon,” she looked up and pointed at a small sign in Arabic with an English translation written below. “There! Well, it says ‘Ben Imran’, but that’s close enough.”

  Passing through the small, mostly deserted village, they could see memories of a more prosperous time; the sand was piled high in the doorways of houses and most shops lay empty, the paint from the signs peeling and faint. There were some cars and people, clearly the area was still inhabited, but dying. Gail’s ‘Idiot’s Guide to Egypt’, a tongue-in-cheek present from Ellie before they had left, did not cover the modern area of Amarna or its surrounding towns and villages, choosing instead to focus on the ancient Egyptians, but Professor al-Misri had already warned Gail that the location was not known for its amenities.

  They would be spending their first night in the only hotel in Beni Amran, which had fifteen empty rooms and was run by an old man and his wife. They also provided all of the meals, as it was the only restaurant in the village. The tourist industry at Amarna had dissipated over the past thirty years, as visitors tended to go to the more famous and immediately impressive sites of Thebes and Memphis. The frequent cruises running along the Nile no longer came as far north as Tell el-Amarna, stopping instead over a hundred and eighty miles away at Dendera. In a world of package holidays to the north and south, Tell el-Amarna was in the no-man’s-land betwe
en.

  “Amarna!” Gail exclaimed. Their car passed under a modern gateway in the form of an ancient Egyptian pylon. On it, barely visible in the cracked and faded paintwork, were the words ‘Welcome to Tell el-Amarna’. George grinned.

  Beyond this gate, they were barely twenty yards from the Nile. But the road did not end on its bank, instead vanishing beneath the water down a gentle slope. A barrier had been lowered to stop people from driving any further, whilst a small sign advertising ferry times in both Arabic and English politely advised them to buy tickets in the hotel before boarding.

  The hotel wasn’t hard to find, as it was right next to the slipway, its three stories rising high above the small flat-roofed homes, the elaborate writing on its fading sign hinting at a more successful past. George parked their car on the side of the road while Gail searched through the papers in her backpack for their reservations; she didn’t think that there would be much of a problem if she didn’t have the printout, but felt better for bringing it anyway.

  The dusty heat of the early evening was in stark contrast to the cool controlled climate of the car, but nonetheless Gail was happy to be on her feet as she faced the river. She filled her lungs, throwing her chest out to catch as much of the atmosphere as possible.

  Instead of the humid heat she had been expecting, she found herself breathing in fresh clean air, and for the first time since their arrival in Egypt she felt a cool breeze against her cheeks and bare arms. In front of her the width of the Nile stretched out over a hundred yards until it reached the opposite bank, beyond which she could see the cliffs that had once enclosed the city of Akhetaten.

  “Come on George,” she turned and opened the boot of the car. “Let’s get our things inside and get ready. There’s a ferry across in half an hour, we can go and see the site before it gets dark, can’t we?”