by Talbot, Luke
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.
Chapter 8
“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 o
ccurring 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.
