by Talbot, Luke
“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.
Chapter 9
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!”
Gail looked at him and summoned the courage to ask him the question she had been reciting in her head. “Ben, Mamdouh has suggested that when he gets back, I go down the steps first on my own, followed by you and the other students,” she said. There was a brief pause. “Do you want to come with me first instead?”
Ben looked at her with a smile. “Gail, this is your find, I merely sat on it to keep it warm.”
“But you were with me, we found it together,” she was almost pleading with him. She felt bad for wanting to leave Ben and be alone, it was not a sign of a competitive streak, she convinced herself, if she tried to make him come with her. But deep down inside she knew that she would not have asked him, but told him to come with her first, had she not wanted to go down alone.
“I wanted to turn back before we got to the top of the cliff, Gail, you did not,” he explained. “If it wasn’t for my requirement to pass this year, I would probably be in Cairo still. You came from England to be here, and climbed over many rocks against my judgement. This is your find.”
“Thank you, Ben,” Gail said, the emotion rising in her throat.
There was an awkward silence during which they all looked towards the steps.
“H
ow was Karnak?” Ben suddenly asked George, changing the subject.
He smiled and pointed at his hat. “That good,” he replied. “Is anyone else hungry?” Saying this, he opened his backpack and removed a couple of packets of biscuits and a large bottle of water.
They shared the snacks around, though almost everyone was too excited to eat, and did their best to enjoy tourist anecdotes for the next fifteen minutes, making sure to keep an eye on the trench for signs of the Professor and the three engineers.
It was while Ben was interesting everyone with a story of an overzealous border guard in Algeria, translating into English at the same time, that the Professor finally emerged from the hole.
Within seconds everyone had crowding round him.
Mamdouh looked up at them all seriously for several long moments before breaking into a huge grin, his white teeth shining in the afternoon sun. He said a short sentence in Arabic and received a great cheer in reply, while the photographer’s camera flashed crazily in the background.
“Mamdouh?” Gail asked over the sound of a hundred questions being asked at the same time in Arabic.
He turned towards her and laughed out loud. “Gail,” he sounded relaxed and enthused, in complete contrast to his behaviour before descending the steps half an hour earlier. “I said you had enough to start your thesis with what we have seen since you arrived, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I am sorry, Gail, I was wrong.” He put his hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “Gail, with what you have found here in Amarna, you have enough for your entire career!”
Gail’s heart missed a beat. “Is Nefertiti down there?”
“We don’t know yet, we can’t tell.”
“So what is it?” she urged.
Chapter 10
Gail took her first step cautiously. She now understood what Mamdouh had meant, talking about Carter and entering a tomb for the first time; no amount of science and studying could have prepared her for the sheer excitement of knowing that apart from four men within the past hour, she was the first person in over three thousand years to descend these steps, and certainly the first woman.
