Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  Florence almost jumped out of her skin. “What the hell?”

  “Sounds like it’s coming from down below,” Robin said, more nervous than smug.

  “There is no down,” the guide said. The darkness managed to hide the panic in his eyes but not in his voice. “This passage, the chamber. That's all.”

  Robin sought out the origin of the sound with his pole as if searching for buried treasure with a metal detector. Florence’s whole body was focused on the noise.

  There it was again. It sounded like it came from a child, or an animal.

  There had to be a rational explanation, but at that moment she was incapable of finding it. She noticed that the guide was wringing his hands, never taking his eyes off Robin. She caught John’s gaze and found herself making the familiar sign with her finger which he understood immediately. He pushed a few buttons on the camera.

  Secret filming mode.

  Robin was kneeling in the hallway when he suddenly exclaimed, “Shit!”

  At the bottom of the wall was a hole, the size of a fist. Robin fumbled in his pocket to find a lighter. The flame gave a pop, then danced in front of the hole. There was air coming out of the hole.

  “You must all leave now, please,” the guide said hurriedly, no longer trying to hide his panic.

  But Robin ignored him. He cupped his hands around his mouth and nose and then pressed them to the bottom of the wall. “Is someone there? Can you hear me?”

  Florence had trouble breathing, but she was checking the camera; John was still recording.

  He pushed the guide to one side and put the lens against the opening. Florence stared at the monitor, mesmerized. There was a shaft wide enough for two or three rats. The light traveled about three feet into its depth before it was lost in darkness. There was no telling how long it was.

  “No filming, no filming!” the guide screamed.

  “I'm not filming,” John lied, “it’s just for the light!”

  The guide bit his cheek as his walkie-talkie went into over-drive. When Florence checked the small screen again, her heart stopped. She had seen a subtle change in light at the end of the tunnel.

  On the other side, something had moved.

  12

  “Mom, don’t worry, I'm perfectly safe here.”

  Max snuffed out his cigarette before throwing the butt into the small pile he had created. He sat down heavily onto one of the blocks of the Cheops pyramid, his mobile phone to his ear.

  With his shoulder-length chestnut hair, six-foot-tall toned frame, fashionable T-shirt, vintage army shoes, and not to mention his twenty-six years, it would be natural to assume that he was not the kind to give in to the impossible recommendations of his mother.

  But today, she had watched too many news reports on TV, and he loved her too much to ignore her anxiety.

  “Mom, I promise you, nothing will happen to me. Yes, I love you too. Give dad a hug too. Bye, Mom.”

  Max hung up, pressed “Redial”, and waited.

  On the horizon, the clouds of orange dust rose from the ground, squirmed and disappeared.

  The khamsin, Max thought. The wind from the Sahara, with its warm, dry breath that made men crazy and brought bad omens.

  “Hello, SCA.”

  “Good morning, ma'am,” Max said in Arabic, trying to keep the desperation from his voice.

  “My name is Max Hausmann. I am a Ph. D. student in conservation architecture at the Architectural Association in London. This morning one of your colleagues called and gave me permission to come and do an R.P.S. reading in Khufu today at six o’clock. I showed up with all my gear, but no one here seems to know anything about it, and I was not allowed in. This is the third time I call your department, but each time I get cut off. Would you please, ma’am, kindly check in your files? My name is Hausmann, H. A. U. S. M. A. N. N.”

  “I’m transferring you to Archives. Please hold.”

  Max sighed.

  It was a lost cause. Since the revolution, no one was responsible for antiquities, the country, or anything else. What saddened him above all was that, in his excitement at receiving the coveted permission from the Supreme Council of Antiquities, he had not asked for the name of the person who had given it to him, orally, over the phone. And of course, he did not have anything in writing. Beginner’s mistake.

  Yet Max was no novice. For thirteen years, he had been studying the internal architecture of the Great Pyramid. In his early teens, he had discovered the mysteries of Egypt in a comic book. Soon after, he was pasting archeologists’ drawings and copies of articles onto his bedroom walls, and, in time, his own photos taken on his first visit to the pyramids, at the age of fourteen. Then followed months of original research for his post-graduate studies.

  But apparently somewhere along the way to being highly educated, he had become unbelievably stupid. How could he not ask for the name of the person who gave him that precious permission?

  “Hello, SCA, how can I help?”

  This time, the voice was male. Max breathed deep and told his story yet again. But then something caught his eye.

  A camel galloped straight towards the entrance of the pyramid, and the armed policeman who was riding it yelled at two of his colleagues before rushing inside.

  “Do you have the name of the agent who gave you the permission, Mr. Hausmann?” the man at the SCA asked.

  “Err… wait,” Max said as he realized that two policemen were running towards him.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have anyone by that name.”

  But before Max even had time to consider his options, one of the policeman grabbed his phone and ended the call while the other shouted excitedly and gestured at Max’s equipment.

  They spoke too quickly for Max to understand precisely what they wanted, but he began to think that rather than wanting him gone, they were instructing him to follow them.

  Inside the pyramid.

  Had his luck changed? With palpable tension and fear in the air, somehow this didn’t feel like a lucky break. He asked them to explain what they wanted him to do, but all they could say was “Go, go!”

  Max bundled up his equipment and followed the guards into the corridor leading to the Queen's Chamber. Almost at once the smell of sulfur burned his nose and throat. But it wasn’t just sulfur – there was something else in it. At the end of the narrow corridor stood the guide with whom he had argued earlier. He also recognized the sound recordist who had been waiting outside, and the pink-haired girl. She was very pale.

  Something felt very wrong.

  “Are those archeological instruments?” the guide asked nervously.

  “Yes,” Max answered.

  “We think there's someone in here.”

  “Where? Here?”

  With the toe of his boot, the guide gestured towards a hole, almost level with the ground. Max knelt and looked down the small tunnel.

  His heart felt like it was bursting in his chest.

  He made a sudden gesture, signaling the others to stand back. He looked around, gathering his bearings as he unpacked and assembled the Ground Penetrating Radar unit. He connected the monitor up to its battery pack and took out a small laptop. His focus sharpened as he made more mental calculations and began to envisage the geometry and structure of the whole pyramid. While he unraveled cables and adjusted levels, he pictured the stones, their mass and density, the pressure on the lintels, the mechanics of the whole assembly, the methods of construction and reasons behind the precise location of each of the slabs. There it was, the opportunity to examine what he had been studying for so long.

  Now he had a shot at proving what he had suspected: that there were secret chambers behind these very walls.

  The GPR screen showed the first results. Ghostly lines revealed what he already knew. There was a difference in density beyond the stone. A void.

  Without saying a word, Max connected a small device as big as a credit card, attached to a tiny LED lamp. He positioned it in front of the h
ole.

  The others saw the image appear on the monitor, but the colors were strange and irregular.

  “Infrared thermography?” John, the cameraman asked, his mouth dry.

  “Yes. Do you mind?” Max asked Robin, pointing to his boom pole.

  He nodded. Max grabbed the pole and attached the device to its end with tape that he tore from a large roll with his teeth. In a single movement, he placed the small camera in front of the opening.

  Then, for the first time since he had arrived, he hesitated.

  The anguish that had gripped the others was making its way inside Max too. The possibility of something, someone beyond those walls, even though preposterous, gave an icy edge to his movement. At the end of this tunnel, there could be a reality that his happy life had not prepared him to face. At that very moment, he met the eyes of the pink-haired journalist. He felt as though he knew her already – a bond had formed in an instant. Her steady gaze spurred him into action.

  Pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, he shifted his weight and gingerly inserted the small camera into the darkness. All eyes were on the monitor.

  At first, there was nothing but a featureless tunnel. The limestone block that made up the wall seemed interminable. Max pushed the pole further into the depth of the stone. The images reflected an infinite vortex and then finally, the void on the other side. Everybody held their breath.

  Then an object appeared on the monitor.

  One of the policemen pushed Max aside to get a closer look at the image on the screen. He stifled a disbelieving gasp. It revealed a treasure that could not be there, in a room that could not possibly exist.

  “Oh, my God!”

  John’s were the only words that escaped any of their lips. Robin's mouth hung open. Florence’s eyes glittered with excitement.

  “It looks like…” she began.

  “Tutankhamen?” Max breathed.

  The guide, as if gripped by madness, began to shout and scream. One of the guards seized Max while the other cocked his assault rifle and pointed it at the film crew.

  “Get out!” the guide yelled.

  Max tried to struggle but the space was too narrow and the policeman’s grip, strengthened by fear, too tight. In the melee, the guide fell against the pole.

  Then Florence screamed.

  They all turned towards her. Her hand was on her mouth and her eyes, bulging, stared at the monitor, which became the center of attention again.

  A body, a human body, moved slowly in the darkness on the other side of the wall.

  Long hair, a delicate neck. A woman.

  Max wrestled control of the pole and the monitor, and managed to adjust the colors. A thermal camera could not lie. The heat levels were there for all to see. The body was orange, red and yellow. But the shades were pale.

  “She’s alive,” he breathed in disbelief.

  “Get her out!” he started to scream, but the words were stifled in his throat by something else on the monitor.

  A man’s body. Rendered in the cold, dead hues of blue.

  13

  In the Champollion Room of the Four Seasons Hotel, journalists squirmed in their seats, waiting for Al-Shamy to resume his briefing. A tall, skinny, ginger-haired man with popping eyeballs and a BBC TV badge winced as Moswen elbowed him in the ribs to get closer to his boss.

  “According to our research,” Al-Shamy finally bellowed, “Nefertiti was likely discovered in 1932 on the Amarna site in a search led by a German archeologist, Dr. Friedrich Dortius, and financed by a rich merchant from Berlin, Adi Goldman.”

  Moswen edged his way close to the dais.He paused, looked up from his notes to make sure he had everyone’s attention.

  With a trembling hand, he scribbled a note on the only piece of paper he could find, one of the scattered press briefings that littered the room. His clammy fingers closed on the message. His boss glanced at him sideways for a fraction of a second, before continuing.

  “Even at that time, the rules regarding archaeological work were clear: everything had to be declared to the authorities and Egypt had the right to retain half of all artifacts discovered. However, we now know that the vast majority of Dr. Dortius' discoveries, including the mummy of Nefertiti, were dispatched to Mr. Goldman's Berlin address without first going through the proper channels set out by the Cairo Antiquities Bureau.”

  “Our records show that at least up to 1937, everything remained untouched. But, by the end of the war, Mr. Goldman was dead, and Nefertiti had vanished.”

  Moswen saw the ginger-haired man chuckle silently to himself. No one else was laughing.

  “Seventy years later,” continued Al-Shamy, “Mr. Goldman's great-grand-daughter, Sophia Neumann, stumbled upon his correspondence and began searching for Nefertiti. Her investigation led her to an abandoned warehouse in Berlin, where she found a cache containing two hundred and three Ancient Egyptian pieces, all of outstanding beauty. Among them, the sarcophagus of Nefertiti, with its mummy, intact.”

  He paused.

  “Sophia Neumann called three internationally renowned Egyptologists to assess her treasure. One by one, they delivered the same verdict: everything was fake.”

  Gasps rippled through the room.

  “The forgeries were not even competent; even the most casual of enthusiasts could see the scale of the deception. As the sale of forgeries is illegal, they advised Miss Neumann to destroy everything.”

  “But a few days before she was due to incinerate her fake Egyptian treasure, she met Yohannes DeBok, an antique dealer and renowned ‘fake-buster’, as is called in the profession – an expert in forgeries. When so many fakes are found together, there can sometimes be clues to the methods, identity or ‘signature’ of a known forger. DeBok spent three days and three nights in the warehouse. When he left, he announced to Miss Neumann that her collection of “junk” was worth between thirty and fifty million dollars.”

  Al-Shamy allowed the crowd to voice its excitement, letting the tension in the room escalate for a few seconds before continuing.

  “To protect his seventy-three real Egyptian antiquities,” he said, clearly relishing the moment, “Goldman had disguised them as worthless copies, and then placed them amongst more than one hundred and thirty fakes of equally mediocre quality. Did Goldman’s ruse confound the Nazis treasure hunters when they discovered the shed and then simply abandoned it, thinking that the pieces were not genuine? Or was the hiding place never discovered at all? We will never know. What we do know, however, is that without the intervention of Yohannes DeBok, Nefertiti and her treasures would all have been burned to ashes.”

  With his climax delivered, Al-Shamy stopped to drink from a glass of water and soaked in the exhilarated hubbub that enveloped the room. The journalists were beside themselves: was it not everyone's fantasy to find a priceless treasure in a forgotten attic? But the archeologist didn’t bask long in the glory of his revelations: the sight of a sweaty, mustachioed man holding a crumpled note and bearing down on him from the floor of the hall, caused his smile to falter.

  “A very urgent message, Sir,” Moswen whispered in his ear as he passed Al-Shamy the note.

  Moswen could feel Al-Shamy’s gaze boring into the back of his skull as he turned and walked away from the stage. When he thought he was a safe distance away, he turned to find that the chief archeologist was already speaking. Had he read the note? Moswen doubted it. His exhausted body relaxed so suddenly that he thought he was falling apart. He had delivered the message. There was nothing else to be done, except wait for the inevitable.

  Al-Shamy’s voice once again boomed around the room.

  “Today, it would be unthinkable for someone such as Dr. Dortius to tear artifacts from Egyptian soil and then make off with them with such impunity. Forty years ago, UNESCO enshrined in law the principle that antiquities belong by right to the country in which they were found, whether during looting or archaeological excavations. This law facilitated the repatriation of co
untless illegally acquired treasures which, in turn, supported the creation of museums and a vital tourism industry, but above all, it enabled Egyptians to take back what was always rightfully theirs: their own history.”

  A note of evangelical fervor began to resonate in Al-Shamy’s voice.

  “But the powerful lobby of antique collectors has succeeded in severely curtailing this law so that it applies only to antiques that were taken out of the country of origin after 1970. Sophia Neumann holds documents that trace the provenance of Nefertiti’s presence in Europe since 1937. And so, this lady, who has never visited our country, can therefore dispose of the remains of one of the greatest queens of Egypt as she wishes, at whatever price she sees fit.”

  He marked a pause, as if the grief was too much to bear.

  “At best, the buyer will be one of the great museums of the world. But nothing prevents her from selling to some anonymous collector who could, if so inspired by the apothecaries of old, and absolutely within the bounds of the law, reduce the remains of Nefertiti to powder and ingest it, in the false hope that it will enhance sexual prowess.”

  The room shuddered with shocked murmurs. Moswen saw the BBC man whisper what seemed like a joke to his cameraman. His colleague reluctantly managed a polite half-smile.

  “Egypt,” bellowed Al-Shamy, “does not have to be a slave to such an immoral auction. Ladies and gentlemen, as Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Minister of the Egyptian Government, I hereby officially request the repatriation of Queen Nefertiti, not in her capacity as an archaeological treasure, but in the name of the return of the remains of one of Egypt's greatest heads of state.”

  Applause thundered around the room as camera flashes strobed chaotically. Al-Shamy kept the uncompromising expression of a schoolmaster, staring down at the projector's remote control. The next moment, all eyes were fixed on the screen as glimpses of the fabulous treasures were revealed: coffins, canopic vases, amulets, furniture, jewels, as well as a wide array of other objects, all of singular beauty and quality. The common consensus in the room was that these treasures easily rivaled those of Tutankhamen.