by Talbot, Luke
After three days of drilling, and an enormous amount of dust inside the antechamber, the engineers had cut around the entire circle. The jack was then taking most of the weight of the cylinder of stone within, while a thin layer of stone still separated the two rooms.
Gail had wondered what tool the engineers would use to cut the final sliver of stone, without generating dust, and had asked Ben his opinion.
“When you cut, using a drill, or a saw, you always get dust,” he had explained. “But when you break, or snap as you say, you get much less. Like cutting a piece of wood.”
Which is exactly what the engineers had done; once all of the dust caused by the drill had been cleared away, they had literally pulled the stone outwards and into the antechamber using pneumatic pumps, like taking the cork from a bottle of wine. The thin circle of stone connecting it to the surrounding wall had broken easily, leaving a more or less perfectly circular tunnel between the two rooms.
The engineers had then entered the Library, with their black suitcase of equipment, and had spent ten minutes assessing the structure. They had then set up a series of electric flood lights, connected to a generator on the surface.
After they had finished, the Professor had addressed Gail.
“Gail, don’t think of the engineers; apart from the strength of the stone in the room, they don’t know the first thing about what they have just seen. You are to be the first person to set foot in that room for over three thousand years. Savour every moment of it.”
She had never forgotten those words. Sliding through the tunnel, she found herself in the room she had dreamt about for days, ever since she had first seen it on the X-ray screen.
The Library was exactly as she had imagined it, with one exception. It was bigger. The Backscatter X-ray, although colour coded for range, simply couldn’t give a true sense of scale and depth. On close examination of the Backscatter images, it was obvious that the room was large, and she was certain that the seasoned experts would not have been surprised, but she had been taken aback by the length of the walls, the number of shelves, and the volume of material stacked upon them.
The room was, as the instruments had shown, one hundred and twenty feet long. What the instruments had only barely shown, however, was that it was almost a hundred feet wide and about fifteen feet tall. On the hundreds of shelves were piled thousands of scrolls, and an assortment of bound parchments and clay tablets – they later found there to be three thousand two hundred and twenty-seven of them in total.
The shelves against the walls were made of planks of wood, slotted into each other like jigsaws. However the rows of free-standing shelves lined up along the centre of the room were more like book cases, solidly built with thicker beams comprising their uprights.
A thick layer of dust covered everything, and as she had walked towards the end of the room, she had seen the footprints of the engineers. They had obviously done their jobs very thoroughly, checking in between every set of shelves, and along all of the walls. The sight of recent footprints did put her off slightly, but she tried hard to focus on what the Professor had told her, and soon she was concentrating on the ancient finds, letting her fingers hover millimetres from the surface of the documents, not daring to touch them lest they disappear in piles of fragments and dust.
Eventually, she reached her goal. In front of her stood a stone plinth, like a small altar, on which a book was propped, facing away from her. Her first impression on seeing the X-ray had been that it was like a Bible in a church. That simile felt even more accurate as she had stood before it. She felt like a member of a congregation, waiting for the priest to walk up and start reading.
Now, after many years giving lectures to students, she likened it more to the podium at the front of a lecture theatre.
The stone plinth was simple, unmarked, ending in an angled table surface that projected out an inch or so from plinth. The book was held in place by a stone lip that ran along the bottom edge.
She had walked round the plinth to see the cover, which was when she first laid eyes on the Stickman, engraved into the wood.
The symbol was made up of seven straight lines and one circle. Six of the straight lines were connected in pairs to form three upside-down Vs, one on top of the other. A vertical line connected the three Vs, starting at the apex of the bottom V and ending at the apex of the third V. A circle sat on the apex of the topmost upside-down V.
Upon entering the room for the first time, Ben had immediately associated the symbol with a stickman, because quite simply it looked just like one, except that it had a second pair of legs just above the first.
From that moment on, it had been known popularly as the Amarna Stickman, previously unheard of and seemingly unique to the Amarna Library. Academically, it remained nameless in the hope that one of the texts in the Library would shed light on its ancient Egyptian pronunciation.
She had not dared to open the book, for fear of it falling apart, and had therefore spent several minutes examining it from every angle. It was about the size of a modern coffee-table book. The covers were a quarter of an inch thick, and the whole thing was bound together, incredibly neatly, with reed. It was in immaculate condition, as if it had only just been placed there.
After a while, she had left the plinth and had walked slowly back to the tunnel, but along the opposite side of the room. It was then that she had noticed that all of the shelf uprights were also engraved with the Stickman symbol from the book-cover. As she had walked past the final row of shelves, she had seen for the first time in full the end wall of the Library, through which the tunnel had been drilled. In the centre of the wall was the same symbol again, but about six feet high. Next to it, but roughly half as tall, was Nefertiti’s Cartouche. The two symbols were separated by a single vertical line.
It was later confirmed that aside from Nefertiti’s cartouche, the strange symbol was the only marking inside the Library. To date, none of the other documents in the Library had been found to contain the symbol.
It was only present on the book from the plinth. And it had never before been seen outside the Library.
She had spent a total of four weeks at the site, longer than she had initially planned, and had returned regularly ever since. In the ten years since the excavation, only a small fraction of the texts from the Library had even been looked at.
Because of the mystery surrounding the Amarna Stickman, she had decided to put it on the cover of her book. Her publisher had readily agreed. For an academic book, it had sold in surprising numbers, nothing short of a bestseller, and beyond her wildest expectations.
Chapter 35
The double-doors of the lecture theatre suddenly burst open. She jumped as she was torn from her reminiscing and three hundred students poured inside.
The noise was incredible. There was shouting, laughing, jeering, talking, banging of chair seats as they were flipped down, shuffling of feet, somebody tripping on the stairs and dropping their bag and a particularly deep laugh somewhere near the back which she could only describe as a ‘guffaw’.
After about five minutes, Gail looked at her watch and decided it was time to close the doors. As she returned to the podium, she could see students pointing to her slide and whispering comments to their neighbours. This lot are lively, she thought to herself with a smile as she prepared to start her lecture.
She dimmed the lights and checked attendance on the podium’s console: a better turnout than usual, there were three hundred and fifty-two people seated in the theatre; eighty-six more than the previous year.
Walking out from behind the podium – she briefly thought of the first lecture she had given, when she had literally hidden behind it - she introduced herself and welcomed them to the course, Introduction to Egyptology.
Looking around the room, she noted with a certain degree of pride that practically everyone was transfixed by either her or the projection on the wall behind. She had never seen such an eager group.
“Eg
yptology is the study of Egypt and its antiquities,” she began. “It has been practiced in its present form for over two hundred years, and is closely linked both to archaeology and history. How many of you here are taking Archaeology and History?”
Approximately half the theatre raised their hands. Some said yes, one person near the back said he wasn’t sure, to which everyone laughed.
“Until the turn of the twenty-first century,” she continued, “the last royal tomb to be excavated in Egypt was that of Tutankhamen, in 1922. For decades, many people believed that the last tomb in the Valley of the Kings had been discovered. They were very wrong. Since 2006, three more tombs have been discovered and excavated there, two in the last decade alone.” She looked around the theatre at her wide-eyed audience. I must be getting good at this, she thought to herself. “Over the past fifteen years, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has seen major investment and modernisation; it now has the capability to regulate and oversee three times the number of simultaneous archaeological excavations compared to fifty years ago, particularly in the pharaonic sector. In other words, the Egyptian government, aided by UNESCO, has invested millions in making it easier to go to Egypt and do archaeology.” She paused and looked behind her at her introduction slide. “And believe me, if you thought two hundred years was enough to find out everything there is to know about Egypt, think again. Egypt is throwing up unexpected find after unexpected find, every day.”
She stopped talking and walked back to the podium. Hitting the screen once with her index finger, the slide changed to a photograph of the book that had been on the plinth in the Library at Amarna, with the Stickman carved into its cover.
“Has anyone seen this Stickman symbol before?” she asked confidently. She always liked to follow this up with ‘don’t worry, until about ten years ago, neither had anyone else’.
Except that this time, not one hand stayed down.
She was used to the normal group, usually near the front, who would raise their hands, sometimes smugly. But since she had started giving the same lecture two years earlier, nothing had come close to this. She was amazed, and was about to say ‘Wow!’, when Professor David Hunt burst through the door at the back of the lecture theatre.
He stumbled down the steps, mumbling apologies to the students, most of whom still had their hands held high. He didn’t even say hello to Gail as he rushed over to the podium and closed her presentation. Bringing up an Internet browser, he found the BBC website and expanded the ‘Breaking News’ of the day.
“Look!” he said, out of breath, pointing up at the projection on the wall.
Gail turned round, still in shock. She read the words, her eyes widening.
‘Evidence of Intelligent Life Revealed on Mars,’ the headline claimed, boldly.
“Wow!” she finally said, as if her brain had queued the word she had been about to say before David’s entrance, and had to make her say it before more words could be used.
“No,” David said with a grin like a Cheshire cat. “This is wow!” He scrolled down to the bottom of the page, and clicked on a picture. She saw two people in space suits standing on some sort of platform on the side of a cliff. He clicked to show the next picture: a close up of the platform, which she now saw was like a small stone jetty coming out of the cliff wall. He clicked to show the last picture. It was another close up of the stone, clearly showing the engraving on its surface.
“Is this some kind of joke?” she said, walking towards the screen. She was oblivious to the excited talking going on in the theatre behind her. “Is that really Mars?”
“Yes!” he almost shouted.
Gail needed to sit down. She pulled a stool out from under the podium and perched herself on top of it. “How?”
“I have no idea, but I’m going to love finding out,” he replied. He was even more enthusiastic than usual, like a small child at a birthday party after too many sweets. “You’ve got to agree with some of my ideas now, Gail, haven’t you? You might even have to revisit some of your Amarna dating,” he jabbed.
She was absolutely stunned. “I don’t know,” was all she could say. “I don’t know.”
That the news showed proof of extra-terrestrial life was amazing.
That it had been intelligent extra-terrestrial life was barely credible.
But that such intelligent life had managed to carve the very same Amarna Stickman, in all of its glory, into the surface of a rock a hundred million miles away on Mars left Dr Gail Turner utterly speechless.
Chapter 36
Larue’s English was certainly good enough to get the general idea of the book Martín had given him, and he had now read enough of it to know what to do next. Nevertheless, he continued to flick through it with increasing interest, dwelling on a series of photos of the archaeological excavation. In one shot, an attractive young lady and a much older, bearded man stood proudly beside a large rectangular stone in the desert. Another picture showed a row of bookshelves covered in scrolls and clay tablets of varying sizes. The picture he was most interested in, however, was of a large engraving on a wall showing the symbol from Mars next to a bunch of hieroglyphs.
He called Martín back in to his office, and when the Spaniard entered he snapped the book shut. He opened his desk drawer and took out a large wallet. “So, you’ve met Dr Turner before?”
Martín smiled proudly and nodded. “Yes, in London. I was visiting some friends and we went to one of her lectures.”
“Why?” Larue was intrigued as to why a young man with a master’s degree in physics would be interested in archaeology.
“A friend of mine was studying history, and recommended that we all go to the lecture with him, because we were doing nothing else that afternoon.” He looked at the signed copy of the book. “He was also too shy to ask her to sign his copy of the book, so I did it for him. I got confused and she signed it for me instead. My friend was quite upset and told me to keep the book.”
Larue smiled at his little story.
“Martin, I think that this cover-up is not over. I don’t believe for a second that whoever is behind it will simply turn over and admit defeat. We will be accused of the same fakery as we are accusing them of.”
He opened his drawer and withdrew a credit card. He placed it on the desk in front of him. “This book is very interesting, but from what I can see it doesn’t make any reference to Mars. And yet here we are. Dr Gail Turner will no doubt have made progress in her research in the last few years. Maybe she knows something she wasn’t able to publish at the time. While we are unable to get close to the findings on Mars, we should look to this site in Egypt to help explain what is going on.
“Your encounter with her, no matter how brief, does give you an icebreaker of sorts, and she may help us find out more. I want you to find her and get more information.” He pulled a piece of paper from the drawer and, along with the credit card, pushed it across the desk. “This is the pin number for the business card, which you may use as required.”
“But Monsieur, I am not a detective!” he complained.
“You are a researcher in my department. This is your research.” Larue closed the drawer and gestured for him to leave.
As the door closed behind him, Martín looked down at the handful of items he was carrying. His assignment was certainly outside the normal remit of the ESA, he thought to himself, shaking his head. But although he was initially apprehensive, he quickly realised he’d just been given a golden opportunity to satisfy his own curiosity, as well as that of his boss.
He strode to his desk and opened up a browser window on his laptop, and started tracking Dr Gail Turner down.
Chapter 37
Seth Mallus shut the door and took his seat opposite Dr Patterson at the imposing desk. Bright sunlight poured through the window of the meeting room. Outside, an old man cycled past whistling and in the distance a group of children could be seen playing with a football on the sandy beach. Palm trees swayed gently as seagulls
drifted on the warm breeze.
Dr Patterson was looking out of the window with interest.
“It’s amazing what can be achieved with modern technology, Doctor,” Mallus told him. “When my father was a boy, the most impressive computers could barely play chess. Now, in simulator windows like this they can make us think that we are enjoying a summer’s day in California, while in the distance, sitting at a small table, two men who don’t even exist are themselves playing chess to the level of the Grandmasters.”
One of the boys playing football on the beach was arguing with the others. He was holding the football close to his chest, and shouting at the top of his voice. Dr Patterson could not make out what he was saying, but the outcome was clear. Three of the other boys suddenly jumped on him, trying to wrestle the ball away from his grip. Within a minute, they had seized it and were triumphantly marching off to their friends, where they quickly resumed their game. The first boy picked himself up from the sand, nursing his jaw. Blood was dripping from his nose. He stole a glance at the other boys as he retreated to the promenade by the beach. The three dimensional effect was staggering, to the extent that had he not been assured it was a computer simulation the thought would never have crossed his mind.
“Man will never change, Dr Patterson. Our playground simply gets larger, the footballs more expensive, and the games more deadly.” He swung his chair round to look at the scientist. “The strong and powerful continue to make the rules, and there is one absolute certainty: the longer you play, the more likely you are to get hurt.”