Keystone (8 page)

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.

“How 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.

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.

The engraved
stone they had removed from the surface had been sitting on a flat sill, six
inches wide and two inches deep that ran uninterrupted along all four edges of
the hole. The passageway in between was five feet wide, enough for two people
to walk down side by side without touching each other.
 
She took a mental note to thank Ben once more
for letting her go down alone.

After
thirty-odd steps, she found herself on a small landing, five feet square, where
the steps took a ninety-degree left turn, away from the cliff outside, and
continued to descend.
 

The walls of
the staircase were completely smooth.
 
As
far as she could see, there was not one hieroglyph, engraving or painting all
the way down.
 
From what she knew of
Egyptian tombs and monuments, this was not entirely uncommon; there may well be
more to see further down.
 

The bottom of
the steps opened onto a large room, about three times as wide as the staircase
and just as long.
 
She shone her powerful
torch around, the passage of the Professor betrayed by the recently disturbed
dust that danced lazily in its beam.
 
In
the four corners of the room and twice at regular intervals on each side,
straight undecorated columns connected the floor and ceiling. On closer
inspection, Gail noticed that they had not been built, but rather carved out of
the bedrock, and were connected to the wall behind.
 
The entrance she had emerged from was in the
middle of one of the walls, in between two columns.

There were no
other openings.
 

As with the staircase
that led to it, the walls of the room were unmarked and the twelve columns
stood out as the only decorative features.
 

The engineers’
X-ray machine was on the floor opposite her, one flat end of the cylinder
touching the wall between two columns, the other pointing towards the centre of
the room.
 
Sitting on the floor next to
it was a laptop computer, open and unlocked.
 
She walked over to it and looked at the screen.

At first, she
was not sure what she was looking at, the monochrome display showing a series
of dark and light shapes within a circular frame, but soon her mind adjusted to
the input, in much the same way it usually did after several seconds staring at
a three dimensional image.
 
She twisted
her head slightly, then looked at the wall the cylinder was propped against.

“No way,” she
said to herself.

She knelt down
in front of the laptop and studied the grey and black shapes more closely for
several minutes, briefly looking back at the wall several times in disbelief
before resuming her in-depth appreciation of what lay beyond the rock.

It was a sight
that, as a student, she was all too familiar with.

The echo of
footsteps and excited voices from the corridor behind her brought Gail back to
reality; she turned round just in time to see three students, a young boy and
two girls, enter the room.
 
Behind them,
she could make out the distinctive tones of Ben trying to explain something to
her husband.

“Look!” she
said, standing up and pointing to the laptop display. “Look at this! Isn’t it
amazing?”

The three
students gathered round and stood in silence as they struggled to interpret the
picture. After a brief moment, one of them recognised an object with a shriek,
and within seconds they were all pointing eagerly at various shapes and talking
quickly in a mixture of English, for Gail was still with them, and Arabic,
because they were too excited to be able to find all the words they needed to
explain what they were looking at.

In this time,
Ben and George had entered the room and now stood behind the small group of
archaeologists.

“All those
steps lead to
this
, a room with no
doors?” George complained.

 
She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him
towards the laptop. “
This
room isn’t
it.” As she gestured towards the wall, he saw the look of excitement in her
eyes and looked more closely at the display before him. “It’s just an
ante-chamber,” she said.

George leant
closer, the puzzled look on his face telling Gail that he was unable to
interpret the monochrome feed. “What am I looking at?”

The
Backscatter X-ray system being used by the engineers was an experimental piece
of hardware, developed mainly for seeing through rubble after earthquakes.
 
The traditional X-ray, as used on patients in
hospitals, was able to ‘see through’ objects by detecting varying levels of
resistance to the radiation passing through them, therefore giving a very
obvious representation of the human skeleton for instance, where the density of
the bone is significantly higher than that of soft tissue. In order to be able
to measure resistance through an object, traditional X-rays require the use of
a radioactive emitter and a photographic receiver, in between which the object
to be examined is placed.
 

In contrast,
the
Backscatter
X-ray, as the name
suggests, exploits a different phenomenon in the field of radiation detection –
that of the amount of subjected radiation
returned
from an object.
 
At the end of the
twentieth century, this new form of X-ray garnered some interest from the
search and rescue community, but it was not until the twenty-first century that
it was fully taken advantage of; indeed, an urge to improve airport security in
the United States following a string of terrorist attacks forced the government
to invest heavily in advanced security technologies. The Backscatter X-ray had
many advantages over other detection methods, primarily in its speed.
  
Whereas it would take nearly thirty seconds
for a person to manually search a passenger, the new system was able to
accurately scan and detect offensive items in less than a second.

The other
benefit of the Backscatter X-ray over traditional X-ray was that as it measured
radiation returning from a target object, the emitter and receiver could be
contained within one box, giving it the same flexibility as radar and sonar.
Rather than placing the object between the X-ray and a photographic plate, it
was simply a matter of pointing the X-ray at the object you wanted to see
through.

Unfortunately,
public opposition to the X-ray eventually proved too strong and the technology
was never successfully implemented.
 
It
was not that the amount of radiation passengers were subjected to was
unacceptable; in fact the Backscatter technique produced far less radiation
than traditional X-rays and was deemed to be harmless.
 
Even the price of the technology was not
prohibitive, as the end cost of a production passenger scanning unit was
cheaper than running a traditional security checkpoint.
 
In the end, the system was abandoned as it
presented an infringement on passenger privacy. Because of the low levels of
radiation employed by the system, it did not see through soft tissue to show
bones; instead, it saw through clothes to show soft tissue.
 
During its first years in live trials, it
became obvious that the quality of the images produced by the system was so high
that it was no different to asking people to pass through security completely
naked, and with airport management unable to commit to the reliable safekeeping
of all of the resulting indecent images, the Backscatter X-ray lost its high
government funding, and it was relegated once more to the search and rescue
community, where funding was low and public interest minimal.

The
cylindrical system they were looking at now had therefore been specifically
designed for search and rescue, and was more portable and significantly more
powerful than its airport ancestors. The level of radiation it was outputting,
whilst still significantly lower than that of a traditional X-ray, allowed it
to see through solid objects and detect whatever lay beyond, within a distance
of up to one hundred and fifty feet.
 
The
software installed on the laptop computer was developed not only to render the
resulting images in monochrome, but also display relative distances and scale;
the further objects were from the cylinder, the lighter their colour on the
display. To help in measuring these variations, a scale was shown at the bottom
of the screen, from black to very light grey, zero feet to one hundred and
fifty. The view was very cluttered, as the user interface had not been
particularly well designed, but as Gail and the group of students had shown,
only a brief period of mental adjustment was needed to interpret the images.

“Hang on,”
George said slowly, before Gail could help him. “I think I know what that is.”

“Yes?” she
smiled.

Running
horizontally across the X-ray were two very dark lines, approximately ten
inches apart. Behind these were a series of six lighter lines, and behind
those, ten more, lighter still.
 
The
pattern repeated itself a dozen times until the colour of the last set of lines
showed them to be at least one hundred and twenty feet from the room they were
standing in.
 
An appreciation of the
diminishing perspective as objects approached the limit of the X-ray’s reach
made it clear that each line was equally spaced vertically, and that the sets
of lines were the same distance from one another.
 
Also, although they were not visible for the
first two sets of lines, from the third set onwards regular vertical lines
seemed to intersect the horizontal ones.

“The machines
scope spreads out in a cone, doesn’t it?
 
So we can only see a couple of feet square for the closest objects, but
when it reaches the furthest ones we’re seeing a lot more?” George asked.

Gail looked at
the display again and did some mental arithmetic. “As far as I can tell, at its
furthest its showing us an area over thirty feet wide; it’s like a very
expensive fisheye lens on a very old Egyptian front door,” she said.

George looked
more closely and started to focus on the detail.
 
On top of almost every single horizontal line
were dozens of thick, short lines and circles.
 
The lines tended to be placed next to one another, both horizontally and
vertically, whereas the circles, of varying diameters, were generally on top of
one another forming triangles, like sets of bowling pins seen from above.
 
As he understood the images more, it became
evident that the Backscatter X-ray cylinder had not simply been placed against
the wall randomly; the position had to have been chosen very carefully so as to
show as much of the more distant objects as possible.
 
If a series of the short, thick lines had
been present on top of one of the horizontal lines in the foreground, they
would have blacked everything else out.
 

“I see it!” Ben
shouted, making the others all jump. “Books! And the things you put books on!”

“Shelves.
Dozens and dozens of shelves,” George said under his breath.

“And hundreds
and hundreds of books,” Gail added. “It’s not a tomb, it’s a
library
.”

George found Gail’s
hand and held it tightly. “And there’s something else, too,” he said.

It was strange
that when faced with such an overwhelming number of priceless written records,
anything could have been more impressive. But as George pointed with his index
finger at the screen, everything Gail had seen so far that day seemed to
dissolve in her mind, to be replaced with an excitement she had not felt for
many years.
 
Suddenly, she was seven
again, looking at the presents below the Christmas Tree, and only seeing the
one huge, beautifully wrapped box towards the back.

In the bottom
half of the screen in very faint grey, at least one hundred and thirty feet
away from them and beyond the farthest set of shelves, was a rectangular
object. It was very small on the screen, but despite the resolution Gail could
just about work out that
there was something
else on top of it.
 

One of the
students looked at the controls of the laptop, and cautiously moved the cursor
on the display until it was over the object. Bringing up a menu in Arabic, he
selected an option and the X-ray image disappeared. After a heart-stopping
moment, the image reappeared, but this time, the rectangular object filled the
screen.
 

“Oh, wow,”
Gail managed to say.
 
She’d practically
stopped breathing.

Of all the
hundreds of books inside the library, there was now only one that mattered.
 
It was placed on a plinth, at an angle, like
a Bible at the altar of a Church.

George leant
over to his wife and kissed her on the cheek.
 
“Merry Christmas, honey,” he said quietly. “Merry Christmas.”

Standing on
the edge of the cliff outside, Professor Mamdouh al-Misri snapped his phone
shut and placed it back in his trouser pocket.

He scanned the
rocky terrain below him, from the Nile on his right to his original
archaeological dig ahead of him to the south. Shaking his head slowly, he
turned round and made his way back to the trench, where the Al Jazeera
photographer was impatiently waiting to be escorted down the steps.