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?”