After three days of drilling, and an enormous amount of dust inside the ante-chamber, 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 ante-chamber 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 best-seller, 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.