Patterson coughed. “Well, he has a torch, and we don’t. So I vote we go with him.”

Gail held back, and Ben looked at her in earnest.

“Gail, I hate to say it, but he’s right; there’s no reason to stay here, and besides, we shouldn’t let him out of our sight. He could still be planning something.”

She thought about this for a moment before conceding. “Alright, but I’m only going with you because I want to make sure that whatever we find gets treated with respect. This is now officially an archaeological dig, so I’m in charge.”

They walked along in silence for a few yards.

“Do you kick all of your archaeological digs?” Patterson said quietly.

Ben suppressed a laugh and while Gail pretended to ignore him, the darkness made it much easier for her to hide a smile.

Chapter 72

They met Walker coming back up the corridor. He shone the torch directly in their eyes as he moved the light between each of their faces.

“I think you’re gonna love what’s up ahead,” he said blinding Gail with the narrow beam of light.

“Don’t mess with that light, Walker,” Ben said. “I still have the gun, remember?”

“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten. How silly of me to forget that you have my sidearm. Jesus, what kind of soldier do you think I am?”

“One of fortune?” Gail suggested.

He turned without a word and carried on back down the tunnel at a faster pace than they could comfortably follow in the dark.

“Might be an idea not to upset the man with the light,” Patterson said.

The tunnel sloped downwards in a smooth curve, so that the doorway they had come from was now hidden from view. After twenty more yards Walker’s light disappeared, and they heard him shout back up the tunnel.

“Left turn!”

Now completely in the dark, they fumbled their way forwards.

“Walker! We can’t see!” Gail shouted back. “Come back here!”

They continued to shout and complain until he returned; they had managed to proceed barely five yards in the darkness.

“Well, what are you all waiting for? Didn’t you bring torches?” They glared at him as one, and he gave them a wide grin back. “OK, game’s over, come and look at this.”

Despite the anger they all felt towards the man, there was an excited tinge to the way he was talking, and they found it hard not to be caught up in the thrill of discovery.

They followed him more closely this time, and as they rounded the corner, he made a quick adjustment to his torch, going from narrow to wide beam. Suddenly the area around them lit up and even Walker, who had already seen it, was speechless.

The corridor ended abruptly and opened up onto a landing at the top of some stone steps, which descended to the floor of a huge hall. Walker bounced the light off two rows of stone columns; they were at least fifty feet high, connecting the floor to the ceiling. While it was difficult to make out the opposite wall, the room had to be at least the length of a football pitch. From the top of the stairs, they felt like spectators looking from end to end.

Gail started walking down the steps, and Walker followed. Patterson joined them as they made their way down to the floor. Ben hesitated for a while, as he tried desperately to focus on the far end of the hall. Then, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes, he went down after them.

The staircase led down to a central avenue. Walker scanned the hall with the torch, and as far as the light would reach on either side they could see row after row of identical columns.

“My God,” Gail whispered. “It’s like Karnak, the Hypostyle hall.”

Walker continued to scan between the columns with the torch.

He let out a long whistle as he slowly moved the beam of the torch from row to row, for while the central avenue was empty, the rows immediately adjacent to it were completely filled with an assortment of crates, wooden boxes, cabinets, large pots and cloth bags.

 “Oh my God!” Gail said in shock. She let out a series of yelps and whoops like an excited puppy as Walker and Patterson tried to keep up and follow her round the piles of artefacts.

“Good?” Patterson asked.

“Good?” she turned on him, the glee in her face was infectious. “Good? This is better than good, this is unimaginable! That Library was one of the most amazing archaeological finds of all time, but this, this is even better!” She leapt from one pile of boxes to a stack of sacks. “Why worry about reading a book on how much grain they stored, when we have it all here?” She stopped just short of plunging her hand into the open-topped bag, as God only knew what toxins and fungi had grown in there. She moved on. “And a box full of tools, so we know how they farmed, a box of cooking utensils, and…” she hesitated before a third box, “and a box of sheets or clothes or something.”

Patterson had been as enthusiastic as her, but as they examined more and more boxes, he started to slow down, until finally he stood still looking at a collection of wooden blades that would have been used to till soil.

“Gail,” he said softly. “Do you realise what this is?”

She stopped in her tracks and looked at him. Walker swung the torch round and pointed it in his face.

“It reminds me of the scenes engraved into the walls of Ptah-hotep’s mastaba at Saqqara, from the Old Kingdom. They show really detailed scenes of people bringing offerings to him, including grain, ducks, milk, there are even scenes showing the taming of wild animals and farmers bringing a bull to mate with a cow. The offerings lead to the burial chamber, where Ptah-hotep himself was laid to rest. My guess is that this, instead of showing what the offerings were like, actually is the offerings.”

Patterson shook his head. “You are the expert on these sorts of things, but to me it looks like something else.”

“What do you think it is?”

They hadn’t drunk any water for some time, and in the dry atmosphere he swallowed painfully before continuing.

“Remember in the book of Aniquilus, it talks of how humans should lead their lives to avoid the wrath of Aniquilus, and in the book of Xynutians it shows what the potential punishment was?”

She nodded and hushed Ben’s inevitable question.

“Well, this,” he showed the room with his hands, “is the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of an insurance policy. Despite their best efforts, they must have known they couldn’t change the whole of humanity, so they left a message for future generations, inside the Library. They then left supplies in here, just in case the worst did happen, so the survivors would have a good enough start.”

“There’s a problem to your theory, in that the timings make no sense. If the book of Xynutians states that the next event would happen close to our time, why would the Egyptians nearly three thousand years ago start stocking up on grain?”

“That one’s easy,” Ben said. “If I tell you that you’ll die in fifty years if you don’t start eating fish, you probably won’t care. But if I tell you that you’ll die tomorrow if you don’t eat any fish, you’ll probably catch one yourself. If Nefertiti and Akhenaten knew that they needed to bring about change, then telling people that it would only matter for their descendants over a hundred generations down the line wouldn’t make much sense.”

Gail made an approving sound. “So they instead state that The End of the World is Nigh, but simply refrain from saying how nigh it actually is. In the meantime, locking the Xynutians and Aniquilus books up for safe keeping, so that future generations will know why they did it.”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Walker snapped. “Zynusense and Anoushka? Who the hell are they?”

“Xynutians and Aniquilus,” Gail corrected. “It’s a long story, but in short, Henry is saying that this is the three thousand year old equivalent of a nuclear bunker with enough stores to start building the new world again after the apocalypse they feared might descend on them.”