“Why they chose this geographic location was never clear. The stone quality was poor and they rushed the building of houses, monuments and palaces, which is one reason why so little remains above the original foundation layer. But now we know why.” She pointed to the LED that Walker was still groping around. “Because the Xynutians chose this place before them; the Xynutians received the same warning, and didn’t heed it. In time, they were wiped out by Aniquilus.”
Patterson looked up from the engravings for a moment. “So now you believe it?”
“In the past few minutes, I’ve come to believe three things. Firstly, that the LED Walker is trying to break over there wasn’t made by Ancient Egyptians. Secondly that these engravings are not Ancient Egyptian. And thirdly, that somewhere on this wall is the mechanism that will make a door open. And whatever is behind that door, it’s not going to be Egyptian.”
Ben clicked his tongue. “That’s a lot to take in right now. You’re saying that these Xynutians are behind this wall? Couldn’t this staff guy be Egyptian? Could this writing just be a dialect we haven’t discovered yet?”
“No,” she said simply.
He chuckled nervously. “I hate it when academics do that, discount what you say without even bothering to say why.”
Walker stood back from the LED and scanned the wall with his torch, letting it rest on the area that Patterson and Gail were studying.
“So if there is a door, is it a good thing that the light turned from red to green?”
Patterson shook his head. “For all we know, it might do that on a timer every thousand years. And we have no idea if red is off or on, or if it has any meaning at all to the Xynutians. What we do know is that this isn’t the first door we’ve seen like this. Minus the LED, which may have been there and we just didn’t see it, this is strikingly similar to the wall that they found on Mars.”
Walker moved the torch to Patterson’s face. “What?”
Patterson sighed, cursing himself for his loose tongue. “I can’t really say any more,” he said. “It’s kind of a ‘need to know’ thing.”
“Well let me just summarise our little situation here: we’re God knows how many feet underground, without much air, no food or water save for a few ancient loaves of bread down there, and we’re stuck at a door that we don’t know how to open, which for all we know may just be our way out of here. If it’s a need to know thing, then I need to fucking know. Where have you seen this door before, and how did it open?”
Walker had visibly used all his mental strength to keep his voice down, but the fire in his eyes was enough to scare Patterson into talking. He explained everything, as briefly as possible, from the time delay in the Mars mission video feeds down to the secret archaeological dig that had uncovered the Jetty and Xynutian passageway, ending in the mysterious doorway that had swallowed Captains Yves Montreaux and Daniil Marchenko. Throughout the story, Walker flicked the light between Gail, Patterson and Ben, realising that only he and Ben were hearing this for the first time.
“So the door simply slid open, and they went in,” he said when Patterson had finished.
He nodded.
“And they didn’t press any buttons or anything?” He groped the engravings, pressing down hard on anything his fingers encountered. “No idea how it worked?”
“There seemed to be some power drain from anything that was near the door before it opened, almost like it was using up the electricity from around it to power itself. The first time it took out Captain Marchenko’s suit battery, almost killing him, and the second time it knocked Jane Richardson’s suit out, but luckily they’d been expecting it. The thing is, it doesn’t matter what we press, we don’t have a power source.”
Gail looked at Walker’s torch, and they followed her gaze.
“No way!” he exclaimed. We lose the battery, we lose our way out! There’s no way we can find our way back without this, we’re literally in the dark here without it.”
She turned round and examined the wall once more. The Xynutian writing was unlike any she had ever seen, like a crazed cross between Arabic and Chinese. She knew from experience – learning the hieroglyphs, and then later on hieratic Egyptian scripts – that she was not a natural when it came to learning another language, particularly one that you couldn’t have conversations in every day. She also knew from history that no matter how good she’d been, there was no way that anyone would understand this writing without possibly a combination of supercomputers, super intelligence, and as much time as was needed.
Even with the famous Rosetta Stone, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs had taken over twenty years to decode, and it wasn’t until more than fifty years of the stone’s discovery that the full text engraved on it was actually translated.
Basically, she didn’t stand a chance of understanding what the Xynutians had written, and she knew it. Worse still, there were fewer pictures on this wall, and more writing, than in the passageway on Mars.
“Give me the torch,” she said, yanking it out of Walkers hands. He tried to protest, but didn’t offer much resistance. Whatever plans of killing them he may have had, he was saving them for when they were free.
She scanned the wall, from the base of the landing they were standing on, to the ceiling thirty feet above them. Concentrating on the join between the floor and the wall, she let out a satisfied hmph and stood up. “The stairs were added later, probably by the Egyptians.”
They all looked around the landing on which they stood. It was completely featureless.
“Which begs the question, if the Egyptians built this staircase to get to the LED and the writing, then how did the Xynutians get to the door?” Patterson asked.
“By walking up to it, from down there,” Gail answered as she made her way down the stairs with them in tow. “Somewhere down there is another door.”
Under the stairs, missed in their eagerness to get to the green LED at the top, they found an arch just taller than a normal doorway and half as wide. Inside, a small room six feet square housed two small statues of a man and a woman, both about three feet high.
“Nefertiti and Akhenaten,” she gasped. “Incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Engravings of them together are more or less common, often appearing in private homes from Amarna, but a statue of them together like this is unique.”
She crouched down in front of the statues and studied their faces. Akhenaten was unmistakable, his elongated, almost caricatured face smiling serenely through large, inflated lips. The statue was still painted, and Gail marvelled at the tone of his skin, only a shade or two lighter than the deep black of the Nubians. His eyes were set in jet black obsidian.
His left arm ended in a clenched fist pointing directly at the floor, while his right arm wrapped around Nefertiti’s back, pulling her close at the waist.
“They were equals, here,” she commented. “Often the kings of Egypt would scale themselves far larger than their wives or concubines, who would commonly be shown at their feet. I’ve seen one notable exception, in Luxor where Ramses II is seated next to Nefertari. Ironically, a couple of miles away in Karnak there’s a huge statue of them again, but this time she’s a few feet high and barely reaches his knees.”
“I know the statue you mean, in Luxor,” Ben said. “I remember we went there together with George, on your second visit to Egypt. Except the one in Luxor has two differences. Firstly, here Akhenaten and Nefertiti are standing up, not sitting down,” he said.
“And secondly, in Luxor only Nefertari is holding Ramses II, while his hands are on his knees,” Patterson finished. “I’ve been there too, many years ago as a tourist, funnily enough.” He chuckled to himself, amused by the odd twist of fate.