Her job, as she saw it, was to pull them in now, get their attention, spark their enthusiasm, and make sure that they stayed. And her hope for the long-term was that the series of lectures, which she had been running now for the past two years, would ultimately lead to a full-time Egyptology unit.
Gail pushed her memory card into the reader, inset into the side of the touch screen on the lecturer’s podium. Quickly navigating the system’s menus, she brought up her media set, entitled ‘Egyptology - Lecture 1’. The first still slide filled the small preview screen. Turning round, she looked at the projection on the wall behind her.
She used to be embarrassed by such displays of her work, especially in front of an audience of hundreds. But over time her confidence had grown, and she now looked up at the wall with immense pride. On a white background was a picture of her book, placed on top of an old, yellowed map of Egypt. A small mound of sand covered one corner of the map. It was one of her book publisher’s marketing shots, but she always used it because she felt it gave the lecture a certain gloss.
The cover of the book showed the title ‘Buried Past – The hidden stories of Amarna’. The space underneath was filled with an engraving on a stone lit by an oil lamp; another dramatic effect Gail felt added a sense of adventure to the lecture.
It would be too obvious, she felt, to start the term with a picture of the Great Pyramids, or Karnak, or the Sphinx. But that wasn’t the impact she was going for. Her aim was to show that even in the twenty-first century there were still incredible discoveries to make, and there were still huge unknowns. It didn’t matter how much research went into Egypt, or for that matter any civilisation, there were always unanswered questions, and questions not yet asked
Asking, and answering, those questions was what archaeology was all about.
She focused on the engraving, following its strange lines, remembering what it had felt like to run her hands over the stones for the first time.
Her presentation ready to go, she let her mind wander and remembered that first venture into the Amarna Library.
Professor al-Misri had promised her that she would be one of the first to go into the Library, following the engineers who had to check the integrity of the structure. But first they had to find a way in. After two days studying the stone wall between the ante-chamber and the Library, it had been decided that the only way to access the room was by cutting through the stone itself. To Gail, this had seemed quite destructive, but modern technology and the ingenuity of the engineers had managed to surprise her.
After identifying a section of wall in the corner of the room with no book shelves connected to it on the other side, the engineers had outlined a circle a foot and a half in diameter, about three feet from the floor. Two slots were cut into the centre of the circle, into which the arms of a counterweighted jack were inserted. The counterweight platform was loaded with lead plates and the jack was raised as far as possible. They had then used a large pneumatic drill to sink a series of holes into the wall around the circle’s circumference. The goal was to create an entrance to the Library whilst generating as little dust and debris as possible. For this reason, the drill bit stopped a fraction of an inch short of the other side of the wall. It was precision work, and very time consuming.
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.