Chapter 38
Gail’s phone had not stopped ringing all morning. She had cancelled her remaining lectures and seminars for the day and returned to her office with David Hunt to look at the Mars findings in more detail. Despite speaking to dozens of people, her mobile still had over thirty missed calls, and her desk phone had more voicemails than she dared count.
She held her head in her hands and exhaled loudly.
“Gail, I know this may be hard, but you may have to accept that Amarna and Mars are linked,” David said apologetically.
Looking up at him, she scowled before burying her face again. “Easy for you to say,” she mumbled. “You’re used to people trying to discredit you! This is Egyptology; I’ll be hung out to dry!”
Professor David Hunt knew exactly what she meant. Over the years, dozens of weird and wonderful theories had been put forward regarding the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the pharaohs; all of those theories had been ridiculed by Egyptologists. Often, they would simply not bother trying to disprove the theory, but would dismiss it out of hand. Gail was worried about keeping her career intact and away from disrepute.
“Look at the bigger picture, Gaiclass="underline" they’ve found evidence of intelligent life on Mars!” he said. “And those creatures used the same symbol as your Amarna people. You couldn’t have gone to Mars to plant evidence any more than you could have carved the Stickman into all those shelves in Amarna, so they can’t possible claim that you made any of this up, can they?”
“That’s not the point!” she whined. “The Egyptian authorities are renowned for refusing to authorise archaeological excavations if they believe an unfavourable alternative theory is being developed. They famously stalled excavation of irregularities in Khufu’s pyramid because Japanese and French researchers couldn’t satisfy their demands that it would significantly advance science. The second I openly admit to a link between Mars and Amarna, I can kiss my access to the Amarna Library goodbye, and there are still over three thousand books that we haven’t even opened yet!”
“Not this time: this is science, Gail! You can see as well as I can that those symbols are identical. There is only one possible reason for that isn’t there?”
Gail sat holding her head for several minutes as David waited patiently for an answer. She looked up. “There is another possible explanation.”
He looked her in the eyes and his face fell. “Gail, don’t do this!” he pleaded with her.
“But you have to admit it’s possible, don’t you? That the Mars photos are faked is a hell of a lot more likely than the alternative, don’t you think? Why do you so readily believe that they are genuine?”
“The truth is that regardless of where those images came from, regardless of how authentic they may be you simply don’t want to accept that there may be some inherent link between the two sites,” he told her, firmly. “You’re grappling for a conspiracy theory that disproves the relationship between the two, instead of objectively looking at all the evidence and judging it on its own merits.” His eyes met hers and softened. “The reason I can still work here, despite all my years trying to prove my unpopular theories, is because I have never forgotten that archaeology is a science, and that scientific method is the foundation of everything that we do.
“I know that there is a twenty-three thousand year old village on the edge of the Caspian Sea because of scientific evidence, not because that’s what I wanted to be true. Had it been only four thousand years-old, it would still have been an important find. As it is, it helped fuel my career for the past fifteen years. Look for the evidence to support a link between Amarna and Mars, and you may be surprised. There may be something in the texts that you have already seen that may now make more sense.”
“I am absolutely sure that there is nothing in the texts I have looked at that suggests a link. There is no evidence I know of in the archaeology in Amarna, or even in the rest of Egypt – the rest of the world! – that can point to a link with extra-terrestrials.” She was angry now, her eyes filled with emotion. Her entire career had been based on the Amarna Library, but the photos from Mars had her looking at a bleak future. “I have two choices,” she said as calmly as possible. “Either I support the possibility of E.T., or I refute it completely.”
David looked at her and smiled. “You made your choice years ago, Gail, when you accepted your scroll from the Dean. You have to be a scientist.”
“There’s always a choice to be made. But first, I have to speak to Professor al-Misri.”
As if on cue, the desk phone started ringing.
Gail was tempted to let it ring: the sheer volume of calls that morning had left her weary of lecturers, friends, family and even students, all asking her the same questions. But then she recognised the Cairo telephone number on the display.
“Mamdouh, I was just about to call you, how strange!”
David pushed himself up from the armchair in which he had been lounged and gestured to Gail that he was popping into his own office for a while.
Gail nodded and continued speaking to the Professor. “Yes, I saw the news. How couldn’t I? I’m fairly certain it’s faked, or that –”
He had just reached the door when Gail stopped mid-sentence. Something about the lengthy pause in her telephone conversation made him prolong his stay in her office for a few moments.
“But, how do you know?” she said, the words stumbling out.
David backed away from the door and regained his seat, all the time studying her face for any signs of what the Egyptian could be saying to her on the other end of the line.
Suddenly, she was saying her goodbyes and hanging up. She sat in silence for over a minute, looking into space, before David could bear it no longer.
“Well?” he urged. “Doesn’t he think that the photos are faked?”
She looked at him, and shook her head slowly. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has seen proof that suggests otherwise.”
“What kind of proof?”
“He can’t tell me over the phone. I have to see him in Cairo tonight. He’s already booked my flight.”
There was something about her pale face and expression, telling him that there was more to it than that. “What’s wrong, Gail?” he asked softly.
She looked him in the eyes. “He says that there’s another book from the Amarna Library, one that I’ve never seen.”
David sighed. “There’s more than just one, Gail! There are more than three thousand books in the Library that you’ve not yet had the time to study, and you know more than anyone about that place.”
Now she was frantically clicking through folders of images on her computer screen, some that had been used in her book, many thousands more that had not. She finally reached the folder she was looking for.
A rendition of the Backscatter X-ray, from a few days before they had entered the Library for the first time, filled the screen. She zoomed in on the plinth, on which the Stickman book had been found.
She flicked through a pile of papers on her desk and brought out an A3 print of another photo, this one taken from inside the Library, behind the plinth. The Stickman book covered less than half of the plinth’s surface.
Comparing the two images, her jaw dropped.
“How did I not notice this before?” she wondered.
“Unbelievable,” he whispered.
“My entire career, all my studies, my lectures, my thesis, everything! It’s all been based on corrupted evidence!” she wailed.
He looked at her wide-eyed as she broke down in front of him. He was horrified and upset for his colleague. But deep-down inside, part of him thrust a clenched fist in the air and cried victory. All his life he had searched for proof of archaeological and historical cover-ups, and now it looked like he would finally get what he’d been looking for.