The Exodus Quest - Will Adams

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now. He tiptoed down to the atrium, his heart in his mouth. No one inside, only a generator chuntering away in the corner. It suddenly started stuttering and coughing, sending vibrations through the floor, the lights dimming for a moment before they picked up again. He waited for his heart to resettle, checked his watch. Griffin would surely be at least fifteen minutes. He could allow himself ten.

      Arched passages led left and right. He went left. The passage snaked this way and that, following the path of least resistance through the limestone. Lamps were strung out every few paces on orange electrical flex, their light coaxing nightmarish shadows from the rough-cut bedrock. The passage opened abruptly into a large catacomb, its walls cut with columns of square-mouthed loculi, an island of crates and boxes stacked in the centre. He photographed a skeleton in one of the burial niches, eye-sockets staring blindly upwards. The Essenes had considered death unclean; burial inside a communal area like this would have been unthinkable. It was a big blow to his Therapeutae theory.

      A camera and ultraviolet lamps were fixed to a stand on a worktable. There were trays and boxes stacked beneath, a processing sheet taped to each, artefacts to be photographed. Knox opened one, found a clay oil lamp in the form of a leering satyr. The next box contained a silver ring; the third a faïence bowl. But it was the fourth box that gave him the shivers. It was divided into six small compartments, and lying inside each of them was a shrunken, mummified human ear.

       EIGHT

      I

      ‘We’re currently inside the pylon of a Temple of Amun,’ began Gaille, her voice echoing in the large chamber. ‘It was completed under Ramesses II, but it fell into disrepair before being extensively rebuilt by the Ptolemies.’

      ‘And its connection with Amarna?’ prompted Lily.

      ‘Yes,’ blushed Gaille. ‘Forgive me.’

      ‘No need for forgiveness. You’re a natural. The camera loves you.’

      ‘Thanks.’ Gaille smiled wryly, her scepticism clear. ‘As you know, Egyptians typically built their monuments and temples with massive blocks of quarried stone, as with the pyramids. But cutting and transporting them was expensive and time-consuming, and Akhenaten was in a hurry. He wanted new temples to the Aten in Karnak and Amarna, and he wanted them now. So his engineers came up with a different type of brick, these talatat. They weigh about a hundred pounds each, light enough for a single construction worker to heave into place by himself, though it wouldn’t have done much good for their backs. And after the walls were completed, they’d be carved and painted into grand scenes, like a huge television wall.’

      ‘So how did they get here?’

      Gaille nodded. ‘After Akhenaten died, his successors determined to destroy every trace of him and his heresy. Did you know that Tutankhamun’s name was originally Tutankhaten. He was pressured into changing it after Akhenaten died. Names were incredibly important back then. The Ancient Egyptians believed that even saying someone’s name helped sustain them in the afterlife, one reason why Akhenaten’s name was deliberately excised from temples and monuments across the land. But his talatat suffered a different fate. When his buildings were dismantled, the bricks were used as hard-core for building projects all across Egypt. So every time we excavate a post-Amarna site, there’s a chance we’ll find some.’

      ‘And recreate the original scenes on Akhenaten’s walls?’

      ‘That’s the idea. But it isn’t easy. Imagine buying a hundred jigsaw puzzles, jumbling all the pieces up together, then throwing away ninety per cent and bashing up the rest with a hammer. But making sense of such things is what I do. It’s why Fatima invited me down here. I usually work with ancient texts, but the principle’s the same.’

      ‘How do you go about it?’

      ‘It’s easiest if I explain with scrolls. Imagine finding thousands of fragments from different documents all muddled up together. Your first task is to photograph them all to scale and at very high resolution, because the original fragments are simply too fragile to work with. You then examine each one more closely. Is the material papyrus or parchment? If papyrus, what weave? If parchment, from what animal? We can test the DNA these days, would you believe, to see if two fragments of parchment come from the same animal. What colour is it? How smooth? How thick? What does the reverse look like? How about the ink? Has it smudged or bled? Can we analyse its chemical signature? Is the nib thick or thin, regular or scratchy? And what about the handwriting? Scribal hands are very distinctive, though you have to be careful with that, because people often worked on more than one document, and some documents were written by more than one scribe. Anyway, all that should help you separate the initial jumble into different original scrolls; rather like separating the jigsaw pieces I mentioned earlier into their different puzzles. Your next task is to reassemble them.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘Often we’re already familiar with the texts,’ answered Gaille. ‘Like with the Book of the Dead, for instance. Then it’s just a question of translating the fragments and seeing where they fit. But if it’s an original document – a letter, say – then we look for other clues. Maybe a line of text that runs from one fragment to the next. If we’re very lucky, multiple matching lines, putting it beyond doubt. More usually, however, we’ll put similar themes together. Two fragments on burial practices, say. Or two episodes about a particular person. Failing that, fragments are, by definition, damaged. Is there a pattern of damage? Imagine rolling a sheet of paper into a scroll, burning a hole through all the layers with a cigarette, then ripping it up. The burn-holes won’t just help you reassemble the scroll, they’ll also tell you how tightly it was rolled in the first place, by the steadily decreasing distances between them. And scribes often scratched guidelines on their parchment to keep their writing level. We can match those scratches from one fragment to the next, by tiny variations in the gaps between them, like checking tree rings.’

      ‘And there are similar indications with talatat, are there?’

      ‘Yes,’ nodded Gaille. ‘Though they tend to be more elusive. For example, talatat are made either from limestone or sandstone. Limestone talatat typically go with limestone; sandstone with sandstone. And the composition of the stone is useful, too, because walls were often built with stone from a single quarry. But you can’t rely too heavily on that. Paint residue can also be helpful, as can weather-damage. Maybe the bricks have been sun-bleached. Or maybe there was a leaky pipe nearby, and they’ve got matching water stains. Anyway, once we’ve done what we can, we try to reassemble them into scenes. Talatat are typically decorated either on their long side, which we call “stretchers”, or on their short side, which we call “headers”. Egyptians used alternate courses of stretchers and headers. That really helps. After that, it often really is a case of putting heads on torsos. Fortunately, many of the scenes are duplicates of each other, or of scenes that have already been reconstructed from talatat found elsewhere, so we know what we’re looking for.’

      Lily’s ears pricked up. ‘But not all?’ she asked shrewdly.

      ‘No,’ acknowledged Gaille. ‘Not all.’

      ‘You’ve found something, haven’t you? That’s why you brought me down here.’

      ‘Maybe.’

      ‘Well? Aren’t you going to tell me?’

      ‘Oh,’ said Gaille, dropping her eyes. ‘I think Fatima wants that pleasure for herself.’

      II

      Knox picked up one of the shrivelled ears. The tissue had a slight sheen to it where it had been severed from the body, suggesting the cut was recent. He checked the loculi, quickly found a mummy missing its right ear, then another. He frowned, baffled, before belatedly remembering he was on the clock. His self-imposed deadline had

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