Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

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.”

Walker let out a long whistle.

Ben was in the central avenue, in the dark. He laughed out loud. “It’s funny how we found the entrance to the Library all those years ago because we sat on a stone, and now we find this because I sat on another stone. I hope one of us sits on the exit to this place!”

She laughed back, but quickly stopped when she realised Ben had fallen silent. He was staring ahead, towards the far end of the immense hall. His face was frozen in a look of utter terror.

“Ben, what’s wrong?” she asked. “What is it?”

“Turn the torch off,” was all he managed to say as he continued to stare fixedly into the darkness.

Walker snorted. “Why the hell would I switch the flashlight off, what –”

“Do it!” Ben almost screamed.

He obeyed, and they all followed Ben’s gaze. Now in pitch black, it took a few moments for their eyes to adjust.

And realise that they weren’t in complete darkness.

For right in the centre of the wall at the other end of the hall was a pinprick red glow.

It was the kind of light that you would normally find on an electronic device on standby; it wasn’t the kind you would expect to find in an ancient tomb in the middle of the desert.

And as they all stood there holding their collective breath, the red light turned green.

Chapter 73

On the count of three, George and Manu heaved with all their might to lift one end of a large stone slab while Leena inserted the broken beam from the ruined roof underneath it.

As it slid into place, they let the slab drop, exhausted, and staggered back.

There were now two large piles of rubble and debris on either side of the old entrance to the Library, which had mostly been cleared. All of the rocks that they could carry had already been removed, and they had reached several large blocks that until a couple of hours ago had formed part of the ancient staircase’s ceiling.

“If we can remove these,” George said between breaths, “then we might be able to make a hole big enough to crawl through.” He was bent over, hands on knees, and his face was covered in dust streaked with rivulets of sweat; the late afternoon sun was still appreciably warmer than a hot British summer.

Zahra, having passed the gun back to Tariq before making good the job of tying up their prisoner, had returned from Ben’s Toyota with a five litre container of water, which she offered to them.

George drank last. The warm liquid mixed with dust as he swilled the first mouthful around, spitting it out with distaste. He then drank thirstily, gulping down rapidly until his stomach complained by contracting, and he suddenly felt an strong urge to go to the toilet. Passing the container back to Zahra, he suppressed the desire to urinate and went back to their excavation of the stairs.

After a further thirty minutes of persistent leverage from Leena using the beam, their combined strength pulling against the only exposed edge, and several failed attempts at lifting it fully, the first stone slab finally rose up on its end and they toppled it over triumphantly, exposing the two stones it had been pinning down.

Getting down on his hands and knees, George clawed at the mixture of sand and rubble that filled every hole in the heap, keeping the Library beneath them airtight.

“Lift this one,” he said pointing to a large slab the general dimensions of a kitchen table, “and we should be there.”

They wasted no time attacking the second stone, and their eventual success and experience gained in lifting the first stone, despite this one being larger and heavier, meant that within twenty minutes they had upended it.  The ground shuddered as it fell away onto its side with a thump.

George dived into the dirt, and seconds later he was rewarded with a small hole, big enough to fit his arm through. He pushed his face against it and started shouting.

“Hello!” He listened as his voice echoed down the stairs, past the corner and into the ante-chamber of the Library. When no reply came, he cupped his hands against the sides of his head and tried to peer through. The build-up of dust coupled with the bright daylight behind him made it almost impossible to see anything, but he was almost certain he could detect artificial light. “Hello! Gail?” he shouted again, to no avail.

Zahra pulled at his shoulder. “George, they may be too weak to talk, or injured, unconscious, we don’t know. We need to make the hole bigger, so we can get to them and help.”

He shouted one last time through the opening. “We’re going to make the entrance bigger, we’ll be with you soon…” he hesitated, before adding, “I love you Gail!” Standing up, he looked down at the stones they still had to move; they had uncovered one even bigger than the first two, and he could see that the deeper they got the more difficult it would be to use leverage on the stones. Nonetheless, in his mind’s eye it was simply a matter of time and effort to clear everything that stood between him and Gail, no matter how heavy and unyielding it might first seem.

He wiped his face with the back of his hand, clearing away the sweat and tears that were making it difficult to see. He then turned away from the others for a moment to take a couple of deep breaths, before returning to work with renewed vigour and passion.

I’m coming Gail, he thought as he threw a couple of small rocks behind him blindly with both hands. I’m coming.

Chapter 74

It was a long time before anyone said anything. They stayed completely motionless, in the darkness of the hall, staring at the solitary green light; and despite the fact that it lit up nothing, it seemed to them as bright as the Sun in the centre of the Solar System.

Eventually, and predictably, it came to Walker to break the silence.

“Something just turned itself on,” was all he said. He turned the torch on and pointed it directly at the green light, promptly rendering it invisible.

It took only a few seconds for them to reach the bottom of another steep staircase. The mirror image of the one they had descended on their arrival, at the other end of the hall. Looking up, they could see no doorway, though as they started to ascend the stairs the green light became easier to make out inside the warm glow of the torch’s beam.

“Inscriptions!” Gail said in wonder.

They reached a platform roughly ten feet deep and double that across, and Walker ran the beam across the whole of the wall in front of them. It was covered in symbols and pictures engraved into the stone.

“They’re not Egyptian, and I think that this might be one of your friends, Henry,” Gail said, pointing to a man in strange clothing reaching for the skies. He was wearing a triple-pointed crown, his face lifted skywards, his staff held aloft.

“Xynutians!” Patterson exclaimed.

Walker was examining a small indentation in the wall, from which the green light continued to glow. “It may look just like an LED from over there,” he said. “But it isn’t.”

“Don’t touch it!” Patterson warned.

Ben stood back as far as he dared in the darkness without getting too close to the edge of the platform.

“What’s going on here, Gail?” he asked suspiciously. “Who are the Xynutians, why is this not Egyptian writing, and why is there an electronic LED in a tomb that’s been sealed for thousands of years?”

She poured her hands over the engravings, trying to feel for their meaning and significance.

“This place,” she began, “is proof that Nefertiti and Akhenaten started this city, the Royal city of Akhetaten, because they had received a warning. They passed that warning on to us in the book of Aniquilus, the book that we found in the Library. It tells people how to live their lives peacefully and how to interact with the world around them. The fact that they built this underground storage area shows how seriously they took not only the warning, but also the threat.

“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.

“Almost,” Gail said. “His hands would be on his knees, if his arms weren’t cut off above the elbows. There’s another small statue of Nefertiti and Akhenaten I can remember, in the Louvre in Paris, of them both holding hands. They were quite a caring couple, even seen in contemporary artwork playing with their children, which is quite uncommon.”

Nefertiti’s face was a far cry from the famous bust in the Berlin Museum, instead sharing the same stylised approach as had been applied to her king. Gail remembered her first visit to Egypt, and asked herself if she would have been so fascinated in the woman and her story had it not been for the beauty of that bust.

Looking into the statue’s eyes, the intense blue of Lapis Lazuli against her pale olive-brown complexion, she knew without a doubt that the answer was yes; bust or no bust, she felt an irresistible connection with the enigmatic queen.

Nefertiti’s statue in turn pulled Akhenaten towards her with her left arm, so that their bare bodies touched. Both their hips were pronounced and feminine and their stomachs bulged slightly at the waistline, but not so much so in Akhenaten’s case as in the huge statue Gail had gazed at for hours in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo’s Amarna exhibit. Their stance didn’t follow traditional regal symbolism, either, with left foot forwards to represent their existence as both divine and mortal; instead they both stood with their feet together.

“Is it normal that they’re naked and bald?” Walker said pensively.

Gail clucked for a moment, playing with her thumbs. “No,” she said finally. “Semi-naked isn’t so uncommon, there are many statues of both Nefertiti and Akhenaten without clothes, but they always have crowns or headdresses, or have some form of accessory, such as a staff or amulet, even a loose fitting sarong. But for both of them to be completely naked is unique.” She paused for a moment. “The baldness is less strange, in fact it’s quite likely that one or even both of them were bald anyway, and that any hair they would have had, particularly Nefertiti’s, would have been a wig. It’s even possible that these statues had wigs, or were carved with the intention of having such an accessory.”

She inspected the statues more closely for several minutes while the others watched in silence. She was looking for any signs of wear on the paintwork, any scratches or markings that might betray the presence of some missing clothing or jewellery. She found none. It was possible that any clothing used on the statues failed to leave a mark, but somehow she doubted it. She was pretty sure the couple had always stood here, humbly.

“Small statues like this are fairly common. Like votive statues, inviting offerings from people visiting a temple. But as far as I know this one is absolutely unique. It’s obvious from first glance, but when you look more closely the peculiarities are stunning. They’re not like temple statues, designed to show the power and strength of a king during their own lifetime; these are normally made after the subject’s death, and by someone who probably never saw the person alive. Caricatured features like this are typical only of Amarna, and yet I wouldn’t have expected to see that here.

“And what’s more,” Gail continued, “they’re not showing any royal symbolism. They’re just a couple, standing naked, exposed, even their legs are together, almost rejecting their own divinity.”

“This is all very well,” Walker broke the silence that followed her monologue, “and we’re all learning a lot about history and all that, but this ain’t getting us out of here.”

Gail shone the torch around as Ben and Patterson reluctantly agreed that they should focus on looking for a way out. The small room under the staircase was completely bare save for the statues.

“There’s nothing in there,” he continued impatiently. “Give me the torch and let’s look around this place.” He made a grab for it but she twisted away just before his fingers closed around the black metal shaft.

“Wait!” she exclaimed. She looked down at the statue, and drew a line in the air with the beam of the torch, to the blank featureless wall where Nefertiti and Akhenaten had been staring for over three thousand years.

Except it wasn’t just a wall. Thin strips of wooden beading ran along the walls, floor and ceiling, almost invisible at first glance and in the poor lighting. She walked to the end of the room and carefully placed her hand against the wall. Instead of the hard coolness of stone, she encountered the soft-warm touch of finely woven cloth. She could feel the hardness of the surface it hid.

“A fake wall!” Patterson gasped.

Walker strode to Gail’s side and placed his palms on the material. Looking up and down at the beading holding it in place, he slowly curled his fingers inwards, letting his nails run along the weave, testing its strength.

“You can’t just rip it down,” Gail protested, reading his mind.

The look he gave her stopped any further complaints, and he dug his fingers into the cloth, taking the few millimetres of slack up and ripping downwards. After several long rips, the entire wall was uncovered, and the remains of the cloth lay scattered at his feet.

Still recovering from the initial shock of Walker’s lack of respect, Gail moved the torchlight from side to side on the now uncovered wall; it was crammed with inscriptions and drawings from the book of Xynutians; Xynutian cities with flying vehicles and towering buildings followed by the chaos and destruction of the wrath of Aniquilus. There was no need here to understand the Xynutian language. This was the story of the destruction of a civilisation, a story that had survived the millennia to warn the ancient Egyptians, who stood here in humility before it.

On top of the engravings, it’s four legs and two arms covering the width of the walls and its round head rising above the ruins of the Xynutian world, the Stickman of Amarna, the symbol that Gail had chased the meaning of for a decade. Aniquilus stood before them.

Seeing it like this, the final pieces of her jigsaw were starting to fall into place.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti, laid bare, abandoning the old gods, were accepting the higher power of Aniquilus, who it was shown had destroyed a more advanced civilisation than their own. But how would they break with thousands of years of tradition and present the truth of Aniquilus to the Egyptian people? By taking Aniquilus and linking it with the old god Aten, the sun disk with outstretched rays touching the people below, and then moving the capital of Egypt to Amarna, away from Thebes and Memphis, away from the old way of life.

And then, finally, by renouncing their own pharaonic link with divinity, by showing that they were mere mortals, and that they would all face the judgement of Aniquilus, from the people who worked the fields right up to the kings and queens.

Gail fell to her knees.

“So this is it,” she whispered. “This is what it was all about. I saw it in the books, I saw the finds on Mars. But this,” she nodded to the statues facing Aniquilus, “is what this is all about.”

Patterson resisted the urge to say ‘I told you so’, and patted her shoulder. But he could little understand what this meant to Gail. After so many years of studying the texts from the Library, without the missing pieces of the puzzle, to finally see everything in context so clearly was at the same time immensely exciting and unbelievably demoralising.