Keystone (41 page)

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.

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
.

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.”