The Winter Vault (4 page)

In the evenings, those first months in Egypt, Avery and Jean often sat together in the hills above the camp, looking out upon what was as yet, to Jean, a scene of indecipherable activity. She felt that if the desert were plunged into darkness, all human presence would also instantly dis appear, as if the incessant motion of the camp was activated by the generators themselves, the men in their service and not the other way around.

There had been many schemes proposed for rescuing the temples at Abu Simbel from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam. It was understood, especially in the reality of post-war demolishment, that Abu Simbel must be saved.

The French had suggested building another dam, of rock and sand, to protect the temples from the reservoir that would form around them, but such a structure would require constant pumping and there would always be a danger of seepage. The Italians recommended the temples be extracted from the cliff and lifted in their entirety on gargantuan jacks capable of hoisting three hundred thousand tonnes. The Americans had advised floating the temples on two rafts, to higher ground. The British and the Poles thought it best to leave the temples where they were and construct a vast underwater viewing room around them, made of concrete and fitted with elevators.

At last, with no time left to prevaricate, the dismantling of Abu Simbel, block by block, and its re-erection sixty metres higher, had been chosen as the “solution of despair.” It was believed that every block in three would crumble.

An international campaign was launched. Across the globe, children burgled their piggy banks and schools collected bags of loose change to save Abu Simbel and the other monuments of Nubia. When envelopes were torn open at the desks of
UNESCO
, coins from every country jangled to the floor. A woman in Bordeaux abstained from dinner for a year in the hope that her grandchildren might someday see the rescued temples, a man sold his stamp collection, students donated their earnings from paper routes, dog-washing, and snow-shovelling. Universities organized expeditions and sent hundreds of archaeologists, engineers, and photographers into the desert.

When Jean and Avery arrived at Abu Simbel in March 1964 for the vibrograph testing, which would determine more discriminately the fragility of the stone and the methods of cutting, the first task was already underway: the building of the immense cofferdam and its elaborate drainage system – 380,000 cubic metres of rock and sand, and a wall of 2,800 metric tonnes of steel sheeting – to keep Ramses' feet dry. Diversion tunnels and deep clefts lowered the water table, so the river would not probe its way into the soft sandstone of the temples. The cofferdam was conceived and constructed quickly, just in time. In November, Avery watched the water tempting the lip of the barrier. It was easy to imagine the colossi melting, toe by toe, the water slowly dissolving each muscular calf and thigh, and the Pharaoh's impassive courage as the Nile, his Nile, took him to her.

There was no town then, and in the rush to build the coffer dam, the workers lived in tents and houseboats, thousands of men in a vulnerable, makeshift camp. Although the Nubians had inhabited this desert with grace and ingenuity for many thousands of years, the foreigners at Abu Simbel lived with scraps of European equipment and their conditions could be described as primitive. But when the cofferdam was finished, the settlement quickly grew; housing for three thousand, offices, mosque, police station, two shops, tennis court, swimming pool. A contractors' colony, a governors' colony, a labourers' village. Two harbours were built for river barges heaped with supplies, and an airstrip for the delivery of mail and engineers. Machinery and food were brought by boat on the long journey up the Nile from Aswan or by jeep or camel caravan across the desert. Gravel and sand pits appeared, and ten kilometres of road, exclusively for the transport of the temple stones, the only paved surface for thousands of kilometres.

The camp was a living thing, born of extremes – river and desert, human time and geologic time. It contained such a babble of tongues that there was no attempt to provide a school for the forty-six children, since few of them spoke the same language.

Each cut, each of the thousands necessary to extract the temple from the cliff, was to be determined in advance and plotted on an ongoing master plan, a fluid web of forces continually shifting as the cliff disappeared. The sculpted faces were to be left whole when possible and no frieze separated at a place of particular fragility. Vibrations made by the cutting equipment and by the trucks were carefully accounted for. The sanctuary ceilings, which had, for generations, held themselves together according to the basic principle of the arch, would slowly be sliced and stored, taking the arch effect with them. And as the stress of the horizontal pressure increased, steel scaffolding with stanchions would be essential to assume the load. Avery worked with Daub Arbab, an engineer from Cairo who set off from his houseboat each day in an impeccably ironed, pale blue, short-sleeved shirt and whose hands – with shining nails and tapered fingers – seemed similarly finely tailored. Avery was at ease with Daub, and was impressed both by Daub's elegant shirts and by the enthusiasm with which he soiled them. Daub was always the first to get his hands dirty, always eager to kneel, to climb, to carry, to crawl into passages to read the gauges. Together each day, to remain ahead of the changing consequences, they monitored the strengthening tests and the stress-relieving cuts in the rock above; any omission or miscalculation of an altered force, disastrous.

Avery watched as the men sliced into the stone. Closer and closer, down to a distance of 0.8 millimetres from the hair on Ramses' head. The workers clenched their teeth against the motion of their own breath. While scaffolding supported the chambers, the walls of the temples were cut into twenty-tonne blocks. Gargantuan columns, like stone trees, were filleted by desert lumberjacks into rings weighing thirty tonnes.

Because lifting equipment was forbidden to touch the sculpted facade, holes were drilled in the top of the temple blocks and lifting bolts were sealed inside. Steel rods were inserted and epoxy (modified to withstand the high temperatures) held together fractures in the coarse-grained yellow sandstone. Cranes slowly lifted the blocks onto the sand beds of loading trucks and they were taken to the plateau above. In the storage area, the blocks were given steel anchor bars and their surfaces were waterproofed with resin. Meanwhile, the new site was readied. The foundation was excavated, frameworks were built for the facades, which would be placed in position and mounted in concrete. And then the concrete domes would be constructed, one on top of each temple, to bear the weight of the cliff to be built above them.

The most delicate work, inside the chambers themselves, was left to the
marmisti
, whose intimacy with stone was unrivalled. They alone were entrusted to cut into the painted ceiling; it was essential that the blocks fit into place within six millimetres, the maximum allowance for inaccuracy. The Italian stoneworkers possessed a daredevil nonchalance, pure
scavezzacollo
, an instinct so honed that the possibility of error was precisely calculated then disregarded. With handkerchiefs tied around their heads to keep any possibility of sweat from their eyes, they stroked the stone surface, reading like a lover every crevice with their fingers, then bit into the stone with the teeth of the saw.

Giovanni Belzoni contemplated the tip of Ramses' head: a few sculpted centimetres exposed from under the weight of the drifted sand. He saw that to clear a passage would be like trying to “dig a hole in water.”

Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in Padua in 1778, the son of a barber. Because he grew to more than six feet, six inches tall and was able to carry twenty-two men on his back, he had, in his youth, joined the circus as “The Patagonian Samson.” But he was also an hydraulic engineer, an amateur archaeologist, and an unrepentant traveller; he and his wife, Sarah, wandered through twenty years of marriage in search of treasure in the desert.

At three o'clock in the afternoon of July 16, 1817, Belzoni climbed the dune at Abu Simbel, took off his shirt, and began to dig with his bare hands. Before dawn, by lantern light, until nine in the morning, when the sun was already murderous, then resting for six hours and continuing again into the night. For sixteen days, Belzoni dug. The cold of the night urged him on. The persistent chill of sand, wind, and darkness; ambition, failure, forsakeness.

Then, at last, at the edge of the lantern light, his hand fell into space and a small gap, barely big enough for a man to crawl through, opened up under the cornice of the temple.

For a moment Belzoni remained perfectly still, almost believing his hand was no longer attached to him. Then, something in the night changed, the desert changed, he could feel it, he could hear it: the ancient air inside the temple moaning from its new small mouth. Belzoni knew he should wait until the morning light, but he could not. Slowly he removed his hand from the hole (like the boy at the dyke) and felt an intense power released, as if a great furnace of sacredness had been opened and the heat of belief was pouring out. An intensity utterly unfamiliar, frightening. Later he remembered what the explorer Johann Burckhardt had said to him – “We have so long forgotten how to be intimate with immensity.” He felt as if the black heat had burned right through him, a wound where now the chill desert wind was rushing – and indeed, when he recovered himself a little, he realized that the air coming from inside the temple was insufferably hot, hotter than a steambath, so hot that later the sweat would run down his arm and through his fingers onto his notebook and Belzoni would have to stop drawing. But now he knew he would have to wait for morning. When he pulled out his upper body, the night wind doused him; instantly, shockingly, the heat froze on his skin.

He squatted in the sand and looked out toward the river that was becoming almost visible, the sun beginning to crack open on the rim of the hills. It was dawn, August 1, 1817.

Soon the sun would enter the great painted hall of Abu Simbel for the first time in more than a thousand years.

From the small hole behind him, the immense roar of silence.

One day, a blind man appeared in the desert. His dark skin was smooth over his bones, and however old one guessed him to be, he was most certainly older. He wore European trousers and singlet but spoke no European language, only a whispered Arabic, as if he were afraid to be woken by his own voice.

At the blind man's request, the labourers carefully guided him up the contours of Ramses' powerful calves to the king's thick knees, each the size of a boulder. The old man would not be carried and took his time memorizing the way. After several ascents and descents, he knew his route perfectly, and they let him climb unaided to sit on Ramses' knee. So steady and interested was his blind gaze, a stranger might assume the old man was looking for something in the river, or keeping watch. It made all the imported engineers nervous to see a blind man at that height, but, after the first day, the labourers took no notice.