“But no camels?” Gail laughed.
He shrugged and pointed to the valley and where the Professor’s expedition was based. “Probably doing a better job than me over there in the trench,” he half-joked.
Gail looked over at him and grinned. “Why do you call yourself Ben?” she asked.
“My real name is Farid, the same as my father. For as long as I can remember, people have called me Ben, I was even called that by my teachers at school!” He looked down at the sand and laughed. “I have no idea where it came from,” he said.
Gail contemplated this for a second before responding. “When I was a child, I could never understand why my parents had named me after the wind. A gale is like a hurricane,” she explained to him. “Names are funny old things, don’t you think?”
“Yes?” he answered cautiously.
“Like Nefertiti,” she continued. “’The Beautiful One Has Come’. What a strange thing to call someone. Where could she have come from, and where could she be now?”
“I imagine she is dead, Gail,” he joked. “And she is certainly not around here.”
Gail stood up and walked towards the lone palm tree, away from the cliff’s edge and the stone on which Ben sat, looking out towards the desert. “She has to be somewhere!” she said. Despite the fact that they had seen nothing all day with the exception of a couple of landslides and a few lizards, she was filled with happiness at simply being in Egypt, in the desert, with ancient ruins barely half an hour’s drive away.
Reaching the base of the palm, she turned and looked at Ben. He was still sitting on the stone about twenty yards away, but had shifted round to see what she was doing. She looked at him and started to wave, then stopped.
“What is it?” he shouted. He got up and jogged over to her. “Gail, what’s wrong?”
She pointed to the stone they had been sitting on, and began walking towards it. “Look!”
Ben turned back to the rock and froze. Even he knew what it meant. The flat stone they had been sitting on was about eight feet long by at least six feet wide. It stood about eight inches high, almost buried in the sand, and was perfectly flat. There were many flat stones dotted around the landscape, a natural by-product of the stratified rock formation caused by millions of years of sedimentation, and this one had seemed no different as they had approached it from the cliff and sat down to rest. But it was obvious, seeing it from the other side, that it had once been shaped by man.
Whereas on the other side it was rough and ragged, this side was perfectly smooth and flat, the vertical face at right angles with the top. From where Gail and Ben were now standing, it looked like a giant stone building block that had simply fallen from the sky and landed in the middle of a barren cliff-top. Naturally occurring geological marvels were not unheard of: Gail had seen pictures of the Giant’s Causeway and plenty of underwater sites around the world where natural rock formations had been wrongly attributed to man. And if it had only been for the right angles and the smoothness of the surfaces, Gail could have doubted her judgement. But it was not just this that made her heart swell with excitement.
Engraved on the stone, just poking out from beneath the sand, were the unmistakable lines, loops and curves of hieroglyphs.
They started clearing the loose sand at its base until an area approximately two feet high by eight long had been exposed.
On her knees, Gail ran her hand over the engravings, following the outline of what they could now see was a cartouche with her fingers. She looked up at Ben.
A cartouche is an oblong shape containing some hieroglyphic symbols. Both ends of the cartouche are always rounded, and if a straight line runs along the bottom edge, then the characters within the oblong typically represent the name of a royal figure. The term cartouche comes from the French word for cartridge, as French soldiers in Egypt during Napoleonic times noted their likeness to their ammunition casing.
This cartouche was definitely for someone important.
“Ben?” Gail asked.
Ben was rummaging in his backpack and brought out a well-thumbed textbook.
“Hieroglyphs, my favourite,” he smiled. Running his finger along the symbols, he read out loud. “The four symbols at the top are Ra, e, t and n. The god Aten. The symbol at the bottom of the cartouche, of a woman, means a queen.”
“Ben,” she started. “Is that Nefertiti?”
He looked between the cartouche and his textbook. “What looks like a church steeple is actually the heart with a windpipe attached. One on its own, nfr, means beautiful. He skimmed through the pages quickly.
“I was never good at this,” he complained, rubbing his forehead.
“You’re doing brilliantly,” Gail encouraged him. “Better than I could!”
He smiled and pointed to the next three hearts and windpipes.
“These three together, are nfrw, similar to the first, but meaning beauty. Ah, OK!” He pointed to a page in his book. “Beautiful is the beauty of Aten. It’s like a part of the name, but not the name, if you see, like saying long live the queen.”
Gail was disappointed. “So, it’s not the beautiful one has come? It’s not Nefertiti?”
“Be patient! OK, the next bit is another heart and windpipe followed by neb, the basket. This is nfr-t, a beautiful woman, or simply a beauty. The last bit, I have no idea. Wait, let me try something.”
She looked at the cartouche and the surrounding symbols. “Beautiful is the beauty of Aten, A beauty something something. It’s pretty close! What do you think, Ben?”
Ben was flicking through the pages of his textbook and jotting down some notes, muttering to himself in Arabic. Finally, he showed them to Gail.
“OK, I did it backwards. You want this last bit to be has come. The verb to come is tall reed with two legs that you see here in the cartouche, but followed by two man legs walking. It is pronounced ii. The two vertical bars in the cartouche are a short form of two walking legs. The problem is the symbols are in the wrong order. They should be, reed, then walking legs, then the last one, which you can see here next to the sitting queen, which is pestle, from mortar and pestle for mixing herbs,” he made a mixing motion with his hands. “The pestle makes a soft t sound, and it makes the feminine of the past of the verb come.”
Gail read through the scribbled notes then took his pen. She jotted down the phonemes one by one: Nfr-t, a beauty, ii-t, has come.
“Nfr-t-ii-t,” she whispered in wonder.
“Finally,” Ben said with a grin. “Now you pronounce it like a true Egyptian!”
They both sat back on the sand, looking at their find with a mixture of disbelief and excitement.
And Gail thought to herself: a beauty has come.
Chapter 9
George edged the rental car down the track and cursed the sand as he looked enviously at the 4x4s parked a hundred yards ahead of where he was going to have to stop. Getting out, he donned an old fashioned explorer’s hat that had been thrust upon him by an eager salesman in Luxor. He checked his backpack for his camera and took a swig from a plastic bottle of water before setting off.
As he rounded the bend in the road ahead, he was surprised to see the number of cars lined up at the foot of the small cliff. On top of the white 4x4s he had seen a few days earlier at the archaeological dig there were three luxury off-roaders, more used to driving in cities but clearly enjoying their trip in the country. On the side of one was a logo for the Al Jazeera news network.