“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.
“Before I saw the Book of Xynutians this week, I only had ideas. Now, I have the actual truth,” she said, deflated. Up until now she had been denying the evidence fed to her by Patterson and Mallus, but now there could be no mistaking the message in the small room under the staircase.