He stood in the middle of the empty hall, surrounded by huge, mute stone gods and kings, dully lit in the gray afternoon light that streamed in from the high windows. He heard the rushing of his blood, the loudest sound in this vacant room.
Recrimination vexed him, and the awful thought that he was somehow responsible for the unexpected change preyed upon him. But what could he have done to accomplish this? Surely not his innocent spat with the governess just now. He hadn’t done anything… partied with a bunch of swells last night, but that couldn’t have done this. What was going on?
Suddenly he became aware of a great absence. The most famous, the most important Egyptian relic in the world, was nowhere to be seen. He took a deep breath, made a quick circuit of the room, and then did it again making certain he missed nothing. He then made his way, in short, reluctant steps, toward a docent who sat reading in a chair. The docent, in a navy blue uniform with shiny brass buttons, looked up at the distraught Nordhausen, and immediately adopted a concerned expression.
“Sir, how can I help you?”
“Where,” his voice broke. “Where is the Rosetta Stone?” he finally rasped out.
“The Rosetta Stone, sir? I don’t believe I know that item. Can you be more specific?” He looked puzzled.
“The Rosetta Stone,” Nordhausen croaked, “Black basalt panel about so by so,” he gestured, “Same message in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek…”
The man gave him an odd look, noticing his dress and immediately sizing him up as a foreigner. “No, sir, doesn’t ring a bell for me. Perhaps you were misinformed. We’ve nothing meeting that description here.”
Nordhausen could feel the blood draining from his face. “Kindly direct me to the Egyptian Curator,” he said.
“Certainly, sir, though I’m certain you’ll get much the same answer from him. Just go through this corridor, up the stairs, and it’s the fourth office on the left. Says ‘Curator of Egyptian Antiquities’ right on the door.”
Numbly, Nordhausen followed the directions, and was soon rapping on a heavy oak door, in an oak paneled hallway.
It was opened by a middle aged gentleman, with white hair and luxuriant, flowing mutton chop whiskers. His upper lip and chin were shaven, but huge sideburns erupted from his cheeks.
“Yes, sir, can I help you?”
“I am looking for the Egyptian Curator?”
“You have found him. I am Wilbert Wilberforce, himself, at your service. How can I assist you?”
“I was hoping to find the Rosetta Stone on display here, can you tell me where it is, sir?” Nordhausen almost pleaded.
“The Rosetta Stone? Which Rosetta Stone? There is a whole collection of artifacts that came in from Rosetta—”
Nordhausen cut in. “Black basalt slab, about so big, in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek.”
The Curator’s eyes narrowed with a hint of recognition. “Oh, let me see, I may know what you mean,” Mr. Wilberforce mulled. “It is not on display, sir, it is in storage, downstairs. May I ask your name, sir, and your interest?”
“Not on display?” Nordhausen was immediately relieved. The great void in his mind was at least filled with the certainty that the stone was here, but why would they have it in the warehouse?
“Forgive me,” he said quickly. “My name is Robert Nordhausen, I have heard of this stone, and have come all the way from San Francisco, in the United States, to make a study of it.”
“Well, sir, you are in luck. I am unoccupied today and I would be happy to accommodate you. Let us go see if we can find this stone of yours. Follow me.”
Nordhausen was delighted. “You are too kind, sir. I was afraid, for a moment, that something was amiss.”
“Excuse me, sir?” The Curator gave him a sidelong glance.
“Well it’s just that none of the displays have any clear identifying labels. I suppose you’ve just not come round to detailing the history yet, is that it?”
“Detailing the history?” The Curator scratched his head. “Well, we’ve got what we can out on the main floor, but there’s simply not enough room for everything else. You’ll see.”
Wilberforce led Nordhausen down to the end of the corridor, and through a service door which opened into a plain dark stairwell, lighted by a skylight high above. The upper floors of museum were illuminated only by natural light.
Wilberforce went on, as they descended the stairs into the gloom. “I have not looked at this one for years,” he shrugged. “It is certainly a curiosity. Perhaps I should consider displaying it. Although, I don’t believe it is as large as you indicated. Ah, here we are.” He opened the door into a dark room, fumbled about until he found a match, and lighted a gas lamp on the wall.
Rows of rough shelving were revealed, running the length of the basement room. They were stacked with Egyptian artifacts, of all shapes and kinds, from statues, to domestic articles, to funerary gear, to odd lumps of stone with remains of paint or carving.
They walked deep into the room, Wilberforce stopping once to light another lamp. They reached the end of the storage room, where a number of stone tablets leaned against the wall.
“Oh, my,” said Mr. Wilberforce. “I should have brought a couple students to assist us.”
“That’s fine,” Nordhausen said, and walked up to the pile. “If it’s here, I will recognize it.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Wilberforce. “May I ask how you know about this stone, sir? I am sure nothing much at all has been published.”
Nordhausen gave the Curator a dark look, his misgivings churning up again. “Nothing published you say? Why, what about the work of Champollion, and that of your own Dr. Young before him?” He manhandled the first tablet out of the way, walking it on its corners with the help of the Curator. They did the same with the next, which was quite heavy, and stopped to catch their breath. The dim gas light cast long shadows.
“I—I—read about it in a French encyclopedia entry,” Nordhausen continued.
“French?”
“Why certainly. Champollion wrote about it all in a letter to a Mr. Dacier, revealing what his many years of research had come to. Why, he worked it all out from this very stone and published a book in 1824 detailing his work on the alphabet.”
“Forgive me, sir, but I’ve heard nothing about it.”
Nordhausen shrugged his shoulders and set to moving the next stone. Little grains of fine sandstone grated off the panel as he rocked it away and against the first two. Mr. Wilberforce didn’t seem to care, which was another thing that rankled in the back of Nordhausen’s mind. These slabs would get prime display in any museum in the world. The Rosetta stone was perhaps the most famous artifact ever recovered in Egypt—yet it was, stored away in the dingy cellar of the museum like so much trash. His eyes widened when he caught sight of the next slab.
There it was, hidden behind the stone he had just moved, dwarfed by the slab behind it. The thick black stone from Rosetta, but as the Curator had intimated, it was considerably smaller than it was supposed to be!
He stared at it, unwilling to believe what he was seeing for a moment. Then strained to push it closer to the light, almost afraid to set his hands upon it. This was it. There was no mistaking the characteristic basalt, with the demotic and Greek text laid out in neat lines etched into the stone. He swallowed hard. Where was the top third? Where were the hieroglyphics?
The stone was broken entirely across the top. There were only a few lines of hieroglyphics remaining, the last few lines of the text, and those were the very words that were missing from a chipped area at the bottom of the slab.