The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [102]
Which is to say, no time at all, considering how long my friend has been waiting for me under the earth! What had we found? By God, what had we not? One of the men—name escapes me, cannot regularly tell two of them apart, perhaps brothers—had in his scraping noticed on the cliff wall at eye level a very small patch of smooth, whitish rock, sunk a few inches back into the dirt and stone of the cliff face, not 100 feet from where Marlowe and I found Fragment C. The aberration was, when they found it, the size and shape of a thumb, an oblong and perfectly flat rock where all around it was irregular brown dust and stone, packed hard, crumbling only when hit with force. It was exactly the sort of thing that had led to a dozen false alarms in our work so far, and by the time I arrived they had taken it upon themselves to try to confirm their discovery, hacking at the brown wall, levering against the white stone with a metal bar, managing to scratch its surface, triple its size, and enrage me for violating my instructions to touch nothing in my absence.
I told Ahmed to explain the rules to the men again; there would be no baksheesh for damaged finds. I examined the stone under a magnifying glass and found on it what appeared to be regular patterns, though it was hard to be sure, considering the scraping the men’s levers had caused. The white rock was without question an entirely different surface than the stone even a foot above it, so if it was large it extended downward only, but it did not display the texture of erosion. I sent the men to fetch shovels and brushes from the donkeys, and I set to work myself with painstaking care. “This is it, then? We are close?” says Ahmed, his first sign of real enthusiasm yet.
Neither supper nor nightfall slowed me in my cautious work. And, to their credit, Ahmed and the men showed no interest in leaving the site even as the sun set, though it was hard to know for sure, as their Arabic has grown increasingly incomprehensible over the past week; private slang and slurring seem to be replacing proper diction. Using a variety of specially crafted small chisels and brushes, ranging in size from a half-inch to more than a foot, I worked steadily, a surgeon conducting the most delicate of operations. Tempting as it was to use battering rams and dynamite (as the early fellows did decades ago), our responsibility is not only to preserve the item inside (rushing it off to a museum or private collector) but to see everything in its original context, and to map and re-create that context for posterity. For observe: we never know the range of our ignorance. We do not know what significance we fail to see by hurriedly smashing a wall that seems blank and meaningless. Preserve every stone and fragment, note each brick’s relation to every other brick before removing anything: this is the care that separates the professional from the tomb-plunderer. And so, if I delay in the description of this unsurpassed day, it is only to give you, eager Reader, a sense of both the building excitement and the strange passage of Time.
For at the moment of discovery, Time goes all agog, flows in every direction at once and at every imaginable speed until the sun flies through the sky even as you feel you have just begun; your work will never end; you can count your every breath; you can imagine what you are going to see, behind this door, in the greatest detail (for it was a door, oh yes, I will reveal that much); you can picture every golden bracelet,