PUBLISHED BY:
Kemamonit
Copyright © 2011 Paul Edwards
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Kemamonit
Chapter one
“God this is hot,” Professor Smith thought as he took a long drink from his water bottle. He surveyed the empty desert before him, all he saw was sand and the odd outcrop of rock and boulders.
He turned around and watched the Egyptian laborers hauling up dirt and rubble from a large trench.
“Publish or don’t come back. Publish what? A thesis on mummified cats,” he thought about his recent meeting with the Minister of Antiquities. The meeting had not gone well, the Minister had found out about the small bits of pottery he had unearthed at his dig last season.
The pottery shards had not seemed very important at the time until one of his eager students had noticed the partial seal of Pharaoh Khufu on one of them.
“If only the stupid shit had kept his mouth shut,” a bolt of anger shot through him.
That was all that had turned up at the dig, that and a pile of mummified cats.
“If I wrote a paper on a pottery shard I’d be a laughingstock,” he thought,” I didn’t become an archaeologist to waste my time with minutia nobody gives shit about.”
The professor thought about his favorite movie as a child, the main character a swashbuckling archaeologist had inspired him to become what he was now.
He had not been naïve enough to think that his career would mirror the films main character, but he had been shocked to find out just how uninspired his peers would be.
“No sense of adventure, just want to argue about minutia, whole careers wasted writing about nothing,” he thought.
He had tried to hide the pottery shards by miscataloging them when he prepared them for shipment to Cairo. Unfortunately one of his students had gotten drunk and blabbed about what they had found when they had returned to the city.
The Minister had rewarded him by sending him to a new dig site in the middle of the desert. It was miles from any known ancient settlements.
“It looks good from orbit,” the Minister had said showing him a satellite photo.
The photo had shown a bunch of random lines etched into the desert. The professor was pretty sure that if there were anything to find here this would have been the last place he would’ve been sent.
“I’ll do my penance,” he thought.
He walked back to the large trench the laborers had cleared out, he saw his foreman Mohammad talking to one his student volunteers a few feet away. Mohammad knew more about ancient Egyptian archaeology then anyone he had ever met.
“If he had had the same opportunities as me, he could have been anything,” the professor thought to himself.
“Find anything interesting?”
“Good sand easy to dig, the Minister will be quite happy with our fine hole, inshallah. “
”He’s probably looking at the satellite photos as we speak. You haven’t found the tip of a pyramid yet have you?”
Mohammad laughed.
So far they had found absolutely nothing, not even the usual cigarette butts and garbage that turned up in most sites. The ground gave every indication of having never been inhabited in any era.
“Lets shut it down for the day, no sense killing ourselves for nothing,” the Professor told Mohammad.
“Ok Charlie,” Mohammad replied.
The group sat around the cooking fire drinking bottled beer and eating their meal of canned food. The beer was still cold since this was their first day digging and the ice they had packed it in hadn’t melted completely.
Charlie didn’t usually bring alcohol on digs, he new from experience that it caused more problems then it solved. He also tried to be sensitive to the laws and customs of the countries he was working in, alcohol was tolerated in Egypt but being a Muslim country it was frowned upon.
“We’re not gonna find anything anyway, so who cares if we’re half cut,” he had said to Mohammad when they were loading the vehicles.
“The Egyptian gods would be pleased, but you disappoint the prophet,” he had replied in his enigmatic way.
Charlie had always thought it must be difficult to be Egyptian, following a foreign religion while being surrounded by the ruins of their own spectacular heritage.
“So professor what are we looking for here?” this from an eager young female student who had never been on a dig before.
“I’m personally looking for redemption, but failing that there is a small chance of finding some remnants of the battles between ancient Egypt and Libya.”
“Do you think we’ll find skeletons?” The eager student had an excited look on her face.
Charlie envied her, he had been like her once. He would wake up early in the morning with the hope of finding something new and spectacular, and never be disappointed when nothing was found.
He had found many interesting things and had started to get a small inkling of what humanity must have been like in ancient times. He had even had epiphanies when he had discovered things that still influenced people to this day.
He had never found anything spectacular though, and as he had gotten older he started to realize that he was becoming much the same as the archaeologists he had disliked in his youth.
He now knew that archaeology was a collective effort and that every small discovery was important in the whole scheme of things, but that had not been the reason he had picked this career.
“Shelly isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Well Shelly I don’t know what we’ll find, but you have a good attitude. If in a few years you’re wondering whether to do this for a career, remember how you feel right now, that’s why we do it.”
Shelly blushed and smiled an embarrassed smile.
The group chatted some more for an hour or so before they crawled into their tents and went to sleep.
Charlie stayed, staring at the embers of the dying fire for another hour while drinking more beer.
He lay down on the sand and stared upwards at the stars with a beer bottle balanced on his chest. It was a moonless night and the stars were exceptionally bright, for an instant he felt as if he was an ancient person oblivious to the knowledge of modern man.
“They are so profound, no wonder they have influenced us since the dawn of mankind,” he thought.
Charlie stood up and put the empty bottle back into the beer cooler, he then walked to his tent crawled in and went to sleep.
Charlie woke up to the sound of yelling, he had a mild hangover and was a bit disoriented.
He listened closely trying to discern what was being said, he heard Mohammad’s voice talking hurriedly in Arabic. He spoke Arabic very badly so he was only able to discern the gist of what was being said.
“Get the professor! Get the professor!” is what he heard.
Mohammad never called him professor, Mohammad never sounded excited either for that matter.
“God I hope its not bandits,” he thought as he searched for h
is ancient revolver.
“I don’t even have bullets.”
He had never fired the gun, it was a navy colt from the American civil war, and he had found that he was able to get it past most countries customs inspectors as a collector’s item because of its age.
It used paper cartridges, which he had never gotten around to purchasing.
“Don’t even know if they still make them,” he thought as he found the guns decorative box under a pile of books.
He pulled the gun out of the box as he heard his tent flap being pulled open. He turned and saw Mohammad’s head sticking inside.
Mohammad looked at the revolver in his hand and started grinning.
“You will cause the bandits to laugh themselves to death,” he said.
“Hey, I can’t get an AK through customs. Is it bandits?”
“Bandits? Here? No one comes here its just sand and us.”
“What’s with all the yelling then?”
“We have found something professor, something marvelous.”
Charlie put the revolver back into its box and piled the books back on top. He stood up and pulled his boots on. He noticed his hands were shaking visibly.
“What is it? A settlement?”
“You’ll see, hurry up.”
Charlie followed Mohammad as he walked back to the trench, he noticed the whole crew was standing around the far edge talking excitedly and pointing to a particular spot in the trench.
When he got closer was able to see what they were pointing at, it was the edge of a large granite block jutting out from the side of the trench. It was about two feet below ground level.
Mohammad pushed his way through the crowd and jumped into the trench, Charlie followed him.
“It looks like an entire building buried in the sand, this is a top corner.” Mohammad said.
Charlie examined the granite block closely running his hand over the surface.
“The carving is exquisite, I can’t feel any tool marks,” Charlie said.
“We dug around the perimeter, It’s about twenty feet square.”
“What period do you think? Amarna?”
“I have never seen carving like this, look at the top corner it’s perfectly square.” Mohammad touched his index finger to the corner and turned it to show Charlie. There was a drop of blood on it.
“It’s not some kind of modern secret military bunker or something?” Charlie asked.
Mohammad looked at Charlie with an odd expression on his face, “Only if it’s Israeli or Libyan, there is no way we would be digging here if there was an Egyptian military anything within a hundred miles.”
“The sand is very loose so we should be able to clear it in a day or so.” Charlie turned to the watching crowd, “let’s be careful, we don’t know what it is so follow the rules.”
Mohammad turned and addressed the workers.
“Ok, we’ll break into teams and work from each corner, Charlie and I will clear off the top,” He started organizing the teams as Charlie walked back to his tent to get his digging tools.
Everyone worked in a frenzied silence to clear the building. The excitement was almost palatable. The sand was loose and easy to move and now with a specific goal in mind the crew moved with a singular purpose. They did not even break when the Egyptian sun reached its zenith baking everyone with its brutal heat.
The building was finally completely exposed as the sun started to set on the horizon.
Charlie stared at the monolithic block of granite, Mohammad had broken out the electric spot lights and the small diesel generator. The lights seemed to make the building look even darker.
“It’s a solid block of granite, unbelievable,” Charlie said as much to himself as to Mohammad.
“There is no foundation, it’s just sitting on the sand, we probed underneath,” Mohammad replied.
“How did they move it? Why a solid block? It makes no sense.”
“Professor! Professor! Over here, there’s Hieroglyphs!”
Charlie turned and saw an excited Shelly waving and pointing to a spot on the building.
“I’ll bet she’s going to be an archaeologist after this,” he thought as he looked at her face flushed bright red with excitement.
Charlie walked over to were Shelly was pointing, the electric lights had highlighted the hieroglyphs.
“Why didn’t we see these before?” he thought.
When he examined them more closely he understood, they weren’t carved, they were inlaid with a slightly different kind of granite.
Charlie looked even closer with a magnifying glass and a flashlight and then gasped. The inlay was perfect, it was as if someone had somehow changed the colour and texture of the rock rather then inlay a different stone.
“It’s Hieratic, that’s odd,” Mohammad said over his shoulder.
“The writing looks almost pre-dynastic too. I’ve also never seen anything carved this well before the fourth or fifth dynasties. Do you think it’s fake?”
“I’ve never seen anything carved this well period. If it is fake it must have cost someone a fortune, this is not Egyptian granite,” Mohammad said.
Charlie stood back and tried to read the message, it was hard to see clearly because of the shadows cast by the electric lights, it looked like instructions of some sort. He was able to make out what looked like a name in the body of the text, Kemamonit.
“Let’s get some sleep, it’s too dark for now” Charlie said
The lights surrounding the block dimmed to a small glow as Mohammad shut off the electric generator.
Charlie walked back to his tent crawled in and fell into an exhausted sleep the second his head hit the pillow.