Wadi Kerf, Western Thebes, Egypt. Site 65-A.
Dr. Reid Farmer perched on the lip of the archaeological excavation and studied the sheer-walled canyon in which he worked. The tomb area had been cut out of the tan-and-amber canyon wall; it lay perhaps three meters above a dry streambed filled with rocks and gravel.
With his archaeologist’s eye, Reid could reconstruct the valley’s original morphology. Higher beds of pale-yellow sandstone had been incised by hydraulic action—probably back in the Pliocene some four million years ago. During the ensuing 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene this part of Egypt had remained desert, and the canyon was occasionally scoured as runoff poured down the exposed slick-rock, sluiced into the wadis, and thundered down the channel.
The ancient Egyptians had changed it with their copper, bronze, and—finally—iron tools. During the Eighteenth Dynasty, they’d quarried the exposed strata for stone and carved out the very bedrock to construct a series of tombs the length and breadth of the valley. For over three thousand years, wind, weather, and sun—along with occasional pillaging looters—had tumbled enough material down the slopes to reduce the valley back to rubble.
Reid glanced up at the brass-hot sky and wondered what kind of damned fool would be out here running an excavation when the temperature was knocking on forty degrees Celsius.
One who’s being paid extraordinarily well, he reflected. Almost too well.
Though why Skientia had chosen him for the job still made no sense. His expertise and skills were in North American archaeology, not Egyptology. Excavation, however, was excavation, be it an Anasazi pithouse or an Egyptian tomb. Reid was being paid to dig and, by God, he’d get it done.
Everything had been seen to with incredible efficiency: visas, excavation permits, travel and lodging, food, tools and supplies, and even security—a perimeter guard of uniformed security consisting of alert young men with slung Kalashnikovs.
“Quite the operation,” Reid mused as he stepped over to their field tent and pulled out yet another bottle of water.
“They really think something is here?” Yusif, the Egyptian crew chief, wondered. He was a broad-shouldered man, closing on forty, who sported a thick black beard. Skientia had chosen him for his expertise in excavation. “I’ve been doing this since I was a boy. Worked with the best. I have a PhD in Egyptology from Cambridge. Never have I seen a project as, how do you say . . . forthwith?”
“Me either.”
“This company?” Yusif asked. “Skientia? You have worked for them before?”
“Until two weeks ago, I’d never heard of them.” Reid glanced up at the fractured sandstone outcrops and high canyon walls. Heat waves shimmered above the pale stone. “When they said Egypt, mentioned the salary, and asked if I had a valid passport, I said yes to all three.”
“Do you know why they said to dig here?”
“Something about an inscription on a potsherd that one of their researchers found in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities.”
“We have heard the same rumor.”
“You ever seen this mysterious potsherd?”
Yusif shot him a sidelong glance. “No, sahib. You?”
Reid shook his head.
“They just gave you the coordinates?” Yusif pointed at the GPS on Reid’s belt.
Reid chugged hot water from his bottle. “They told me Wadi Kerf, this GPS reading, and that I’d have everything I needed waiting for me in Cairo.” He screwed the cap on and looked back at the line of sun-baking vehicles stuffed with research equipment.
Yusif’s voice lowered. “You know, don’t you, that this dig is highly irregular?”
“How’s that?”
“You have seen the export permit? The document which allows you to remove artifacts from Egypt?”
“Sure. They faxed copies of all the paperwork before I left the US.”
“I’ve never seen an export permit before.” Yusif paused to emphasize his point. “Not in modern Egypt. Everyone looted Egypt’s finest artifacts going clear back to the Romans. Our antiquities fill foreign museums. These days it’s a matter of national pride and identity that Egypt’s archaeology remains Egyptian. Why does Skientia, a company no one has ever heard of, have an export permit?”
“All I can tell you is that I was hired to bring a team of excavators to these exact coordinates, open a test unit, and determine if a tomb is present. If we find one, I’m to open it, thoroughly record the tomb’s contents, recover all possible ancillary samples for dating, as well as floral and faunal analysis. I’m supposed to document, then stabilize and remove, all fabrics, wood, and bone. If a burial is present, it is to be painstakingly recorded in situ by the famous Dr. Kilgore France. Under her direction the burial is to be removed, packed in some special shipping container, and sent back to the US.”
“And all of it has been approved by the Minister of Antiquities,” Yusif muttered to himself. “I do not understand.”
“Neither do I.” Reid paused. “But as long as the pay is this good . . . and no one asks me to compromise my professional ethics, I’m on board. Anyone demanding this level of anally meticulous data collection isn’t in it to just ‘grab the gold and run.’”
The ringing of a shovel on stone was followed by a cry from Ibrahim. Reid stepped to the pit rim. Ibrahim—one of the field crew—worked in a crouch, using a trowel to loosen the sandstone-filled matrix from the rear of the trench. Reid could tell that the squared rock emerging from beneath the overburden was a lintel stone, the top of a heavy doorway.
“How about that,” Reid muttered to himself. “Right where they said it would be.”
The rest of the crew pitched in, laying planks to allow them to use wheelbarrows to more quickly remove the crumbled colluvium.
Ibrahim called out in a string of Arabic, then turned to Reid. “Dr. Farmer. Come. Take a look! This is not right.”
Reid slid down into the pit, edging past the Arabs to stare at the lintel. Letters had been carved deeply into the stone, the edges slightly weathered: TEMPUS DEVINCERO.
“Latin? Here?”
“It is indeed Latin,” Yusif finally agreed. “But what is a Roman tomb doing among all these Eighteenth Dynasty tombs?”
“Intrusive? Something the Romans dug down to this level?”
Yusif was absently pulling at his beard. “The style is not Roman. When this was built, the wild tribe who would one day become Romans were still nomadic hunters and herders somewhere in central Europe.”
“Just wait, Yusif. We’ll get it open and find Roman-period furnishings, maybe even a date.”
“And if we do not?”
“Then, my good friend, we’ve just made our careers. They’ll have us on all the lunatic talk shows.” He laughed at Yusif’s worried expression. “Oh, come on! It’s an intrusive tomb. Probably a Romanized Egyptian from the second century who wanted to be buried among the ancestors.”
“Or a hoax.”
Reid climbed out of the pit, retrieved his water bottle, and sucked down what was left. “Or a hoax. Everyone loves to hoax archaeology.”
Steel rang hollowly, as if to mock him.
“Sahib?” Ibrahim called. “You better look at this!”
Ibrahim had dug down another twenty or thirty centimeters, exposing the top of the door. While it had once been clad in stone, the stained and corroded portal could have been nothing but steel. The kind of steel that wouldn’t be invented for nearly three thousand years after the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Reid clambered down to inspect this latest of upsets. “Looks to me like Skientia is being scammed.”