The Sleeper in the Sands Read Online Free PDF Page A

together, lumbering and swaying along the dusty track, we had soon left the palm groves of the Nile behind and passed into the desert. I was astonished by the suddenness of the transformation: one moment there had been cattle, and crops, and trees, the next nothing but a vast expanse of rock and sand. The dunes would sometimes be skimmed by a blast of hot wind, the dust lifted in a momentary veil, but otherwise all was deathly still. It was as though the very world had ended, and I at once understood, gazing out at the fiery sands, why for the Ancient Egyptians the colour of evil had been red.
    Certainly, the landscape through which we rode -- savage and barren, and littered with boulders -- might have seemed a fitting haunt for restless demons, and I felt something almost like relief when we suddenly joined the edge of a cliff and saw the ribbon of the Nile once again below us, fringed with the green of fields and trees. We continued to follow the edge of the cliff, until at length it curved away from the river and we saw before us, hollowed out to form a natural amphitheatre, the crescent of a sandy plain. There appeared nothing of great interest upon it, only scrub and the odd low pebble-strewn mound; but I could see, toiling in the centre of the plain, gangs of white-clad workmen and, just beyond them, a line of baked-mud huts. We began to descend the cliff towards them, and as we did so, unable to restrain my curiosity any further, I demanded to know from Newberry what it was we had come to see. He answered me by sweeping outwards with his arm. ‘This is known today as the plain of El-Amarna,’ he replied, ‘but its ancient name was Akh-et-Aten, and there once stood here, though for barely fifteen years, the capital city of a Pharaoh of Egypt.’
    ‘Indeed?’ I pointed towards the workmen. ‘Then that is what is being excavated here?’
    I saw a gleam of excitement in Newberry’s eyes as he nodded.
    ‘Who is leading it?’ I asked.
    ‘Mr Petrie,’ he replied.
    ‘Not Mr Flinders Petrie?’
    ‘The very same.’
    I heard this with considerable interest. Of course, I had known of that celebrated archaeologist even before my arrival in Egypt, for he had long been the dominant figure in his field. In Cairo, though, during the few days I had passed there, I had been fortunate enough to meet with him and to learn some of his opinions on Egyptology. He had struck me then as a man of considerable eccentricity, but also of remarkable discernment and vision, and so I welcomed the chance to see him at his work. As we approached the line of mud huts, Newberry called out his name and I saw -emerging from the doorway, his black beard vivid against the glare of the sands -- the figure I remembered so well from before.
    Yet he greeted us with no particular show of enthusiasm, making it perfectly plain that we had distracted him from his work, and asking us brusquely what our purpose was. Newberry answered that he had heard reports of a find. Petrie grunted noncommittally. ‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘since you have ridden all this way, you had best come and see it.’ First, though, he demanded that we descend from our mounts, for it was an eccentricity of his that he would never ride anywhere but always go on foot, and I, for one, was glad to leave my camel behind. We trudged together towards some distant mounds, Petrie muttering as we did so about the iniquities of the French. This was a favourite topic of his, it seemed, for the French, then as now, had a vice-like grip upon the country’s Service des Antiquites and were determined, so Petrie claimed, to thwart his projects at every turn. ‘Can you believe it,’ he muttered, ‘but they almost denied me the concession to dig here? Me -- Flinders Petrie! And even as it is, I cannot excavate anywhere but here, upon the plain.’ I noticed that Newberry grew pale at this and gazed around at the cliffs, almost as though he feared to see them crawling with Frenchmen. There was