The Sleeper in the Sands by Tom Holland Read Free Book Online Page B

scribbled the inscription down, then hurried after him, almost at a run. It will sound queer, I know, and it is hard to explain, but I had no wish to be left on my own in that place, for even as we rode back across the desert I imagined that the chill of its shadows lingered upon my skin. As a wind began to blow, the sand rising in whirls upon its shriek, I remembered the ancient superstitions and could almost believe that I was listening to Seth, stirred from his rocky sleep, and risen once again to claim back the world.
    We arrived back at last, feeling weary and depressed. Not surprisingly in view of our state, Blackden and Fraser asked us where we had been. I told them about our discovery of the quarry, but nothing more. I noticed, however, that they both exchanged glances, and I knew that our purpose would not remain a secret for long. Newberry himself was growing steadily more frantic as the days slipped by and nothing more was found; and the more frantic he grew, so the more haphazard our search came to seem.
    At length, the period of our holiday came to an end and I prepared to return to my work in the tombs. Newberry, however, had other plans, for he told me he had arranged with my sponsors that I should move to El-Amarna, where Petrie had offered to train me up as an excavator. Of course, I knew full well what Newberry’s motive was in all this: he wanted his own man in residence on the site, so that he would learn at once of any significant finds. But what did I care? Petrie was the greatest archaeologist of the age -- and now he had offered to teach me all he knew. Me! - a mere draughtsman -- in Egyptological terms, the lowest of the low! What would I not have done to be granted such a chance? I had been in Egypt a bare few months, but already it had confirmed me in all my boyhood fascination, and I knew that it had become my great love and perhaps, I thought, my fate. The lure of its mysteries had me in their grip - and it had grown my profoundest hope that I too, one day, would be an archaeologist myself.
    I trusted that Petrie, who was self-taught himself, would understand this ambition -- and yet it was just as well that I possessed it, for he was not to prove an easy taskmaster. I had learned before of his eccentricities; now I was to suffer their full effect. My first day he put me to building a hut; for I found that - like furniture and linen - servants were sternly tabooed. The result of my efforts could hardly rank as luxury -- nor could the conditions under which I was then set to work. There was to be no galloping about in the pursuit of lost tombs now; rather, a painstaking sifting of rubble and dust; no searching for hidden mysteries or treasure; rather for shattered statues, the fragments of pots, and all the scattered pieces of an impossible jigsaw. How I loathed my teacher, for he was a pedant of the most ruthless and bloody-minded kind. And yet how I reverenced him as well, for he was certainly a genius as Newberry had claimed, with the most extraordinary aptitude for interpreting history out of chaos. I began to understand, as I sweated and toiled beneath the midday sun, how archaeology is dependent upon meticulous research - not the giddy pursuit of some dramatic find, but rather the labour of months, perhaps even years, and the mapping of an infinite number of clues. Petrie taught me, in short, the ABC of my profession -- how an excavator must be a man of patience and of science.
    Yet for all the enthusiasm with which I accepted these lessons, I sometimes found myself missing Newberry - his faith in the extraordinary, the sense of passion he had brought to his quest. Petrie, I knew, mistrusted such emotions, and it was with something almost like relish that he informed me one morning, as I was panning mounds of dirt, that some French officials had been seen upon the cliffs. ‘I won’t let them come here,’ he proclaimed, extending his arms outwards to gesture at the plain, ‘for all this