The Exodus Quest

III

Knox put his shoulder to the wall, tried to slide it to one side, lift it, press it down. Nothing worked. Down the passage, splashing noises were replaced by the scuff and patter of footsteps. By Knox's best estimation, they had a minute at the most. And there was nowhere to hide, no way to spring an ambush. It was getting through this wall or nothing.

'Look!' said Lily. She steered the torch in his hand at the base of the wall. It was difficult to make out, dark against a black background, but there was an ankh-shaped hole there, the approximate size of a man's hand. He went a little numb. The ankh was the great Egyptian symbol of life. It had evolved from a hieroglyph for magical protection, though there was still furious debate over what that glyph had originally symbolized. A ceremonial knot, said some. Or perhaps a sandal. Others claimed that it had represented the sun rising over the horizon, or even the fusion of male and female genitalia, a kind of hermaphroditism all of its own. But looking at it right now, Knox couldn't help noticing how much it looked like a keyhole.

'Hurry,' said Lily. 'They're getting closer.'

Ancient Egyptians had invented mechanical locks at least five hundred years before Akhenaten. They'd typically been simple, wooden, cylinder-and-tumbler devices, fastened to posts outside doors. But there was no reason they couldn't have fashioned more sophisticated examples. He knelt, pressed his cheek to the limestone floor, angled the torch. It was hard to see inside, but he glimpsed jagged teeth and an internal cylinder, components large as a child's toy.

Memories of a desert drive with his late friend Rick, veteran of the Australian special forces. Killing time discussing methods of picking locks, the tools you needed. He opened up his scissors, twisted and turned the two blades until he'd wrenched them apart. Far too large and clumsy for a modern lock, but not for this. He pressed one blade against the cylinder, gently jiggled the tumblers with the other, listening intently as they clicked into place.

'Quickly,' begged Lily. 'They're getting closer.'

'Please,' he said. 'I need silence.'

The final tumbler slotted into place. He tried to twist the cylinder clockwise. It wouldn't shift. He went counter-clockwise instead. It gave reluctantly, protesting at being disturbed after so long. Thirty degrees, sixty, ninety. And then it stopped altogether, no matter how hard he strained.

'Come on!' wailed Lily.

He lay on his back, slammed the wall with both bare soles. Nothing. He kicked again, a third time, a fourth. Something clicked inside. A releasing latch perhaps. The floor began to tremble, shaking dust into the air. The tortured groan of metal on rock as counterweights went to work. The wall began rising with painful slowness, like the curtain of a theatre. Its metallic surface began to glow in the torchlight, a yellowish tint to it, brighter and brighter, too golden to be silver, too silver to be gold. Electrum, then, a naturally occurring alloy of the two, so highly prized by the Egyptians for its sunshine dazzle that they'd coated the capstones of pyramids with it. And then the disk of the Aten itself appeared, climbing slowly up the wall. The sun was rising over Amarna.