The Exodus Quest

II

Mallawi's Museum of Antiquities consisted of three shabby long halls with high ceilings and low lighting. The curator raised her eyebrows when Naguib set the figurine from the dead girl's pouch on the glass top of a display case.

'May I?' she asked.

'That's why I brought it here,' said Naguib. He watched her pick it up, turn it in her hands. 'Well?' he asked.

'What do you want to know?'

'What is it? How much is it worth?'

'It's an Amarna-style statuette of Akhenaten in pink limestone. As to what it's worth…' She shook her head regretfully. 'Not very much, I'm afraid.'

'Not very much?'

'It's a fake. One of thousands.'

'But it looks old.'

'It is old. Many fakes were made sixty or seventy years ago. There was a big market for Amarna antiquities back then. But they're still fakes.'

'How can you be sure?'

'Because all the genuine ones were found decades ago.'

A party of schoolchildren arrived yelling and playing, gleeful to have escaped their classroom prison. Naguib waited until they'd been ushered past by their embarrassed teachers before asking his next question. 'So there are genuine ones?'

'In museums, yes.'

'And you can always tell the difference, can you? I mean, just by looking?'

'No,' she admitted.

'So it's conceivable that one might have been lost? Buried in the sand, say, or in some undiscovered tomb?'

'You'd struggle to convince a buyer of that.'

'I don't have a buyer,' said Naguib tersely. 'What I have is a dead girl who may have been murdered over this. So tell me: how much would a piece like this be worth, if genuine?'

The curator looked down at the figurine with a touch more respect. 'Hard to say. Genuine Amarna artefacts don't often come up for sale.'

'Please. Just a rough idea. In US dollars. A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?'

'Oh, more. Much more.'

'More?' swallowed Naguib.

'This wouldn't just be a figurine,' said the woman. 'It would be history. Amarna history. People would pay what they must pay. But you'd have to prove it was genuine first.'

'How would I go about that? Are there tests?'

'Of course. Chromatography, spectography. But nothing is conclusive. For every expert who'll tell you one thing, another will say the opposite. Your only real hope is to establish provenance.'

'Provenance?'

'Find this undiscovered tomb of yours. Then we'll believe you.'

Naguib grunted. 'And where should I look for that?'

'In Amarna, certainly. If it was me, I'd check the wadis leading out to the Eastern Desert. A lot of antiquities have been found in them. The storms, you know. They hammer at the cliffs like a million pickaxes. It can still happen that the hidden mouth of an old tomb will simply shear away and its contents wash down into the wadis and then in a great river out into the desert.'

Naguib went a little numb. 'A flash flood,' he said.

'Exactly,' smiled the curator. 'A flash flood.'