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The lid on the sarcophagus was laid down and the vases arranged.
The sweet sickly smell of burning incense filled the tomb and the faint hum
of distant voices echoed an eerie hymn along the cavernous tunnels. The procession
began to make its way back out of the pyramid as the huge painted boulder was
rolled slowly into place, obscuring the great pharoh, Seti 1 and his riches
from sight. And his soul was left for the after-world.
Dust flew up Giovanni’s nostrils and penetrated through the web of lashes over his eyes. His feet sank in the sand dunes and he was constantly weary of snakes and scorpions. The heat of the sun, now almost at its highest point, beat down ferociously on the back of his neck like a boxer. The heat was unbearable and as much as Giovanni was used to boiling suns, Giovanni couldn’t stand it any longer. He sank down onto the nearest heap of sand and pulled a hip-flask from his jacket. He took several swigs before his brain, which was aching with the heat, realized what was happening. He dug his hands further into the sand and felt the damp crumbly feeling of stone slabs. Not the smooth feeling you often get out of stone, but the ancient feeling of stone that has been kept out of sight for hundreds of years. Maybe even thousands. He ran his fingers across the crumbling slab and sat and thought.
"the hieroglyphs were quite unclear at first and not all of them are legible still. Yet we have enough information now to gather how it was there, who was in it and other such." Amy Perkins, a researcher at the British Museum, was enjoying her lunch-break over a cup of coffee with her best friend Milly.
"Well? Who was it?"
"It’s an
extraordinary find," Amy continued, ignoring her, "and how it was preserved
I can’t say. It appears that it was indeed once entombed in a pyramid, but owing
to certain circumstances, most probably an earth-quake, it collapsed. We have
our reason to believe this because there was a satisfying amount of rubble around
it. Our hieroglyph translator came into the lab and we have learnt more from
him about the mysterious sarcophagus," here she paused for breath. Milly looked
at her expectantly so Amy decided to reveal all she knew. "He said that it was
the tomb of a great pharoh called Seti 1. We are at the moment researching to
see if his name has been mentioned in any other historical hieroglyphic work.
In fact I’d better be going as I offered to help out." The two friends bid each
other good-bye and set off to their different jobs in the city.
Sir John Soane looked down past the busts to the floor below. There he admired his new find. It had cost him two thousand pounds but, in his opinion, it was worth it. It was a sarcophagus of Seti 1 of Egypt. He had bought it from the British Museum when they couldn’t keep it, after Mr. Belzoni had discovered it. It took him lots of trial and error to even get it into his house. In the end he had knocked down a wall to get it in. It was a lot of trouble but he had wanted it so desperately. Now, he often found himself gazing down upon it. He felt it completed the whole architectural atmosphere of his house and was immensely proud of it. He knew that he would never grow tired of looking at it because he enjoyed it so much.
The tour group’s footsteps echoed across the stone slabs in the basement as they neared the sarcophagus. "This here is the great sarcophagus of Seti 1 of Egypt discovered by Giovanni Belzoni in…" The tour guide droned on in his wheezy uninspiring voice. But Alice wasn’t listening she looked at the sarcophagus and tried to imagine it deep under Egypt’s sands and quickly grabbed her notepad. Her pen scribbled away, her handwriting steadily becoming messier. She wrote what she thought was the whole history of the sarcophagus. But little did she know that there were more mysteries hidden in it than meets the eye.
By Alice Mole
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