John Schettler: Touchstone

“What did you find?” she asked.

“It’s what I didn’t find,” Nordhausen replied. “They’ve got every last line of discovered hieroglyphic text on file now, and I know enough about the script to replicate what I saw in that scroll. Using characters dating from the Old Kingdom, I was able to draw out most of what I remembered. I scanned the images and ran comparison queries in the database, but there were no hits on those phrases.”

“It could mean that this Rasil fellow had something from another milieu.” Maeve raced on in her thinking, and it had jogged something loose in Nordhausen’s mind.

“Then you suppose they might be using the hieroglyphics as a kind of code?” he remembered saying. “That would explain why the passages don’t exist in any discovered writings. But I had the distinct impression that the characters I saw were a rubbing—as if they had been pressed onto the scroll from an original stone carving. It was very odd.”

It certainly was, and Robert intended to follow up on his hunch and get to the bottom of this business, here and now. He went through his reasoning again, like a man shuffling through his pockets to be sure he had everything he needed for a trip. There were lots of discoveries from antiquity that failed to survive to his present day. Many artifacts had become lost, damaged or destroyed. Libraries had been looted in ancient times, as at Alexandria, and even in recent years, when the collection of the Baghdad Museum had been plundered at the outset of the war in Iraq. Unless they were utterly destroyed, these things still had to be in the world somewhere. Perhaps he could use the Arch to have a look around in a few promising places. In the process he hoped to find out more about Rasil’s mysterious scroll. If it was indeed a rubbing, as he suspected, it seemed to him that some of the history was written in stone. The more he thought about it the better it sounded in his head, though he did not want to bring his idea up in committee just yet. He had an inkling of where he might find a good cache of old stone carvings from Egypt that had been lost to his day. They were here, right here in London, in the British Museum.

The world had been blissfully ignorant of Egypt and its fabulous history until Napoleon followed his ambitions and invaded that ancient country in 1799. A thousand scholars had accompanied him there, bent on bringing the benefits of Western enlightenment to backward people, yet the inverse had been true. Instead, the troops of savants had uncovered the majesty of the pyramids, of Karnak and Luxor and Thebes. They had sketched it all out in notebooks and carted off hundreds of artifacts and stone carvings to Europe when Napoleon finally fled. Some of the very first finds of the old hieroglyphics had been uncovered during that three year expedition—and many of them were here, in the British Museum. They were all nested away in the showrooms and cellars, long before the greed and neglect of the world saw them scattered or lost. He had them all on hand for his inspection, and he was going to have a very close look before the weekend was through. This was going to be great fun, he thought. Great fun indeed!

He looked about, trying to get oriented. He hadn’t gone far in time. He imagined he should be pretty close to the target date, and pulled out a map of the City while walking to the nearest gas light. The trees were dripping, and his eyes were starting to burn. How on earth could people live like this, he wondered? It was worse than Los Angeles in the summers of his youth. More evidence of human progress, he thought, with a sense of pity. These people suffered from asthma, tuberculosis, chronic alcoholism, tobacco related illnesses… what did they not suffer from? There were hideous chemical toxins in the air, especially heavy metal compounds of lead, arsenic, mercury—not to mention parasites and pathogens. And this was the greatest city in the world at this moment in time. He would be lucky not to come back with cholera! He made a note to drink only brewed, distilled or fermented beverages. Beer, wine or gin were likely to be his tipples this weekend.

He peered at the map while standing below a street sign posted on the side of a wall at the intersection. Paddington Street. Tracing his finger, he found it. Yes, he was smack in the middle of London, close to Covent Garden and the British Museum, just off Baker Street… Baker Street!

The thrill of time travel was on him again. Around every corner would be a new historical landmark. He could not begin to take it all in. He wondered who might have been beheaded on this very spot, 900 years ago. If only it weren’t so murky. At that moment, bells began to peal in the far distance. What time was it? They were immediately picked up by a closer set and, one by one, half a dozen, seven, eight, peals overlaid one another. The gentle tolling hung in the air, almost vibrating the fog molecules, making the entire city hum.

The nursery rhyme came to him, unbidden, from forty years in his past. And indeed, nearby St. Paul’s tolled long and deep, and hung in the air rolling longer than any of the others. He turned toward its sound, but could see nothing in the fog. He counted out four long tolls.

What time was it, indeed? What year was it? This was not the undifferentiated Olden Days, this was a specific moment of time. The Arch had sifted and juggled every quantum particle of the universe to produce this moment—just for him. Now he was in a Deep Nexus, and Time waited, holding her final judgment in abeyance as she watched his every move, like Maeve on his shoulder, her constant whisper in his ear. He would have to be very careful. He couldn’t do anything to inadvertently change things. He would just have a brief look around, steal over to the museum, and then get home. He had studied the maps and social history books (all at home, never at the labs!) But he needed to get oriented. This was quite different from the desert adventure. Here there was a real possibility that he would have to interact with the locals, have conversations, and pass in society. He and the Bedouin might have been space aliens to each other as far as their social intercourse. Here, he must pass; he must fit in and flow along the streets like the genteel soul he made himself to be in his carefully chosen clothing.

Oh, Maeve, perhaps you were right…

He decidedto head out to Baker Street, which was a thoroughfare, and sounded as if it had more traffic on it. It was six o’clock, and very dark in these northern latitudes by this hour, but the night was still young.

He stood, for a while, at the corner, watching the passersby. This appeared to be a substantial middleclass neighborhood. The street was lined with shop fronts, supporting three brick stories of apartments above them. There were street lights on the corners and, in the middle of each block, a line of fading glows in either direction. The fog was lighter here. People strolled along the street, alone or in couples, mostly in silence, but he caught occasional lines of conversation.

“Evening, Miss Hynes.”

“Evening, Mr. Simms.” The gracious nod as one passed another in the street, and occasionally a casual, courteous remark or two. “You’re looking well tonight. Lovely rose in your cheeks, m’lady. Must be that fine fare you set on table. Such a roast! Enough to feed a brace of yard workers, I’ll warrant.”

“You’re too kind, Mr. Simms.”