The Cursed Excavation

My name is Fikri Gohar, I'm an inspector with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. This report is about Site 42N, Korsenka. It's on the West Bank between Kurosko and Amada. The site was first recorded on February 26, 1964. It was part of a foreign salvage concession working ahead of the high dam construction. In '66, the site went underwater. It's been submerged most of my life. But this season, the water level dropped enough that the shaft head is exposed again, back on dry land. That's why I'm here, inspecting Site 42N once more. No excavation report was ever published. No human remains were recorded. The material I'm examining came from the mission's cameraman. In '91, he handed it over to a university archive in Bristol. 61 reels of 16-millimeter film, about 40 hours of footage. 19/4-inch tapes recorded on site. And one final tape recorded by the donor the day he delivered everything. I've listened to that last tape four times. It ends with something that doesn't add up. Names Stanley Aldridge. I was 34 that season, earning 11 pounds a week, plus my keep. Truth be told, I took the job for three months away from an English winter, not for the work itself. I handled camera and sound, not an archaeologist. When people hear Nubia, they picture the men with trowels. I was the one behind them with a bolex and a tape machine doing what Sour told me. By then, dozens of missions were spread along the river. Everyone worked to the same clock. That clock was the dam. They were building it at Oswan. When it closed, the river would back up 300 miles, and everything below a certain line on the map would be submerged, gone for good. He came up from Oswan by boat, landing at a spot that's vanished now. Two land rovers, a lorry with supplies, then about an hour west into a core, a dry water course, sand and limestone walls on either side, flat as a board where we camped. Sour held a concession for three sites in that core. Two were dead ends. The third was 42 North. The villages along that stretch were already breaking up. It started moving people north to calm Ambo the month before. It was done in batches by boat and orderly, no panic, no stampede. Families sat at the landing with everything they owned stacked behind them. Crates marked with chalk numbers, a man with a clipboard ticking them off, matching crate numbers to his list. They handled it like cargo. Everyone knew it, no one made a fuss, nobody saw the point. I filmed some of it, don't know if any of that footage ever saw the light of day. Camp was six Europeans, Dezuki from the Antiquity Service and Aubrey the Rays, the Foreman. He ran the men, Sour was in charge. Rothwell did the inscriptions, Brant handled the survey, two others came and went and me. Four tents, a cook tent, a generator, a table under an awning, no one used except Rothwell. We ate at seven started at half past six, knocked off when the light faded. Mornings were cold enough for a coat till nine, but by eleven you couldn't keep your hand flat on the Land Rover's metal. The shaft sat in the core's floor about forty yards from the north wall. When I first saw it it was a black rectangle cut into the ground, ringed by stones, no structure above it. It was normal, most of the deserts just holes with nothing on top. Sour had it measured before the photos, 1.4 by 1.1 meters, cut square into the limestone, plunging down out of the light. I filmed it that first morning. The log notes nine degrees at dawn. I put that at the top of every page, date, temperature, stock, then the shots. Got the book right here now. My handwriting was better than. I held my hand over the shaft's mouth to check if I'd need to change the stop. The air rising from it was warm. I stayed longer than I needed to, then asked Sour about it. He'd been in Egypt, 19 seasons, I'd been there nine days. He was looking over the schedule, said, "We have until the end of February, then nothing." I told him the air was warm. He said the rock years soaked in sun for 4,000 years, bitumen in the seams holds the heat. Then he asked if I had enough stock to run two cameras at the mouth if needed. I said yes, that was it. He was right about the rock. I wrote it down in the log, warm air off the shaft nine degrees dawn, then went to film the stores coming off the lorry. Last morning, lots to do. The men came up from the landing at half-six, local from the emptying villages hired by the day. Aubrey did the hiring. He stood at the core's head. Men came up in a loose line. He took who he wanted, sent the rest back. Didn't explain why, and I didn't ask. Some days he wanted eleven men, in January, 60. At dusk, they got paid. Aubrey walked the line, touching each man's shoulder one by one. Then he told it to Suki the number, to Suki had a ledger. Then the men's count in one column, money in the other. He counted it out. Twenty-two piasters a day, that first night, fourteen men. They walked back down the core toward the landing about an hour on foot in the dark. Every night, it was routine. So routine I filmed it. The evening light was the best all day, and that line of men walking down the wadi made a beautiful shot. I even said so on the tape. Then the sun dropped. Cold came fast. The generators started. After that it was us, the cook, and the whole in the core's floor, forty yards out. Before turning in, I went and put my hand over it again. Didn't tell anyone I did. Emptying a shaft is simple, slow work, a rope, a basket, and a lot of patience. Two men down at the face, filling the basket, a man on the rope, two men at the top, swinging it clear and tipping it onto the spoil heap where someone sives it. The basket goes back down. That's it. The oldest set up in Egyptian archaeology, and there's nothing better. The hour had it running by the second week at about forty baskets an hour. What came up was mostly rubble, dust, and broken pot. Rothwell wanted the pot. Brandt wanted the levels. I wanted whatever the light was doing. The light at the shaft's mouth in mid-morning was the best thing I filmed all season, a hard white bar sliding down the near wall, the rest of the whole pitch black. There were no flies at the shaft, Egypt's full of flies, none within fifteen feet of that hole. I chalked it up to the heat, and that was all I had to say about it. Thursday of the second week, a basket came up with a foot in it. Not a bone, a foot, skin still on it, toes all in order, dry and light, and brown like a walnut. The man on the rope set the basket down and stepped back, called for Rothwell. She came over, sleeves rolled up, looked at it for four seconds. "Dried," she said. I asked if that meant it was old, means it was dry. That was all she gave me, and she was right. In that country, a body in dry ground doesn't rot, it dries out. It can sit there whole for four thousand years, or forty. You can't tell which, just by looking. It's no surprise to an Egyptologist. She didn't treat it like one. She went back to the wall. By Saturday, we had nine. Nine individuals, Rothwell's phrase, not mine. You don't pull nine people out of a shaft. You pull up a jumble of material. Rothwell had a page in her notebook with the count, kept it in pencil so she could change it. The wall was what really mattered to her. Down the north face of the shaft, in a band about a meter wide, there was writing, six different hands, not from the same century or anything close. One evening at the table, sleeves pushed up because the notebook was back in her tent, she wrote it on her arm. High erratic at the top, the script of Egyptian scribes. In Meroetic, Nubian, almost no one alive can read it. Greek, Coptic, Ottoman Turkish in Arabic script somewhere in the last century. Arabic script, probably from the 1950s, a workman with a pencil in his pocket. asked what the warning said, "She looked at me like I'd been reading the wrong books. They're not warnings, they're counts." Numbers, tally marks in fives on the old ones, proper numerals, lower down, six hands tallying over 3,000 years, not a word else. Quarry marks, gang counts, a foreman's daily tally where he can see it. The dullest inscription you'll find, she was disappointed, she'd hoped for a text. Then she pulled a stick of chalk from her pocket and wrote her own numbers beside them. I filmed her doing it, roll 14. The men working the top that week were mostly the same from day one. One was a lad, about 19, in a brown jumper, in that heat. He worked the spoil end and had a habit of drifting over to wherever I set up, standing at the edge of the frame, not in it, right on the line, watching the camera more than the whole. One morning I let him look through the finder. He laughed, reflex finders show the world upside down. Nobody expects that. He told me his name. I didn't write it down. Then Avery wanted him back on the spoil, and that was that. He's in a lot of my footage. Not on purpose, just there at the edge, because he was interested, and I was the interesting thing that week. Tuesday of the third week, the siving stopped. Rothwell wanted the section drawn before we dug any deeper. Brant's drawings took him two days, nobody dug Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning. I filmed Brant drawing, not exactly riveting. Thursday afternoon, Rothwell came up and changed the number in her notebook to 11. I remember saying something like, "We haven't dug since Monday." Sour stood up, played in hand. That's how he took every meal that season, and said, "Fill in a shaft isn't solid. Its loose material stacked in a tube. It dries, settles, drops, and material moves forward out of the section on its own for weeks." He'd seen a section give up a whole burial three days after the trench closed. "It's true, I checked with two people years later." Rothwell said nothing, she let him have it. I'd been in Egypt six weeks, he'd been coming out for 19 seasons. Friday was a wide day, Sour wanted the whole site from the north wall for the record. I climbed the ridge, a shelf about 30 feet above the core floor on that side. You can see the shaft, spoil heap, winch frame, tents, all in one frame. I did four takes, then came down and did it again in the afternoon for the light. On the last take that afternoon, a man stood on the far ridge, opposite side, above the shaft, facing down at the site, not working, not walking, just standing still. I held the shot on him a moment. A figure gave the frame scale, then looked up to shout and asked him to hold it longer. There was no one there. It's about 200 yards across the core, maybe 30 feet up on open rock in daylight. No cover on that shelf. A man walking off it would have been in full view the whole way. I'd have seen him. Good evening, I mentioned it to Abri. He said his men go up there to get out of the sun and smoke where he can't see them. He said it twice, they go up there, they go up. That was a good enough answer. They did go up there. I filmed them going up there. The only thing I put in the log was the exposure. I'd metered on the ridge before the take and again with him in the frame. The reading dropped a full stop, no cloud in the sky. I wrote it down because I wrote everything down. Roll 17, fourth take, F8 ridge, went to 5.6, no cloud, 41 degrees. By January we had a proper winch frame over the mouth, four legs of scaffold pipe, a pulley, a hand crank, all lashed together, nothing welded. A plank staging around three sides so you could stand at the edge without kicking it in. A wooden ladder lashed down the north face and sections and cable run for two lamps. You rig lamps down the shaft, expose for them and lose the sky. That's why all my footage below about four meters has the top of the frame pure black. That's 10 in the morning, sun straight overhead. Exposed stock went out on the supply boat every second Thursday, came back processed on the boat after that. So I was always looking at footage a month old. Had a rewind bench in my tent, two spindles, a splicer, a hand viewer with a little ground glass screen about the size of a matchbox, ran the rushes through it when they came checking exposure, marking the log. A fortnight's work in an evening, done in the dark with a lamp behind a cloth. By mid-January we were at eleven meters, sour wanted fourteen by the end. He had a chart pinned in the cook tent with fortnight's ruled off. He'd stand in front of it with a plate in hand, eating, not saying a word. The generator gave out at the end of January. Brant couldn't fix it and neither could anyone else. So we had four evenings by pressure lamp. We played cards. Rothwell had a pack missing the four of hearts. We played anyway, with some rule I can't reconstruct now. Brant told us about a car. He'd had an opal in Hamburg with a fault four garages couldn't find. The story wound through garage two, garage three, and a man at the third who'd been in the Kriegs Marine. At some point Rothwell said, "You're go without looking up." Brant took his turn and carried on. Twenty minutes of story. Rothwell won three hands out of four and didn't seem to notice. Tisuki wouldn't play. He said he didn't play in a way that shut it down. He sat all four evenings anyway, tea in hand, watching us play. Sour stood in the cook tent doorway with his plate. A week of January we started taking men down instead of just baskets. Aubrey picked the men for it and there was a rate for that. I filmed the descents from the staging straight down. I liked that shot. The lamp moves away from the camera, the walls open past. One Wednesday I had the camera rolling while one of Abri's men went down with a hand lamp. But I filmed him doing it. He told Abri there'd been somebody on the ladder above him the whole way waiting to come down after him. The next morning I set a tripod up eight feet away and shot two minutes of him pushing dirt through a mesh. But that was the expedition. Rothwell recorded what came out of the hole. Brant measured where it had been. Sour watched the clock and I filmed all of it because after February it was going to be the only thing left. He kept his head down that morning and never once looked at the mouth. Neither did I. At eleven Sour stopped the work to have the lower section photographed and I looked down while they were rigging. It was darker than it had been the fortnight before and the sky was clear. I'd metered it twice that morning and written both readings on the page. The two lamps hung one above the other, throwing hard white circles onto the wall and between them the stone went out completely. That's what you get when you light the bottom of a hole and expose for the lamps. Rothwell's chalk went down the north face past the higher attic, the meruitic, the Greek, the coptic, the Turkish, the pencil. Her own numbers beside all of them in a column as neat as a bill. I asked her what the old ones were counting. "No," she said, which was how she said she didn't know. By the end of that day we were at twelve meters. The air came up warmer every day that week. You'd get it when a basket cleared the mouth a breath of heat off the thing before the evening had it. Nobody talked about that anymore. That night one of the men didn't come back from the landing. I didn't know his name, I didn't know most of their names. I knew the faces because I'd been filming them since November. The one who worked a rope like he'd been born on the end of one. The one who complained every time a basket came up heavy. The one who put a scarf over his mouth the second the wind got up. Fourteen men and I could have drawn you all fourteen of them. I couldn't have told you one name. Aubrey counted them at dusk touching each man on the shoulder as he went down the line and came up one short. He didn't make anything of it. "Home," he said. Then he said it again, "Home," he's gone home. Next morning there were thirteen and nobody went looking. The villages were emptying north in lots that winter and men came off the resettlement Thank you for watching. the morning and went back onto it at night. A man who didn't turn up had had his number called. That morning, though, the lad in the brown jumper was standing at the spoil heap. I knew him straight off. He was the one who'd looked through the finder in November and laughed at it because a reflex finder gives you the world upside down and nobody expects that. He wasn't looking at the camera. He was looking at me. I put my hand up. Nothing. I pointed at the finder, which had always been good for a grin off him and got nothing at all. Then Arbery shouted from the mouth and he turned away to the spoil end. At lunch, I asked Tosuki his name because Tosuki paid them. He squared his plate up with the table edge before he answered. He did that with everything, paper especially, and said, "What lad?" I said the one who's always round my camera. He gave me a polite smile. "You know the men better than I do if you please." Afterwards, I found Arbery with a tin plate on his knees and asked him the same thing. He took his time over it. Then he said the boy had gone home. "Who?" "The boy," he said. And he went back to his plate. The boy was standing twenty yards off by the sieve. I looked back at Arbery, still eating. And when I looked round again, the boy had turned to face the shaft and gone completely still. Men shouting across the mouth about the crank, a basket coming up and scraping the stone, and him standing in the middle of it, not moving at all. I got the camera up out of habit. Since November, the moment I lifted the bolex, he drifted in towards it to see what I was seeing. He didn't move. I ran about twenty seconds on him. He looked into the lens for the whole of it and never once found my eye, and my eye was a foot to the left of the glass where it always is. Then he walked to the edge and leaned out over it further out than a man leans. I had a hand up and a word half out of my mouth. Then he straightened and looked back at me. His face wasn't doing anything. In November, he'd grinned at his own reflection in the finder glass and copied the way I held the camera against my chest. This was the same face with nobody working it. I said his name. What I thought his name was, he'd told me in November and I hadn't written it down. He didn't answer. I said it again and he smiled. The smile came about a second after the name did. Then he looked past me, up at the ridge. I turned round to see what was there. Bear shelf opened raw. When I turned back, he was gone. There's thirty yards of open ground between the sieve and the spoil heap with nothing on it a man could get behind. And I was looking straight down the length of it. I looked for him for half an hour. The jumper was on a peg by the work shelter and I put my hand on it. That's when somebody said my name from down the hole. Mr. Aldridge, nobody called me that. It came again. Mr. Aldridge, I went to the edge and looked down. Black, one of the two lamps swinging on its cable, the chain knocking against the stone. Then it said, "Can you see me?" I didn't answer. I couldn't think of one word to put down there. It was the boy's voice and it was coming up out of 12 meters of limestone. I stood back off the edge and I didn't tell Sour. At dusk, Aubrey walked the line touching shoulders and for once I watched him do it instead of filming it. 12, 13, 14. He looked at the man in front of him. Then he looked at the space behind that man and then he went back to the head of the line and did the whole thing over again. 14. He told D'Soukey the number, counted the money out, and it agreed because his arithmetic always agreed. I didn't sleep much. At about two, there were footsteps outside the tent dragging a little in the sand and they stopped at the flap. Then it moved, an inch and then another inch. I had my hand on the lamp and I never lit it and while I was reaching for it the thing outside said my name. Mr. Aldridge, it was my own voice. I didn't open the tent. I lay there with my hand on an unlit lamp until it got light. In the morning there were footprints in the sand going from the mouth of the shaft to my tent and back again. Half those men worked barefoot and I told myself so until 11 when the light went flat and I looked at them properly. They didn't go anywhere else on that side at all. I didn't tell Sour about the footprints or about my own voice outside the tent or about the boy. I told him about the missing man instead. It was easier to get out and it was true. I found him after breakfast at the mouth with brand the pair of them bent over a survey sheet with a stone on each corner of it. I said we hadn't seen Hamdi. I knew that one's name and I should have said so earlier. He was on the rope most days and Aubrey shouted it across the site 40 times a morning which isn't the same thing as being told it. Sour said the man had probably walked down to the landing. I said he hadn't gone down with the others and Sour said then he went back. I said he'd left his things. That got him. I showed him the coat on the peg where it had been the previous morning in the hand-lamp standing by the sieve with the glass blacked up the whole height of it. He checked the wig and said perhaps the man had borrowed another one. Perhaps? I said I'd heard something in the shaft. He waited. A voice. I said it was the boys. He stopped with the sheet half folded. He looked at me for a bit and told me I'd been filming too much down that hole. Then he said we'd send somebody down and I asked who and he looked at the mouth and said me. He checked the rope and went first and I gave him half the ladder and then went after him. The light goes in stages. On the surface at half nine in the morning it is white and it hurts your eyes. Three meters down it's gray. At six it's brown. By ten there's nothing but what you've carried down with you. I had one hand on the ladder and the other on the camera case against my chest. Sour was standing on a ledge at the bottom with more room round him than I'd expected. The shaft ran out into a passage. Two meters of headroom, near enough, wide enough for one man comfortably and too badly. Pact earth underfoot cut stone both sides and cut into the stone all the way along it, short vertical lines and fives. "Don't touch them," Sour said. "I wasn't going to." He carried on and I followed him. He'd got warmer every ten yards and there was no draft and no dust in the air and it smelled of wet stone which isn't a thing you get in that country. Thirty meters in he stopped and put his lamp on the floor. Boot prints, the edges gone off them but recent. These are humbys. You sure? He put a finger on the heel. There was a split running across it and the man had been complaining about that boot the week before. We followed them until the passage narrowed to a stretch we had to go through sideways with the lamps held down at our knees. Then it opened out. I was expecting a chamber. What was there was a second shaft going straight down through the floor of it. There was water somewhere underneath moving slowly against stone and it was the only sound down there I could put a name to. Sour held his lamp out over it and the light went down and didn't arrive at anything. I asked how deep. He didn't answer me. He was looking at the wall. There was writing on it. Pencil dates one under another going down the stone in a column. 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, then a gap of some inches and 1964. I said other people had been down here. No. Too quick for a man who'd been out for 19 seasons and had never once given me a fast answer. I pointed at the dates. He didn't look at them. I said they weren't anybody's excavation marks. Then what are they? I hadn't got anything for that. "Keep moving," he said. 20 meters on, humbys lamp was lying on its side against the stone. Sour picked it up. The wick was still warm. He told me to call him. "I didn't," I said. "You call him." He put his head up and said the name into the dark. "Ham-D." And we went on. The passage finished at a door. A slab of limestone set across the whole of the opening, floor to roof, with a gap under it of about six inches. Cold air was coming through the gap and that was the first time. since the latter the air had cooled instead of warmed. Sour got down and put his lamp through. The light went out into something with no wall near enough to catch it. He stayed down there breathing hard, and then he said, "Stanley, he'd never used my first name in four months. I got down beside him and put my eye to the gap. There was a chamber on the other side, and the lamp was going up and not finding a ceiling. Columns, plain square sectioned stone, nothing cut on them, going back into the dark and rows. And between the columns, openings, doorways, one after another after another. There was a building down there under the floor of a hole in a dry water course, and nobody had put it on any sheet of paper I ever saw. In the middle of it, 20 meters off, there was a chair, wooden, ordinary, old. It was facing us, and the dust round the legs was pressed flat. Neither of us moved. Then something changed behind the chair. It wasn't much. The dark shifted about where the dark was, and I couldn't have sworn to it in a court. I put my lamp up, nothing. I put it higher, and the light got as far as the chair. We'd got as far as turning round when Hamdie said my name. "Mr. Aldridge, I stopped. Sour had hold of my arm. It hadn't come up the passage behind us. It came from inside the chamber on the other side of the slab. Mr. Aldridge, closer. I looked at Sour, and he shook his head at me, slowly, twice. Then it was at the slab. Can you see me?" The same voice as the day before at the top of the shaft, and the same three words I looked down. A shadow went across the gap all the same, the whole length of it, one side to the other. Sour pulled me back. The shadow stopped. Then a hand came under the slab. Just the fingers, hooked up over the edge of the stone on our side. Dirt under the nails, the skin dark, a split down the side of the thumb. Sour got me moving up the passage, and I went. He did the first ten yards of it backwards, because neither of us would turn round. The fingers stayed where they were. They didn't come any further under, and they didn't go back. "Don't speak," Sour said. He went up the ladder first, and I came up after him, and about half way I looked down between my boots. The lamp we'd left, burning down there, was still burning. When my head came out of the mouth, the light took my eyes completely. Sour got himself onto the staging beside me, and sat down on it, which I had never once seen him do. Then he said, "You're not going back down." I nodded. He looked at the mouth. Neither am I. Rothwell was over by the siv behind him, with a piece of stone held in both hands, and no color in her face at all. What? Sour said. She looked at me, and then at the mouth of the shaft, and then she held the stone out. There was one line of pencil on it, fresh enough that the graphite still had a shine on it against the limestone. It was my writing. Stanley went down. I knew it was my hand before I'd read it. Narrow letters, close together, the downstrokes heavier than they need to be, and the cross on the T running out past the letter on the right, which mine has done since school. She'd had it out of the last basket. She hadn't written it, and neither at I, and it didn't read like a message. It read like a line out of my own log. Sour took it, went over the letters with his thumb, put it in his coat pocket, and said we were closing the shaft. I asked about Hamdee. He didn't answer for long enough that I knew. Then he said we weren't going back down for him. That was the only time that season I heard anything in Sour's voice except in patience. The men were told it was safety, and weren't told anything else, and nobody asked. By dark, the staging was down, and everything that had gone into that hole was laid out in the sand beside the land-rovers, and Brent walked the line of it with a clipboard ticking. Before I turned in, I went through the kit. There was dust on the camera body, a fine grey powder around the base of it, and I wiped it off with my sleeve, and there was a darker smear under it. Stone dust, the same pale grey as the walls on the other side of that slab, and I'd know, because, as I say, I'd had my face down in that gap for the best part of a minute. There was more of it inside the case. That case had been on my chest the whole way down and the whole way up. Next morning, they filled the shaft, planks, then timber, then spoil, and they worked fast. None of the shouting had been all season, and none of the sitting about at the water tin. By midday, it was gone. Blat disturbed ground with a scatter of stone across it. I filmed it, and it was the wrong way around, and I knew it while I was doing it. Two days before, we'd been standing on the staging, looking down the thing. I took the camera down off my eye, then I put it back up. There was a man out by the spoil heap. Brown jumper, hands at his sides, looking straight down the lens. I looked round at the whole sight with my own eyes, and there was nobody within 50 yards of that heap. I told myself I'd had one eye shut against a finder since half six. I took the morning's roll off the camera and put it in a tin, and that was the whole of what I could do with it. Exposed stock went out on the supply boat every second Thursday, and came back processed on the boat after that, and there was nowhere on that river to develop a foot of film. I had nine tins on the shelf by then, and not one of them was any more used to me than a tin of paint. So I got out what I did have, and I went through the processed rolls looking for the boy. He's on roll 24. Second week of December, a wide of the spoil end off the staging, taken when nobody had been further down that shaft than eight meters. Rothwell found me at the bench about an hour later. She asked whether I'd really gone down there the day before, and I said I had. She said, "That's not what it says." Then she took the stone out of her coat pocket. I hadn't known she'd got it back off-sour, and I never asked her how she managed it. Stanley went down, was where it had been, underneath it, feint her, in the same hand, and the same pencil, and the same heavy downstrokes, there was a second line. Stanley came back. I don't know what my face did. She said she hadn't written it, I said I hadn't either. Stanley, who was standing behind you? I turned around. There was nobody behind me. I could hear somebody breathing, close in, closer than she was, and she was near enough to put a stone in my hand. I looked out at the fill, and it stopped. I had forty yards of open sight in front of me, and there wasn't a man standing on any of it. That afternoon I decided to go home. The shaft had nothing to do with it, and neither did Hamdie. I'd stopped trusting the camera. Roll 51 was the fourth tin off the shelf when I packed. Roll 51 is the night test from 28 January, ten minutes of the mouth of the shaft at F2 under the two worklamps on the tripod on the staging, and I'd stood off to the side of it and had a cigarette while it ran. Whatever came up on the lip that night was on that stock, or inches from my thumb, and there was nothing on that site or anywhere near it that could show it to me. I put it in the crate with the rest, and got the lid on. I carried that crate off a boat at Aswan, and onto a train, and into a room in Cairo. The mission had the use of a cutting room off a courtyard behind Sharia and Model Dean for a fortnight in March. Two benches, a rewind, a proper viewer with a foot pedal on it, and a window with a fan in it that didn't turn. The last nine rolls went to a lab from there, and came back to that room five weeks after I'd shot them. The first four minutes of roll 51 are the mouth, the winch frame, the two lamps, and a great deal of black. At four minutes and eleven seconds, something comes into the bottom of the frame. I came off the pedal and got my eye down on the screen. A hand had come up over the near lip of the shaft. Then the other hand, somebody was climbing out of it. I stopped there and sat back, what I thought was, "Hamm-dee." I ran it on, and the head came up between them. I stopped it again. The face was turned away, one frame on. He was looking straight into the lens. It wasn't Ham-dee, and it wasn't the boy. It was me. The camera case on its strap across my chest, standing on the lip of the shaft at night, looking into my own lens. I was smiling. I had never seen that frame in my life. I hadn't been standing there. The cigarette still going. I wound it back. frame was really good. was where I'd left it. I ran it again. He put a hand up slowly and pointed past the camera. I turned round. Nothing. When I looked back the film was still running. He'd come up close to it, close enough that the face took the whole of the screen. He'd stopped smiling. He was looking past the camera at me. Then the frame went white and stayed white. The mission left Corsinka 11 days after the shaft was filled. The shaft was not reopened. The concession was surrendered rather than extended, and by the following spring the floor of the core was underwater and whatever was under the excavation went under with it. Stanley Aldridge did not return to Egypt. The reel is held at Bristol under its original number and may be viewed on application. The reading room keeps a log of everybody who asks for it. One thing I haven't said. The camera that shot those seven minutes was never recovered. It was catalogued as lost with the rest of the chiro store in 61. There is no camera in Bristol's collection that could have shot Roll 51's second sequence, and no explanation on file for how 10 minutes became 17.