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| The Unfinished Obelisk. THE OBELISK PROPHECY Egypt adventure thriller |
Granite quarry, Aswan,
Egypt
The
unfinished obelisk lay trapped in the stone in an ancient quarry.
There
was something both lethal and impotent about its appearance, like a nuclear submarine
stuck in the polar ice.
A
solitary man walked on its surface, swaying as if on a deck in a storm. Swirling
grains of dust whipped up by winds buffeted him.
‘A
monumental catastrophe,’ he thought. ‘Literally.’
Two
thousand tonnes of smoothly shaped, elongated stone, its bottom side still lying
attached to the red granite bedrock.
One
day, thousands of years ago, something had gone wrong at this quarry, a site of
patient, human-borne erosion of the stone by stonemasons cutting out and
shaping a colossal block, not with the aid of machines, powered jackhammers and
diamond carbide saws, but balls of dolerite, a stone harder than granite,
expending only the energy of their hands, muscles, sinews and their sweat as
they rained blow after endless blow into the deepening grooves around the stone
until it sounded to the workers’ deafened ears that the thuds were the
heartbeats of mother earth herself.
Then
an overseer gave a cry. Trembling, he pointed at the stone. It was a finger of
doom.
Disaster!
A
crack had rivered through the sublime monolith being fashioned for Queen
Hatshepsut.
News
spread in a buzz through the site. From the throats of the workers there arose
a sound of swarming, like a giant hive of bees mourning the death of a queen.
