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again,
Nordhausen decided to go in the other direction. He resolved not to get
involved with anyone else, if at all possible. He would just mind his own
business and be done with this trip. As he sauntered towards the far end of the
hall, he glanced at the cards on some of the displayed items. They were very
curious, even for this curious world he found himself in. Not a single one
identified the item, beyond a general description: Sandstone Goddess; Memorial
stele; Porphyry pharaoh, from Luxor .
    Nordhausen began to get a
gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach. He began to look at every single
item around him. Nothing was dated, nothing was identified. He could read a
number of royal cartouches on various objects, and recognized Rameses, Thuthmose
and one or two vaguely familiar others, on various statues, but none of them
was named on the placards.
    Something was very wrong. It was
nearly a hundred years after the discovery of these objects by Napoleon during
his expedition to Egypt in 1799. By now several
scholars should have worked out the details of the hieroglyphics: Ackerbad and
Silvestre de Sacy in 1802, and the initial work of Thomas Young on the
deciphering of the Rosetta Stone itself. It was Young who proved that the
proper names in the hieroglyphics section of the stone did, in fact, have
phonetic values, and were not merely symbols, as had been hypothesized earlier.
He then introduced the idea of the proper names being inscribed with ovals
around them, known as cartouches.
     Nordhausen didn’t expect the
testy governess to know such things, but surely the Curator of the museum
should know all this by now. Young’s main contribution to Egyptology was
published in the 1824 Encyclopedia Britannica. The work of the French scholar
Champollion would follow up on this thesis and do much in the way of
explicating the hieroglyphics. But nothing was named here.
    He stood in the middle of the
empty hall, surrounded by huge, mute stone gods and kings, dully lit in the
gray afternoon light that streamed in from the high windows. He heard the
rushing of his blood, the loudest sound in this vacant room.
    Recrimination vexed him, and the
awful thought that he was somehow responsible for the unexpected change preyed
upon him. But what could he have done to accomplish this? Surely not his
innocent spat with the governess just now. He hadn’t done anything …partied
with a bunch of swells last night, but that couldn’t have done this. What was
going on?
    Suddenly he became aware of a
great absence. The most famous, the most important Egyptian relic in the world,
was nowhere to be seen. He took a deep breath, made a quick circuit of the
room, and then did it again making certain he missed nothing. He then made his
way, in short, reluctant steps, toward a docent who sat reading in a chair. The
docent, in a navy blue uniform with shiny brass buttons, looked up at the
distraught Nordhausen, and immediately adopted a concerned expression.
    “Sir, how can I help you?”
    “Where,” his voice broke. “Where
is the Rosetta Stone?” he finally rasped out.
    “The Rosetta Stone, sir? I don’t
believe I know that item. Can you be more specific?”  He looked puzzled.
    “The Rosetta Stone,” Nordhausen
croaked, “Black basalt panel about so by so,” he gestured, “Same message in
hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek…”
    The man gave him an odd look,
noticing his dress and immediately sizing him up as a foreigner. “No, sir,
doesn’t ring a bell for me. Perhaps you were misinformed. We’ve nothing meeting
that description here.”
    Nordhausen could feel the blood
draining from his face. “Kindly direct me to the Egyptian Curator,” he said.
    “Certainly, sir, though I’m
certain you’ll get much the same answer from him. Just go through this
corridor, up the stairs, and it’s the fourth office on the left. Says ‘Curator
of Egyptian Antiquities’ right on the door.”
    Numbly, Nordhausen followed the
directions,