Adrère Amellal

The side view of the Adrère Amellal in the Siwa Oasis, Egypt. Follow the switch backs as they pass through the "dark band" in this excerpt from Hypatia's Diary chapter 53.

Darwin spoke as little as possible during the meal and continued his silence while Fathi drove through quiet streets, passing small groups of men returning from morning prayer. The sun ringed the mountains of the oasis and crests of the tallest dunes in the sand sea. Once they had left the palm groves, the White Mountain, also known as Adrère Amellal in the local language, came into clear view, and he studied it as the road carried them around the south side of the lake. The water had filled the space surrounding the lower slope of the plateau, making a peninsula, and they were heading toward a land bridge on the western side.

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Geologically, it was one of a series of table-top mountains left behind when the ancient ocean retreated in the mid-Miocene era about eleven million years ago. The sea levels had risen and fallen across the epochs, creating a varied fossil record. This was textbook stuff, and he slept through much of it at university. But he knew it was vital to understand what kind of rock they would delve into and had grabbed a paper off the Internet before leaving Rome.

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He read that the plateaus were siliciclastic sediments, a sandstone-quartz combination solid enough to resist the floods. They were also interspersed with limestone, dolostone, marl and olive shale, all sedimentary rocks that tended toward the soft end of the hardness scale. Easy to carve for tombs, but fragile when unsupported. 

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No diamonds here, he thought, watching the sun strike the mountain full on. Crisp shadows highlighted the yellow-orange striated layers, ranging from khaki, to caramel, to dark brown that matched the mountains ringing the northern edge of Siwa. However, the White Mountain appeared taller because it stood kilometers apart from its nearest neighbor and, from this distance, resembled an old wrinkled Panama hat. 

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Its base skirted outward like a down-turned brim, and the vertical sides bent inward just below a flat-topped crown. A distinct thick brown layer circled the mountain mid-height, giving the appearance of a hat-band. That’s the dark band that Hypatia described. The tomb should be just above it.

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They crossed the land bridge onto an empty plain and reversed direction alongside the mountain. To the left, the plain ran towards a thick palm grove about one-hundred-fifty meters distant, and to the right the road hugged the base of the mountain as they headed back eastward. Darwin now had to look at the mountain through the opposite window and leaned forward a little to see up its slope. He knew from studying the maps it was a kilometer east to west and nearly half a kilometer at its widest point. This thing’s huge, he thought, trying to fathom the scale of a tomb inside the mountain.

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Two minutes later, they parked under a few palms at the eastern side of the mountain. He got out of the vehicle and looked at the hundred-meter cliff face. He stumbled backward to recover his balance from looking up so steeply and moved toward the shore of Lake Siwa to get a better perspective. From the water’s edge he could see the entire cliff face without straining his neck, but he frowned at the fetid odor of decay rising from the mud. The lake had expanded from run-off over the last hundred years as the inhabitants drilled more wells, centuries of evaporation had left the water brackish, making it a haven for wildlife and not so much for humans.

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Darwin pulled his sunglasses from atop his head to shade his eyes from the increasing solar radiation coming off the eastern cliff. His face grew warm as the day’s heat built like a campfire on a cool night. He had thought about this moment standing before the mountain divining where Alexander would have carved his tomb entrance. He knew it would not be obvious, or others would have discovered it, but the sheer size of the cliff and two millennia of exposure to the elements made the task feel impossible. This is so much bigger in real life.