History in the Faking Read online

  Eric glanced at his sister, but continued his search through a foot-high stack of hardcover books. “We need that book you have on Gyptians.”

  “E-gyptians,” she corrected.

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “that one.”

  Rachel didn’t look too upset. She stood next to me and watched Eric. Her suntanned forehead sparkled with tiny beads of sweat. She must have been running or biking. “Why do you need it?” she asked. Again, not mad—just curious.

  Eric didn’t answer Rachel’s question, so she said, “If you’re not going to tell me why you want it, I won’t give it to you. And you can leave my room now.”

  Eric stood up, frustrated. He scanned the room, and I knew he was thinking that we could just come back later. But by then Rachel might stash the book someplace where we’d never find it. We needed it right away.

  I broke the tense silence. “Okay, we’ll tell you,” I said, “but you have to swear not to tell anyone.”

  Eric flopped into an old-fashioned barber chair in the centre of the room and groaned. He clearly didn’t want Rachel in on our hoax. “Cody, she’s a girl,” Eric whined.

  “Yeah . . .” I gave him a look like “Well, what do you suggest instead?” but he just rolled his eyes.

  Rachel went into her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. “Alright,” she commanded, “let’s have it.”

  I did most of the talking for the next ten minutes, though Eric interrupted twice to clarify our plan. I had fun—more fun than I expected—explaining to Rachel how our fake artifact was going to get everyone to come to Sultana. And how we’d be the kids who put our small town on the map. I left out the part about Rachel’s mom getting fired from work, and the possibility they may have to move. She might not know yet, and I didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

  Rachel looked back and forth between the two of us, and finally said, “But why? I still don’t see why it’s so important to put Sultana in the spotlight.”

  I looked at Eric. No way was I going to answer that question.

  Eric sighed. “A couple of days ago I heard Mom on the phone. She was saying that if business doesn’t improve at the Rivercrest soon, and I mean real soon, she’s going to lose her job. And if Mom loses her job—well, you know what that means, right?”

  Rachel responded with a frustrated shake of her head. I could tell, though, that she was starting to get worried. I mean, if my parents lost their jobs, how would I feel about it?

  Eric released an exasperated sigh and glanced away, staring intently at the unfinished mural. “If she can’t work, we’re gonna have to leave,” he mumbled. “We’re going to have to move away from Sultana.”

  “But . . . but Mom can sell her art . . . her paintings,” she said quietly. “People will buy them.”

  Eric shook his head. “She tried that before. Remember . . . when Dad died? It won’t be enough.”

  Rachel gazed out her window. “Move away?” she said. “Like forever?”

  “Unless we can get people to come to Sultana,” Eric said, “And the Rivercrest.”

  Rachel took a long, deep breath. “Wow. I thought I’d never say this about this town. But I really don’t want to leave.”

  “I don’t either,” Eric said.

  She continued to stare outside. “This is where Dad grew up,” she said. “This is where we were born. I like our house and I like our neighbours. I like all the rivers and lakes and bush trails. This is our home. I don’t want to move.”

  That was my cue again. “And you won’t have to,” I said, “because we’re not going to let that happen. Now you see why this hoax has to work?”

  She looked at me and then at Eric. “Yeah. But how are you going to do it?”

  I carefully outlined the rest of our scheme. And I relaxed a bit as I talked. From the looks of it, Rachel thought our idea was great—she kept nodding—but by the time I finished, she was shaking her head.

  Eric, who had been cranking the barber chair up and down all this time, stopped. “Why are you shaking your head?”

  “Well, let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You want to carve a message in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics onto a tablet.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Yup,” Eric agreed.

  “And then you want to hide the plaque so it’ll be found by Dr. Murray.”

  We nodded some more.

  She continued, “Dr. Murray will then take it to scientists who will be blown away by it and swarm the town.”

  “Yes!” Eric and I shouted.

  Rachel shook her head. “It won’t work.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “WHAT DO YOU mean it won’t work?” Eric asked.

  Rachel sighed. “Because any scientist with half a brain will figure out that it’s a prank. And he’ll do that in minutes.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you why.” Rachel left the bed, pushed around a bunch of CDs next to her dresser, and extracted a book from the debris. The title was Egyptology for Everyone.

  She returned to the bed, placed the book on her lap, and flipped the pages until she found the section she wanted to show us. “Here it is,” she announced. She set the book on the bed and pointed to a heading.

  Eric left his chair to examine the open page. “Check it out, Cody.”

  I dropped to my knees beside Eric and looked at the section Rachel was tapping with her finger. “Egyptians in Australia?” I read out loud. And beneath that was a smaller subheading that said, “Hoaxers in Gilmaroo Foiled.”

  Eric and I read the entire page in silence, while Rachel waited. It was about some pranksters who had attempted to reproduce hieroglyphic messages on the wall of a cave. But the inscriptions had been “immediately dismissed as a hoax.”

  A photo on the following page showed a dozen men standing around what looked like authentic Egyptian hieroglyphics. Some of the men—obviously the hoaxers—had big grins on their faces. While other men—perhaps the Egyptologists who had wasted time flying to Australia—looked extremely grouchy.

  “Those carvings sure look real to me.” I said, leaning in close for a better look.

  “Yeah,” Eric agreed, “they’re pretty cool.”

  “But it’s all gibberish,” Rachel said. “The article goes on to say that the carvings are just a bunch of random symbols that don’t mean anything. The pranksters probably looked in a book about King Tut and then copied a mix of drawings onto the cave. It looks impressive, but to an Egyptologist it reads like baby talk.”

  She twisted up her face, “The carvings probably said, ‘Goo, goo, goo. Bla, bla, bla.’ ”

  I laughed at her demo, and even Eric chuckled a little, though he tried to hide it.

  “But people would still have to come to Sultana to check it out,” Eric jabbed the book with a finger. “Just like here in Australia.”

  “Not anymore,” Rachel said. “That happened almost twenty years ago. If these same hieroglyphics were discovered today, someone would take a digital photograph and e-mail it to an expert. The expert would look at it, laugh, and then declare it a hoax. And it would all happen within hours.”

  “And it might not even make the local paper,” I said. “And we need to get in the newspaper and on TV.”

  “Exactly,” Rachel said, pleased we were catching on.

  Eric jumped up and began pacing. I had my back to him now and felt kind of dumb kneeling on the floor, so I got off the carpet and sat on the bed next to Rachel.

  “So the only mistake those guys in Australia made was not writing a real message,” Eric said, winding his way around the clutter. “Right?”

  “It seems like it,” I agreed.

  Rachel nodded.

  “In other words,” Eric continued, “if we wrote a message that really meant something, it might fool people.”

  “At least for a while,” I said.

  “Hey!” Eric froze, suddenly excited. “Do you remember in French class, when we used that translator on the int
ernet to help convert English words into French words? Well, maybe they have translators for hieroglyphics.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s worth a look.”

  Rachel bounced off the bed. “Well, then let’s go to Cody’s house.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you have high-speed internet.” Rachel looked at me like I was the village idiot. Maybe I was.

  Eric tried to shake his sister. “Don’t you have to go next door and babysit Gwyneth?” Rachel often helped Mrs. Roberts watch her baby, Gwyneth, on mornings when she was working. Mrs. Roberts shared a rural mail route with another lady.

  “Nope. Not today.” Rachel grinned fiendishly. “I have the whole day off.”

  Eric groaned and looked to me for support. He must have forgotten that we actually needed her help. I shrugged—he’d figure it out eventually.

  CHAPTER 4

  I KNEW ERIC wasn’t happy about Rachel tagging along, but he seemed to get over it by the time we walked through the back door of my house.

  “You got anything to drink?” he asked, opening the fridge before I could answer. It was 2:30 in the afternoon and Eric knew my mom was working at the park gate and wouldn’t be home for hours.

  Our desktop computer sat in the corner of the kitchen. We each grabbed a Coke, pulled up chairs, and waited for the computer to warm up. Since it was my house, I worked the keyboard, sandwiched between Rachel on my left and Eric on my right.

  I clicked my way to Google. “Egyptian Translator?” I asked.

  “Let’s be even more specific,” Rachel said. “How about Egyptian Hieroglyphic Translator? Otherwise, we may get a modern Egyptian translator.”

  Eric nodded, and I typed the words into the search box.

  Three seconds later the screen filled with a list of websites that translated English words into ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  “Wow!” Rachel said. “That was too easy.”

  I went to the first site on the list and it asked me what I wanted translated.

  “Try my name,” Eric said eagerly.

  I typed in E-R-I-C and pressed Enter.

  Eric was impressed. “How cool!” We were staring at a vulture, a mouth, a leaf, and a basket.

  “Do mine now,” Rachel said, moving closer.

  R-A-C-H-E-L.

  ENTER.

  “Look,” she said, in awe of the mystical symbols. Her index finger floated across the screen and touched each object lightly. “A mouth, an arm, a vulture . . . hey, what’s that one?”

  I realized my mouth was so dry I couldn’t talk. I quickly irrigated my tonsils with some pop.

  “I . . . I think it’s a TV,” I mumbled without thinking.

  “Don’t be silly. They didn’t have TVs in ancient Egypt.”

  “This will make it easy,” Eric said. “All we have to do is enter our message, print out the translation, and carve it on our plaque. Then we’ll have an authentic, mysterious Egyptian artifact.” He leaned back in the chair, pleased.

  We goofed around for the next hour, exploring the website and translating all sorts of names and words:

  M-O-M.

  D-O-G.

  F-I-V-E-H-E-A-D—that one got Eric a play-punch from Rachel. And so forth. Each time a new symbol popped up we would let out a “wow.”

  But then I stopped.

  I’m not sure if it hit me or Rachel first, but somewhere in our heads something clicked at the same time.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What?” Eric grumbled. “What doesn’t make sense?”

  “The translator,” Rachel said.

  “Just look at the monitor.” I jabbed at the screen with my finger.

  Eric shook his head. “What are you guys talking about?” He pushed back some blond hair that was now covering his eyes.

  “You guys don’t know Egyptian or hieroglyphics or whatever. How can you say it’s wrong?”

  Rachel leaned forward and touched the pictograms one at a time. “Look at these symbols for the last word that Cody entered. A rope, a vulture, a mouth, and so on. Right?”

  “So?” Eric said. “We’ve seen most of those symbols before in the other words.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but Cody typed in helicopter.”

  “Don’t you see?” I said. “They didn’t have helicopters in ancient Egypt.”

  “Shoot!” Eric leaned back in his chair. “So this translator is only converting the sound of our letters into Egyptian letters.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So if we made a plaque engraved with the symbols for ‘King Tut was here,’ it might look impressive, but it would basically be in English.”

  “And it would quickly be dismissed as a hoax.” Eric sounded depressed. “So we’re at another dead end.”

  “Maybe not.” Rachel looked at me. “Could I try something?”

  “Sure.” I pushed the keyboard over to her.

  Eric and I watched the computer and tried to follow all the links she bounced to. After five minutes she found a website that made both Eric and me sit up. The title was Egyptian Pictographs.

  We quickly read the first few pages. Rachel absorbed the information fast, while Eric and I barely kept up with the cursor as she scrolled down the page.

  The site was similar to the first one, including all the basic symbols for the early Egyptian alphabet. But then it also explained how certain symbols and drawings—called pictograms—represented complete ideas or actions.

  The web page had hundreds of drawings, and next to each drawing was the English translation of what that pictogram meant.

  “Look.” Eric tapped the monitor with a dirty finger. I automatically wiped his fingerprint with a napkin. “They had symbols for almost everything.”

  They were organized on the website according to how frequently they had been used in ancient texts. Glyphs for man, woman, village, walking, and so on, came first. And three pages later we found the lesser-used symbols. For example, there were over one hundred little drawings that represented the different parts of a ship.

  “Wow!” I said. “Look at all the different scratchings they used for weapons.” Now we were looking at pictograms for knives, shields, bows, and spears.

  “Hieroglyphics must have included over a thousand symbols,” Rachel marveled.

  “We’ll have to keep our message pretty simple,” I warned.

  “Yeah,” Eric agreed. “If we try anything too complex or too wordy, it might not work.”

  I found a piece of paper and a pencil. “So . . . what message should our ancient Egyptian explorers leave for the people of Manitoba?”

  “Let’s start with a date,” Rachel suggested. “My book said they had dates based on the king that was ruling Egypt at the time.”

  “How the heck would that work?” Eric sounded grumpy again that Rachel had butted in on our great plan.

  “It’s simple, Eric.” She wrinkled her nose and did a really good impression of a snooty librarian. “Each time a new king started to rule, they would start at year one. So a date for our artifact might be ‘the tenth year, fourth month, twentieth day, under the rule of King Tut.’”

  “Perfect,” I said, taking notes. “Let’s use that.”

  “But not the ‘King Tut’part.” Rachel shook her head. “That’s too phony. Let’s use some king no one’s heard of. I can find one in my book later.”

  Eric nodded, finally (and grudgingly) accepting that his sister was smart and useful.

  “The hieroglyphics that the scribes used look pretty detailed,” I said. “What if we start off by saying that the chief scribe on our expedition died or got killed, and an apprentice scribe is now doing the recording?”

  “Yeah, that’s good,” Eric said. “Then if we really mess things up with the inscriptions, the experts will just think it was because the junior scribe took over. I love it.”

  Together we spent the r
est of the afternoon debating a proper message that our Egyptians may have left over three thousand years ago. At 4:30 we stopped. We agreed that what we had was perfect.

  “Okay.” I looked down at my final written copy and read it out loud.

  Twenty men died crossing the water. Our scribe is now with the gods of the Underworld. This foreign land is the enemy—harsh and cold. Ra has forsaken us. We have gone north on the wide river for far too long. It now turns to ice under our bow. We have not the time to return. I fear I will not see my beloved Nile again. Osiris have mercy on our souls.

  When I finished reading it, the three of us sat in silence. We could all feel how weird it was—almost like there really was an Egyptian who left that message for us thousands of years ago.

  That’s how good it sounded.

  Until Rachel burst our bubble. “Now comes the hard part. Looking up those symbols and engraving them into something.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’LL PRINT OUT these pages,” I said, “and then work on the translations tonight after supper.”

  “We can get together again first thing tomorrow morning,” Rachel suggested, “and make the inscriptions.”

  Eric shook his head. “No. That won’t work. Mom said I have to mow the lawn in the morning. That’ll take an hour.”

  “So why can’t Cody and I start on it?” Rachel glared at her brother.

  Eric looked at me and then at Rachel. “Fine.” He passed Rachel her backpack. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Cody.”

  Rachel grinned and followed her brother to the door. “Can I come over at nine o’clock?” she asked me.

  I nodded my assent and walked them to the front door. I stared down the empty street for a while after they left, until I realized I still had loads of work to do. Get a grip, Cody.

  I returned to the computer and printed out every page that could possibly provide a useful pictogram. Our printer was painfully slow, and I was worried Mom and Dad would get home before I finished. Not because of all the paper I was using—well, that too—but because I didn’t want them to see what I was printing. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out who was behind an Egyptian hoax, if they caught me staring at a website for hieroglyphics all night.