London, 21st January 1914.

To Messrs the Board of Directors of the British Archeological Society.

Concerns: a matter of interest to you - your query of 10th January 1914.

Dear sirs,

Further to your query for a full report of the 1909 Bir Matha expedition, I have spent most of last week going through the records of our main office library. Although I am confident I filed the extensive Bir Matha documents myself after the return of Marcus Brody last year, the filing cabinet in question now holds less than 1/10th of its original content. As far as the expedition diary is concerned: it is missing, I'm afraid... I took the liberty of writing up the following, partly based on what I can remember from what Marcus Brody told me at the time (information I have never reveiled to anyone else) and partly based on a few notes I took myself during our conversations. So, some of the information below are his very own words, others are mine.

30th April 1909.
Young Marcus Brody examines, commissioned by the prestigious British Archaeological Society, an abandoned settlement just south of Bir Matha. His predecessor, Dr. Henry Jones, left the site after - in the more northerly located region of Girgeh - rumours had emerged about the location of the most elusive object in human history: the Holy Grail.
Jones, an American of Scottish / Irish descent has been researching this mystery for most of his life and the slightest chance to find even the most minuscule fragment of the puzzle was enough to make him leave in a rush. This highly disappointed his son - Henry Junior - who much preferred exploring the dozens of caves in the area rather than sitting in a dusty mausoleum waiting for his father to decipher yet another old manuscript. But Jones sr being Jones sr, there was no way to stop him from hunting down the Grail: Bir Matha would still be there upon his return...

Brody is convinced that the excavations at Bir Matha may prove valuable and has managed to convince the British Aerchological Society to raise some extra funds (as per our records). There is something strange about this site...
Largely located in an ancient abandoned quarry, several things indicate that there has been activity more recently than previously thought, though the quarry dates from a period long before the first pharaos.
He may find evidence there that there have been Egyptian dynasties prior to the pharaos' reign and that alone is more than enough for Brody to tirelessly search on.

Today is an important day. Brody's team will try to blow up a pile of rocks at the end of the narrow entrance to this almost perfectly circular quarry. For an untrained eye, no access is visible, but Marcus soon concluded that there MUST be an passage. Why else would a road be clearly cut in the hard basalt stone?

Dynamite and Brody don't go well together. He finds it amazing but dangerous stuff, surely with the reigning temperatures. You can clearly see the dynamite bars “sweating”... The dangerous stuff, now even more unstable than normal, makes Brody all too eager to let his assistant Harry do the blowing up. Harry likes this kind of work. Maybe his nickname “Madde Harry” has something to do with it...

Harry's works supervisor, the cheerful and dedicated Sallah has some doubts about the amount of dynamite that Harry deems necesarry for the job and has already wondered (aloud, mind you) whether Harry is trying to launch the blocking rocks all the way to Cairo! Harry however ignores these 'subtle' comments and prepares for what he calls “The Big Bang”.

At exactly 16h15 the charge explodes and henceforth our world will never be the same again...

As soon as the dust settles, Marcus immediately realizes he had been right all along. There IS a passage behind the barrier and both he, Harry, Sallah and the rest of the team rush towards it. All stand in silent amazement. Behind the just revealed entrance is a huge cave and one need to be an archaeologist to see that it is man-made. A nearly perfect spherical void in the immensely hard rock could never have sprung from natural causes....
If they still may have had doubts, these are swiftly swept aside by the sight of a platform bearing two gigantic stone pillars. This had to be manmade and probalby carefully been hidden by its creators or their successors. The walls of the "cave" are covered with symbols clearly grouped in the same ... something .... sort of...

A couple of yards in front of the stone pillars stands a near flat segmented metal disk, positioned near horizontally on a vertical support beam. In the center of the disc sits a large, distinctly coloured hemisphere. Brody and the others now know they have made a major discovery!

The individual segments of the disc - as well as the sphere in the centre - can be pressed down (as they soon find out) and most symbols match those on the big stone pillars. The symbols, although they vaguely resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs, are totally unfamiliar to Marcus Brody .
Pushing randomly on the segments is clearly a waste of time as they soon find out. Marcus and Harry decide to first study everything carefully and take elaborate notes. Unfortunately they have no camera to take pictures, but perhaps a photographer could be called over from Cairo or Alexandria.

1st August 1909.
Marcus Brody and his assistant Harry have been studying the contents of the cave and taken notes ever since the day of their discovery. All symbols are mapped, and for some days now, they have begun to try out specific figure combinations. Both are convinced that a correct combination will open some secret passage.
They have started with a combination of 4 symbols, continued with 5, 6 and 7 and - a bit desperate now - they are testing combinations of 8 figures. And they haven't even tried a fraction of all possible combinations yet...

1st August 1909 - 23h16.
Harry has just retired for the night but Marcus - against his own better judgement - wants to go on with his obsession to try out more combinations for a while longer.
The symbols, carved in the walls (etched would be a better word, because the incisions are very clean and of a uniform depth) appeared to do nothing. Marcus lights a cigarette and presses, almost by accident, the last symbol of the first row, then the second and then the last.

He burns his fingers on his cigarette when suddenly the stone pillars light up and the previously thought solid stone segments on the front begin sliding up and down, rearraging themselves. A buzzing sound not unlike a high voltage charge is clearly audible, and the red hemisphere in the control panel lits up!

Marcus rushes out to call Harry, who - like Sallah and some of the diggers - has been awakened by the sound. Truly flabbergasted they are now all looking at the spectacle of the clearly "active" pillars.

The living daylights are scared out of Marcus Brody when everything goes silent again. He feverishly tries the previously pressed combination and sure enough, the whole process starts all over once more. The codes are hidden in the symbols on the walls, but what is the purpose of this all?

The men in the cave couldn't know that - on different locations all over the world - similar sites came to life the very same moment (Marcus - and most likely Harry too, but we can't be certain about this - learned about this later). In Songea in East Africa the ground of a dry river bed is split open and a blueish light shines through the threathening crack... A Touareg experiences the fright of his life when a large sand dune in Semara suddenly is swallowed up by the earth and the entrance of a cave is clearly visible in a crater at least 50 meter deep... A terrified Kikuyu stumbles uninvited into the home of his white master babbling about the ghost cave near Kabinda... In Usak (Turkey) a large piece of rock detaches from a mountainside, revealing a cave entrance. Yilmaz Aslan decides that even the sweet Feyza (who at that time was about to drop her last piece of garment in front of him) wasn't strong enough an argument to stay around any longer... In Cavan (Ireland) Paddy O'Rourke is convinced he had had REALLY too much this time when (upon returning from the pub) he finds his sod cabin sunken in a huge pit, from which an ungodly light illuminates the last remains of his former home. This is a dirty trick of the damned Sassenach, no doubt! Paddy decides to immediately inform Liam Whelan, the local IRA leader...

August 1913
Four years after the first activation, the secret of the stone pillars is finally revealed in Bir Matha by the Marcus Brody expedition. Marcus will regret this for the rest of his life. After that the initial combination of 4 symbols was found, the rest of the puzzle was actually a quite logical matter, though it still took a long period of thorough research. The completely intact carvings on the walls of the cave were hereby a big advantage to Marcus and his team. On most other sites (see above), the symbols were damaged & only partially readable and therefore near useless for the local scientists studying the mystery.

On Wednesday, August 1st 1913 around 8 pm, Harry Fleming pressed combination #171,459 and the sphere in the middle of the panel suddenly lit up brightly. Fascinated, Harry pressed the glowing sphere. Stone tablets moved frantically in their settings and clicked audibly in a clearly specific position. Then.. all hell broke loose!

A “flash” of blue light - a couple of yards long - squirted from the narrow slit between the stone pillars and destroyed everything in its path. Immediately, the light stabilized and the open space between the pillars was suddenly filled with a vertical rippling "pool" of "blue water" against all laws of gravity. Marcus, who came running in, was just as astonished as his collegue when he watched this unearthly spectacle. Named "Madde Harry" for good reason, Fleming began throwing stones in the vertical “pool” of "blue water" without thinking further. He could have saved himself the trouble: the stones disappeared as soon as they hit the rippling surface...

Harry - becoming bolder - stuck his left hand in the “water”. He just as quickly pulled it back because the "water" was cold indeed, but strangely enough not wet... Marcus didn't like his subordinate to take the innitiative, and was just about to repeat Harry's experiment and overrule him, when the unthinkable happened. An Egyptian assistant by the name of Adnan, very concerned with Brody's well-being, tried to pull Marcus' arm away from the “pool”. Marcus, who thought it to be the now annoyed Harry, made a sudden move to push his subordiante back, but hit poor Adnan instead, who fell backwards in the narrow blue coloured slit between the pillars and... disappeared! A few seconds later, the pool dissolved too and once again only the cave's wall behind was visible.

Marcus, Harry and the other team members were speechless once again. Frantically, Marcus activated the portal (as they called it now) again, but no trace of Adnan could be found. After a while, the "blue water" dissolved again. Marcus reactivated the portal again and again, hoping Adnan would be able to find his way back, but in vain.

Acccording to Harry, there was only one option now: to step through the pool and see what was to be found on the other side (typical...). He was preparing to do so, well wrapped in and with a rope around his waist so Marcus could pull him back in case of trouble. Marcus didn't like the idea at all, stating it was too dangerous, but in fact he might have envied Harry a little for his courage and initiative, who knows... They had just begun argueing amongst themselves about the issue, when suddenly Adnan came rolling out of the portal. He was back!

It was clear the man was totally upset, on the brink of being hysterical. Marcus tried to calm him but the only thing the terrified Adnan could utter was: "The gods are there, they exist!... The gods are there and they are angry!..." .

A couple of hours after his disastrous adventure, sadly Adnan died in agony . According to a local doctor who was rushed to the site the cause was noting but sheer fear and panic.
Marcus decided this whole matter was becoming too big and too complex a venture for a simple archaeologist and had a messenger sent a telegram from the nearest telegraph post. (As you will recall) this telegram was sent to the British Archaeological Society (yourselves), whereby His Majesty's Government was informed and asked for a small military escort before further action was to be taken by Marcus' team.

This is all the information I posses and I sincerely hope this will serve your purpose. Meanwhile, I will continue my search for the missing documents.

Sincerely Yours,

P. Ennesack
Secretary to the British Archeological Society.