The Arab told him, and at the first opportunity the Egyptologist took the train to the nearest point. For 20 miles he trudged over the country, often going astray, but coming in the end to many mounds in the desert. Countless fragments of early Greek pottery furnished Petrie with all the evidence he needed. Quickly filling his pockets, he started on his long walk back to the train. The following year he returned to the mounds. His first task was to find a shelter. He had barely done this when he noticed two stones lying just outside. He stooped and turned one over, to find it was a proclamation of the long-lost city of Naukratis carved in Greek characters, a city which men had eagerly sought, a city the very existence of which some men doubted. It was a sudden revelation, a mighty discovery to spring from a little alabaster statue, and it provides one more indication of the genius of its discoverer. Perhaps the weirdest experience in all Egyptology was Petrie’s discovery of the noble Horuta at Hawara down a well 40 feet deep. Here in a flooded chamber, amid impenetrable blackness, he and his labourers wrestled continually with mighty blocks, in order to get to the stone sarcophagus which he suspected was there. They found it at last, with the lid barely peeping above the surface of the icy water. For days they strove to shift it, but it was immovable, so he decided to cut the sarcophagus in halves in order to get at the inner coffin. Weeks of fatiguing labour saw this gigantic task accomplished, and there was another desperate fight, with men working up to their chests in water, to get it out. Instead of the coveted head-end of the sarcophagus, the foot-end came to light. It was a terrible disappointment. The coffin still remained in the other half, and was apparently as far off as ever. The Egyptologist, groping in the murky water, fought with it, strove to shift it with his hands, with his feet. It was firmly fixed. Still he was not beaten. After a sustained effort lasting several days, he and his workers managed to raise the lid of the other half of the sarcophagus with wedges, until the inside of it was a few inches above water-level. Then he wriggled inside, and for hours in the darkness he sat astride the coffin and struggled to loosen it. The top of his head touched the lid of the sarcophagus, he had hardly room to move at all, the water came up to his mouth and compelled him to breathe through his nose. More than once in the course of his tremendous exertions he took in a mouthful of the nauseous water. The sand clung to the coffin as though it were set in a bed of cement. He tried scraping away the sand with his feet, he prised at the coffin with crowbars. All his efforts failed to shift it a fraction of an inch.