Camels not being the most reliable forms of transport, we
break down almost as soon as we’ve left Docherty’s Dock. We park for the
nineteenth time, while the camels consider whether this would be a good place to found a camelopolis. This time we're in a narrow crevasse filled with debris which threatens to drop unwanted weighty material on us at any moment.
Here we notice a twittering bird, dancing very excitedly in the
rubble. Our resident expert (in just about everything), Lance Corporal Knowall, valiantly
identifies it as a European Stonechat, that peculiar bird whose call sounds
just like two stones being banged together*. This one is tweeting excitedly about
a stone buried almost completely under other identical stones. It looks like a very ordinary stone
amongst mile after mile of extraordinarily ordinary stones and we can’t see any
reason why anyone, or anybird, in his right mind would be so excited about such a
lump of debris. But his frenetic tweets are as pitiful as a fragment of
progressive rock, so Sergeant Watson digs it out of the sand.
The bird goes wild, tweeting madly and pecking at it like a tiny
little hammer, chipping off pieces of encrusted earth and shards of stone,
inspecting each one as if it was a piece of amazing discovery. Chip after chip, it’s almost
as if the bird is writing on the stone, row after row of peculiar signs appearing,
like a paleolithic takeaway menu. It would probably make fascinating reading if
only (a) we were at all interested in stones, (b) the developing text didn’t
look suspiciously like an academic paper and (c) we had ever learned to read.
Lance Corporal Knowall heroically advances to the stone and
gives it a hefty kick.
“That there stone’s been buried in this crevasse for tharsands of years,” he
concludes, emphatically.
Sergeant Watson inspects the stone, and then the Lance
Corporal, treating them both with the same enthusiastic disinterest.
“How on earth can you tell, Knowall?”
“Sedimentary, my dear Watson.”
We bury him under the stone, and spying the Snowlord’s peak
in the vague distance, head west.
---
*A real
bird, actually. No, it really is. Go on, Google it.
---
As part of my Napoleon in Egypt project I’m planning on
skirmish games and maybe even some form of RPG (Napoleonic D&D?), because
I’m interested in a bit more than just the military aspects of Napoleon’s
invasion, and I’m also keen on slightly off-the-wall, even exotic, elements for
games. So I’m finding models to use as Napoleon’s “savants” – scholars,
engineers, scientists and artists whom Napoleon brought with him to investigate
what Europeans tended to think of as “the mysterious east”. The Rosetta stone
was one major, if accidental, discovery of the expedition so the stone’s
importance could make it the focus of several possible scenarios.
I carved the model from blue insulation foam, in rough
imitation of the original, but I didn’t try to reproduce any hieroglyphs or
cuneiform, just made random graphic scratches in the surface. If you’ve every
seen the original in the British Museum you’ll know that mine is overscaled,
and a bit greyer than the original. I made it this way partly because the
modelling was easier, and partly to give me a model which might plausibly be
used in other game settings, such as Frostgrave.
The stone was discovered in 1799 whilst excavating a fort at
Rosetta. The figure I’ve painted alongside might be one of the savants, or he might
be Pierre-François Bouchard, who made the discovery. I’ve used a model from Perry
Miniature’s ambulance set, which I take to be Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, He'll revert to that role when I've managed to paint up his ambulance-camels.
I’m not sure what might be a reasonable score for the stone.
It’s about 1.5”x 1” x 0.5”. In terrain cubes, this would be approx 1/14th
of a point, I think, so perhaps you can be generous and round that up to 1
point?
Scoring: 1 28mm fig 5pts, stone 1 pt, Cooke’s Crevasse 30
pts = 36 pts total.
-----
By Paul:
I'm going to have to defer to our resident Geologist to verify the classification of the rock in question.
The Rosetta stone was such a critical component to unlocking the Egyptian language that your homage to it will be awarded 2 points (and yes I have seen it in fact). Unfortunately, the French Expedition's use of the Sphynx's nose for target practice then reduces that back down to 1 point - so a total of 36 points it is!
