Ras el-Qaus · R.14
Halloway reports the coloured arc. Ravensworth and Ambrose reach the shaft at 5:51 and observe it for eleven minutes.
Reading Room · selected records
A bow was found in a sealed chamber in 1909.
It has never been drawn under museum custody. The papers surrounding it describe another object, another chamber, and an arc of coloured light that appeared before sunrise.
Examine the first record
Record I · Gallery 9
One curve. Two states.
The museum records three physical configurations: barque-state, transitional state, and bow-state. The object was recovered, crated, salvaged, and accessioned in the relaxed barque-state.
“The curve of the drawn bow and the curve of the barque are, in the terms of the corpus, one curve in two states.”
Verrick Museum gallery guide · object record Read the modern technical examination → Find the same curve in 1909 →
Record II · Stela No. 41
The image holds both forms at once.
At Ras el-Qaus, a different expedition recovered a stela. Its middle register places a solar barque below a horizontal chord and a recurved, strung bow above it. Both spring from precisely the same two points.
“Within the arc of the bow, and above the string, is a second disk, sunk and formerly painted red.”
Annual Report · §§35–38 Examine what appeared above the tomb →
Record III · Tomb R.14
A rainbow before the sun.
On nineteen mornings, an arc of coloured light stood above the shaft mouth. It appeared eighteen to twenty-five minutes before sunrise, in a clear sky, without rain. Its bearing remained fixed while the sun’s rising point moved.
“A bit of rainbow in a clear sky.”
T. R. Halloway · first report, 3 February 1909 Compare the two field records →
Record IV · The shared dawn
Two chambers opened within the same hour.
The archive never joins these entries. Their dates do.
Veiled Oasis · Chamber 3
Cordelia Ravensworth records the lifting of the sealed slab and the discovery of the case containing field no. 137.
Place both dated records beside one another to retain their shared date. The record does not establish a cause.
Record V · Private dossier
Continue with Cordelia’s own record →
The copied line and the line that was never copied.
Ravensworth kept six enclosures from the printer. Among them: a working contact print of Plate X and a tracing made against it. Properly aligned, every line agrees but one.
“The bow does not watch the sun. It watches the other one.”
Pencilled, unsigned, in the margin of the print Align the tracing yourselfContinue with Cordelia’s own record →
Record VI · Cordelia Ravensworth
The bow was found in its other posture.
The field notebook names the object cautiously. Her later private letter is more exact: the object in the case lay in the easy posture, below the stela’s string—the barque-state.
“It lies in the other posture — the easy one, the one your stela shows drawn, below your own string.”
Cordelia Ravensworth to Edmund A. Ravensworth · 17 May 1909 Set the evidence side by side →
Record VII · The surviving pattern
The surviving pattern does not settle itself.
The Report calls it a solar device. The stela preserves a recessed disk inside a recurved line. The physical object was recovered in a relaxed posture. At another chamber, coloured light was recorded before sunrise.
The archive preserves positions, dates, and drawings. It does not supply a final phrase for their arrangement.
Related material: the AR-1188 custody record →
Carry the arrangement forward →
The Cataloguer’s Coda
The papers stop here. The possibility does not.
The final room separates what the record establishes from what an arrangement may invite you to see. It offers no solved screen and closes no open question.
Enter the Coda