The next morning, I returned early to the newspaper offices housed in a modernist five-story building constructed at the turn of the century. I went up its wide staircase to the second floor and found, as ever, an incessant movement of people who were all coming and going. I crossed the hall filled with the deafening noise of typewriters, the sound of telephones ringing nonstop, the continuous shouts of correspondents and a strong smell of tobacco that had made the atmosphere almost unbreathable.
I opened the door and entered the chief editor's office, a sixty-year-old Scotsman with an aquiline nose, thick sideburns and a lean face. On that morning he had assembled several reporters.
‘Come in and close the door,’ he said sulkily. ‘Since I’ve stopped smoking, I can't bear the smell of tobacco.’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Sarah, the feature writer.
She had overdone it with her French perfume that day.
‘We’ve got a lot of work on this morning. Sales of the newspaper’s Sunday Edition have dropped alarmingly in the past two months,’ he said banging his fist on the table. ‘If we continue like this, the Sunday Edition will collapse. We need something new to boost sales.’
‘We could add a police story,’ said one reporter who had recently come over from a rival newspaper.
‘Too hackneyed,’ said the Scotsman. ‘That’s already been tried at other newspapers and it has been a failure. All the writers think they’re the next Arthur Conan-Doyle.’
A young correspondent who had started work the week before took out his pipe, filled it with tobacco and lit a match. The Scotsman went over to him and took the pipe out of his mouth.
‘Weren’t you listening before?’
The boy turned pale and we all held back our chuckles. He didn't know who he was messing with.
‘Any other ideas?’ he growled.
‘Maybe a gardening section,’ Sarah added.
‘Everyone in this country is a gardener,’ he replied with a dismissive gesture. ‘If you’ve got nothing worth saying, keep your mouth shut,’ he added with a threatening look. ‘We need something innovative.’
They all fell silent for a few minutes without knowing what to say. I went to the teapot and poured myself a cup of tea. I had had an idea the night before, but I was uncertain about saying it out loud. Finally, I plucked up the courage.
‘I may have something interesting,’ I announced as I put the teacup down on the table.
‘Let’s hear it!’
‘Carter's discovery in Egypt could turn out to be a gold mine. It has made people forget about the horrors of the war.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘People have an insatiable appetite for reading about the stories of our great explorers.’
‘Chronicles of those expeditions can be found in any public library.’
‘That’s true, but we could surprise them with some little-known accounts. There must be thousands of interesting stories just waiting to be published.’
‘Hmmm. I’m not sure,’ he replied as a look of doubt crossed his face. ‘And where do you plan to unearth these little gems?’
‘We could start with the British Museum Library,’ I suggested.
He was silent for a few moments, pondering the idea, after which he added:
‘Well, if nobody has a better idea, see what you can come up with over the next few days.’
The meeting was adjourned and we left the office to get on with our normal daily work.
The next morning when I awoke, the window was covered in a white blanket of snow. It was the first snow of winter and the streets were full of children throwing snowballs at each other. As I made my way to the British Museum, I saw a couple of passers-by slip on the treacherous surface; the ice had made several streets impassable and workmen had already begun to scatter rock salt on the ground.
Despite this, the museum's library was crowded as usual. An endless stream of people were coming and going through its doors: students, readers, tourists and researchers, all of whom would spend hours within its walls.
I climbed the front steps carefully so as not to slip, then crossed the main hall and arrived at the atrium: a large circular reading room with space for more than a thousand people. Some of the oldest volumes in the country could be found there.
I had to wait in the queue at the reception desk until a pretty librarian with medium-length blonde hair and wearing a navy blue suit pointed out where I could start my search.
‘We have three types of inventory,’ she explained, peering above her tiny pebble glasses with her pretty eyes, ‘topographical, chronological, and business.’
‘I’m searching for any journals detailing archaeological expeditions from the last fifty years.’
The librarian sighed and said:
‘You can start your search by looking under “SUBJECT”. Then, you could proceed by looking up “CARTOGRAPHICAL STUDIES”. From there, you could refine your search chronologically. In other words, to the period of time that you wish to investigate.’
‘Does that mean I have to search through more than one whole classification or section?’
She nodded with a half-smile.
This was going to take more time than I had bargained for.
I went up to the second floor and after walking down several aisles full of bookshelves, I found a section replete with manuscripts.
I asked the person in charge of that section for the documentation I was looking for, and he proceeded to deposit a mountain of files on the table that exceeded my height.
‘Will that be all for today?’ he asked without a flicker of emotion.
‘I hope so,’ I replied, the tone of resignation quite obvious in my voice.
‘If you don't manage to get through it all, we have some shelves in reception where researchers can store any materials they are working on for the following day.’
‘Thank you very much. That’s most kind of you to suggest it.’
I turned on the small green lamp that was present on each table and opened the first dossier; a process I repeated many times over the following days.
After a few days into the research, I was beginning to regret my proposal. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I had imagined. The information seemed endless, and it would take years to study it properly.
I found out about all manner of explorers, from those who had discovered the most remote places in Africa, to archaeologists who had unearthed the historical legacies of the Middle East.
Around mid-morning, while turning a few pages, I looked up and noticed a man watching me from a few tables further up. I wasn’t sure if I knew him, or if he was looking at me for some other reason. A moment later, I looked up again, but he was gone.
After lunch, I went through the library shelves. It felt like a real privilege to run my fingertips over those volumes that held so many centuries of history: Stanley's personal diary of his odyssey through Africa until he found the