Soaring Stones: A Kite-Powered Approach to Building Egypt's Pyramids by Cray Daniel & Clemmons Maureen

Author:Cray, Daniel & Clemmons, Maureen [Cray, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delcominy Creations, LLC
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five:

The Meeting

I've given a lot of presentations before, but this one was different. I took a deep breath, and after that I don’t remember breathing for twenty minutes. I just slowly outlined everything: the kites, the field tests, even the history and climate of Egypt. I had one of the engineers stand up and try out the ankh, so they could experience its usefulness as a tool for restraint and control of heavy lines and weights. I really put my heart and soul into that presentation.

Finally I paused, and that’s when I got nervous. It hit me in the gut right then: these guys were going to start asking questions, and I was going to have to defend myself against five of Caltech’s top engineers. That was the moment when the fear finally set in. It was all going to come down to whether or not I could survive a question-and-answer session with these great thinkers.

Truth be told, Clemmons felt intimidated from the moment she set foot on the California Institute of Technology campus, which lacks the stately architecture of an Ivy League institution but conveys academic intimidation through building placards, art, and other subtle reminders of its twenty-eight Nobel Prize winners. The fact Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman once wandered the tree-lined quads made Clemmons feel like a rookie outfielder assigned to patrol Babe Ruth’s old spot in Yankee Stadium.

She met Roshko, a slender, clean shaven man with light hair, and he quickly informed her that “the others” were waiting in a nearby room. Clemmons hesitated, thinking, “Others?” She followed him into a conference room that looked like something beige exploded. The walls were beige, the floor was beige, even the conference table was beige. The only things that weren’t beige were the four people sitting at the table. Roshko introduced her to Hans Hornung, the man who had initially replied to her email, and three other department engineers.

At first Clemmons didn’t know what to say. She looked at the group of engineers sitting in front of her, not spread around the table but five in a row, and couldn’t help thinking the scene looked like a military tribunal. As Roshko explained the basic concept of the wind engineering theory to the others, Clemmons wheeled her portable luggage trolley to the table and started unpacking the miniature obelisk, the ankh, samples of the kites she’d used for the field tests, photos of the hieroglyphs, and every scrap of research she had put together.

There was an awkward silence when Roshko finished talking; Clemmons wasn’t certain how to begin. Roshko made it easy: he simply told her to go ahead. “She clearly wasn’t a professional in the field,” says Roshko, “but I had seen the same Nova program about the failed attempt to raise an obelisk, and the idea of using a kite to do the job seemed interesting.” Hornung was thinking much the same thing. “I didn’t look through everything she sent to me, but I had read her

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