Some years ago a geologist and his team were hired by an Anglo/USA investment group to look for possible Oil deposits in an area South of the Valley of the Kings alongside the Nile. After several weeks of surveying their equipment detected an anomaly which, although obviously not an Oil deposit, was reported back to the investors in the usual weekly report summary whereby they were told to ignore it and continue their surveys further South.
Two of the team however decided to stay at the site and excavate whatever it was, about 12ft under the sand. Dreams of finding a lost tomb were shattered when they realised they had unearthed a WW2 bunker, many of which had been found previously in the area and were usually either empty or full of unstable armaments, fuel or tins of food.
One of the investors however asked them to stay longer and see what was inside just out of curiosity. Around a week later they finally got access and found an armoured vehicle that had been damaged and a car.
The investor concerned, a previous client of mine, asked me to go and look. At first I refused and recommended a military vehicle expert but he insisted I went personally. The trip was not an easy one as at the time Egypt was in turmoil and very unstable but after a somewhat precarious 10 day trip through the desert via Aswan I arrived at the site. I was greeted initially with a relatively narrow reinforced bunker in which had been squeezed a German armoured vehicle, had no idea what it was, some sort of half track. After climbing over to get to the car I could not believe what I saw.
Suffice to say that after a great deal of investigation I traced the car to the original purchaser, an English member of the House of Lords that once owned an estate in Surrey who bought the car in 1935. There was no evidence that he had ever participated in the war or had any links to it having been deemed exempt from conscription due to his productive farms etc. I never did find out how the hell the car ended up in pristine condition in a German bunker in the desert. The car eventually sold to a private collector for $1.6m US dollars. The geological team never did find oil.
One of the guys that unearthed the bunker became a life long friend and it was painful to see his gradual and newly acquired addiction to treasure hunting completely overtake his life and pretty much destroy it.
He lost his job, his wife and two children disappeared over the horizon, his house was seized by the bank and just about everything else was taken over a 6 year period whilst looking for all sorts of stuff from Incan artefacts to Confederate gold abandoned during the civil war, all to no avail. He contacted me many times with a variety of ridiculous schemes which I declined but did help him occasionally with enough funds to at least keep him off the streets.
He was born and raised in the everglades with a devil may care attitude that makes him really likeable even if his sanity is questionable.
I can remember an instance one morning when I awoke on the passenger boat we had hired to find him sitting in the shallows of the Nile shaving whilst in his underwear surrounded by a group of huge Crocodiles and when warned of their presence he responded with " Goddam F*cking lizards " and after a cursory glance in their direction carried on shaving.
After his last visit and, on the odd occasion he was sober, listening to yet another highly improbable bid for life changing wealth I heard nothing from him for around 5yrs.
Today however I received an email from him and against all the odds he has unearthed a stash of gold coins and artefacts with a tax and all associated costs paid value of $3.2m US.
I guess it might be prudent to stop criticising my wife's dumbshit useless father for spending untold thousands over the years buying lottery tickets without even having enough money to buy food for his children and never even winning one Dom.
Well, you never know.
