National Geographic Magazine ~ April 2009 . Vol. 215 • No.4

April 2009 The Woman Who Would Be King Why did Hatshepsut decide to rule Egypt as a man?
What motivated Hatshepsut to rule ancient Egypt as a man while her stepson stood in the shadows? Her mummy, and her true story, have come to light. By Chip Brown Photograph by Kenneth Garrett
There was something strangely touching about her fingertips. Everywhere else about her person all human grace had vanished. The raveled linen around her neck looked like a fashion statement gone horribly awry. Her mouth, with the upper lip shelved over the lower, was a gruesome crimp. (She came from a famous lineage of overbites.) Her eye sockets were packed with blind black resin, her nostrils unbecomingly plugged with tight rolls of cloth. Her left ear had sunk into the flesh on the side of her skull, and her head was almost completely without hair.

I leaned toward the open display case in Cairo's Egyptian Museum and gazed at what in all likelihood is the body of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, the extraordinary woman who ruled Egypt from 1479 to 1458 B.C. and is famous today less for her reign during the golden age of Egypt's 18th dynasty than for having the audacity to portray herself as a man. There was no beguiling myrrh perfume in the air, only some sharp and sour smell that seemed minted during the many centuries she had spent in a limestone cave. It was hard to square this prostrate thing with the great ruler who lived so long ago and of whom it was written, "To look upon her was more beautiful than anything." The only human touch was in the bone shine of her nailless fingertips where the mummified flesh had shrunk back, creating the illusion of a manicure and evoking not just our primordial vanity but our tenuous intimacies, our brief and passing feel for the world.

Australia's Dry RunWhat will happen when the climate starts to change and the rivers dry up and a whole way of life comes to an end? The people of the Murray-Darling Basin are finding out right now. By Robert Draper Photograph by Amy Toensing

On the side of a road somewhere in southeastern Australia sits a man in a motionless pickup truck, considering the many ways in which his world has dried up. The two most obvious ways are in plain view. Just beyond his truck, his dairy cattle graze on the roadside grass. The heifers are all healthy, thank God. But there are only 70 of them. Five years ago, he had nearly 500. The heifers are feeding along a public road—"not strictly legal," the man concedes, but what choice does he have? There is no more grass on the farm he owns. His land is now a desert scrub­land where the slightest breeze lifts a hazy wall of dust. He can no longer afford to buy grain, which is evident from the other visible reminder of his plight: the bank balance displayed on the laptop perched on the dashboard of his truck. The man, who has never been rich but also never poor, has piled up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The cows he gazes at through his windshield—that is all the income he has left.

Ice ParadiseThe rich life of Svalbard, Norway’s Arctic archipelago, faces a creeping thaw. By Bruce Barcott Photograph by Paul Nicklen
Five minutes past midnight in Svalbard: The wild world is awake and clattering. At the edge of a sheltered estuary in the Adventdalen, a valley on a cluster of islands halfway between Norway and the North Pole, a flock of arctic terns soar and wheel in the perpetual daylight. They're agitated. A pair of glaucous gulls—chick snatchers, egg stealers, the Arctic's formidable winged predators—are approaching from the east. The terns put up a fierce defense. They flash their red beaks at the gulls and turn themselves into a cloud of sharpness.

The gambit works. The gulls bypass the terns and circle inland, passing over a pair of ground-nesting eiders, a kennel of sled dogs, and a solitary reindeer feeding on the tundra.

The VanishingWe are witnessing a mass extinction. An exotic fungus is delivering the fatal blow to many amphibians already hit by habitat loss, pollution, and climate change. By Jennifer Holland Photograph by Joel Sartore
He grips his mate, front legs clasped tight around her torso. Splayed beneath him like an open hand, she lies with her egg-heavy belly soaking in the shallow stream. They are harlequin frogs of a rare Atelopus species, still unnamed and known only in a thin wedge of the Andean foothills and adjacent Amazonian lowlands. The female appears freshly painted—a black motif on yellow, her underside shocking red. She is also dead.

Above this tableau, at the lip of the ravine, a bulldozer idles. Road construction here, near the town of Limón in southeastern Ecuador, has sent an avalanche of rocks, broken branches, and dirt down the hillside, choking part of the forest-lined stream. Luis Coloma steps gingerly over the loose rocks, inspecting the damage to the water­way. The 47-year-old herpetologist is bespec­tacled and compact in a yellow shirt dotted with tiny embroidered frogs. He hasn't bothered to roll up his khaki pants, which are soaked to the knees. Poking a stick into the debris, he says, "They have destroyed the house of the frog."

Outlook: ExtremeAs the planet warms, look for more floods where it’s already wet and deeper drought where water is scarce. By Elizabeth Kolbert Photograph from China Daily/Reuters/Corbis
The world's first empire, known as Akkad, was founded some 4,300 years ago, between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. The empire was ruled from a city—also known as Akkad—that is believed to have lain just south of modern-day Baghdad, and its influence extended north into what is now Syria, west into Anatolia, and east into Iran. The Akkadians were well organized and well armed and, as a result, also wealthy: Texts from the time testify to the riches, from rare woods to precious metals, that poured into the capital from faraway lands.

Soul of RussiaDriven underground for 75 years, the faith of the Russian tsars now enjoys favored status. By Serge Schmemann Photograph by Gerd Ludwig

The new Russia steadily ebbs away on the drive out of Moscow. The gridlock and pollution, the sprawling malls and billboards of the recent boom years give way to the gray suburbs and rusting factories of the Soviet era. These in turn fade into tall forests of pine and birch, punctuated by meadows and timeless villages of log houses. Now and again a whimsically painted steeple breaks the horizon, its gilded cupola glittering in the bright spring sun. We're back in the glubinka, the "deep" Russia beloved of Slavophiles, exiles, and painters. And we're headed for its very heart.
Code:
http://rapidshare.com/files/224601872/NG_2009-04ab.rar