Thirty-Two
N eil followed the black-cloaked form of Sayyid’s wife down the mountain, hoping he wasn’t about to plummet to his doom. The path Zeinab picked along the steep face of stone would barely have accommodated a cat. It followed the line of an ancient washout rife with loose stones and slender ledges that fell straight down to the hard floor of the wadi.
The light from Julian’s lanterns washed over the walls perhaps two hundred yards ahead, which still felt far too close. Voices echoed from the excavation site, laughing heartily or calling out orders before another spill of spoil was tipped over the ledge to rattle down into the gorge.
Neil’s calves ached. His boots found every loose stone with an uncanny accuracy. He lost track of the number of times someone glared back at him in a silent imprecation to keep quiet.
He was keeping quiet. The cliff was making all the noise.
When they finally reached the ground, Neil breathed out a sigh of relief—one that cut short when he looked up at the wall of sheer, ragged stone that they now needed to climb on the opposite side.
Sayyid’s wife led them up another precarious route of steep runnels and narrow perches that wound them back in the direction of Julian’s excavation. The sounds of the dig grew louder as they neared it. Neil flinched at the bark of a rough cough and the crack of the pickaxes.
They rounded another turn, and Neil faced a moonlight-washed depression that looked as though it had been scooped out of the top of the ridge by the hand of a giant. The ledge was framed on three sides by steep, high walls of stone. On the fourth, the land fell away precipitously to the canyon floor.
The rest of the group tucked themselves into hiding places behind the boulders as they surveyed the terrain. Only Neil lingered—until Adam’s hand clamped onto his shoulder and yanked him behind the cover of a ragged crust of limestone.
“Where does your hundred and ninety feet take us, exactly?” Zeinab demanded of Adam in a low murmur.
Adam crept forward to join her, keeping to the shadows with the grace of a jaguar. “Right there.” He pointed a little beyond the center of the hollow curve of the rock, near to where Julian’s lights spilled up from beyond a slight rise in the landscape.
Neil regarded the spot as his heart leapt, thudding powerfully at the base of his throat. Was it really possible that somewhere among those scattered boulders and pools of wind-blown sand lay the final resting place of one of the most mysterious and important pharaohs in Egyptian history?
The answers to so many puzzles must lie in Neferneferuaten’s tomb—not the least of which was the true identity of the pharaoh herself. If Akhenaten’s queen, Nefertiti, had indeed risen to rule in her own right after the death of her husband, her origin story remained rife with mysteries. No one knew who her parents had been. She had arrived in Egyptian royal life seemingly out of nowhere, rising from obscurity to claim first the love of a king, then the most powerful position in the empire.
Zeinab frowned with wary displeasure as she regarded the place Adam pointed out. “What are we looking for?”
“If there is a tomb here, the entrance would most likely have been dug into the cliff and then covered in rubble,” Sayyid replied from where he hid a little further back under the shadow of the looming cliff.
Ellie crept forward to peer down into the barren, silent hollow. “I don’t see much rubble.”
“The Egyptians were very clever about disguising their tomb entrances,” Sayyid returned. “We might have to look from exactly the right angle to see it.”
“Then we will spread out and search,” Zeinab declared.
Nobody questioned her order. The others—even the gangly young apprentice and the stout old fishwife—slipped down the rest of the steep, awkward distance to the floor of the depression.
As they reached the bottom, Constance set her hands on her hips and studied the curved wall of stone that framed their perch. The crown of the ridge rose perhaps forty feet overhead. “Someone really ought to scale the cliffs. There’s no reason the Egyptians couldn’t have dug their tomb a little further up.”
“I’m good,” Adam demurred flatly.
Constance’s gaze shifted deliberately to Neil.
“I… uh…” Neil started uncomfortably.
“I will do it,” Jemmahor cut in, adjusting the strap of the rifle that hung over her back before striding away. Neil watched the young woman find a grip on the stones and haul herself up.
“I’ll take the side by the bad guys.” Adam glanced over at Ellie as she let out a soft huff of irritation. “What?”
“Of course you are. And I’m going with you,” she replied, and the pair set off.
Zeinab moved along the base of the cliffs like a flicker of black shadow. Constance started off toward another section, then stopped to glance back. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I…” Neil turned his head to realize that Sayyid had wandered away from them, lingering at the place where the ground fell away into the canyon. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
Neil crossed over to his foreman—or was that his former foreman? The thought carried a healthy burst of guilt along with it. He looked down over the drop into the wadi. Even though the ledge stood only a little over halfway up the height of the ridge, the floor of the canyon still looked very far away.
It should have been easy to break the silence that lingered as he and Sayyid stood beside each other, but Neil found himself struggling to open a conversation. Everything that came into his mind sounded painfully awkward. The truth was, he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he should say to Sayyid. Should he apologize for the way his sister had come barreling in to overturn the man’s life? Or for that wretched note he had sent to Julian Forster-Mowbray?
He wanted to tell Sayyid how much he wished he could go back to those months in Saqqara where they had worked side-by-side together in such comfort… but sensed the declaration wouldn’t be entirely welcome.
“The bottom of the wadi looks oddly flat, doesn’t it?” Neil offered instead.
Sayyid frowned down at the pale surface of the canyon floor. “I suppose,” he distantly agreed.
They both kept their voices low. Neil was still painfully conscious of the lamplight spilling into the canyon from Julian’s dig, which was just around the bend from where they stood.
“It almost looks like a road,” Neil mused.
Sayyid opened his mouth to respond, and the furrow in his brow cleared, his eyes widening. “It is a road,” he observed wonderingly.
Neil felt a spark of scholarly inspiration. “And that slight rise in the grade over there? I mean, it could just be a natural declination—but one might almost imagine it to be a ramp of some sort.”
“But why build a ramp in the middle of a canyon?” Sayyid returned carefully. “This hardly seems the place for chariot races.”
“Maybe they were dragging something along,” Neil replied a little absently.
Something about the notion felt right.
Sayyid finally turned to look at him, his eyes narrowing with interest. “And what might they have been dragging?”
Ellie popped into place between them, leaning out over the ledge. “Goodness! Doesn’t that look rather like the road at the quarry of Hatnub?”
Neil blinked at her in surprise while Sayyid raised his eyebrows.
“That ramp there would have been for dragging larger cuts of stone. Look—you can see the stairs cut to either side of it,” Ellie elaborated.
She pointed, and Neil realized that he could see them. The steps were pale lines of light and shadow marking out a narrow space to either side of the softly graded ribbon of packed earth.
“But what do they need steps for?” Neil had to work to keep his voice down.
“For pushing along large slabs by pole and sledge, of course,” Ellie returned. “Didn’t you read Griffith and Newberry’s report on the tombs at El Bersheh?”
“Of course I did,” Neil retorted. “But I don’t remember anything about poles and sledges.”
“Well, it was more of a passing mention,” Ellie said dismissively. “Only it does suggest the most intriguing theory about how the Egyptians might have used similar technology to raise blocks high enough to build the pyramids.”
Only Ellie would manage to file a passing mention in an obscure excavation report away in her brain like a neatly coded library card, ready to pull out at the slightest peripheral reference. She had always had a prodigious knack for recalling anything that she had read.
That skill would have made her a formidable archaeologist in the field… had such a position ever been open to her.
She planted her hands on her hips, turning around to survey the cliff-ringed bowl with a frown. “We have been all the way around the walls, and there are no substantial piles of rubble to speak of—only boulders and sand. I cannot see anywhere that someone might have concealed a royal tomb.”
Neil wondered if he ought to feel disappointed.
He was not immune to dreams of finding the lost tomb of an important pharaoh. What Egyptologist didn’t hope to make the sort of discovery that would revolutionize the entire field? But Neil had always imagined himself doing it the proper way—in the broad light of day with an official concession from the government granting him permission to excavate.
First, there would be weeks of careful survey. When he finally uncovered the entrance to the tomb, he would be surrounded by government officials and newspaper reporters—along with his sponsors, of course. He could envision the speech he would have given.
I am honored to recover this lost evidence of Egypt’s noble history, and I look forward to the wisdom and enlightenment that its careful study can grant to the scholars of the world.
Instead, he was creeping through the dark with a band of lady revolutionaries.
“I might have been wrong about the cubits,” Sayyid admitted with a frown.
“I honestly don’t think you were,” Ellie insisted, then twitched the fabric of her skirt. “Oh! I seem to have acquired a passenger.”
She shifted the folds of gray poplin, exposing the shining black carapace of a very large beetle clinging to her hem.
“Aeerrggh!” Sayyid exclaimed, taking an instinctive, panicked step back—which put him very near to tumbling off the edge of the cliff.
Neil caught him by the sleeve of his coat.
“It’s just a scarab,” Ellie protested.
The insect was the length of Neil’s index finger, fat and glossy in the moonlight. Even he had to admit that it was larger than the usual type.
“But are there any more of them?” Sayyid pressed urgently. “Are any of them trying to climb my trousers?”
“I don’t see any on your trousers.” Ellie gave the fabric of her skirt a neat shake. In response, the scarab spread its wings and buzzed loose.
Sayyid ducked. “Where did it go?”
“It’s all right,” Ellie assured him. “It flew off that way.”
She pointed across the depression in the vague direction of the continuing rattle and clanging of Julian’s dig.
“Alhamdulillah,” Sayyid noted with a fervent sigh of relief.
Neil was only half listening to him. He was still staring in the direction where the scarab had flown as something tickled at the back of his brain. The uncomfortable itch reminded him of the feeling he’d had when he first stood on the plain at Saqqara and looked at the place Sayyid had flagged out for their dig.
Not there , he had thought automatically. An irresistible tug had pulled at him from thirty meters to the southwest, where he could picture pylons and painted walls rising from the sand. There.
There, something whispered at him again as he gazed out over the still, moonlight-washed landscape. It felt like a flicker of movement—the soft slap of sandaled feet on sun-dry stone. Skin brushed with dust. Exhaustion mingling with purpose.
Neil followed it without quite realizing that he was moving.
“Where are you going?” Ellie demanded behind him.
“I just…” Neil trailed off distractedly—and then kept walking.
Sayyid’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He cast Ellie a questioning look, and she frowned, but the pair fell into step behind Neil as he picked his way across the hollow.
He stopped in front of a large, flat boulder that hung suspended over the ground, the opening beneath it taking the form of a thin black gap. The shiny carapace of the scarab glittered against the surface of the rock. The bug wiggled its antennae at his approach before skittering over the stone and disappearing beneath it.
“Neil?” Ellie asked in a low and fairly urgent whisper. “What are we doing here?”
The sound of her voice pulled Neil out of a fog. He realized where he had come to stand—just below the natural wall that separated the hollow from Julian Forster-Mowbray’s dig site. He was close enough that he could see where the yellow glare of Julian’s lanterns painted the top of the stones. Individual voices emerged from the murmuring clamor of activity—Dawson’s peevish complaints distinguishing themselves from the laughter of a pair of Al-Saboors.
Neil startled, coming back to himself sharply. This was the last place he wanted to be. Should anyone from Julian’s excavation wander uphill, he would be immediately visible to them, spotlit like a bug under a looming shoe.
“I… I don’t…” He trailed off as something about the boulder beside him tugged irresistibly at the back of his mind—then blurted out the rest, both embarrassed by the words and utterly certain that they were true. “There’s something here.”
Sayyid’s gaze was quietly thoughtful.
Ellie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “There’s no rubble here that could conceal a tomb entrance.”
She was right. Constructing a tomb was a massive undertaking. Any entrance would have needed to be large and accessible enough for transporting hundreds of tons of spoil carved from the core of the mountain, never mind the myriad grave goods that would accompany a royal burial.
His mind still rang quietly with the sound of sandaled footsteps.
With a burst of irrational determination, Neil crawled beneath the boulder.
The ground sloped softly downward, forming a little cave just high enough for Neil to move from wriggling on his stomach to a crouch. The space was black as pitch.
“Does anyone have a light?” he asked awkwardly, whispering back at the pale line of the gap he had crawled through.
He heard rustling cloth and quick, soft footsteps. A moment later, Ellie’s hand thrust into the opening, holding one of Zeinab’s shuttered lanterns. She lowered her face down to peer in at him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Neil’s first instinct was to brush her off, but the careful concern in her tone held him back. He realized what she must be seeing—her rational, cautious brother crouching in a claustrophobic hole for no apparent reason.
Was he fine?
“I just… want to take a look,” he returned awkwardly.
He carefully slid open the shutter on the lamp.
Golden light flooded the space around him, revealing the jagged underbelly of the boulder… and a small army of shining black scarabs.
“Oh bugger,” Neil bit out, then threw himself down as the insects took flight, whizzing furiously around the tight space.
They shot around him in a hissing storm… and then spilled into a dark, ragged crack in the ground nearby.
“What was that?” Sayyid demanded nervously from outside.
“Er… nothing?” Neil offered back unconvincingly.
He crawled to his knees, moving over to the edge of the fissure. The dark opening zigzagged across the stone like a bolt of black lightning, widening to perhaps eighteen inches before thinning to a jagged line.
A lingering black scarab crawled over the side of the gap and disappeared.
Neil had never been particularly bothered by bugs, unlike his foreman. He still found that he had to steel himself against an instinctive sense of horror in order to carefully lower the lantern into the hole.
A beetle flew out of the fractured stone, buzzing at Neil’s face. He shooed at it furiously with his free hand, biting out a curse. Then he brought the lantern lower and the flickering light washed over what lay inside the ragged fissure.
He was only vaguely aware of rustling of cloth behind him. A moment later, Ellie slid into place at his side.
“What is it?” she asked.
Neil stared into a cavity that went down, down, down into the heart of the mountain, its lamplight-washed walls peppered here and there with the iridescent bodies of lingering scarabs.
“We need to go in there,” he declared, his voice tight with both certainty and unease.