The Buried Pyramid (19 page)

Everyone was looking at him, so he must make some reply.

“I think you are mistaken, dear lady,” he said lightly. “We are mere tourists, not explorers.”

“Oh.” Even puzzled, Lady Cheshire was impossibly fetching. “Babette said something about having been with Miss Benet’s maid when the maid was taking clothing out of one of the trunks. Babette said she saw a quantity of what looked like field gear, and mentioned it to me.”

Neville made himself smile easily.

“Of course I brought some field gear,” he said. “English equipment is some of the best. I thought about setting up some sort of trade with the archeological community.”

“Samples then?” Lady Cheshire asked.

“Of a sort,” Neville replied, wondering why he felt embarrassed. It must be presenting himself as a common tradesman that did it. “In any case, I have Jenny to consider. The desert is no place for a young lady.”

“Ah, there you are wrong, Sir Neville,” Lady Cheshire said. She put a finger under her chin, and smiled playfully at him. “That is, unless you count
me
an old hag. I accompanied my dear Ambrose on several of his digs, and I thought the desert enchanting and romantic.”

“Nasty, hot, sandy places, deserts,” muttered Mrs. Syms. Then she brightened, “The Arabs’ horses were lovely as gazelles, though, and twice as smart as their owners. Camels are nasty, smelly beasts.”

Neville hardly heard her. He was battling several conflicting responses. Lady Cheshire’s flirtatiousness seemed to call for a response, but he was all too aware that Captain Brentworth had set down his wine glass, and rested his hands on the edge of the table, as if at the least provocation he would leap to his feet.

Neville settled for sounding stodgy.

“But you were a proper married woman, Lady Cheshire. Jenny is unmarried, and her American ways leave her open to misinterpretation.”

Now Jenny was glowering at him, but Captain Brentworth had relaxed and picked up his glass again. Lady Cheshire looked thoughtful.

“If you were to travel,” she said, “perhaps Sarah and I could offer ourselves as female companionship for Miss Benet. She has her maid, of course, but no one who is her social equal.”

Neville felt that here, at least, he could respond in a fashion that would offend no one.

“I shall keep your kind offer in mind.”

“And another armed man would be of assistance,” Captain Brentworth said stiffly, almost as if rehearsed. “The ruins by night can be quite dangerous.”

Jenny cut in here, her tone playful, even, Neville realized with a trace of shock, coquettish.

“But Captain Brentworth, why ever would we go out at night? How could we read the inscriptions or enjoy the beauty of the carvings and paintings that adorn the monuments?”

Captain Brentworth seemed immune to Jenny’s attempt at charm.

“Haven’t I seen you reading those books on Egypt? Don’t you realize that much touring is done when the sun is low? That often means returning, if not by night, at least in twilight.”

Lady Cheshire added much more kindly, “One of my favorite passages is Champollion’s description of the enchantment he felt at visiting Dendera by moonlight. Torchlight gives the scene charm as well, and when the shadows dance, it almost seems as if the sculptures are moving.”

From that point, the question of where the Hawthorne party was going or whether Lady Cheshire and her companions might accompany them was dropped. Instead, those who had been to Egypt before vied with each other to tell the first timers about the delights that awaited them.

They lingered over sherbets and thick Turkish coffee, but Neville felt that hardly any time had passed when Stephen pulled his watch from his pocket.

“Look at the time!” he exclaimed. “And we’ve an early train to catch. I fear we must excuse ourselves. Otherwise we’ll overstay our welcome and fail to be enter-training.”

He grinned foolishly, and the party broke up with disparaging remarks about punsters.

Once they returned to the upper floor, Neville went to his room. Maybe his afternoon nap had rested him too thoroughly, or maybe he had indulged in one too many cups of the deceptively strong coffee. Whatever the reason, he could not sleep, though he did dream.

Before the sun had fully risen the next morning, Neville and his companions had departed Alexandria on a rattling train. Almost all of its length was given over to cargo, but the passenger compartments were comfortable almost to the point of decadence.

“The other side,” Uncle Neville said to Jenny, “of that debt we were discussing shipboard. Not all the money the Egyptians have borrowed from Europe has gone to simple modernization. The ruling class has an Oriental taste for splendor, verging on decadence. Colonel Travers tells me that this car was taken in payment for debts from a Turkish princeling.”

Jenny frowned, but rather to her uncle’s surprise didn’t pursue the argument. Now that he thought about it, she had been distracted and quiet since they had met for breakfast. He attributed her quiet to a sleepless night like his own, leaned his head back against the plush velvet, and wondered if attempting to sleep or ordering more coffee would be the wiser course of action.

Most of the other passengers were destined for military or government posts in Cairo. Some were already posted there and had come to Alexandria on business. These were enjoying flaunting their senior residency to the newcomers, and amid this game of precedence, Colonel Travers’s guests were left to their own devices. Even Mrs. Travers and Mary had made their apologies and left. Apparently, some general’s wife was also traveling by this train, and had invited them to ride with her in what was apparently an even more elaborate car.

Sleep wouldn’t quite come, so Neville was drowsily watching the panorama ofthe
fellahin
, the native Egyptian peasants, planting their freshly fertilized fields when he was jolted to full alertness by the approach of a junior officer, not one of those who had traveled with Colonel Travers, but a stranger.

“Sir Neville?” the officer inquired, raising his voice to carry over the rumble of the train.

“Yes?” Neville replied, trying not to sound as if he had been half-asleep.

The young man extended a slightly grubby envelope.

“This letter is addressed to you, but apparently became mixed up in our post. I apologize for not delivering it to you sooner, but we only just realized the error.”

Neville accepted the envelope.

“No problem at all, Lieutenant. Thank you for taking the trouble to deliver it.”

When the soldier had departed, Neville stared down at the envelope, vaguely troubled. It was addressed to him aboard
Neptune’s Charger
.

With a sense of foreboding, he slit the envelope open, aware that Stephen had laid down his book, and that though Jenny’s pencil continued to move across her sketch pad, the majority of her attention was for him.

What if it were a personal letter?
he thought, indignantly. Then he realized that they could easily have seen the address when the lieutenant had handed the envelope over, and so had every right to be interested.

In a less guarded manner, Neville slid the paper from the envelope, unfolding it so the text was visible to them all. There was silence as they stared at the string of block letters interspersed apparently at random with the simple yet elegant symbol known as the Eye of Horus.

“Heavens!” was all Jenny could manage. Stephen whistled.

Neville glanced around, but no other passenger was occupying the nearer seats. The closest person was a rather portly civil servant, asleep with a newspaper over his face.

“M. Dupin,” Neville said, “Jenny, what do you make of it?”

Jenny leaned forward and turned the paper so she could look at it right-side up.

“Uncle Neville, do you have either of the other letters we received with you—and their envelopes?”

Neville removed the two missives in hieroglyphs from where he carried them in an inside pocket of his coat.

Jenny studied them for a moment, her gaze flashing back and forth between the envelopes and the new letter.

“It is hard to be certain,” she said, “given the different types of characters, but the envelopes make me certain. These were written by the same person.”

Stephen nodded. “I agree. You know, this mishmash of letters rather recalls the cipher Legrand discovered in Poe’s tale ‘The Gold Bug.’ I’ll hazard a guess that this newest missive is in a substitution code of some sort, and that the base language in which it is written—as with the first two missives—is English.”

Jenny turned her sketchbook to a new page and made a quick copy of the new letter, leaving large spaces between the lines so they could insert their guesses. With a flourish, she concluded by printing “SPHINX” over the final group of letters.

“That,” she said with satisfaction, “is my guess. If I’m correct, we now have five consonants and a vowel.”

“Bravo!” Stephen said. “Fill in those wherever they occur. We could get another insight from seeing what comes out.”

“I wonder,” Neville said, watching Jenny’s fingers fly over the page, “why he used the Eye of Horus rather than simply another letter for ‘I’? The coincidence between ‘I’ and ‘eye’ is too great to be ignored.”

Stephen grinned, “To be confusing, I think. Or maybe to be helpful.”

“You can’t have it both ways,” Neville protested.

“I can,” Stephen insisted. “If our correspondent wanted to confuse us, mixing in a symbol along with the more usual letters would do it. We might have spent hours discussing the Eye of Horus as a protective charm, or the symbol’s history, or its meaning as a hieroglyph in the Egyptian language.”

“And if he wanted to be helpful?”

“Does he know for certain that we’ve figured out Sphinx is his
nom de plume
?” Stephen asked. “He does not, for certainly I have not told him. Therefore, he needs to provide us with one letter to help us on our way. He supplies the letter ‘I’ in symbol form—a pun on ‘I,’ I might say. ‘I’ is not only a letter, but it is one that occurs in the final word in each missive. Therefore, he gives us a clue to that final word.”

“I suppose you could be correct,” Neville said dubiously. “Why this change in format?”

“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “Perhaps the text when translated will give us some hint. What do we have, Miss Benet?”

Jenny showed them.

--I--/---/----/---N/---N--/---/---I---/N-/-N-/-N--S/-H--/---/S---
/-HIN-/--/---/---I-N/---/---IN/--N---/SPHINX

“Something springs to mind right away,” Neville said. “ ‘N’ followed by a space must be ‘no.’ Something of the same pattern comes immediately after. I am willing to hazard that this must be ‘one.’ ”

“Bravo!” Stephen said eagerly. “Two vowels! Fill them in, Miss Benet.”

Jenny was already doing so, pencil working back and forth between text and crib with a speed only moderated by the need to be perfectly accurate. She held up the end result, frowning slightly.

--I-E -O- H--E -EEN ---NE- -O- -E-IE--E NO ONE -NO--S -H-- -O- SEE- -HIN- -E -RE -E-ION -O- --E IN --N-ER SPHINX

“Several words are almost complete,” she said. “Blank-E-E--N. -S-E-E-blank.”