The Buried Pyramid (37 page)

Neville frowned. “I don’t mind playing out this charade, Eddie, but will it leave you time to finalize our arrangements?”

“Already taken care of,” Eddie assured him. “I’ve had a note from the fellow who’s meeting us with the camels, and he’s on his way to the rendezvous. Reis Awad has agents who handle purchasing for the
Mallard
, and I’ve given them our shopping list. Nothing could be more innocent.”

Neville had to be satisfied with this. He even began to enjoy the touring. Luxor was rapidly becoming the second most famous area in Egypt, and its attractions were more apparent than they had been a decade before. Separately, both Jenny and Stephen shared with him their desire to return someday when they would have more time, and he didn’t really blame them.

But I have something to do first, before I can rest and tour other people’s achievements. I need to achieve something of my own goals.

A few days after their arrival, Reis Awad came into port. He was a short man, stocky, but nimble as a monkey. With considerable pride, he took them on a tour of the Mallard. Like all vessels of her kind, she was flat-bottomed, equipped either for sailing or rowing.

“And when the wind fails us,” Awad said, “we track.”

He showed them the long lines used for towing the dahabeeyah from the bank.

“My sailors pull,” he explained when Stephen looked mystified. “It work very well, but maybe you not see this. The wind is sweet and steady from the south this time of year, Allah willing—and we not go so far.”

Reis Awad was too polite to state his curiosity openly, and though Neville felt that he could be trusted, Eddie’s constant warnings about caution were having their effect. Neville just smiled and ignored the implied question. Let Awad think this was just another mad English venture. In truth, was it anything but?

Maybe,
Neville thought, remembering old Alphonse Liebermann,
a mad Teutonic venture.

The next day they moved aboard the
Mallard
. The cabins for passengers were aft, a roof built between them providing an upper deck furnished as an outdoor sitting room with its own removable canopy. Below was a many-windowed saloon for times when the outdoors might be too hot or windy to be pleasant. The cabins were tiny, but furnished with all the civilized amenities.

“I feel like I’m a little girl playing house,” Jenny said, looking at the miniature perfection of her cabin. “I wish we were staying aboard for more than a few days.”

Neville was tempted to suggest she do just that, for he still felt a great deal of concern about taking her into the desert. However, he knew Jenny would be indignant if he did, and doubtless there would be a wrangle. There had already been one over the kitten. Before surrendering to Neville’s command that she leave the kitten at the hotel, Jenny had proven herself more willing to argue or sulk than to burst into ladylike tears, and Neville didn’t know if he wanted the Arab crewmen to see him permitting such behavior.

Though Eddie would be sleeping on the foredeck with the members of the crew, he used the excuse of helping them settle into their cabins to brief them.

“Most of Reis Awad’s business is ferrying tourists from Luxor to the nearby sites, so he’s done himself proud with all the trims that appeal to Europeans. There are cooking facilities near the foremast, and as long as the wind holds, you won’t be bothered by smoke. The cook’s good, too. He did a few years in one of the big Cairo hotels, and knows how infidels like their food prepared.”

“You’ve found us a fine boat,” Neville said. “Given that I would have settled for speed and a reliable crew, this luxury is almost too much.”

Eddie grinned. “Just helping out the family. Awad’s a cousin, after all.” He grew serious. “From Miriam’s father’s side of the family—no connection to those peculiar Bedouin.”

Neville needed to return to the hotel to settle their bill and pick up some clothing the hotel laundry hadn’t had ready when they’d packed. When Neville reentered the lobby, the clerk at the front desk reached into the maze of pigeon holes behind him.

“A letter came for you when you were out, Sir Neville,” he said. “It was delivered by hand.”

Neville looked at the handwriting on the outer envelope at first with eagerness, but recognition brought with it no joy, only a sensation of dread.

“You say it was delivered by hand?”

“Yes. Some street urchin. That is not uncommon, sir. There are so many steamers this time of year, not to mention the dahabeeyahs and the regular land post. Letters get mis-routed, and then some child gets to earn his dinner running them to their correct destinations.”

Neville accepted the envelope, tucking it unopened into an inner pocket. He settled the bill, collected his package of laundry, tipped the clerk, and headed back to the
Mallard
.

Jenny and Stephen were ensconced on the upper deck, watching the activity in the busy harbor while ostensibly improving Jenny’s knowledge of hieroglyphs.

“We had a letter today,” Neville said after greetings had been exchanged.

Jenny looked up from her lesson book.

“From Papa Antonio?” she asked. “I believe he is the only one who knew where we planned to stay.”

She glanced at Stephen as she spoke, with such an obvious undertone in her voice that it made Neville defensive.

Jenny can’t know I told Lady Cheshire we were going to the pyramids at Gizeh. Then again, maybe Mrs. Syms said something, and she does know. She certainly suspects.

He dropped the envelope on the table, indignant in his injured innocence.

“It is not from Papa Antonio,” he said.

“The Sphinx!” Stephen murmured excitedly.

“I should have known,” Jenny said with mock boredom. “He is the only one who ever writes me.”

Stephen slit open the envelope and seemed pleased rather than otherwise to find the missive was again enciphered. Turning to a blank page in her sketch book, Jenny made a clean copy.

“The last word can’t be Sphinx!” Jenny said in alarm. “It doesn’t have the right number of letters.”

“He gave us one letter,” Stephen said soothingly. “An eye for an ‘I,’ if use in the last missive to include that symbol holds constant. That’s a vowel and a common one, too. Surely we can solve the cipher from there.”

Jenny looked doubtful, but obediently wrote the letter ‘I’ under each of the Eye of Horus emblems.

They all stared blankly at the page, then Stephen said, “I would hazard a guess that neither letters nor numbers progress in order. Therefore, effectively, each is simply a blank symbol. He could have drawn squares and triangles or little stick figures and they would have served as well.”

Neville snorted, “And doubtless it will come to that if we don’t find him out and shake sense out of him.”

Stephen smiled. “I’ll make another guess. The most frequently repeated pattern is 12-W-11. It occurs four times—including, perhaps significantly, at the beginning of the missive.”

He held up a finger when Jenny would have interrupted. “Moreover, 12-W occurs in two other places, suggesting that these letters are frequently found in conjunction. Let’s see what happens when we fill in ‘the’ for 12-W-11, substituting wherever those numbers occur.”

Jenny did so, and before either man could speak she said, “The second to last word must be ‘either’—which gives us the ‘R.’ ”

No one objected, so she filled in the letter. Then Neville laughed shortly and pointed to a pair of letters.

“Eye-F,” he said, “must be ‘is.’ We know 12 stands for ‘T,’ which rules out ‘it.’ ‘F’ is the last letter of four words, which is reasonable if it is ‘T,’ but not if it’s ‘N.’ ”

“And the Sphinx,” Stephen added, “has very helpfully used ‘F’ as his cipher symbol which rules out ‘if.’ ”

Jenny filled in the “S,” and they stared for a long, silent moment.

“Sense of the phrase,” Stephen said, “can be as useful as frequency of letters or grammatical clues. Think about the word ‘either.’ It implies a comparison. We have a four letter word preceding it, ruling out ‘or’—even if word order would admit such clumsy phrasing. I would suggest ‘than’ fits both the letters we have, and the sense of the phrase.”

“Oh, good,” Jenny said, scribbling away, “that gives us two more letters—and one of them is a vowel.”

“If ‘than’ is correct,” Neville said, “the final word must be ‘one’ and that supplies us with the ‘O.’ ”

“It’s beginning to make sense,” Jenny gloated, her pencil flying across the paper. “Take a look.”

Steven examined the partially completed cipher.

“ ‘The -a--a- trai-s the -ion.’ The letter ‘X’ occurs three times there. Either ‘L’ or ‘N’ would work in ‘trai-’, but we already have ‘N.’ ”

“So it must be ‘L,’ ” Jenny concluded triumphantly. 
“The -a--al trails the lion.”

“Jackal!” Neville said, so loudly that several of Reis Awad’s sailors looked nervously toward the shore.

Each of them felt a chill of horror as they recalled their nocturnal burglars.

“Got it,” Jenny said, keeping her voice down as she filled in the new letters. “ ‘The -ockin--ir- -is-laces the ro-ins e--,’ ” she continued. “There sure are a lot of sixes in that line.”

“A double letter,” Stephen said. “Not overly common in English, especially when you eliminate most of the letters we already have.”

“ ‘G’ ” stated Neville. “It has to be ‘G.’ That makes the final word ‘egg.’ I’ll bet my estate that the long word is ‘mockingbird.’ ”

“Another bird right after that,” Jenny said, already filling in. “Robin.”

“The mockingbird somethings the robin’s egg,” Stephen said. “ ‘Displaces’ would be my guess.”

“Looks good. We almost have it,” Jenny said, continuing to pencil in. “Could the next word be ‘love’?”

Neville noticed that she very carefully did not look at him as she said this, and didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or annoyed. He settled for reading the completed message aloud.

“ ‘The jackal trails the lion. The mockingbird displaces the robin’s egg. Love is more dangerous than either one.’ Why bother to encipher this at all? It doesn’t make any sense even translated.”

Jenny frowned at him. “You’re going to be angry with me, Uncle, but I’d say that it makes perfect sense—and fits in with the Sphinx’s other messages quite neatly.”

Stephen frowned. “I thought that cuckoos were the birds that pushed eggs out of other bird’s nests, not mockingbirds.”