The Buried Pyramid (49 page)

“We’ll get to them later,” Stephen promised, his fever now purely scholarly. “A history of the occupations of this place would be fascinating.”

“I just hope we don’t need to empty all the sand out of this valley to find Neville’s ruins,” Eddie said grimly. “That would take an army, and even his fortune isn’t up to hiring that much labor.”

Neville heard, but didn’t comment. Stephen had started on the Isis text, proposing to work his way around the four cardinal points, but nothing he had read to them when they’d taken a midday break had seemed particularly promising. Isis certainly was expected to do her part in protecting the area against evildoers, but thus far her role fell neatly within the parameters described in mythology.

Neville had greater hopes for the Osiris texts, since Osiris was the lord of the underworld, but Stephen grew fussy when pressed to change his plans, and Neville was a good enough commander to know when to back down.

It’s not like I haven’t waited this long
, he thought.
And in any case, why would the texts do more than caution? It isn’t like they’re going to provide directions into the tomb where anyone could find them.

But he couldn’t help but hope they would find something. The ancient Egyptians had firmly believed that the dead flourished through contact with the living. Offerings were not mere ritual, but were thought to offer nourishment for the dead. The dead were thought to offer counsel and intervention from their transformed state. Surely, the “good king” would not have been completely cut off from his people.

Surely not.

Jenny wondered if anyone else was aware just how tense Uncle Neville was becoming. She faithfully worked away as a copyist, but she had little hope that the texts would tell them anything. Eddie’s probing around the edges of the valley seemed a more reasonable route toward finding the tomb of Neferankhotep, but it would be several days before Uncle Neville’s sprained ankle would permit him to join Eddie at this work. For now he was restricted to carefully copying the hieroglyphs, and to pretending that he didn’t care if they found anything more than these few texts.

She didn’t believe him. Uncle Neville wasn’t a looter, not even in the way Belzoni or the other early archeologists had been, but somehow, someway finding proof of Neferankhotep’s existence had become irrationally important to him. She also suspected that nothing short of finding the good king’s tomb would satisfy her uncle’s mania. Even if they found the entire legend written on a wall somewhere, he would persist.

Jenny decided to spend some time making careful examinations of the areas surrounding the four statues. Now that she had access to ample water, the climate of the Egyptian winter didn’t bother her a bit. She’d experienced far worse during summers in the southwestern United States and, unlike Stephen, she never forgot to protect exposed skin.

She finished the panel she’d been copying, and brought the finished sketch over to Stephen.

“That’s all of the second one,” she said.

Stephen looked up at her, his expression so blank that she realized his mind was still thinking in Egyptian.

“I’m going to take a break,” she said, “or I’ll be drawing vultures for owls, and confusing ankhs with the Girdle of Isis.”

“That wouldn’t do,” Stephen said, truly appalled for a moment. Then his natural sense of humor reemerged. “We’d be writing ‘wife’ for ‘life.’ ”

Jenny mimed throwing a handful of sand at him, and then paused to decide where to start exploring.

While copying Isis texts, Jenny had been given ample 
opportunity to inspect the area around the statue of that mysterious goddess. Anubis—completely unfairly, she knew—continued to make her skin crawl. Sir Neville had staked out the area near Osiris, and her uncle’s temper was such that Jenny had no desire to remind him by her own crawling and climbing that his impulsiveness was what had shackled him. That left Horus, who offered the added advantage of being directly across the valley from her uncle, and thus completely out of his line of sight.

Therefore, scooping up Mozelle, who was burrowing among Stephen’s notes, Jenny crossed to the eastern edge of the valley.

First she walked around the Horus sculpture, carefully examining it from all angles, trying hard to think like Auguste Dupin and see with her mind as well as her eyes. Neither approach seemed to do much good. Her eyes saw a statue carved from the rocky wall behind it, the stone polished and smoothed so perfectly that she found herself fighting the impulse to believe it had been made not by human hands, but by divine will. Her mind suggested that the statue might hide a door, but she found no indication of this.

What she did find didn’t seem overly useful. From the start it had been evident that the sculpture stood on a base of some sort. Stephen had brushed away the sand that had accumulated around the feet and ankles to see if there were any texts there. What Jenny’s investigation showed her was that the base went a whole lot further down than any of them had realized. She hadn’t carried tools over, but little casual digging showed that it went down a foot without any sign of stopping.

Recalling how the legend told of the valley being buried in sand to hide Neferankhotep’s tomb and all its lavish appointments, Jenny found herself wondering if rather than this being a statue set flush with what they thought of as “ground level,” it might rather be the top of a massive pillar.

Thus far Uncle Neville had not turned from his laborious copying of the text over by Osiris. However, the sun was reaching its noontime height, and soon Eddie would demand that they break for an afternoon siesta. Jenny cast about for Mozelle, and spotted the kitten crouched belly to the sand, intent on a long-tailed lizard that had emerged onto a flat piece of rock.

Amused, Jenny watched as Mozelle began her stalk, golden-brown fur blending perfectly with the sand as long ago the now vanished Egyptian lions must have done. The tip of the kitten’s tail twitched, then her entire rump wiggled in an ecstacy of enthusiasm.

Mozelle leapt too late. The lizard darted away, slipping up and over the sand, dodging into a crevice in the face of the polished panel. That should have ended the hunt, but Mozelle continued scrabbling determinedly at the rock and sand, unwilling to accept that the lizard could go where she could not.

“I believe,” Eddie said, the sound of his voice making Jenny jump, for his soft-soled shoes had made little sound on the sand, “Mozelle wants to be an archeologist. Look at her dig.”

Jenny was wondering if she dared make a more indelicate joke, and had just reluctantly decided that this would be improper when she realized there was something strange about where the kitten was digging.

“Eddie, look,” she said, keeping her voice low, though every fiber of her longed to shout. “The sand is draining away faster than Mozelle’s digging should account for.”

Jenny dropped to her knees and pulled the kitten back. Then she saw a small piece of flat sandstone knocked to one side.

“This crack is longer than it seemed,” she reported, “and either Mozelle or the lizard knocked away the bit of stone that was chinking it. I can hear the sand trickling in somewhere, like there’s a hollow space behind.”

From that moment, translating hieroglyphs took second place to clearing away the sand. Stephen and Neville were called over to view Jenny’s discovery, and were equally excited.

“The stone has been dressed here,” Neville said. “Carefully and so as not to show the marks, but once you know where to look for a seam, it’s quite clear. I think we have found the upper edge of a doorway.”

Jenny didn’t mind that “we,” not one bit, for the tension had melted from Uncle Neville, and his eyes shone with even more intensity than they had done for Lady Cheshire.

Eddie was wise enough to know that this was not the time to insist his charges take their midday break. With Jenny’s assistance, he broke out the gear that had been brought along in case they found anything worth digging after. Among the most useful items were a selection of wide, shallow baskets, tightly woven enough that they could be used to carry away sand. Although bulky as individual items, the baskets could be nested inside each other, and so Eddie had brought a good many.

This proved wise, for moving sand was their primary task. They shoved, swept, and even scooped with their hands, but there was no rapid way to clear the stuff, and soon all had been given ample demonstration of sand’s insidious ability to trickle, to collapse, and to otherwise make itself persistently difficult to remove.

After a time, they yielded to Eddie’s persuasion that they would get more done if they were rested and cool. Back beneath the shelter of the camel-hair pavilion, Sir Neville presented Mozelle with a sliver of roasted mutton.

“I take back everything I ever said about this kitten, Jenny,” he said, his high good humor evident, perhaps because despite his exertions the swelling in his ankle had not increased appreciably. “Mozelle has earned herself a lifetime of cream and mice once we return to England.”

Jenny smiled, and scratched the little cat between its tawny ears, obliging with a tummy tickle when Mozelle rolled sleepily onto her back.

“To think,” Stephen added, “the entire interior wall here could be honeycombed with doors hidden beneath that sand, and we would never have known.”

“Don’t say that,” Jenny requested with a shiver that had nothing to do with the lengthening shadows. “It gives me goose pimples just thinking about it. What if they should all open at once?”

“They’d fill with sand,” Stephen said dryly.

Removing the sand proved to be only part of the job, carrying it away was another—one that devolved largely on Jenny and Eddie, for Stephen still needed to avoid the sun and so was delegated to digging beneath a tarpaulin erected to assure shade. Sir Neville, also restricted to digging, insisted that the sand be carried to the “plain” at the center of the valley.

“Otherwise we may end up moving it all again to get at something else along the edge, or the least breath of wind may blow it back.”

The camels were drafted for some of this labor, but human hands had to carry the stuff, and human arms and backs to lift and load it. Within a few hours, Jenny’s back ached abysmally, and she was having second thoughts about her find. Copying had been dull, but decidedly unpainful.

She was almost grateful when Eddie ordered her in the most matter-of-fact way possible to return to camp and cook the evening meal. He had shot another goat earlier that morning, but the flat bread—more a cracker than a bread by this time—beans, and dried fruit that were to accompany the meat needed preparation.

When dusk forced them to stop, they had the upper portion of a doorway cleared. Based on other structures of that type, Neville seemed confident they would be finished the next day. They had also uncovered along the sides of the door a short series of incised hieroglyphs accompanied by sunken relief pictures. Stephen had made a quick sketch of these, which he now tilted to the firelight to better study them.

“I can’t work out the entire meaning,” he said, “since the text runs top to bottom, and so I’m missing a good half. What I can read seems to indicate that entrance through this door is forbidden to all but those confident in the justice of their actions.”

“Another curse,” Neville asked, masking a yawn, “or a more specific warning?”

“It seems to be just another warning or curse,” Stephen admitted. “The writing on the other side of the doorway has something to do with sand. I can’t guess what that has to do with anything. It’s in a different hand, and the writing is less deeply incised, and in a later style.”

“Like what we saw at the Hawk Rock?” Jenny asked.

“Very similar,” Stephen said, folding the cover shut over his notes. “I should light a lantern and go finish my copying, but I will admit gratitude that Neville has forbidden gratuitous burning of oil. I, for one, am a spent candle. I understand why most excavators hire native help.”

“We couldn’t have done that this time,” Jenny reminded him. “We didn’t know for sure that we were going to find anything.”

“And,” Eddie said, staring over where the statue of Anubis kept its silent watch, “it might not have been wise.”

No one chose to comment on the warning implicit in Eddie’s statement. Since they had arrived in the Valley of Dust, it had become increasingly difficult to believe in the world without. Their entire existence seemed to have been bounded by the golden glow of the curving sandstone cliffs. The lush green Nile on which they had so recently traveled had become nothing more than a rather unlikely and extravagant dream.

Eddie, however, continued watchful, and until full darkness fell, he frequently strolled to one or more of the watch posts from which he had earlier established he could see out of the valley and into the surrounding desert.