The Buried Pyramid (46 page)

The rock ridge seemed to go on forever. The rocks started getting larger, so Jenny realized that their assessment of the ridge’s height had been all wrong. They’d been judging as if the rocks at the top were just about the size of the ones at the bottom, while actually some were so big she had to go around them rather than over. That meant squeezing through some tight gaps and hoping the cobras were sleeping elsewhere.

I never realized what a polite snake a rattler is, she mused. At least they give warning—at least most of the time, they do.

She hardly realized when she had dragged herself to the top. Her hands were reaching for the next rock, anticipating the next challenge. She stumbled forward, her feet surprised to find themselves on relatively level ground.

Moonlight illuminated a sandstone ridge bordering a sandy plain. Again she was reminded of a volcano, but here the crater was filled with sand instead of fire—or as had been the case with a mountain lake she’d once seen—with water.

The memory reminded herself of what she was seeking. At first glance, the crater was featureless, but then she noticed that scrubby grass grew near the edges. More patiently than she would have thought possible, Jenny scanned the rim, unwilling to waste energy trudging through the sand.

There. There was an area where the grass seemed a trace thicker. She trudged over, aware of sand trickling into her boot. She must have cut open the leather during her climb. She’d need to mend it or she’d have blisters to end all blisters.

She distracted herself from hope, thinking about the need to mend her boot. Eddie wouldn’t have forgotten something as basic as heavy needles and thread, but if he had she might manage with something from her doctor’s bag. There was a probe in there that might work as an awl.

There was grass under her feet, not soft like the groomed lawn at Madame’s academy, but uneven and coarse. Then, like a miracle, she scented dampness. The patch was in shadow, but she found matches in her pocket. Striking one, she confirmed what her nose had told her. There was a spring here, hardly more than a damp trickle against the rock, but definitely water.

Removing her glove she touched her hand to the dampest spot, and when it came away wet, licked the water. It tasted of her own sweat, of leather, and of sand, but it was definitely fresh. She dug with her hand, making a catch basin for the water, moving a rock or two so the spring flowed as a trickle rather than spreading its wealth along the rock.

Jenny set her canteen to fill. Then she hurried back to where she’d topped the ridge. Squeezing between two boulders she located Eddie, standing just as she’d left him. Even Mozelle hadn’t moved.

“Eddie! I’ve found it. There’s water! Not much, but at least one spring.”

She saw the flash of Eddie’s teeth as he raised his face and smiled.

“Lower your line,” he said. “I’ll get the buckets.”

At that moment, that practical command meant more to her than medals.

Neville felt many things when he awoke: pain from his ankle, lassitude warring against expectation, a numbness where he’d lain too long on one shoulder. However, it was what he did not feel that first caught his attention. Licking his lips in a motion he’d repeated so many times throughout that last hot ride that it had become reflex, he realized that he did not feel thirsty.

He opened his eyes to early morning light against the golden-brown of the woven camel-hair pavilion and tried again. His lips were dry, but neither swollen nor cracked, and his throat was moist. He decided to try speaking, and though his words sounded rather distant to his ears, they came without the hoarse croaking of a parched throat.

“Eddie? Jenny? Stephen?”

Eddie appeared at his side almost instantly. He held a canteen in his hand and without speaking offered it to Neville. His mischievous grin said more than any words. Neville drank and tasted water, heavily tainted with minerals, but fresh and even cool.

“Jenny climbed up last night,” Eddie said. “She found a spring. This morning, when there was more light, she went around and found a second, even better than the first. I’ve been nursing water into you and Stephen since she sent down the first batch. You’ve been too dopey to notice, but Stephen’s doing well enough to complain alternately about how his head hurts, and how we’re keeping him from going up to help Jenny—and to get a firsthand look at what she’s found.”

Neville felt his heart beating so unbearably hard that it actually hurt.

“Then we have . . .”

“Found the Valley of Dust? Seems like it, unless there are two such places. Seems like we have.”

Eddie looked less than delighted, but Neville had grown so accustomed to his friend’s mixed feelings about the venture that he didn’t even comment.

“Tell me,” he ordered, muscling himself upright with the strength of his arms alone. He’d had much practice with this when his broken leg was mending, years before, that he could do this almost without thinking.

“Better,” Eddie said. “Do you think you can stay on a camel? Good. Jenny’s located a path that—with a little work on our part—will let us bring the camels and gear up into the Valley. It’ll save a lot of hauling, and then you can see for yourself.”

Neville insisted on rising, though his ankle throbbed beneath the bandages. Using a crutch Eddie put together from materials in their supplies, he took charge of getting their gear ready. Stephen, still red and peeling from exposure to the sun, pitched in with enthusiasm. Between them, suffering only a few mishaps that would be comic later but were insufferably annoying now, they packed and loaded the camels, freeing Eddie to help Jenny clear the promised trail.

With more than the usual amount of spitting—and complete rebellion on the part of one of the camels, who refused to rise even when she saw the rest of her train leaving, but who finally joined them, as if a queen gracing them with her presence—the pack train climbed the narrow, rocky trail.

Neville bit deeply into the side of his mouth lest he show how much the jolting progress hurt his injured ankle. He knew that if any of the others suspected how much pain he was in, they would bar him from exploration.

And I have not come this far and waited these ten years,
he thought stubbornly,
to be tucked into bed with bread and milk.

However, when his muttering and protesting mount topped the rise and descended into the Valley of Dust, Neville forgot even his pain in the intense joy of seeing the place at last.

Jenny had compared it to the interior of a volcanic crater, and Neville fully understood why. The entire of the valley stood higher than the surrounding desert, cradled from sight within ringing walls of sandstone. These rose twenty feet or more in height, cupping them within a peculiar quiet.

Although they could not be seen from the inside, Neville understood that without the valley, built from the same sandstone that walled the valley, stood four monuments. Chad Spice had described them as statues, but Stephen reported they were more like columns or pillars.

“You see figures like them in tombs, paintings, and amulets,” he said, his cracked lips, now liberally treated with ointment but doubtlessly still painful, not limiting his enthusiasm. “Some say that they’re meant to represent palm trees, but there is no doubt they represented stability.”

“Stephen says,” Jenny added, when the other paused to sip some of the blessedly abundant water, “that the pillars may be later additions, rather like the obelisk on the Hawk Rock. I wouldn’t let him stay out there to examine them closely. We did notice something odd, though. It looked as if they may have been damaged around their uppermost reaches—as if something had been broken away.”

Neville frowned. He had read Chad Spice’s journal so many times that the text was engraved on his memory. Spice said he had taken shelter beneath a statue—not a pillar. He’d even referred to the place as “The Oasis of Statues.” Neville considered raising the point, then decided there would be nothing to gain from it. Stephen would be sure to argue that an adventurer like Spice would not bother to differentiate between a statue and a pillar, and he would probably be right.

Eddie and Jenny had chosen the location for their base camp on the edge of the valley, near the more strongly flowing of the two springs. It was sheltered by the crater wall from some of the sun, and their pavilion was to be pitched to provide even more protection from the day’s heat.

He could imagine Stephen eschewing this shelter to stand out in the sun and examine the columns. Had he been more mobile, Neville himself might have done the same. After all, one of them was likely the column that had given Chad Spice shelter, guiding him, too, into the Valley of Dust.

Fleetingly, Neville wondered about the conflicting impulses that seemed to exist to hide and yet to mark this place, but he was too excited to dwell on his minor mystery. What mattered was that they were there. With water and what remained of their supplies—not to mention the game they would certainly find—they need not hurry away, but could take advantage of what remained of the winter to find the actual opening into Neferankhotep’s tomb.

Already he could see where they would need to begin.

At each of what Eddie’s compass confirmed were the four cardinal points stood a statue—or rather a sculpture carved in extremely high relief. Each was at least ten feet tall, and stood guard alongside a smoothed panel of stone upon which long texts had been inscribed in hieroglyphs.

“We start by copying and, if possible, translating those texts,” Neville said.

“Good,” Eddie said. “I thought you might have us empty all this sand out of the valley, and I was wondering where if I’d brought enough baskets for hauling it away.”

Neville felt too good to rise to the tease.

“We’ve found the Valley of Dust,” he said. “After all this time, we’ve found it. I wish old Alphonse could be here. I can just imagine his excitement.”

“I wonder,” Jenny said, standing hands on hips and examining the valley, “why old Neferankhotep wanted to be buried way out here? I mean, Gizeh was pretty nice, and the Valley of the Kings seemed a whole lot more convenient.”

Stephen nodded. “I’ve wondered about that, as well. All that legend says is that Neferankhotep asked to be buried in an ‘infertile valley.’ This certainly fits the bill, but it wouldn’t be at all easy for the proper offerings to be made. Without those, our good king would have had a pretty grim afterlife.”

Eddie scratched along the edges of his beard.

“I heard once that the Red Land has come closer in toward the Nile over time, that the fertile areas were once much larger. Perhaps in Neferankhotep’s day the Black Land extended out closer to this point.”

Jenny shivered, “And when the gods took their revenge on those who had attempted to steal from the good king they spread the desert around him for greater protection.”

“Don’t be overimaginative,” Neville rebuked her. “We are here as scientists, not superstitious old women like Sarah Syms. Remember that we arrived here the long way around. First we went to the Hawk Rock, then crossed along to here. If we had gone directly west from the appropriate point along the Nile, we would have cut off some of the distance. Neferankhotep’s people would have done that.”

Jenny accepted his rebuke with grace. “It’s easy to forget what’s real and what’s legend, when you’re out here, and those statues are staring back. All right, we’ve a good bit of daylight left. Where do we begin?”

“My suggestion,” Eddie said before Neville could speak, “is that you and I get camp assembled. I’d rather have Neville not moving around, and Stephen out of the sun, so they can gimp over to the eastern rim. The sun isn’t low enough yet to penetrate there, and they can start their recording.”

Neville thought Jenny might rebel, but he’d underestimated the discipline acquired in the years she’d spent traveling with her parents.

I really must learn more about what they did,
he thought.
I suspect Alice deferred to what she imagined were my sensibilities and didn’t tell me the half.

Before moving to help copy the text near the easternmost statue, he scanned the whole of the valley wall with his field glasses. All four of the statues were worn from millennia of exposure to sand and wind, but he thought he could make out the basic details.

“Stephen,” he said, turning to where the younger man was gathering together the necessary equipment. “I agree with Eddie’s suggestion, overall, but are you up to circumnavigating the valley first? It isn’t overly large, and I am eager to begin by becoming acquainted with the overall layout.”