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“I suppose it was too much to hope that they might have rested for the night before going after the tomb,” Neil grumbled.
“But where will they have gone?” Constance demanded.
Neil pointed across the rubble-strewn plain to where the sunset painted a ragged ridge in hues of mauve and ocher. “See that gap in the cliffs? That’s the entrance to the royal wadi, where the tombs of Akhenaten and his chief ministers are located. The tablet said the tomb of Neferneferuaten will be on a branch about three miles up.”
Past theIsis, the shoreline thickened with palm trees and tangled shrubs. Constance steered the felucca into a gap in the growth. The prow caught up against the muddy earth.
“Then we’d best start walking,” she declared.
They climbed the steep, slippery bank, pushing through scratchy young acacia trees. Beyond the brush, the fertile land gave way to an arid expanse of sand and stone.
Neil looked out over a landscape peppered with tumbled fragments of the city Akhenaten had raised from the virgin desert as a tribute to his revolutionary god.
He had planned to come here before, of course. How could he not wish to visit a place that had loomed so large in his studies for the better part of a decade? Somehow, even after two years in Egypt, he hadn’t found the time. The excavation at Saqqara had eaten up nine months out of the year, and then there had been visits to home and reports to make.
Little of the city’s former splendor remained. Akhetaten had not been built of great limestone slabs like the pylons of Thebes, but of smaller talatat blocks and mud-brick. Later pharaohs had ravaged the place for materials for their own monumental projects, leaving nothing behind but low rubble, the sand-swept platform of a road, and the bases of shattered columns, all whispering of ghosts.
Neil didn’t realize that he had stopped until Constance turned back to look at him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
Neil struggled for the words to answer her. How could he possibly explain what it meant to him to be standing here in the ruins of a city that had loomed so large in his imagination for so long?
A rogue breeze stirred the sand by Neil’s boots as he stepped forward. He looked down and realized that he was standing on the weathered paving stones of an ancient courtyard.
That he had stepped into Akhetaten.
An electric chill shivered through him, along with a scent of ozone like the breath before a storm. Neil raised his head—and Akhetaten rose around him.
Monumental buildings soared over clean-swept boulevards, their walls painted with bold murals. Silk curtains bloomed from palace balconies. Pools shimmered coolly in palm-shaded courtyards.
The Temple of the Aten was visible to the north, crowned by the smoke of offering fires. To the south lay the records office and the police barracks beside the house of the high priest.
He smelled incense and roasting lamb. Heard chariot wheels clatter over paving stones.
Women laughed in gardens lined with lemon trees. Flower petals drifted from an open window, dancing to the rattle of a sistrum.
“It’s beautiful,” Neil breathed, awe and wonder washing over him until he felt like he would break.
“Neil?” Constance asked carefully.
Neil blinked, and his gaze fell across a field of rubble, colorless and still.
“What’s beautiful?” Constance pressed, standing beside him at the edge of the ruins. “What were you looking at?”
“Nothing.” His voice was rough in his throat. “Just… imagining things.”
That was all it had been, of course. Years of research and the shock of finally being in this place that he had studied for so long must have combined into something like a hallucination.
The reaction was perfectly natural… and should not have left Neil feeling as though something had been taken from him when it winked out of view.
Constance eyed him thoughtfully as a dry wind tugged softly at her dark curls.
“We should keep going,” she finally said, her voice uncharacteristically solemn.
“Right,” Neil agreed tightly. “Of course.”
They picked their way through the vast plain of debris, the rubble silent save for the crunch of their boots against the ground and the quick scurry of a mouse. A scarab beetle clicked its wings, suddenly taking flight.
