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Neil regarded the spot as his heart leapt, thudding powerfully at the base of his throat. Was it really possible that somewhere among those scattered boulders and pools of wind-blown sand lay the final resting place of one of the most mysterious and important pharaohs in Egyptian history?
The answers to so many puzzles must lie in Neferneferuaten’s tomb—not the least of which was the true identity of the pharaoh herself. If Akhenaten’s queen, Nefertiti, had indeed risen to rule in her own right after the death of her husband, her origin story remained rife with mysteries. No one knew who her parents had been. She had arrived in Egyptian royal life seemingly out of nowhere, rising from obscurity to claim first the love of a king, then the most powerful position in the empire.
Zeinab frowned with wary displeasure as she regarded the place Adam pointed out. “What are we looking for?”
“If there is a tomb here, the entrance would most likely have been dug into the cliff and then covered in rubble,” Sayyid replied from where he hid a little further back under the shadow of the looming cliff.
Ellie crept forward to peer down into the barren, silent hollow. “I don’t see much rubble.”
“The Egyptians were very clever about disguising their tomb entrances,” Sayyid returned. “We might have to look from exactly the right angle to see it.”
“Then we will spread out and search,” Zeinab declared.
Nobody questioned her order. The others—even the gangly young apprentice and the stout old fishwife—slipped down the rest of the steep, awkward distance to the floor of the depression.
As they reached the bottom, Constance set her hands on her hips and studied the curved wall of stone that framed their perch. The crown of the ridge rose perhaps forty feet overhead. “Someone really ought to scale the cliffs. There’s no reason the Egyptians couldn’t have dug their tomb a little further up.”
“I’m good,” Adam demurred flatly.
Constance’s gaze shifted deliberately to Neil.
“I… uh…” Neil started uncomfortably.
“I will do it,” Jemmahor cut in, adjusting the strap of the rifle that hung over her back before striding away. Neil watched the young woman find a grip on the stones and haul herself up.
“I’ll take the side by the bad guys.” Adam glanced over at Ellie as she let out a soft huff of irritation. “What?”
“Of course you are. And I’m going with you,” she replied, and the pair set off.
Zeinab moved along the base of the cliffs like a flicker of black shadow. Constance started off toward another section, then stopped to glance back. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I…” Neil turned his head to realize that Sayyid had wandered away from them, lingering at the place where the ground fell away into the canyon. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
Neil crossed over to his foreman—or was that hisformerforeman? The thought carried a healthy burst of guilt along with it. He looked down over the drop into the wadi. Even though the ledge stood only a little over halfway up the height of the ridge, the floor of the canyon still looked very far away.
It should have been easy to break the silence that lingered as he and Sayyid stood beside each other, but Neil found himself struggling to open a conversation. Everything that came into his mind sounded painfully awkward. The truth was, he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what heshouldsay to Sayyid. Should he apologize for the way his sister had come barreling in to overturn the man’s life? Or for that wretched note he had sent to Julian Forster-Mowbray?
He wanted to tell Sayyid how much he wished he could go back to those months in Saqqara where they had worked side-by-side together in such comfort… but sensed the declaration wouldn’t be entirely welcome.
“The bottom of the wadi looks oddly flat, doesn’t it?” Neil offered instead.
Sayyid frowned down at the pale surface of the canyon floor. “I suppose,” he distantly agreed.
They both kept their voices low. Neil was still painfully conscious of the lamplight spilling into the canyon from Julian’s dig, which was just around the bend from where they stood.
“It almost looks like a road,” Neil mused.
Sayyid opened his mouth to respond, and the furrow in his brow cleared, his eyes widening. “Itisa road,” he observed wonderingly.
Neil felt a spark of scholarly inspiration. “And that slight rise in the grade over there? I mean, it could just be a natural declination—but one might almost imagine it to be a ramp of some sort.”
“But why build a ramp in the middle of a canyon?” Sayyid returned carefully. “This hardly seems the place for chariot races.”
“Maybe they were dragging something along,” Neil replied a little absently.
Something about the notion felt right.
Sayyid finally turned to look at him, his eyes narrowing with interest. “And what might they have been dragging?”
