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Ellie popped into place between them, leaning out over the ledge. “Goodness! Doesn’t that look rather like the road at the quarry of Hatnub?”
Neil blinked at her in surprise while Sayyid raised his eyebrows.
“That ramp there would have been for dragging larger cuts of stone. Look—you can see the stairs cut to either side of it,” Ellie elaborated.
She pointed, and Neil realized that hecouldsee them. The steps were pale lines of light and shadow marking out a narrow space to either side of the softly graded ribbon of packed earth.
“But what do they need steps for?” Neil had to work to keep his voice down.
“For pushing along large slabs by pole and sledge, of course,” Ellie returned. “Didn’t you read Griffith and Newberry’s report on the tombs at El Bersheh?”
“Of course I did,” Neil retorted. “But I don’t remember anything about poles and sledges.”
“Well, it was more of a passing mention,” Ellie said dismissively. “Only it does suggest the most intriguing theory about how the Egyptians might have used similar technology to raise blocks high enough to build the pyramids.”
Only Ellie would manage to file a passing mention in an obscure excavation report away in her brain like a neatly coded library card, ready to pull out at the slightest peripheral reference. She had always had a prodigious knack for recalling anything that she had read.
That skill would have made her a formidable archaeologist in the field… had such a position ever been open to her.
She planted her hands on her hips, turning around to survey the cliff-ringed bowl with a frown. “We have been all the way around the walls, and there are no substantial piles of rubble to speak of—only boulders and sand. I cannot see anywhere that someone might have concealed a royal tomb.”
Neil wondered if he ought to feel disappointed.
He was not immune to dreams of finding the lost tomb of an important pharaoh. What Egyptologist didn’t hope to make the sort of discovery that would revolutionize the entire field? But Neil had always imagined himself doing it the proper way—in the broad light of day with an official concession from the government granting him permission to excavate.
First, there would be weeks of careful survey. When he finally uncovered the entrance to the tomb, he would be surrounded by government officials and newspaper reporters—along with his sponsors, of course. He could envision the speech he would have given.
I am honored to recover this lost evidence of Egypt’s noble history, and I look forward to the wisdom and enlightenment that its careful study can grant to the scholars of the world.
Instead, he was creeping through the dark with a band of lady revolutionaries.
“I might have been wrong about the cubits,” Sayyid admitted with a frown.
“I honestly don’t think you were,” Ellie insisted, then twitched the fabric of her skirt. “Oh! I seem to have acquired a passenger.”
She shifted the folds of gray poplin, exposing the shining black carapace of a very large beetle clinging to her hem.
“Aeerrggh!” Sayyid exclaimed, taking an instinctive, panicked step back—which put him very near to tumbling off the edge of the cliff.
Neil caught him by the sleeve of his coat.
“It’s just a scarab,” Ellie protested.
The insect was the length of Neil’s index finger, fat and glossy in the moonlight. Even he had to admit that it was larger than the usual type.
“But are there any more of them?” Sayyid pressed urgently. “Are any of them trying to climb my trousers?”
“I don’t see any on your trousers.” Ellie gave the fabric of her skirt a neat shake. In response, the scarab spread its wings and buzzed loose.
Sayyid ducked. “Where did it go?”
“It’s all right,” Ellie assured him. “It flew off that way.”
She pointed across the depression in the vague direction of the continuing rattle and clanging of Julian’s dig.
“Alhamdulillah,” Sayyid noted with a fervent sigh of relief.
Neil was only half listening to him. He was still staring in the direction where the scarab had flown as something tickled at the back of his brain. The uncomfortable itch reminded him of the feeling he’d had when he first stood on the plain at Saqqara and looked at the place Sayyid had flagged out for their dig.
