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“Nothing.” Ellie turned her attention back to their mission. “A sun chapel would be situated in an open-air courtyard to catch the light of the rising dawn each day. If there’s no ceiling, it can’t fall down.”
“Let’s go have a look, then,” Neil concluded tiredly.
The doorway only appeared narrow from a distance because it was so very tall. Ellie craned her neck back to look up at it as they passed through, filled with a sense of quiet awe at its monumental scale.
A set of stairs descended a half-story to a space that would once have been a covered vestibule. Bas relief art on the walls had been scoured clean of all but a few remnants of old paint, but Ellie could still make out a few lines of hieroglyphs and the kilted figure of the pharaoh.
Her face had been chipped away.
Another doorway framed by half-ruined walls opened from the vestibule to the sun chapel. As Ellie had expected, the space was open to the sky. Even though the walls that framed it were partially fallen into rubble, they were still high enough to reach well above Ellie’s head, making the space a private secret closed away from the rest of the temple.
The Ancient Egyptians had worshiped the sun in many forms, stretching back thousands of years. Ellie shouldn’t be surprised to find a space dedicated to that practice inside Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple—though she still wondered how Neil had known about it.
The open-air chapel would have been built several generations before Akhenaten transformed the sun cult into a faith in the Aten as the sole god of Egypt and creator of all life—but it still felt plausible that an Atenist might have found this an appropriate place to conceal a clue to the secret history of the mysterious pharaoh Neferneferuaten.
The sun altar itself dominated the small courtyard. The square platform, roughly four feet in height, was where the ancient priests would have stood when making prayers and offerings to the rising sun.
Ellie circled it, carefully studying the stones as Neil frowned at some of the surviving fragments of artwork on the courtyard walls.
It didn’t take her long to fully explore the space. The sun chapel was really just a rectangular box, open to the air and entirely lacking in distinctive features. Besides the altar, there were only two little nooks in the walls that once held votive statues. They were now empty except for the sandy-colored cat, which had hopped up into one of them to lick at a paw.
“I don’t see any disks,” Ellie admitted.
“This space wasn’t as heavily decorated as other areas of the temple,” Neil replied a little distractedly, still studying the walls.
“But it has to be here,” Ellie insisted. “This is the only place that makes sense.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Peanut.” Neil pulled his attention from the stones and gave a little shrug. “It’s just a courtyard and a rebuilt altar.”
“Rebuilt?” Ellie echoed, confused. She looked back to the stone platform that dominated the center of the space. Its perfectly squared blocks all looked unbroken and original—which she would not have expected with a structure that had been recently restored. “By whom? Mr. Naville?”
“Not Naville,” Neil returned with a hint of exasperation as he poked his head into one of the votive nooks. “The priests.”
Ellie stared once more at the box of neatly quarried limestone. “Neil, how do you know this was rebuilt by the ancient priests?”
“Just look at it,” Neil ordered with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Iam,” Ellie insisted—and then she saw it.
The altar was built of a finer sort of limestone with a light, even grade… but the color of the blocks was slightly different on part of the staircase. It looked as though one type of stone had been layered over the top of another—as if the original stairs had been lengthened and increased in height to accommodate a larger altar.
The difference was almost indistinguishable unless you were up close and looking for it… which Neil hadn’t been, as he was standing on the opposite side of the platform.
Ellie fought back a wave of frustration and admiration. This was just the sort of thing that had always driven her batty about her brother. Neil was handy with facts and figures—but Ellie could out-memorize him any day of the week. His startling leaps of intuition were what took his scholarship to the next level and made it feel nearly impossible to compete with him. They came out of nowhere, though Neil always managed to rattle off some explanation for how he’d arrived at them when pressed on the matter.
Yet those explanations had never felt quite right to Ellie. They were always just a little short of what they ought to be to explain how he came to his conclusions.
Were she a more superstitious sort of person, Ellie might have called it uncanny.
She pushed her attention back to the sun altar—because Neil’s revelation, however he arrived at it, raised an intriguing possibility.
“Ancient builders wouldn’t have wanted to waste high quality limestone by making these facing blocks any thicker than needed,” she mused aloud. “I would bet my left foot that they’re only panels, supported by struts laid over the structure of the older, smaller altar, with rubble filled in for added stability.”
Ellie buzzed with excitement at the discovery—but Neil didn’t seem to hear her. He gazed at her from the other side of the altar, his shoulders slumped into lines of dismay.
“Peanut…” he began.
He looked so forlorn that for once his use of Ellie’s wretched nickname failed to infuriate her.
