Authors: Kathryn Le Veque
Morgan was right
on the top of the hill, on the cusp of the edge, as she began to dig. Her arms
were sore but she refused to give in to the pain, instead, working through it
even to the point of groaning every time she pushed the shovel into the dirt.
This dirt was fairly loose and rocky as compared to the dirt they were digging
in over at Ranthor, so the first several inches came off easily. After that,
however, it turned into something just this side of cement. After the first
few hacking tries with the shovel, Morgan broke out the pick and began to chip
away.
Fox was down the
slope, watching her throw her entire body into her swings and knowing how sore
she was going to be by the evening. But she didn’t back down and his admiration
for her was renewed as he watch her pound away at the hole. He finally left his
own hole to go offer to help her, but she refused his aid. Fox tried to insist
but she just smiled and pushed him away. So he left her to her pick and
shovel, returning to his own dig hole, watching his wife in between shovelfuls
of earth. Mostly, he just didn’t want her to hurt herself but he also liked
watching her breasts jiggle every time she moved. He had lied to her; he really
was
a chauvinist.
Morgan, Fox and
Allahaba continued digging into the late afternoon. Twice, they had seen armed
guards from the gold mine to the south watching them but the men came no
closer. Morgan saw them, too, but after what happened between her and Fox
yesterday, she was less inclined to go running for her gun. So she kept an eye
on the men in the distance, watching them fade in and out of view as the day
progressed.
Morgan didn’t
realize how much of her focus had been on the gun-toting men from the gold
mine. Even though she had been looking at the hole in the ground, her mind had
been reaching out towards the south. By the time she really took a good, hard
look at what she was doing, she realized she had chipped away a fairly deep
hole. Her shoulders and triceps were killing her, but she didn’t want to stop.
She had to keep digging.
Jabeel kept
running up the hill and taking her buckets of spoils, running them through the
mesh sifter and then bringing the empty buckets up to her. As dusk began to
turn the sky colors of orange and pink, Fox finally ceased digging on his own
test hole. He turned the shovels and brushes back over to Jabeel before turning
to his wife, still up on the crest of the hill.
Morgan was about
forty feet from the floor of the valley, still plugging away with her pick and
shovel. Fox stood there a moment, watching her, shaking his head when he
realized he’d be rubbing her arms and shoulders all night after her strenuous
day. The woman was digging like a coal miner. He climbed up the hill, making
sure to stay in her line of sight so she wouldn’t nail him with the shovel.
Morgan saw him
coming and she came to a halt, panting with exertion. But she managed to smile
at him as he came upon her.
“Whew,” she
breathed. “I’m exhausted.”
“Ready to quit
for the day?”
She looked
around, down the slope at the two other test holes that had been dug. “I don’t
know,” she said. “Did you guys come across anything?”
He shook his
head. “Nothing at all. The stone you found is the only artifact we’ve found all
day.”
She sighed
heavily, looking down at her hole, which was now about three and a half-feet
deep by about five feet in diameter. She knelt down, pointing at it.
“Only the top
eight inches of soil were sandy and loose,” she said. “After that, it was
almost like cement. It’s been a bitch to chip away at.”
He nodded,
inspecting her hole. “I had about two feet of loose soil before it turned into
this hard stuff,” he told her. “It’s probably the location, up here on the
rise. This area would get more of the winds and erosion. Some winds blow loose
soil away and some deposit it. It’s kind of a never-ending circle.”
Morgan sat down
on her bum, coming to realize that she was extremely tired. “Well, the packed
dirt underneath is certainly hard,” she picked up her water bottle and drank
the last of her water. “How long before we should know something?”
His gaze was in
the hole. “I would think that by tomorrow if we keep digging and find nothing,
we can pretty much assume there’s nothing here and move on to another area.”
Morgan didn’t
like that thought. “Don’t you usually keep digging for a few days just to be
sure?”
He shrugged. “It
depends,” he replied. “At Edfu, there was stuff on the surface so it was just a
matter of clearing away the soil and debris. Howard Carter dug for years
before he found Tutankamun’s tomb, and even then, it was kind of a stroke of
blind luck.”
Morgan looked at
her hole thoughtfully, growing increasingly depressed that he was willing to
give up digging after only a couple of days.
“It’s possible
that we’ll dig around here for weeks and never find anything,” she murmured.
He watched her, noting
the gloomy expression on her face. “It’s not only possible, it’s probable,” he
said, somewhat gently. “Love, I know you want to finish this quest for Fanny’s
sake and I do, too, but surely you didn’t come here expecting to actually find
something the first time out.”
She shrugged,
her gaze moving from the hole to the stars that were starting to appear in the
sky. “The papyrus said we would.”
He sighed
faintly. “Honey-love, you know as well as I do that all of the clues we pieced
together from the papyrus are guesses. There are no guarantees. We could be
hundreds of miles off-base. Or the papyrus could simply be pretty poetry and
nothing more. But as much as I know that, even I’m hoping for a miracle.”
“Me, too,” she
said, somewhat depressed. “But I’m realistic; I don’t really expect it. I just
really, really wanted to finish Fanny’s story. I wanted to give her a happy
ending.”
He smiled at
her, the dark eyes glimmering. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
He reached out
to touch her hand. “Fanny already
has
a happy ending,” he pointed out.
“Married to the love of her life for seventy-five years is a hell of a happy
ending. Plus, she got to meet you. Don’t you see that by finding her, however
accidental, you’ve already written the end to the woman’s story? You brought
her life full circle. You already gave her that happy ending and you don’t even
realize it.”
Morgan was
looking at him with tears in her eyes. “You say the sweetest things,” she
breathed.
His smile
broadened. “It’s true,” he murmured. “So why don’t we shut this down for the
night and start fresh tomorrow. Okay?”
She sniffled and
blinked away the tears, struggling to rise on weary legs. “Okay,” she said, but
she picked up the pick again anyway and took another few hits.
Fox stood up and
watched her, hands on his hips. “Morgan, my love,” he said gently, as if to
encourage her to stop. “Let’s go get some dinner. I’m starving.”
Morgan sighed
heavily and made one more chop at the hard, hard earth. “Just a few more
minutes and I’ll stop, I promise.”
He shook his
head and reached out for the pick. “No,” he told her as kindly as he could.
“Stop now. We’ll start first thing in the morning. You need to eat and get some
sleep.”
She pulled the
pick out of his reach, losing her grip on it in the process. The thing sailed
into the hole, smacking the bottom of the hard-packed earth with a thud. But
instead of simply laying there, the pick disappeared. Morgan and Fox watched,
shocked, as a hole opened up at the bottom of the pit and the pick fell
through. They could hear it hitting something hard down in the hole, clanging
and banging as it seemed to fall further and further away from them.
“Oh, my God,”
Morgan gasped, falling to her knees. “A… a
hole
!”
Fox was right
beside her, trying to peer down into the eight inch in diameter hole at the
bottom of the test pit. He didn’t miss a beat; he pushed himself up and
yelled.
“Al!” he boomed.
“Bring a flashlight!”
Morgan was
starting to move into the pit but he grabbed her. “No,” he commanded. “Stay where
you are. We have no way of knowing what’s under that hole.”
Morgan was
electrified; she was practically jumping up and down as he held her. “A hole,”
she repeated over and over. “There’s something here; I told you there was!”
He had her
around the waist, tightly, so she couldn’t get away from him as he gazed at the
black hole three feet down in the pit. Truth was, he wasn’t quite sure what to
think. He was struggling not to let excitement get the better of him so his
professional, clinical persona took over.
“This area has
been mined for gold for centuries,” he said calmly. “It could be a mine shaft.”
“Or it could be
a tomb!”
He wouldn’t give
in to her enthusiasm, not just yet. He struggled to stay on an even keel as
Morgan squirmed excitedly in his arms. Fox swore that if he didn’t have a good
grip on her, she would have jumped head-first into that hole and disappeared
just like the pick. As he held on to his wriggling wife, Allahaba and Jabeel
appeared at his side.
Both men were
huffing and puffing from their run up the rocky hill. Allahaba had two big
flashlights, handing one to Fox. Fox flipped the switch and directed the light
into the jagged, black hole.
Unfortunately,
they couldn’t see anything from their vantage point three feet above on the rim
of the depression. The fact that the sun was setting only made visibility
worse. Fox lay on his stomach and shimmied down the side of the pit, trying to
catch a better glimpse, but it wasn’t enough. He pulled himself back out of
the pit and looked at Allahaba.
“We need to get
a better look but I’m afraid I’m too heavy to do it,” he said to the man. “Get
on your belly and slide down there. I’ll hold your feet.”
Allahaba shook
his head. “This is your find, Fox. You must do it.”
Fox waived him
off. “I’m too heavy for you to hold,” he began to push the man down onto his
belly. “Slide down there. I’ll hold your feet.”
Allahaba did as
he was told. With Fox holding his ankles and Morgan all but crawling out of
her skin with excitement, Allahaba slid down the side of the pit, flashlight
blaring in his hand. He reached the bottom of the cavity, picking away at the
existing hole as he poked the flashlight down inside. He struggled to make
heads or tails out of what he could see, laboring to get a good vantage point
without chipping away more of the hole. He had no way of knowing if a bigger
section would collapse and dump him down into the unknown depths.
Morgan was on
her knees next to Fox, so excited she couldn’t stand it. Her hands were folded
in front of her mouth as if praying and Fox could hear excited grunts now and
again. But he kept cool, as smooth as silk and as right as rain while Allahaba
finally gained a peek at what was beyond in the darkness of the hole.
After several
long moments of waiting, Fox finally asked the fateful question. He had to.
“Well?” he
asked. “What do you see?”
Allahaba didn’t
say anything for a moment. Then, he rolled onto his side, craning his neck
back so he could look at Fox.
“Fox,” he said
in a low, calm voice. “You had better see this.”
Fox’s calm
demeanor was slipping. “Why? What is it?”
Allahaba sighed
faintly, his dark eyes glimmering in the fading sunlight. “Stairs,” he replied
faintly. “Sixteen of them leading down to a doorway.”
January 1, 1924
Because
of Louis and William, we have remained in Luxor. Kadin has told me many tales
of ancient Egypt and the goddess we are searching for, Isis. He told me the
tale of Isis and Osiris, and of the evil brother, Seth, who cut Osiris into
pieces. Isis loved Osiris so much that she found his body parts and sewed him
together again. I am coming to understand what love she must have felt for
him.
~FS
CHAPTER TWENTY
THREE
“He has moved,”
Beni was getting spotty reception on his cell phone even though he was near
Edfu and the cell towers built there to look like palm trees. “We followed him
to the Manjam Hamsh wilderness and now he’s at the old Roman gold mines near
Marsa Alam.”
Alia, in her
office in Cairo, rose from her seat to close the office door before replying.
“Marsa Alam?” she repeated. “What in the world is he doing there? There’s
nothing there but old ruins and desert.”
Beni was trying
not to make eye contact with any of the drug lord’s men around him, hard and
bitter men who would kill with the wrong look or wrong word. The past few days
with them, following Dr. Henredon through the desert, had been a nightmare. He
sincerely wished there was some way to get out of all of this. With the drug
lord on one side and Alia on the other, he was in hell.