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evildoers, but thus far her role fell neatly within the parameters described in mythology.
Neville had greater hopes for the Osiris texts, since Osiris was the lord of the underworld, but Stephen
grew fussy when pressed to change his plans, and Neville was a good enough commander to know when
to back down.
It s not like I haven t waited this long , he thought. And in any case, why would the texts do more
than caution? It isn t like they re going to provide directions into the tomb where anyone could
find them.
But he couldn t help but hope they would find something. The ancient Egyptians had firmly believed that
the dead flourished through contact with the living. Offerings were not mere ritual, but were thought to
offer nourishment for the dead. The dead were thought to offer counsel and intervention from their
transformed state. Surely, the  good king would not have been completely cut off from his people.
Surely not.
Jenny wondered if anyone else was aware just how tense Uncle Neville was becoming. She faithfully
worked away as a copyist, but she had little hope that the texts would tell them anything. Eddie s probing
around the edges of the valley seemed a more reasonable route toward finding the tomb of
Neferankhotep, but it would be several days before Uncle Neville s sprained ankle would permit him to
join Eddie at this work. For now he was restricted to carefully copying the hieroglyphs, and to pretending
that he didn t care if they found anything more than these few texts.
She didn t believe him. Uncle Neville wasn t a looter, not even in the way Belzoni or the other early
archeologists had been, but somehow, someway finding proof of Neferankhotep s existence had become
irrationally important to him. She also suspected that nothing short of finding the good king s tomb would
satisfy her uncle s mania. Even if they found the entire legend written on a wall somewhere, he would
persist.
Jenny decided to spend some time making careful examinations of the areas surrounding the four statues.
Now that she had access to ample water, the climate of the Egyptian winter didn t bother her a bit. She d
experienced far worse during summers in the southwestern United States and, unlike Stephen, she never
forgot to protect exposed skin.
She finished the panel she d been copying, and brought the finished sketch over to Stephen.
 That s all of the second one, she said.
Stephen looked up at her, his expression so blank that she realized his mind was still thinking in Egyptian.
 I m going to take a break, she said,  or I ll be drawing vultures for owls, and confusing ankhs with the
Girdle of Isis.
 That wouldn t do, Stephen said, truly appalled for a moment. Then his natural sense of humor
reemerged.  We d be writing  wife for  life. 
Jenny mimed throwing a handful of sand at him, and then paused to decide where to start exploring.
While copying Isis texts, Jenny had been given ample ? opportunity to inspect the area around the statue
of that mysterious goddess. Anubis completely unfairly, she knew continued to make her skin crawl.
Sir Neville had staked out the area near Osiris, and her uncle s temper was such that Jenny had no desire
to remind him by her own crawling and climbing that his impulsiveness was what had shackled him. That
left Horus, who offered the added advantage of being directly across the valley from her uncle, and thus
completely out of his line of sight.
Therefore, scooping up Mozelle, who was burrowing among Stephen s notes, Jenny crossed to the
eastern edge of the valley.
First she walked around the Horus sculpture, carefully examining it from all angles, trying hard to think
like Auguste Dupin and see with her mind as well as her eyes. Neither approach seemed to do much
good. Her eyes saw a statue carved from the rocky wall behind it, the stone polished and smoothed so
perfectly that she found herself fighting the impulse to believe it had been made not by human hands, but
by divine will. Her mind suggested that the statue might hide a door, but she found no indication of this.
What she did find didn t seem overly useful. From the start it had been evident that the sculpture stood
on a base of some sort. Stephen had brushed away the sand that had accumulated around the feet and
ankles to see if there were any texts there. What Jenny s investigation showed her was that the base went
a whole lot further down than any of them had realized. She hadn t carried tools over, but little casual
digging showed that it went down a foot without any sign of stopping.
Recalling how the legend told of the valley being buried in sand to hide Neferankhotep s tomb and all its
lavish appointments, Jenny found herself wondering if rather than this being a statue set flush with what [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]