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  She pointed at the writing on the screen. “This is the passage that gives the location of the pillars. It says there’s a secret entrance under the ‘sacred altar’. Wherever that is.”

  “Any ideas?” Skarda asked.

  “Maybe. See these symbols?” She turned the monitor so he could see four geometric shapes that looked like upright and inverted triangles, two with lines drawn through them.

  “They’re early signs representing earth, air, fire, and water—the four elements that the alchemists believed composed all matter. Remember, the Egyptians believed it was Thoth who invented the science of alchemy, so these symbols must be tied into the location of the pillars and the Tablet. I’m guessing they’re what we have to look for. But these vertical shapes—“ she ran her finger over two long thin oblong signs—“I have no idea what they are. Since they’re placed right next to the location of the pillars, they have to be a clue.”

  “Well,” Skarda said, his grin flashing in the candlelight. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  ___

  A waxing quarter moon cast a glittering pathway of light on the Birket Siwa as the Land Rover sped along the narrow road to the Aghurmi acropolis, a tapering hill of sandstone and chalk that looked like some weird fruit growing out of a dense grove of palm trees. On the dark ring of the close horizon the three-story-high faces of limestone outcroppings gleamed like bleached bones.

  April ran the Land Rover under a clump of date palms next to a path that led up the hillside. With quick strides they climbed to the flat expanse of the hilltop, where the mud-brick ruins of a fortress rose up before them, looking like it was the work of some giant child making sandcastles at the beach. This was the more recent structure, built by the Arabs in the fifteenth century CE, that enclosed the ancient temple at its heart. Entering the citadel gate, Skarda pulled his LED lamp from his backpack and flashed it in a wide sweep, noting the thick palm logs that buttressed the entrance. In Cairo they had stopped to fit themselves out for the expedition, with packs, coils of Assaultline rope, lamps, chisels, hammers, and bottled water. April also fitted out her pack with two of her favorite Fusion Fulcrum throwing knives.

  Letting his lamp carve a path of light in front of him, Skarda strode through the gate. Directly in front of him rose the remains of an abandoned mosque whose minaret tapered to a point just below the moon, as if its tip were balancing the bright sliver in place in the night sky.

  April’s lamp raked over the deep fissures that had ruptured the walls. Heaps of rubble littered the ground as a result of centuries of rock falls. She gave her head a solemn shake. “This place has seen better days.”

  But Flinders was impressed. The beam of her flash bobbed this way and that as she tried to take everything in at once. To the north and east irregular sandstone walls ran along the edge of the rock. “This,” she announced, “would have been the entrance to the court where the processions of the god took place. Imagine that—Alexander himself walked where we are right now, on his way to seek his future with the Oracle.”

  Ahead a rectangular doorway about twenty-five feet high opened into deeper darkness. Stepping through, they entered a chamber about the size of a living room. Flinders unfolded a sketch she had made of the temple and shone her light on it. “Okay…this is the outer court. Over there—“ She pointed to the west wall. “—is a crypt. And through that opening ahead is the inner court that leads to the sanctuary where the Oracle was. Hopefully that’s where we’ll find the altar.”

  They moved through the chamber. The roofs of the Oracle enclosure had vanished long ago, and even with the glow of the moon and the warm starlight, the night enveloped them in pools of darkness as they made their way through to the inner court, their boots crunching on broken rock.

  Flinders’ flash picked out three doorways on the north wall. “Follow me,” she said, and headed for the middle entrance.

  The sanctuary itself was small, about ten by twenty feet, with walls covered with inscriptions, some as defined as if they were carved yesterday, and others worn and almost indistinguishable in the moonlight. On the wall to his immediate right Skarda could make out the partial outline of a human figure wearing an Egyptian crown.

  Flinders pointed at a set of hieroglyphs enclosed in an incised oval carved next to the figure. “This is the royal cartouche of Ahmose II, who ruled during the twenty-sixth Dynasty, in the sixth century BCE. He’s wearing the crown of the North, which is the crown of Lower Egypt. The Greeks called him Amasis. Supposedly he was the one who built the Oracle, although legend has it that it’s hundreds of years older, constructed to honor Ham, the son of Noah.”

  Skarda played his light over the walls. From what he could make out, it looked like the Pharaoh was offering vases to a lineup of waiting Egyptian gods. But clearly the image had been deliberately defaced. “It looks like somebody took a chisel to this. What happened?”

  “My guess is it was the work of the Persians, after they defeated the Egyptian army in 525 BCE at the battle of Pelusium. There was no love lost between them. Herodotus wrote that the Persian ruler Cambyses II had Amasis’ mummy dug up, mutilated, and then burnt. But then Cambyses was also supposed to have a led a force of fifty thousand Persian soldiers into the desert on an expedition to destroy the Oracle and they were swallowed up by a giant sandstorm and never seen again.”

  “Karma’s a bitch,” April said.

  Flinders consulted her map, then swung her flash at a narrow doorway on the eastern wall. “This should lead to an area behind the back wall.” Skarda saw her teeth flash in a grin. “This is probably where the main altar was. The Oracle here was a woman called a sibyl, who allegedly went into a trance to be able to communicate directly with the gods and give prophecies under divine inspiration. Usually they were vague statements, which could be interpreted in many ways—the same way that modern fortune tellers and psychics operate. The sibyl would hide in a secret room and whisper into a tube that opened onto the altar in the temple, where the words would be amplified and considered the voice of the god by the supplicants. Then later the priests could interpret the oracle in any way that seemed appropriate. I’m hoping this is where the altar is.”

  Flinders stepped through the doorway. Her LED speared through the darkness, illuminating a chamber hewn from the solid rock. Stooping his tall frame to enter, Skarda straightened, seeing Flinders triumphantly pointing her beam at what looked like a four-by-six-foot granite box in the center of the room, about three feet off the ground, surmounted by a granite lid about ten inches in height. April’s light joined his.

  “The altar,” Flinders announced.

  “It doesn’t look so secret to me,” April said.

  “My guess is that it’s the entrance to whatever is under this room. That’s where the secret is.”

  April angled her lamp to shine on the dark line where the lid joined the base. “How do we get it open?”

  Flinders moved to the altar and stooped down to examine it. “Well…the ancient Egyptians did invent pin and tumbler locks, made out of wood or stone. A series of internal pins would line up with grooves carved in the lid, and voila, open. Let’s hope that’s what we have here. And let’s hope they were made of stone. Anything made out of wood would have rotted away long ago.”

  “But we still have to figure out how it works,” Skarda said.

  Getting up, Flinders studied to the hieroglyphs carved on the lid surface. “This is a hymn to Thoth, so I think we’re on the right track.” She stooped, running her fingers over the surface of the altar. Smiling, she looked up at them. “This is Thoth’s cartouche.” She aimed her flash, showing them a raised oblong enclosure carved from the rock, surrounding a series of hieroglyphic images.

  April bent, inspecting it closely. “There’s a hairline crack here.” She indicated a thin line where the boundary of the cartouche met the granite block. “It looks like it’s been opened before.” Finding the chisel in her pack, she fitted the point into the crevice and
swung back her mallet.

  But Flinders grabbed her wrist. “No! We can’t cause any destruction here! These are priceless artifacts!”

  April looked up at her with a blunt gaze. “If we’re going to find out what’s going on here, we’re going to have to do what we need to do.”

  Laying a hand on Flinders’ shoulder, Skarda said gently, “I think she’s right. We’ll do as little damage as possible.”

  Flinders crossed her arms over her chest and regarded both of them, her face twisting with indecision. Finally she nodded. “Okay,” she said in a heavy voice. “But you’ll have to promise me you’ll be careful. This goes against everything I stand for.”

  “I will,” April said. And meant it.

  With careful movements she inserted the chisel and tapped it with her hammer. The crack widened naturally, so that she was able to run the chisel tip along the line of the cartouche. “Hold this,” she said.

  Flinders kept the chisel in position while April grabbed the raised boundary with her long fingers, working the cartouche back and forth, until she could grip it firmly and pull it from the granite slab.

  Flinders played her lamp over the open hole. The cartouche had been a plug, fitting like a lid on a shaft that ran back about a foot-and-a-half into the granite. Set in the center of the end wall were two vertical copper handles, green with ancient verdigris.

  She gasped. Then she quickly opened her laptop and brought up the digital images of the papyrus. “Look! The handles! They’re the oblong glyphs I couldn’t figure out! They found the same thing on hidden blocks inside Khufu’s Pyramid!”

  Skarda peered inside the shaft. “So what do we do? Pull…push…?”

  Flinders leaned forward and pointed to faint geometrical forms carved in the granite. “See those signs? They’re the same alchemical symbols that are on the papyrus.”

  Angling his flash to outline the edges of the glyphs, Skarda could make out the symbols for air and fire next to the left-hand handle, and those for earth and water next to the right.

  “Air is up and earth is down,” April suggested.

  “I think that’s it,” he agreed. “I guess you could make the same case for fire and water.” He turned to Flinders. “You want to do the honors?”

  Her eyes gleamed with excitement in the light of the lamps but she gave her head an agitated shake. “One of you two do it. I’m too nervous.”

  Crouching low, Skarda reached into the shaft with both hands, wrapping his fingers around the handles. He turned the left handle toward the lid and the right toward the base.

  A grating noise of stone against stone came to his ears.

  “The pins!” Flinders breathed. “They’re sliding into position.”

  Skarda stood, pressing his hands on the center of the near edge of the lid. “It’s moving!”

  The women moved to each end, pushing hard. With another grinding noise, the lid slid back about three feet, revealing a yawning black hole. Flinders probed the darkness with her LED, revealing granite steps, heavily clotted with sand, disappearing down into the darkness.

  Her heart hammered. She turned to look at him with wide eyes. “This is incredible!”

  Skarda was getting caught up in her excitement. He thrust his face into the opening, suddenly taking a step back. “What’s that smell?”

  Flinders laughed. “Obviously you haven’t been around archaeological excavations before! You can’t forget—that air down there has been shut up for centuries. That’s what you’re smelling! It smells like heaven to me!”

  “Better let me go first,” April said.

  “No way.” Flinders slapped her hands on the lip of the altar and vaulted into the black mouth of the stairway. Her flash bobbed in erratic circles as she raced down the steps. “There’s a landing down here,” she called up. “And another staircase going down.”

  Then Skarda heard her gasp out loud.

  SIXTEEN

  SKARDA helped April lever herself onto the steps, then followed behind her. Inside the hole, the air was bone-dry, but as he descended, the stench of stale air, dust, and the wet, fetid odor of centuries-old stone grew more pungent. Almost immediately his chest was heaving, his lungs working overtime to suck in the reduced level of oxygen. He coughed, choking on dust.

  Ahead of his position he could see Flinders’ torch spearing through the darkness below, bouncing off blocks of limestone. She had cleared the second staircase and was standing on a broad open area carpeted with a thick layer of dust. In the trail of her footprints he could make out the dull sheen of a granite-slabbed floor beneath.

  “I can’t believe this!” She swung her lamp in wide sweeps, trying to take everything in at once.

  Skarda followed the staircase, stepping down into the main gallery. He stabbed his light into the chamber, seeing the beam dance with the flurry of dust April and Flinders had kicked up by their entry. They were standing in a foyer-like area, boxed in by smoothly-cut limestone walls adorned with hieroglyphs depicted in vibrant reds, blues, and yellows. Above their heads a low ceiling painted dark blue like the night sky was adorned with crude figures standing in boats, surrounded by drawings of animals and representations of stars. Beyond the white pools of their lights the darkness looked like the mouth of a bottomless pit.

  “I can’t tell you how amazing this is,” Flinders said, her voice breathless. “We’re the first people to set foot in this place maybe since Alexander’s time!”

  She pointed to the image of a bird on the ceiling standing in a U-shaped bowl, wearing a conical-shaped hat with a bulb-like projection at the top. “This is the goddess Nekhbet, the white vulture goddess of Upper Egypt. And there’s the falcon god Horus, ‘Horus of the Two Horizons’, who was associated with the rising sun, also called ‘Horus the Red’, who was Mars. And Sebegu, who was Mercury. Usually you don’t find scenes like this until much later, in the New Kingdom, but this is definitely Predynastic.”

  Unshouldering his pack, Skarda took out the Nikon D3s and 50mm f/1.4 lens he had bought in Cairo along with a folding tripod and remote shutter release. He attached the camera to the tripod, then set the ISO at 25,600 to compensate for the near total darkness, sighted, then thumbed the button on the shutter release. He snapped another image, and then a third, each time adjusting the camera’s position a bit to capture the entire sweep of the ceiling.

  Flinders moved forward, her light carving out a path for her feet. Ahead, brightly-painted columns, shaped like stylized lotus blossoms, broke up the western wall. In the center the dark rectangle of a doorway yawned open. Skarda hefted the camera and tripod and followed. The stale air and the eerie silence was getting to him. A wave of claustrophobia clenched at him.

  They stepped through the opening, each footstep kicking up a mini-explosion of choking dust. But April had stopped and turned, her eyes narrowing at the staircase, its shape all but imperceptible in the blackness. She was growing increasingly more uncomfortable.

  “Park,” she said. “I’m going outside.”

  Skarda turned and nodded at her. “Okay.” He knew she didn’t want to leave their backs unprotected.

  She left, not making a sound.

  Inside the doorway, Flinders’ lamp pierced the darkness. A smaller chamber, about ten feet high, opened around her. The light carved out two identical shapes, rising up from the floor.

  “Oh, my God!,” she whispered. “The pillars!” Her hand found Skarda’s bicep and gripped hard, her fingers digging into his muscle.

  Skarda mated the beam of his flash with hers. In the combined pool of light they could see two tapering pillars surmounted by capitals that looked like bundled stalks of papyrus plants, flanking an empty throne carved from a massive block of granite. On the throne sat the figure of a man with a baboon’s head, carved from the same block, his hands folded over his chest.

  Flinders sprinted across the room. The barrel of the nearest pillar gleamed with a dull yellow sheen.

  Gold!

  And its ma
tching companion glowed a brilliant green.

  Each pillar was inscribed with rows of hieroglyphs, marching around the circumference of the rounded shaft.

  Flinders ran her hand over the surface of the first pillar. Awe suffused her face. “This is pure gold! Not asem. And the other one is emerald!” She let out a private laugh. “Herodotus was right!”

  “What’s asem?”

  “Electrum. It’s a naturally-occurring alloy of gold and silver. The Egyptians mined a lot of it. But over time the patina can turn red or even dark purple. See? There’s nothing like that here.”

  She inspected the inscriptions on the near pillar. “Can you shine your light on the other one?’ she asked.