“Then you have a theory, Holmes?” Watson asked.
“I do, though perhaps it is better termed a hypothesis, in the circumstances. You and I are going to find out if it is correct.”
“And so you trust us now?” Nichols-Woodall wondered.
“I do.”
“Then you know who did it,” Phillips declared, certain.
“Sherry! TELL ME!” a determined, furious Leighton cried, lunging at him, catching him by the shoulders. “Tell me who did it!”
“No, Leigh. I cannot be positive of that, as yet, though yes, I have my suspicions. Say rather that I now know of a certainty who it is not,” Holmes corrected, gently removing Leighton’s clinging hands. “I should know more in a few hours, if Watson and I are successful. Leigh, go inside with your Uncle Parker and your friend Phillips; the three of you stay here until I tell you otherwise. Guard her well, gentlemen. You shall answer to me most severely if anything ill befalls her.” They nodded solemnly, and he turned. “Come, Watson, let us go see what may be seen.”
* * *
Holmes made a bee-line for the crypt, taking Watson all the way in to the interior room with the bluestone, and using the waterproof container of matches he carried to light all of the lamps there.
“What are we doing in the crypt, Holmes?” Watson wondered, as Holmes began exploring every inch of the room.
“There is more here than meets the eye, Watson,” Holmes tossed over his shoulder without looking up. “Somewhere in this room, there must be a hidden chamber containing something significant. As important a find as it is, this slab alone cannot be worth killing a man over. Not without some sort of additional explanation. And it MUST be here.”
“Then how do we find it?”
“I have an idea,” Holmes admitted, then pointed to a particular inscription on the wall, tracing it out with his index finger. “Do you see this hieroglyph right here, Watson? It looks something like the end of a steamer trunk, with its handle, and a bird sitting atop it.”
“Yes, I see it in several places on the walls.”
“That is the name of Ka-Sekhen,” Holmes explained. “The box around it sets off his name, and is called a serekh; later versions of hieroglyphics used an oval around the name, and called it a cartouche. The bird is the falcon of Horus, meaning that this is a royal name.”
“All right. So…?”
“I have a notion about it, and I strongly suspect that we will find a variant on Ka-Sekhen’s royal serekh, somewhere in this room,” Holmes said, still examining the walls.
“What kind of variant?” Watson asked, beginning to study the inscriptions himself.
“I have no idea; it could be anything. Look for one that is not identical to the others.”
They were quiet for a long time, running hands lightly over the walls, looking for the serekh of Ka-Sekhen, and finding only duplicates. Finally Watson tapped the wall thoughtfully in a particular spot on the inscription.
“Holmes, come here,” he said. “I think I may have something. Look here. What is this?”
Holmes came to his side and studied the markings Watson indicated. “Oh, very good eye, Watson,” he said. “I think you may have found it.”
“What does it say?”
“Mm, this shape is ‘house,’ and these two symbols could mean ‘desert’ and ‘sun,’ in which case this structure we are in is, ‘Ka-Sekhen’s house of the desert sun,’ which is not quite right, as we are in the mountains; or it could mean… oh, now this is interesting… ‘house of the light of the foreign nation’…” Holmes shook his head. “Why, this elucidates a good deal, Watson.”
“So it does, Mr. Holmes, so it does.”
Holmes and Watson spun.
Dr. Thomas Brockingthorpe Beaumont stood there in the doorway, pale and sweating profusely, glaring at them with baleful saffron-tinted eyes, his cocked revolver trained upon them.
CHAPTER 11
A Royal Alliance
—::—
“So I was right,” Holmes declared. “It was you.”
“Ah, no, no, young Monsieur Holmes,” Beaumont replied with a foreboding smile, tipping back his helmet to wipe his perspiring forehead with the back of his hand; the carbide lamp strapped to its front momentarily spotlighted a patch on the ceiling, sending golden inlays glittering. “Strictly speaking, no, it was not I. It was the Alliance. I was merely its hand.”
“Hand, foot, eye or brain, it was you who administered the poison in Professor Whitesell’s wine that night,” Holmes accused, one arm herding Watson slightly behind him, as Beaumont advanced into the room, and the investigative pair retreated toward the bluestone slab. “And it was your hand that wielded the khopesh which beheaded him.”
“Well, it is no matter if I admit to it now, for you will not tell anyone, mes amis. Now, I see the revolvers in the waistbands of your trousers. Non, non, get your hand away from it, Monsieur Holmes, or I shall shoot! Now, please remove them very slowly, and lay them on the bluestone slab where I can see them. If you so much as wave the barrel in my direction, I will kill you both.”
“But WHY?! Why did you do it?” Watson exclaimed, doing as Beaumont ordered; beside him, Holmes followed suit. “What could be so important as to be worth a man’s life? A colleague, dare I even say friend?”
“Whitesell was no friend,” Beaumont spat venomously. “He was a fool. He was given every warning, and he ignored them all. Und die beiden von ihnen,”62 he added, beginning to mix languages freely as his face flushed with fever, “are too stubborn for your own good. You should have remained in London, or turned back at once, and never come here.”
“Then it was YOU!” Watson cried. “It was you who kept trying to divert us!”
“Sim, é claro, doutor, esta certo,”63 Beaumont replied. “But you, Monsieur Holmes, are too smart for your own good—or for those around you. And yet, not quite smart enough.” He laughed.
“So you already have what was hidden here,” Holmes said.
“Non, non, I do not have that, not yet,” Beaumont’s malevolent smile returned, “but thanks to you, I know where it is now.”
“Damnation, we led him right to it,” Watson muttered in disgust, and Beaumont laughed. It was an evil, scornful sound, with an edge of hysteria, or maybe madness, to it, sufficient to make the skin crawl.
Then the archaeologist moved to the unusual serekh which Watson had spotted and Holmes had predicted, keeping his weapon trained upon them. He spared a moment to glance over it, then with his free hand pressed each symbol of the serekh in a sequence. Some half-a-dozen soft clicks echoed in the chamber, their direction impossible to determine; then the rectangle of the serekh opened into a small door with a shadowy recess behind it. Beaumont pulled it open as wide as it would go, then crouched low, so that the carbide lamp on his helmet would shine into the small safe and reveal its contents: a single leather cylinder, some eight inches long and three in diameter, closed on each end, tooled and dyed in a design which appeared to resemble the serekh. Beaumont laughed and pulled out the tube, briefly removing the cap, exposing one end of a scroll within, before sealing the cylinder once more.
“So it is as I thought, another scroll was hidden with it,” he murmured. “A scroll and a bluestone, a scroll and a bluestone. Even then, the Alliance kept los excelentes registros.”64
“What is this Alliance of which you speak, and what record is that?” Holmes asked, gesturing at the tube.
“Oh, this is not the first such scroll I have found, zanmi mwen yo,”65 Beaumont murmured. “Nor yet the first bluestone from Stonehenge. No, I found another, some ten or twelve years ago, in a ruin hidden in the depths of the Amazonian jungle, where I first contracted the malaria. It is a treaty of my ancestors, you see! Did you not know? Could you not tell?” Beaumont drew himself upright and gazed haughtily at them. “I am descended of the very Atlantean royal family itself, mes amis. The Aletean kings! The very house which negotiated this! The Atlantean Alliance!” He shook the cylind
er in the air. “For my ancestors came to me, as I was recovering from the malaria, and told me of my true nature! I am the very incarnation of Thoth himself! I am the hereditary King of Atlantis! Bow before me, commoners!”
Holmes blinked in some surprise, both at the nature of Beaumont’s frenzied command, and at his vehemence. Watson placed a firm hand between the detective’s shoulder blades and pushed down as he bent himself. From their bowed position, the physician murmured, “See his flush? The wild eyes? The malaria parasite is in his brain. He is delirious. This is fever-talk. Do as he says, use all your wiles, and we may yet walk away from this.” Holmes gave a slight nod of acknowledgement.
“And now you will obey your sovereign,” Beaumont was continuing, as he backed toward the doorway, keeping the revolver aimed at them. “You will remain here and guard the bluestone. Under no account must Stonehenge ever be rebuilt, you see. It is far too dangerous.” He smiled again, a chilling expression, as he reached the door. “And so your king commands you to stay here forever and guard it! I shall bring down the side of the mountain with the dynamite I have concealed around the door, and you will remain, telling no one what you know, while your spirits will drive off any future misguided attempts to rebuild the engine.” He stepped across the threshold to the outer room.
“NO!” Watson cried, lunging forward.
“Watson, STOP!” Holmes shouted, tackling his friend and bringing him to the ground…
…Just as the floor of the antechamber opened up underneath Beaumont. He flung up his hands in desperation, the revolver discharging into the roof of the room with a loud boom, then with a shriek, he vanished into the pitch-black abyss.
* * *
Holmes clambered to his feet, offering Watson a hand up. Then he went over to the bluestone and retrieved their revolvers, tucking his own into his trousers waistband once more, before handing back Watson’s service revolver. Together they walked to the doorway and surveyed the scene.
The entire floor of the outer chamber appeared to have opened up as if on giant hinges, yawning into a black pit. From somewhere in its depths came a soft skittering sound. Holding carefully to one side of the door frame lest he fall, Holmes peered over, into the cavity.
“Look!” he exclaimed. “Watson, LOOK!”
Watson mimicked his stance and grip on the other jamb, and looked down.
* * *
Beaumont’s helmet had come off in the fall, and now lay on its side, some three or four feet away from the archaeologist’s prostrate body, and illuminating it. Beaumont lay sprawled on the stone below, arms and legs randomly akimbo, unmoving and apparently unconscious. His revolver was not in sight.
But what brought a chill to Watson’s heart lay just along the periphery of the beam of light.
Cobras.
Hundreds of cobras.
All crawling toward the unconscious man’s body.
Within moments, they were swarming over Beaumont, striking this intruder to their lair hard and repeatedly. The doomed man’s form jerked reflexively with the force of the bites. Suddenly Beaumont rolled over, having regained consciousness—and screamed in agony, just as the largest cobra struck him full in the face.
But, with his helmet turned on its side, the water no longer dropped onto the calcium carbide fuel to produce acetylene. The carbide lamp flickered… and went out.
Beaumont kept screaming horribly for several more minutes, over the sounds of hissing and slithering, and the loud thumps that Watson knew were made by the reptiles’ strikes. After several moments, the screams grew progressively weaker. Finally, with a gurgle, Beaumont’s voice faded into silence.
* * *
Torches flamed in the distance, outside the tomb entrance—for so it certainly was, now—and suddenly Udail appeared in the doorway, flanked by at least a dozen men.
“STOP WHERE YOU ARE!” Holmes shouted. “DON’T COME FORWARD! IT IS DEATH!”
The men froze.
“What is wrong, Mr. Holmes?” Udail shouted back.
“Hold a torch through the doorway and look down, Udail,” Holmes called. “But hold on tight to the door frame.”
The foreman did so, and he and all that were with him gasped in horror.
“The floor opened up?!” Udail exclaimed.
“It did,” Holmes replied. “Dr. Beaumont is at the bottom.”
“Then we must get ropes and rescue him!”
“There is no rescuing him,” Watson declared, sombre. “There is a cobra temple at the bottom. They… resented his sudden intrusion.”
“He… is dead?”
“He is,” Watson averred.
“Which is justice most poetic,” Holmes declared, “for he was the murderer of Professor Whitesell. He poisoned him.”
“No!”
“Indeed.”
“Udail, what of my nurse Alimah?” Watson asked then, concerned. “She was tending Beaumont in the hospital tent…”
“I am sorry to say, she is dead also, Doctor,” Udail replied morosely. “We found a knife in her chest, where she lay on the surgery floor. Dr. Beaumont must have killed her in order to try to capture you. Her death cry was the first inkling we had that something was wrong.”
“Damnation,” Watson cursed bitterly. “I had great respect and liking for her. She was an excellent nurse and an exceptional woman.”
The men on both sides of the chasm were silent for long moments, out of respect to the dead nurse. Finally Udail turned to the others.
“We must get them out. Fetch the longest ladder we have,” he ordered.
* * *
It was not a particularly pleasant experience, especially having seen the fate that awaited them should they slip, but once Udail and his comrades succeeded in finding a ladder long enough to anchor across the opening, first Watson, and then Holmes, managed to crawl across the chasm and exit the crypt. Holmes promptly ordered the outer door closed and latched, and the sticks of dynamite carefully removed.
“For it would not do for someone to accidentally fall in,” he said. “There is no return from that pit, as Watson and I have seen. Nor is blowing up the mountainside a wise plan, in my opinion. For if one man falling into the cobra temple angered them, what might that do?!”
Then they made their slow, weary way to the tent of the geologist, where the remaining scientists of the expedition team—and the expedition leader’s daughter—awaited news.
* * *
Nichols-Woodall took one look at the two ashen-faced men and opened his tantalus, pouring them both stiff shots of brandy. Without hesitation, they both knocked the drinks back, then took the extra camp chairs that the geologist hurried to bring from Professor Whitesell’s tent nearby. The others sat quietly, watching, until Holmes and Watson could regain a measure of composure. Finally Leighton leaned forward and laid a hand firmly upon Holmes’, squeezing gently.
“Who killed my father?” she demanded.
“Beaumont,” Holmes replied, succinct. “He is dead.”
“What?!” Phillips gasped.
“It is true,” Watson vouched.
“Tell us everything,” Nichols-Woodall said.
* * *
It took the rest of what was left of the night. Watson noted that Holmes omitted most of the details about the supposed scroll and Atlantis, merely alluding to Beaumont’s wild hallucinations, fever dreams, and nonsensical babblings about ancient civilisations. Then he urged Watson to explain the malarial infection of Beaumont’s brain. Finally, as the sun was rising over the Nile in the distance, Holmes told of Udail’s improvised scaffolding which had enabled their escape from what had earlier promised to be their tomb. Leighton paled and gasped.
“He nearly took the both of you with Da,” she whispered. “How… horrible!”
“But he did not, Leigh,” Watson soothed. “We are here, and we are safe, and the man who killed your father over some crackpot notion is the one who died a horrible death, in the end.”
“And now, if you do not
mind,” Holmes murmured, “I think Watson and I have rather earned a rest.”
“I should say so, old boy,” Nichols-Woodall agreed, rising and offering Holmes a strong hand to stand. “More than, I’d think. I’ll lay odds you’ve hardly slept since you found the Professor.”
“And you would be correct,” Watson averred. “I slept for a couple of hours… was it yesterday in the wee sma’s? And I don’t think Holmes has slept at all.”
“Then by all means, rest now,” Nichols-Woodall recommended.
“Absolutely,” Phillips concurred. “Leigh is safe here with us, I swear. Why don’t the two of you go back to your tent and get some sleep? We’ll have someone bring you a tray of food in a bit; the breakfast gong should ring any minute now. You can eat, then collapse.”
“A capital plan,” Holmes said, rising. “Come, Watson.”
They went.
* * *
After a largish breakfast, which Nichols-Woodall sent to their tent on a tray, the pair retired to their camp cots and slept the deep sleep of the just. They missed luncheon entirely, but Watson woke from a nightmare, in which cobras featured heavily, shortly before tea-time.
Leaving Holmes sleeping soundly, Watson freshened up and dressed properly, then slipped out of the tent and made for the mess tent, having decided that his belly could stand a bit more in it. Leighton was sitting at the table, a teacup in hand, a tea tray at her elbow, and a plate of dainties before her. On either side sat Phillips and Nichols-Woodall, still dutifully watching over her, vigilant body-guards. At a meaningful glance from her, they rose, nodding affably to Watson, then stepped just outside the awning. Leighton patted the seat that Nichols-Woodall had just vacated, and he sat down. Immediately she began preparing him a cup of tea, as he took a plate and started helping himself to the fruit, tea sandwiches, and biscuits.
When his hunger had been sated, he smiled at his companion.
“Thank you, Leigh,” he said. “I was surprisingly hungry when I awoke, given how much food you sent over to our tent this morning.”
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