Neville suspected that Stephen had actually said something more like, “Morning, Weatherington. Is Sir Neville in? I just need a quick chat.”
“He would be very welcome indeed, Weatherington. Show him in directly.”
Perfect timing, Stephen, Neville thought in amusement. I wonder if he was outside waiting for the post to be delivered.
Stephen breezed in moments later. The portfolio tucked under one arm was the only neat thing about him. His golden whiskers were in disarray, and his clothing was subtly misaligned. Neville fancied that Stephen must have dressed in the dark, and the visitor’s first words confirmed that supposition.
“I had my final lesson with the Meadowbottom brat this morning. I don’t know which of us will be happier to see his lessons end. One thing’s sure, his father is going to hate losing my services. Won’t find anyone who’ll tolerate that imp of Set for less than twice what he was paying me.”
Neville made sympathetic noises, then pushed the letter across the desk.
“I received your missive this morning,” he said with a chuckle. “Very clever. Haven’t had a chance to work it out though. You overestimate my skill—or at least how quickly Weatherington brings the letters around.”
Stephen had automatically picked up the sheet of paper, and was staring at it with what Neville could have sworn was genuine amazement.
“What are you talking about, Neville?” he asked, lapsing into the informality they had adopted during their teacher/student days. “I didn’t send this. Do you think I have the time for something this elaborate, what with everything to be finished before we depart?”
Neville wasn’t taken in.
“A letter in hieroglyphs? Come now. Who else would do something so elaborate? You must admit it’s right in line with your idea of a joke.”
Stephen raised his gaze from the letter. “I tell you, I didn’t do it. Moreover, it’s all wrong as a teaching exercise.”
“What do you mean?”
“No determinatives, for one,” Stephen said, frowning. “No syllabics, only the simplest phonetics…”
He trailed off, his gaze returning to the letter. Then he started, glanced around the clutter of the small room Neville used as an office, and said almost frantically:
“Neville, can we go into the library? I need to write something down and there’s no room in here. Do you still have those texts we used for your lessons?”
“Of course,” Neville said, leading the way across the hall to the library. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is more like what’s right,” Stephen said cryptic in his enthusiasm. “Wait just a moment or two and I’ll show you.”
They entered the library, and were halfway to the large, round table that stood invitingly in the morning sun, when they realized that Jenny was there before them. She had Mariette’s recent volume, Itinéraire de la Haute Egypte, open in front of her, and had been so absorbed in her reading that she hadn’t noticed them any more than they had noticed her.
“Uncle Neville. Mr. Holmboe. What is going on?”
Neville might have tried to distract her, but Stephen felt no such compunctions.
“Look at what came in the post for your uncle this morning.”
“Why it’s written in hieroglyphics,” Jenny said in astonishment.
“Hieroglyphs,” Stephen corrected absently, rummaging where he knew blank paper and pens were kept. “You wouldn’t call the letters we use ‘alphabetics’—same principle.”
“Oh,” Jenny looked temporarily stunned, but recovered quickly.
“Why is someone writing to Uncle Neville in hieroglyphs?”
“That is what we’re about to find out,” Stephen said. “Mind if I sit? This is going to get tedious.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” Jenny said, making room next to her. “Sit here. Uncle Neville can have your other side. This way we can both see what you’re doing.”
Stephen dropped into the indicated seat without hesitation.
“Neville, before you join us, would you grab that basic text we used for your class?”
Neville had already taken the requested volume and several others from their places, and he set them on the table.
“Now,” he said, “what is this about the message being ‘all wrong’?”
“All wrong as a teaching exercise,” Stephen clarified. “That’s what I said. Look at what we have here.”
They did. Clusters of hieroglyphs were drawn with elegant perfection on the page.
Jenny frowned. “They look all right to me. I even recognize a few—that owl and that reclining lion.”
“They are correct,” Stephen said, “as far as they go. What is wrong is what is missing.”
“I’m terribly confused,” Jenny admitted. “Would you mind explaining?”
“What do you know about hieroglyphs?”
“That it was fancy picture writing,” Jenny said, hesitantly. “The ancient Egyptians didn’t have an alphabet. Instead they had hundreds and hundreds of pictures, and none of them meant the same thing.”
“Accurate as far as it goes,” Stephen said, and Neville recognized the pedantic note creeping into the younger man’s voice, “but only as far as it goes. Actually, the Egyptians did use the same sign for more than one thing. That owl is a good example. It could represent the bird, but it could also mean the sound we associate with the letter ‘M.’ ”
Jenny frowned. “If you say so, but I’d think it would be confusing.”
“No more than our silent letters, once you know the rules,” Stephen replied with a shrug. “Though it’s something of a miracle that anyone ever translated the system at all. It would have taken much longer without the Rosetta Stone.”
“That’s the one found by Napoleon’s expedition,” Jenny said, “the one with the same text in a bunch of different languages.”
“Right.” Stephen waved a dismissive hand. “You can read about the Frenchman Champollion, and how the Rosetta Stone was the key to his discoveries and all the rest in a dozen books. What is important for our purposes here and now is a very odd fact. The Egyptians actually had a perfectly good alphabet. They just didn’t use it. Apparently, they preferred their cumbersome ideographs. Sometimes they even went to the trouble of writing redundant texts, including both the pictures and the phonetic signs.”
“Why?” Jenny asked.
“No one knows,” Stephen said. “Maybe they did it as a pronunciation guide. Egypt was a large and populous kingdom. Quite likely spoken Egyptian had dialects, just like modern English. Heaven knows, there are times I can’t understand what you Americans are saying.”
“Or I our own country folk,” Neville hastened to add, seeing Jenny’s brow cloud, “or, I suspect, them me. Stephen, stop lecturing, I want to know what this says.”
“A minute, Neville. You have a smart niece here. We shouldn’t quash her enthusiasm.”
Neville wasn’t so certain, but he knew dissuading Stephen would take longer than letting him finish his explanation.
Jenny also wasn’t about to give up.
“If they used the same sign for more than one thing,” she asked, “how did they know what was what?”
“The same way we do, pretty much,” Stephen said. “By context. I mean, if you say ‘Hello, Mrs. Jones. How is your son?’ that good woman won’t think you mean the sun in the sky. However, if there could be any doubt, the scribes added what we call determinatives.”
“You’re losing me,” Jenny warned him.
“Right. Let me slow down. The Egyptians were a lot like us in that they named their children after important people. So a village might have lots of Rameses, if that was the current pharaoh’s name. Well, to tell all these Rameses apart, they’d use nicknames. Let’s say the village strongman, Rameses, is nicknamed ‘Bull’. With me?”
“All the way,” Jenny answered quickly. “So if you wanted to write about this strongman, and make sure no one would doubt you meant the man named Bull not the
bull in the field, you’d add one of these determinatives.”
“I wish all my students were so quick,” Stephen said. “Sure you’re not pulling my leg about not knowing hieroglyphs?”
“Sure,” Jenny affirmed. “But my father was French, and I grew up with two languages in the house, and learned Spanish soon after, and scraps of various Indian languages as we traveled. I’m not stuck to one language.”
Neville thought with some amusement that Stephen was looking at Jenny with genuine admiration, her command of languages having impressed him where her beauty had not.
“Right,” Stephen said. “Now, before Neville hits me over the head with the poker, I’d better finish this fast. You were right when you said that Egyptian writing was more ideographic than alphabetic, but you didn’t go far enough. Ideographs could be made up out of syllable signs. I noticed right off that there were none of these, no determinatives, and none of the ideographs for very common words. In fact, every sign here is one that has a simple phonetic value.”
“So this text,” Neville said, reaching for his beginners textbook, “is written in an alphabet—not ideographs.” He started scribbling down the equivalents he could remember, glad to be making progress.
Jenny looked down at the letter. “But how do you tell in what order to read them? I see that several signs are repeated, but sometimes they’re side by side, and sometimes they’re heaped on top of each other.”
“Very observant,” Stephen replied. “And when you’re looking at genuine inscriptions, it’s worse. The Egyptians would write a text left to right or right to left, or even in columns.”
Jenny stared at him.
“Why would they do that?”
“Our best guess is because they liked their texts to fit in the most attractive way possible into the available space. Another probable reason is that hieroglyphs take up a lot of room, so you want to fit them efficiently into the space. That’s the reason for the stacking you noticed.”
“So how do you know which way to read them?”
“It’s fairly simple,” Stephen said. “Characters that look like an animal or person—like that quail chick—always face toward the head of the line. I assure you, there are a lot more of this type of symbol in a real text than are represented here.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Jenny said.
“Then you read upper before lower, whether in a column or in a compressed word group.”
Neville had been copying fairly mechanically while he listened to Stephen’s explanation. Now he looked up in concern.
“Stephen, this text doesn’t look anything like the Egyptian words I remember,” he said. “I’ll be the first to admit that I need the dictionary more often than not, but…”
“You’re onto something, my good knight,” Stephen said, obviously in high spirits. “Now give us a good morning and let us finish the basic transcription before we go on.”
Neville agreed, and with Stephen helping him, it wasn’t long before the hieroglyphic text had been reduced to strings of letters broken into word groups.
TH GDS KRS BYDS BY TH BRYD KING DPRT NT INGLND FR DSRT WSTS DTH IS THR BWR TH GRINING WMN SFYNK.
“But it doesn’t make any sense!” Jenny protested. “There are too many consonants, not enough vowels.”
“Actually,” Stephen said, his good humor persisting, “there are no true vowels in written Egyptian. The Egyptians didn’t bother writing them, anymore than the Hebrews did.”
“And I bet they figured them out by context, right?” Jenny said. “I could write my name Jni Bnt and someone familiar with French or English might guess what to fill in.”
“That’s about how it went,” Stephen agreed. “I see you scowling at our humble transcription, thinking I’m teasing you again. The characters Neville and I keep filling in as an ‘I’ are technically weak consonants, but don’t let that bother you. I believe our writer here has included the feather to make his meaning more clear.”
“More clear?” Jenny asked dubiously.
“Well, he could have left it out altogether,” Stephen said. “He didn’t use the signs that might fill in for the letter ‘A’ for some reason. So, Neville, you’ve had time to study this. What do you make of it?”
“I think,” Neville replied, feeling his way toward what he had felt as he began to transcribe the text, “that this is not written in Egyptian, but in some other language—most probably English.”
“English!” Jenny said. “Show me what you mean.”
Neville pointed to a word about a third into the transcribed text.
“That for one. It says ‘king’ as clear as anything. The one three words later could be ‘England’ without too great a stretch of the imagination.”
“Inglnd,” Jenny said, sounding it through. “There’s no hieroglyph for ‘E,’ right? Anyhow, we don’t so much say ‘eh’ as ‘ih.’ Ln-d sure does look like ‘land,’ though I suppose it could be ‘lend.’ ”
“Think like an Egyptian,” Stephen urged. “What makes sense is probably what we want. Shall we start at the beginning?”
“I’ll wager that ‘T-H’ is ‘the,’ ” Neville said without hesitation. “It occurs several times in the text.”
“Gods!” Jenny exclaimed, nearly shouting her discovery. “The next word is ‘gods.’ ”
“Now, K-R-S doesn’t look like much,” Stephen said, “but take a page from our Germanic cousins. Don’t look at it, sound it through.”
“Krs,” Jenny said obediently. Then her eyes widened. “Curse!”
“That’s my guess, too,” Stephen said. “We must remember that English is completely illogical and we have hard C’s that sound like K’s and soft C’s that sound like S’s. Our correspondent here is giving us phonetic equivalents.”
“I think,” Neville said, “that this is why he didn’t use the character for ‘A.’ As I recall, the Egyptians didn’t have a character that differentiated between the long and short forms of the vowel, while a long ‘I’ sounds like ‘Y’—which was represented by the doubled feather character.”
“The letter Y is long ‘I,’ ” Jenny murmured. “That means the next word is ‘bides.’ ”
Using these rules, they quickly translated the remainder, with only a few words causing them to pause long enough for the ink in Stephen’s pen to blot.
THE GODS CURSE BIDES BY THE BURIED KING DEPART NOT ENGLAND FOR DESERT WASTES DEATH IS THERE BEWARE THE GRINNING WOMAN SPHINX.
“I admire this manner of spelling,” Jenny said, comparing the original to their transcription. “It makes more sense than ours. I mean, look at ‘death.’ D-E-T-H would do just as well.”
“For spelling, maybe,” Neville said, “but I don’t much like our correspondent’s content. It’s rather hard to make out precisely what is meant without punctuation, but this is clearly a threat.”
“Or a warning,” Stephen said. “That last line isn’t particularly threatening. Now, I would punctuate the text this way.”
He took the pen and jotted a few marks.
THE GOD’S CURSE BIDES BY THE BURIED KING. DEPART NOT ENGLAND FOR DESERT WASTES. DEATH IS THERE. BEWARE THE GRINNING WOMAN SPHINX.
“Woman sphinx?” Jenny asked. “Aren’t they all women?”
“Not at all,” Stephen said. “The Egyptians apparently adored sphinxes. They depicted them with male, female, and even animal characteristics—hawks spring to mind; rams, too. So we apparently are being warned to be wary of a specific female sphinx.”
“If we take the ‘buried king’ to mean our Neferankhotep,” Neville said grimly, “that means someone knows our purpose for going to Egypt.”
“Not necessarily,” Stephen said breezily. “I mean, who else do archeologists want to dig up? Certainly not commoners. The occasional queen is nice, but kings are the prize.”
“Maybe so,” Neville said, but he was not convinced.
Jenny looked up from the message, her expression solemn. “Are you planning to cancel your t
rip, Uncle Neville?”
“No!” he replied a trifle sharply. Then he softened. “However, if you wish to remain here in England, it is not too late for me to speak with Lady Lindenmeade.”
“I’m going,” Jenny replied. “I’ve already started shopping. This is just going to make me expand my list—unless I can borrow your primers. We’ll have lots of travel time, and I think I’d like Stephen to start teaching me hieroglyphs.”
Neville forced a laugh. “You may have the books, Jenny, but I’m beginning to think you’d better buy spare ammunition for your guns.”
It was hard to say who looked more surprised, Jenny or Stephen. Jenny’s surprise rapidly changed to delight.
“I have a rifle, too, Uncle Neville, a new Winchester, custom-made. Can we get ammunition for that, too?”
“Of course.”
Stephen sputtered, “Guns? For a lady?”
“Jenny’s parents had rather peculiar ideas as to how best to raise a lady,” Neville said, “and since you have no doubt that Jenny is a lady…” He trailed off challengingly.
“Not a bit,” Stephen replied a trifle over-heartily, “and given I can’t even knock off the coconut at the village fair, it’s probably a good idea that Miss Benet can compensate for my deficiencies.”
“We should make certain you know the basics,” Neville said. “But that will need to wait. We leave in two days.”
“For the desert wastes,” Jenny said, looking down at the letter.
Where death awaits, Neville thought.
4
Unexpected Traveling Companions
Jenny thought the amount of fuss her English companions made about the journey to Egypt almost funny, given what they claimed to be ready to attempt once they were in Egypt. They were traveling through parts of the world civilized since the time of Julius Caesar—though Caesar certainly wouldn’t have said the Gauls were civilized—to one of the cradles of human culture.
The distance involved was tremendous, but they were traveling by train and steamship. Thanks to Uncle Neville’s wealth, they would travel first class all the way. Jenny was rather looking forward to the journey—especially when she compared it with some of those she’d taken with her parents. Those had involved buckboards, covered wagons, and in a few cases barely broken Indian ponies.
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