The Buried Pyramid

by Jane Lindskold

  “Maybe,” Neville said, his voice curiously husky, “it’s like the legend says and people shun this valley.”

  No one even smiled at his suggestion, instead the silence that met it said that this was the explanation that had been lurking in everyone’s mind, but no one had wanted to be the first to mention it.

  “What could they fear?” Eddie said at last, his irritable tone not for Neville, but for the mystery. “Certainly they don’t fear the ghosts of dead pharaohs or the wrath of ancient gods. The Egyptians themselves are the longest running crew of tomb robbers in the land.”

  Stephen nodded, taking refuge in pedantry. “Belzoni wrote of the primitive natives of Kurneh—or was it Karnak—who lived in the outer chambers of cliff tombs with the bones of the dead scattered about their feet. Certainly, they preserve no wholesome, Christian fear of the dead.”

  “So what keeps them away?” Eddie persisted. “The journey wasn’t easy for us, but it would be nothing to a Bedouin. What keeps them from profiting from this valley?”

  No one had an answer. The setting sun cast shadows that seemed to make the statues of the gods move, but they retained their silence. In the rocky canyon below, a jackal found the entrails of the sheep. Its bark carried through the still air, chilling the souls of those who heard it with its note of triumph.

  17

  Better and Verse

  By the middle of the next day, they had fallen into a working routine. Neville balked when he learned that Stephen planned to copy all of the inscriptions before making a serious effort to translate any of them.

  “But if something interrupts us,” Stephen said, startled at his employer’s protest, “then we will have the texts. We can work on them anywhere.”

  Neville had to agree that this reasoning was scholarly and sound, but he wanted to know what the writing said. The bits and pieces he could read only whetted his interest, hinting as they did at a more complex meaning.

  “Jenny and I will take over the copying,” Neville said. “You start translating the Horus text we finished this morning. Eddie, can you handle camp chores?”

  “Easily,” the other answered. “I’d like to go down into the canyons below and cut some extra fodder for the camels, but I’ll let you know before I leave.”

  Neville hardly heard him.

  “Jenny, I know you don’t have much knowledge of hieroglyphs, but your sketching is excellent. Can I trust you to make a perfect copy of one of the panels? Don’t omit a line or a dot. Sometimes that’s enough to change the meaning.”

  “Like leaving out a single line would transform a ‘q’ into an ‘o,’ ” Jenny said. “If I’m in doubt whether some mark is intentional or just a flaw in the stone, I’ll sketch it in lightly.”

  “I’ll do the same,” Neville said. “The Anubis text is closest to camp, so I’ll hobble over there.”

  “And I’ll take Isis,” Jenny said. “Can’t have you gentlemen consorting with a woman in such a state of undress—especially when she’s another man’s wife.”

  Favoring them all with a deliberately saucy smile, she scooped up Mozelle and her sketchbook, then trotted across to where Isis held her unspeaking court.

  “That girl,” Eddie said, “is going to be trouble for some man someday.”

  “She’s trouble for one now,” Neville said. “I don’t know whether I should try to marry her off or tuck her in a nunnery.”

  “She wouldn’t thank you for either,” Eddie prophesied.

  Stephen remained unnaturally intent on his notes during this conversation, and Neville found himself wondering if the linguist was smitten with his niece. Jenny was certainly lovely enough to turn a man’s head, but there didn’t seem to be any sparks flying between the two.

  Crutch firmly anchored in his armpit, Neville thumped across the sand. He distracted himself from the pain attendant on this slow progress by thinking of Audrey Cheshire. There was loveliness and more, no doubt about it.

  That evening, Stephen announced he had translated two portions of the inscription near Horus.

  “There is more than one text,” he explained, “as can be seen by the varied directions in which the hieroglyphs are oriented. I started with the one from the upper section of the panel.”

  “Stop playing professor,” Neville said, irritably. His eyes hurt from the glare, and his copying had been less than swift. He’d kept stopping to try and make sense of what he was working with, and succeeded only in frustrating himself.

  Stephen cleared his throat. “I went for speed, and accuracy, not artistry. Forgive any awkwardness.”

  “We do,” Jenny said, “in advance.”

  Stephen cleared his throat once more, and Neville was just feeling guilty about pressing someone who had just a day or so before been nearly killed by heat stroke, when the young man began:

  From the East comes he, Horus the Hawk, Horus the Avenger.

  With the Sun comes he, Horus the King, Horus the Son.

  Born of living mother, murdered father, comes he who causes the wicked to flee in terror.

  He thrashes them with his flail, herds them with the wind rising from the beating of his strong wings.

  He tramples them, as the Pharaoh tramples all who threaten the Black Land.

  He is terrible in his wrath, yet tender in his protection of those who dwell beneath the shelter of his wings.

  From the East comes Horus, and with him comes the wind.

  Stephen’s recital was met with respectful silence, and he commented rather shyly, “That’s all of the first bit.”

  “It was lovely,” Jenny said, “but frightening, too.”

  Stephen looked pleased. “I remind you that my interpretation may not be exactly what the writer intended. I had to guess where hieroglyphs had been partially effaced. The tone is not precisely traditional, at least from what I know…”

  “Is there more?” Neville interrupted. “I realize that piece is quite long, but if you have any others, we would enjoy hearing them.”

  More relaxed now, Stephen did only a minimal clearing of throat and shuffling of papers before beginning.

  “This one seems to be cautionary in nature, perhaps a curse against impious behavior. Quite the thing for a place like this.”

  Forget not that the Eye of Horus is the Eye of the Hawk,

  The keen Eye that sees the evildoer and the just man alike.

  Horus shreds the evildoer with cruel curving beak and punishing claws.

  The wind from the wings of Harakhtes, the wind from the east, buries the evildoer beyond the sound of prayer or the gifts of his kin.

  In the afterlife the evildoer will be a slave and no wine will ease his hours.

  He will dine upon excrement and the leavings of monsters.

  When he comes before Osiris, he will have no gifts for the father of his slayer.

  Osiris will condemn him.

  Anubis will refuse the opening of his mouth.

  The evildoer will long for nothingness and be denied.

  He will slave forever in filthy darkness and rank starvation.

  “The other was frightening,” Jenny said. “This one is plain horrid.”

  “Ironic, too,” Stephen commented, “since the tomb robber would probably be illiterate and not understand the warning.”

  “I wonder,” Neville said, “if that’s correct in this case. The legend of Neferankhotep says that priests, jealous of the pharaoh’s favor in the eyes of the gods, were the ones who attempted to rob him. They would have understood this well enough.”

  “You sound,” Eddie said with a thin smile, “as if you believe all that nonsense about the gods.”

  “I don’t,” Neville said quickly—perhaps a touch too quickly, for Eddie’s smile only broadened. “However, the people who reburied Neferankhotep here would have known the story.”

  Eddie let the matter drop.

  “What fascinates me,” he said, “are the references to the wind from the wings of Horus. As I recall—and I do
n’t claim to be an expert, but I have lived here over ten years—the prevailing wind in Egypt blows from the north, the opposite direction from the Nile current, which is why it is such a friendly river for navigation. This ‘wind from the east’ seems to be something other than natural.”

  Jenny cut in before anyone could respond to Eddie’s challenge. “By the way, who was Harakhtes? He’s the one with the wind in this verse.”

  “It’s another name for Horus,” Stephen said. “Horus of the Horizon. I think later periods merged him with the sun god, Ra. It’s an appropriate title for Horus in his role as all-seeing god, just as Hor Nubti, Horus of Gold, was the common name for Horus in his role as avenger of his father. I took a few liberties there…”

  Neville interrupted. “Eddie has an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about the wind from the east being a supernatural wind. I guess I thought it was a reference to the khamseen .”

  “The khamseen ?” Jenny asked.

  “It’s a wind that comes from the southwest, usually in early summer,” Neville explained. “It’s quite terrible. It can last for up to fifty days without much of a break. Dust clouds blot out the sun, temperatures rise, sometimes destroying the crops. As if that wasn’t enough, the khamseen seems to encourage flying insects. I can’t think of a more vivid curse.”

  “But you said this khamseen comes from the southwest,” Stephen protested. “I took no liberties with the direction mentioned in the text. This Horus wind definitely comes from the east.”

  Neville shrugged. “I am sure you translated accurately. After all, this is a ritual inscription, not a guide to advise travelers. As I see it, Horus is usually associated with the east. Here he is also associated with the sun god, Ra. The sun comes from the east, and so would Horus, and so would any wind he brings to punish the wicked. I think we are unwise to imagine more.”

  Jenny looked as if she wanted to agree, but stubbornness wouldn’t let her.

  “But shouldn’t we take the legend seriously, Uncle Neville? You didn’t believe Alphonse Liebermann was onto anything, but here we are. And it wasn’t that long ago that that German…”

  “Schliemann,” Stephen interrupted.

  “That German,” Jenny persisted, “found Troy by following descriptions in Homer. I’m not saying there’s any truth to the story about gods burying the original mortuary complex, but I’m saying that Eddie’s right. We should take notice of any oddities. If you and Eddie are right, a wind from the east might stand out to an ancient Egyptian like someone putting the Rockies running wrong way along North America would stand out to us.”

  “We’ll see what the other texts tell us,” Neville promised. “In the meantime, the light is growing too poor for us to continue, and I’d like to preserve our lamp oil for if we find something underground. Shall we entertain ourselves with something other than archeological speculation for the evening?”

  “Papa Antonio taught me how to play senet ,” Jenny suggested. “That doesn’t take much light.”

  The evening passed quickly, all the more so in that everyone was tired enough to go to sleep early. Eddie insisted that they continue to post watches, though Stephen was omitted from the rotation until he was recovered from his heatstroke.

  In the morning, they continued copying and translating. Eddie went out and shot a goat. Once the meat they couldn’t hope to eat before it spoiled was curing, he occupied himself poking around the bases of the statues and looking for other areas that might hold inscriptions. He found a few, but Stephen judged them hieratic texts, much later than the elegant inscriptions on the panels near the statues.

  “We’ll get to them later,” Stephen promised, his fever now purely scholarly. “A history of the occupations of this place would be fascinating.”

  “I just hope we don’t need to empty all the sand out of this valley to find Neville’s ruins,” Eddie said grimly. “That would take an army, and even his fortune isn’t up to hiring that much labor.”

  Neville heard, but didn’t comment. Stephen had started on the Isis text, proposing to work his way around the four cardinal points, but nothing he had read to them when they’d taken a midday break had seemed particularly promising. Isis certainly was expected to do her part in protecting the area against 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 beh
ind 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 they thought of as “ground level,” it might rather be the top of a massive pillar.

  Thus far Uncle Neville had not turned from his laborious copying of the text over by Osiris. However, the sun was reaching its noontime height, and soon Eddie would demand that they break for an afternoon siesta. Jenny cast about for Mozelle, and spotted the kitten crouched belly to the sand, intent on a long-tailed lizard that had emerged onto a flat piece of rock.

  Amused, Jenny watched as Mozelle began her stalk, golden-brown fur blending perfectly with the sand as long ago the now vanished Egyptian lions must have done. The tip of the kitten’s tail twitched, then her entire rump wiggled in an ecstacy of enthusiasm.

  Mozelle leapt too late. The lizard darted away, slipping up and over the sand, dodging into a crevice in the face of the polished panel. That should have ended the hunt, but Mozelle continued scrabbling determinedly at the rock and sand, unwilling to accept that the lizard could go where she could not.

  “I believe,” Eddie said, the sound of his voice making Jenny jump, for his soft-soled shoes had made little sound on the sand, “Mozelle wants to be an archeologist. Look at her dig.”