stood looking down the straight path between the paws of the crouching lions. “Early morning and evening seem to be the best times to attempt a leap. I can sometimes feel when it is active.”
“Extraordinary.” The scientist squatted down and put a hand to the broken pavement. “Do you feel anything now?”
Kit shook his head. “Not at the moment, no.” He cast a glance to the sky. The sun was well down, the night stars rising in the east. “It may be too late. Maybe, when we have found what we are after, I can show you how it works.”
“I will look forward to a demonstration with keenest anticipation.”
The next morning Khefri led them to the wadi entrance, and the expeditionary party proceeded down the long, winding stone corridor of the gorge. They reached the divide, and a little farther along began seeing the burial niches; they came to the steep cutting where Kit and Giles and Lady Fayth had climbed up to await their assault on the tomb in the ill-fated attempt at rescuing Cosimo and Sir Henry. Shortly after that, they arrived at the place where the main channel split into east and west tributaries.
“This is the place,” said Kit, gazing around. “Here is where we make camp.” The bowl-shaped gulley was much the same as he remembered it, with only slight variations—so slight, in fact, that Kit had difficulty remembering that this was not the place he had been before. In this world, it was 1822 and there were neither tents nor Burley Men, and no excavated tomb either: just the sheer dust-coloured rock walls and the dry and empty wadi floor winding away on either hand. The great empty temple was there and still empty—though the interior, when inspected later, bore signs of scavenger activity. Indeed, there was no guarantee that Anen had even lived in this world, much less that he had been buried in the wadi.
“Are you certain this is the place?” Thomas, sweating beneath his big white straw hat, patted his brow with a handkerchief and looked around doubtfully. “I have to say, I have never heard of a tomb located in such a remote and inaccessible location. I would never have thought of digging here.”
“If the tomb is here at all, it will be in this wadi,” Kit assured him. “Somewhere . . .” He paced along the eastern branch a few dozen steps and stopped at a bend in the rock that looked faintly familiar. “Just about here, I’d say.”
He pointed to the base of the curtain wall. “Somewhere along here is the entrance. There are steps leading down to the burial chambers below.” He looked along the seamless wall for any sign of the tomb but saw nothing to betray a hidden entrance. “At least, that’s the way I remember it from the other place.”
“Then that is where we will begin.” The doctor told Khefri to have the men unload the animals, unpack the equipment, and set up camp.
Soon the area resembled a bedouin village, complete with low, wing-shaped tents and a tiny campfire of twigs and dried dung over which flat bread baked on the bottom of an upturned pot. Sweet acacia smoke drifted on silvery threads into the air, and as the sun sank below the surrounding hills, an air of peace and calm descended over the ancient burial ground.
While the evening meal was cooking, the doctor took a long, thin iron rod and began probing the sandy floor of the wadi where Kit had indicated, thrusting the tip of the rod deep and waggling it around, searching for any fissure or other anomaly that might betray a manmade structure. “This is how we begin,” Thomas explained. “You would be surprised what can be learned by literally poking around.”
Working methodically, he applied the rod along the base of the wadi wall; when he finished, he had identified a half-dozen places where exploratory trenches would be dug. Kit was satisfied that at least one of them would turn out to be the sealed entrance of the tomb.
Darkness claimed the day, and after their simple meal the men rolled in their cloaks to sleep, and soon the camp was at rest in the silence of the desert. Kit himself spent a restless night troubled by dreams of finding the bones of Cosimo and Sir Henry, or worse: being locked in the tomb with their rotting corpses.
Those unhappy thoughts cast a dark cloud over his soul that lingered through the next