turned his gaze slowly towards the sarcophagus where he and Kit had put the bodies of Sir Henry and Cosimo.
Kit saw the glance and involuntary grimace that followed and recognised the reaction. “I know, Giles,” he said. “It takes a little effort to put it behind you. But it might help to remember that this is not the same tomb where Sir Henry and Cosimo died. That tomb—the one we were in—is in another place and time, in another world.”
Giles nodded, but said nothing.
“Now,” said Kit, moving on to the fourth panel of the giant wall painting, “take a look at this last one. There is High Priest Anen holding the map—the whole thing—as he points to the star.”
“But ours is only a piece,” commented Wilhelmina. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“Possibly a fourth or fifth of the whole—just as Cosimo believed, and which more or less corresponds to the portion I saw in the Christ Church crypt.”
“But you said that was a fake,” Mina pointed out.
“It was,” confirmed Kit, “although someone had gone to the trouble of making it roughly the same size and shape as the original he had stolen.”
“What will you do with the map?” wondered Thomas. “Now that you have found it, what will you do?”
“First,” Kit considered, “we must learn to read it. And then we’ll use it to carry on Cosimo and Sir Henry’s quest to find Flinders-Petrie’s treasure.”
Wilhelmina put her face close to the painting. She held her lamp nearer and studied the map in the high priest’s hand. “Are these in any way accurate, do you think?”
“I wish they were,” said Kit. “They’re just the artist’s representations. I don’t think the people who drew those symbols had any interest in rendering them in exact detail. My guess is they probably never saw the real map at all.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Let me see it,” said Wilhelmina.
Kit turned to Thomas, who produced a bundle wrapped in fresh linen. The doctor untied the cord and unrolled the nearly translucent patch of human parchment. In the gentle lambent glow of the lamps, the indigo symbols etched on the skin seemed to pulsate with strange power.
“May I?” said Wilhelmina. Thomas passed the map to her, and she held it up to the painting. Though the symbols in the painting were crude squiggles next to the real thing, the basic shapes seemed more or less correct. The piece Mina was holding did match up with the upper right quadrant of the map in High Priest Anen’s hand. “Whoever cut up the map was very careful,” she observed. “Look at the ruffled edges.” She pointed out the lower portion and left side of the map. “See how irregular the line is?”
“Whoever did it was at pains not to cut into other symbols,” replied Kit. “So they cut around them, producing this deckled edge.”
“The adjoining pieces will match precisely,” offered Thomas. “By that you will know they are genuine.”
Wilhelmina carefully re-rolled the human parchment and passed it to Thomas, who returned it to its cover. The four had then returned to the wadi camp, where Khefri had organised a special dinner of roast goat to celebrate the successful completion of the dig. They had eaten and talked late into the night, and now, as the sun was rising in the east, it was time to depart.
Wilhelmina started down the avenue towards the spot where Giles was waiting. Kit lifted a hand and called, “Farewell!”
“Go with God, my friends,” shouted Thomas, waving them away. “Grace and peace attend you.”
But his words were lost in the shriek of the wind that suddenly gusted along the ancient pavement. The world grew hazy in a mixture of dust and grit . . . and the next thing Kit knew, a fierce rain was beating on his face. His clothing whipped about his limbs in a gale-force wind that, unlike his other experiences, did not summarily die away upon their arrival.
“I think we’ve landed in the middle of a hurricane!” he shouted, trying to be heard above the crash and roar.
“What?” came Wilhelmina’s voice from a distance that sounded like miles, but must have been only a few feet away.
“This storm,” he cried. “We’re in the thick of it.”
“It’s always storming here,” she shouted, emerging out of the lashing wind. “It never stops.”
“Never?”
“Not ever.” She pressed her wet face closer. “Not that I know.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Lots of times.”
He felt her hand grip his arm.
“This way. Stay with me.” She turned her head and shouted