more concerned about its depth.” Dirk’s nose was buried in a report on Nubian archeological excavations before the completion of the Aswan High Dam. “Some areas reach six hundred feet deep.”
“If that’s the case around Faras, we should have followed Rod to Cairo and flown back to D.C.”
“The good news is that Faras is a long way from the dam. It’s near the Sudanese portion of the reservoir they call Lake Nubia. The maximum depth there is four hundred twenty-five feet, with an average around eighty.”
“I’ll take the average. Where does Max put it on the lake?”
“Near the center corridor, unfortunately, a dozen miles south of Abu Simbel. The water level changes constantly, so we won’t know the depth until we get there.”
The plane touched down a short time later at Abu Simbel Airport, and Dirk and Summer followed a throng of tourists onto the baking tarmac. They collected their bags, made their way past a pair of tour buses, and hailed a weather-beaten cab. It was less than a five-minute ride through the dusty village to a cracked concrete dock aside the lake. A smiling, mustachioed man dressed in white waited for them beside an open-topped runabout.
“Ms. Pitt? I am Ozzie Ackmadan, proprietor of the Abu Simbel Inn.” He rushed over and shook Summer’s hand. “I have the boat you called about all ready. It is full of gas and has two dive tanks that were delivered this morning.”
“Very kind of you to meet us here.”
“Enjoy your day on the lake. You can return the boat right here. The hotel is just two blocks over.” He pointed up the road. “I have two rooms reserved for you tonight. Let me take your luggage, I have a vehicle right off the dock.”
“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll look forward to seeing you later.”
Dirk loaded their dive bags into the boat and cranked on the outboard motor. Summer released the dock lines and hopped aboard, taking a seat on the bow as Dirk guided the boat out of the small cove.
He briefly turned the boat north, hugging the eastern shore to take in the view of one of Egypt’s most iconic sites. Facing the water was the Temple of Abu Simbel, featuring four colossal statues of the seated Pharaoh Ramses II.
“It’s quite impressive in person,” Summer said, admiring the scale of the statues compared to the tourists milling about their base like ants.
“Equally impressive,” Dirk said, “is that they were relocated here in the 1960s from their original site, along with twenty-three other important temples and monuments that would otherwise have been flooded by the Aswan High Dam.”
“Too bad our Faras temple was one of the victims.”
Dirk looped the boat around to the south and opened the throttle. Leaving Abu Simbel, they motored into a barren stretch of the lake that stretched for fifty miles to Sudan.
Dirk reached into his dive bag and powered on a GPS unit he had purchased in Assiut. He’d already entered the coordinates of the Faras temple provided by Max and steered toward the point a dozen miles away. As the boat bounced through the waves, Summer assembled their dive kits and confirmed the borrowed air tanks were topped off.
Reaching the designated location a half hour later, Dirk positioned the boat over the coordinates, and Summer released an anchor off the bow. She let the rope slip through her hands, measuring the line as it went. When the line went slack, she tied it off to a cleat and turned to Dirk. “Looks to be about seventy-five feet. We got lucky.”
“Our real luck will be if we can find any remains of the temple.”
Despite a surface water temperature of eighty-five degrees, they slipped on lightweight wetsuits since it would be considerably cooler at the bottom. Before they donned their tanks, Dirk pulled a sheet of paper from his dive bag and showed it to Summer.
“Hiram found a hand-drawn image of Faras from the 1890s. It identifies the layout of the temple. Much of the building materials had been dismantled for reuse, but there were still remnants of the temple and a notable shrine wall. The fortress around it was quite a large structure. The remains look significant, so we should be able to see those. The temple was at the northernmost end of the fortress and contained a small sanctuary.”
Summer studied the drawing and nodded. “That gives us something more than a needle in a haystack. If we can locate the temple and sanctuary, then we have