Lady of Heaven (33 page)

So he decided to
settle back, watch the Henredon group, and bide his time. He was sure, at some
point, the opportunity to abduct the gun-toting American woman would present
itself.  He would have to be sharp enough to take it.

December 5, 1923

            Louis
is still not feeling well.  He stays with William constantly although William
is thriving in the wonderful Egyptian climate.  Mr. Sula escorted me to a marvelous
bazaar in Luxor today.  We ate Egyptian delicacies and sipped strong, sweet
Egyptian tea.  Mr. Sula has a great love for this country, as do I.  He has
asked me to call him Kadin, of which I am honored. We have become great
friends.

            ~FS

CHAPTER TWENTY

The following
day dawned windy and warm. Fox was up as dawn broke, trying to pull Morgan up
with him but she refused to budge. So he dressed alone and emerged from the
tent to find Jabeel and Allahaba already at the fire, cooking breakfast. The
smell of fresh bread and coffee filled the cool dawn air.

Yawning, Fox
stood by the fire as Allahaba handed him a cup of strong Arabic coffee.  He
took a couple of sips, surveying the valley at dawn.  It was shades of gray, of
bluish, as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon.  He felt at peace, content,
and back in his element. He’d missed communing with ancient Egypt.

“Too bad that
Morgan is still asleep,” he said loudly. “She’s going to miss a fantastic
breakfast.”

If Fox had
learned one thing about his wife, it was that she had selective hearing.  She
could sleep through a hurricane and then he’d say the smallest thing and she’d
wake up.  He continued to sip at his coffee, smelling fresh bread, increasingly
eager to get on with the day.  Glancing over his shoulder, he didn’t see any
activity in his tent.

“The coffee is
good,” he told Allahaba loudly, glancing over his shoulder again. “And the
bread smells wonderful. I’m starving.”

The flap to his
tent suddenly jerked back and Morgan stumbled through, gathering her hair back
into a ponytail and winding a rubber band around it. She marched up on the men,
unhappy and sleepy.

“I heard you the
first time,” she grumbled. “I was awake.”

Fox bit his lip
so she wouldn’t see him grin. “I just wanted to make sure.”

“Stop nagging.”

He did grin,
then. “Nagging, am I?” he wrapped a big arm around her and pulled her close. 
He must have pulled too hard because she grunted when he slammed her against
his torso.  He kissed her on the cheek. “Good morning to you, too, sunshine of
my life. Did you sleep well?”

“Fine.” In spite
of her grumpy mood, she returned his kiss and turned to Allahaba.  “Coffee,
please?” she asked.

Allahaba handed
her a cup, very sweet, and she took a first contented sip.  With Fox’s arm
still around her, she gazed out over the Manjam Hamsh wilderness. It was a
beautiful, desolate sight.

“What did you
want me to do this morning?” she asked Fox.

He was gazing
out over his dig site. “Take pictures.”

“I’d rather
dig.”

He looked at
her. “It’s a lot of work, especially in this soil,” he told her. “The ground
will be hard.”

“I’d still like
to try.”

He shrugged,
nodding reluctantly, secretly suspecting that she’d dig for about an hour and
be exhausted.  He was completely surprised when she proved him wrong.

After a
breakfast of fresh bread, dried fruit and much cinnamon date cake, Morgan
followed Fox out to the area he had surveyed.  Fox wanted to do at least three
test holes so he put Morgan on one of them.  She took a pick and shovel that
Jabeel had brought in the back of his beat-up Land Rover and began to dig.  Fox
went over to his own test area but the truth was that he was watching Morgan to
see how long it would be before she gave up.  Much to his astonishment, she
didn’t.

She hacked and
shoveled well into the morning.  Her hole wasn’t nearly as deep as Fox’s or
Allahaba’s, but it was neat and methodical.  Jabeel brought everyone water when
he wasn’t helping Allahaba and Morgan made sure to drink regularly. Fox watched
her from the corner of his eye, deeply impressed with her fortitude. Every day
he saw something new in her that he loved. As the morning progressed towards
noon, she was still digging steadily and Fox paused to pull off his shirt
because he was sweating so profusely. Once he did that, she immediately ground
to a halt.

“That’s
not
fair, Henredon,” she pointed a gloved finger at him. “You’re doing that to
distract me. I’m trying to do a job here.”

Fighting off a
smirk, he began to flex and pose like a bodybuilder, displaying is fantastic
physique. The man was mouth-watering and he knew it, posing specifically so the
beautifully artistic tattoo on his left arm received maximum attention. The
ankh symbol was particularly appropriate at the moment. She watched him for a
few moments before rolling her eyes and turning away.

“You’d better
cut that out,” she went back to digging with her back to him.

“Why?” he flexed
an enormous bicep, kissing it as if completely self-absorbed. “Don’t you like
what you see?”

She fought off
the giggles. “You big jerk,” she muttered.

He heard her
laughter in her reply.  With a grin, he picked up his shovel and resumed
working, his skin turning bronze under the Egyptian winter sun.  Morgan was
aware that he had left his shirt off and tried to catch a glimpse of him now
and then, but Fox must have had radar; every time she looked, he would catch
her and flex like a self-centered body builder in the midst of a competition.
She would start giggling and pretend like she didn’t care.

Noon rolled
around and they were all still digging with dedication. Fox’s hole was about
four feet deep and he hadn’t come across anything he could categorize as a
ruin.  He was coming to think that perhaps he needed to start another hole
somewhere else. While he stood and pondered the layers of earth inside his
hole, Morgan was on to something.

She had only
managed to dig about half of Fox’s depth, but her hole was wider than his was.
Consequently, she had more underlying earth to work with.  As they dug, Fox had
them all dump their dirt into a bucket which was in turn dumped into a mesh
screen that would sift out anything caught in the pile.  Jabeel had been
working the sifter in between handing out water.  Morgan hauled her bucket over
to the sifter and poured it in; Jabeel was over with Allahaba so she sifted the
dirt herself. 

She was
expecting all of the dirt to slide through without incident, but this
particular batch was different.  As she shook the sifter, she noticed small
pieces that she first thought were rocks.  When she picked one of them up, she
realized that it wasn’t a rock; it was too round to be a rock in addition to
being a dark shade of blue when brushed off.  Morgan turned it over in her
hand, realizing there was a hole through the center of it. Her eyebrows flew up
as she picked it up to more closely inspect it.

“Oh, my God,”
she breathed. “It looks like a… bead. It’s a bead!”

She whirled to
Fox; he was about thirty feet away, on his knees as he peered down into his
test hole.  She started jumping up and down.

“Fox!” she cried
excitedly. “A bead! I found a bead!”

Fox’s head
snapped up to her, registering what she was saying, before bolting to his feet
and racing in her direction.  He rushed up to her as she practically put his
eye out holding up the small relic.

“Let me see,” he
said calmly.

He took it from
her gently, inspecting it carefully and closely in the palm of his hand. By
this time, Allahaba and Jabeel had joined Morgan and the three of them watched
Fox very carefully inspect the item. 

“Well?” Morgan
said eagerly.

Fox wasn’t so
quick to react. He looked at her. “Did you find any more like this?”

She nodded,
racing back over to the mesh sifter and picking out the six remaining bits of
blue rock.  Fox had followed her and she placed them carefully in his hand.  He
continued to study them, silently, as Morgan, Allahaba and Jabeel wait
anxiously. Finally, Fox spoke.

“Show me where
you found these,” he told Morgan.

She took him
back to her hole, pointing down into it. “They came from the very bottom of the
hole,” she told him. “I was scraping around, trying to widen it, at the
bottom.”

Fox knelt down
beside the hole and just stared at it.  Morgan watched him, realizing he was
studying all of the layers of the hole itself.  Pulling a small, soft paint
brush from his back pocket, he began to carefully brush the edges of the hole.

Time marched on
and Fox continued brushing.  At one point, he had Morgan go over to his test
hole and collect a small trowel had been using. Morgan brought it back over to
him and he alternately brushed at picked at the sides of her test hole.  He
found more interest near the bottom of the hole and concentrated his efforts
there.  Morgan continued to stand over him while Jabeel finally left the group
to start lunch. 

Morgan didn’t
want to bother him but the suspense was killing her. When the boredom began to
set in, she took to pacing around, but never very far from Fox as he continued
to very carefully brush away centuries of earth.  He was swept up in what he
was doing and as the day progressed his bronzed shoulders began to turn red
from the sun.  Jabeel brought lunch over to them, sandwiches made from cucumber
and hummus, but Fox didn’t stop to eat. He was busy. So Morgan sat down a few feet
away from him with her sandwich, watching him as he worked.

Lunch came and
went.  Just as Morgan was contemplating a nap, Fox suddenly sat up from the
hole with something in his hand.  Morgan jumped up from where she had been
sitting on the ground a few feet away and went to him.

“What did you
find?” she asked.

He was still
looking at whatever it was, putting it in the palm of his right hand while he
examined it with his left. After a moment, he sighed and shook his head.

“Well,” he said
slowly. “There’s something there; that’s for certain. I’m seeing a stratum that
looks like some kind of flooring or tile.  It’s clear as day.”

Morgan looked at
him, absorbing his words. She noticed that he was still holding a small piece
of something in his hand. “What do you have?”

He held it up to
her; it was a fragment of pottery that had faint swipes of color on it.  “A
potsherd,” he told her frankly, turning it over in his big fingers. “I can make
out a glyph on it, I think.”

“Really?” Morgan
was very interested. “What does it say?”

He gazed down at
the fragment for a moment before speaking. “Egyptian writing is fairly phonetic
in nature, meaning that, for example, a drawing of an eye means eye but it also
means ‘I’, as in a first person pronoun.  It’s also an Aljad alphabet, meaning
there are no vowels.” He sighed as he looked at the small piece of pottery, the
same color as the desert sand. “I’m well-versed in all known forms of Egyptian
hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic. I’ve made a specialty out of reading any written
form of the Egyptian language.”

“I know,” Morgan
interrupted him before he could finish his thoughts, her brown eyes twinkled at
him. “I did my homework on you before I came to see you at the Bolton.  You’re
considered one of the world’s foremost experts on written Egyptian language,
which is why I came to you with the papyrus. I knew if anyone could decipher
it, you could.”

He smiled at
her, reaching out to gently touch her arm; he didn’t want to touch anything
else because his hands were so dirty. “Lucky for me,” he winked at her before
continuing on his train of thought. “Anyway, I’ve looked at this glyph now for
a better part of a half hour and it’s the most archaic form of writing I’ve
ever seen.  It resembles something I’ve seen on Gerzean pottery, but even that
didn’t look quite like this.”

Morgan wasn’t
quite following him. “What’s Gerzean?”

“The simplified
answer is that it’s pre-dynastic Egyptian writing, although there’s more to it
than that.”

“Okay,” she
lifted her eyebrows expectantly when he didn’t elaborate. “So what does it all
mean?”

He shook his
head. “It means that whatever is here is truly ancient,” he looked up at her,
the obsidian eyes intense. “There were ancient Egyptian tribes that roamed
these deserts prior to the first dynasties, so I wouldn’t be surprised if
whatever we have here is part of those ancient Egyptian tribes. However, the
city of Ranthor is allegedly even more ancient than the pre-dynastic tribes.
It’s possible that those tribes built their own city on the ruins of Ranthor.”

Morgan thought
he sounded like he was rambling, trying to filter out all of the possibilities
before forming any kind of opinion. “So what is the symbol on that piece of
pottery?”