The Mummy's Curse (2 page)

I
give up!” Cody said to her mother as she entered the breakfast nook before school Monday morning. Cody bounded into the room dressed in a yellow short-sleeved T-shirt that set off her curly red ponytail. Well-worn jeans and a pair of red Converse Chucks completed her simple outfit. Lately the spring weather had been so sunny, all she'd need was her red hoodie and she'd be set for the short walk to Berkeley Cooperative Middle School.

“What's the matter?” Mrs. Jones asked her
thirteen-year-old daughter, before sipping from a mug of hot, steaming coffee. Already dressed in her uniform, Cody's mother was ready for her job at the Berkeley Police Department. “Did you have trouble figuring out the puzzle Ms. Stadelhofer gave you for homework?”

“No,” Cody said and signed, so her deaf four-year-old sister, Tana, would be included in the conversation. “That was pretty easy.” She sat down on a stool, filled her bowl with Cheerios, her favorite cereal since she was little, and added milk. “We've been studying ancient Egypt in class, and Ms. Stad gave us these cool decoder cards that have the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet, so I knew that was the key.” She took a spoonful of cereal.

“What mean h-i-r-o …?” Tana tried to fingerspell the word.

Code Buster's Key and Solution found on
this page
,
this page
.

Cody slowly respelled the word using the American Sign Language manual alphabet, then
signed, “Hieroglyphs are like words and stories written in pictures.”

She turned to her mother. “We're going to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose on Friday to see some hieroglyphs and ancient artifacts, and even a mummy.” Cody had never seen a mummy before, except in movies, and
they
always looked fake. She wondered if she'd be creeped out by a real one.

“So what's the problem?” her mother asked.

“I'm not sure what Ms. Stad's word means.” Cody took out the assignment from her backpack and showed it to her mom. Written underneath the hieroglyphic symbols was Cody's English translation.

Code Buster's Key and Solution found on
this page
,
this page
.

Cody's mom looked at the decoded word her daughter had written. “Did you look it up?”

“The dictionary says it means ‘concealed writing'—kind of like a hidden message. But that's all I know.”

“Hmm,” her mom murmured. “It sounds like
Ms. Stadelhofer has another mysterious puzzle for you to solve.”

“Seriously! I hope there are a bunch of hidden messages at the museum. Ms. Stad said the place is full of mysteries. She said to make sure we study our latest spelling words, because they'll be part of our assignment. I have a feeling she's making up some puzzles for us, too.”

“Sounds fun. Do you want me to quiz you?” Cody's mother asked.

“Sure.” Cody handed the word list to her mother. Cody was a good speller. She'd taught herself tricks for remembering difficult words and almost always got 100 percent on her tests. But this time she might not do as well because these new words were so different. They were the names of Egyptian gods and goddesses.

As her mother read off each spelling word, Cody wrote it down on a piece of paper. Most of the names weren't too hard—
Amun, Anubis, Bastet, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Sekhmet, Sobek.
She could sound them out. But
Maat
was tricky—two
a
's instead of two
t
's
like Matt the Brat. And
Thoth
was pronounced
toth
, so she had to remember to add the silent
h
.

“How'd I do?” she asked her mother after she'd corrected the test.

“Perfect, as usual,” her mom said. “Do you have to know why all the gods and goddesses were worshipped? They each had their specific purposes.”

“Yep, I memorized them, and we picked our favorites as our Egyptian Code Buster names,” Cody replied. “Let's see. Amun was the god of air and invisibility. That's the one I chose, because I'd love to be invisible sometimes and just watch people. Anubis was the god of death. Bastet was the cat goddess. M.E. chose that one because she loves animals. Horus was the god of war and the sky. Isis was the goddess of magic. That's Quinn's favorite, since he's been learning magic tricks. Maat was the goddess of truth and justice. Osiris was the god of the underworld and afterlife. Sekhmet was the goddess of lions and power. That's Luke's Egyptian code name, because he's strong. Then there's Sobek … Sobek … um …” Cody shook her head.

“I think he's the god of crocodiles,” Mrs. Jones said.

“Right! Crocodiles,” Cody said. “And the last one is Thoth, the god of wisdom. I just have to remember Sobek. Then I'll know them all!”

“Good morning, students,” Ms. Stadelhofer said to her class of sixth graders after the students were settled in their seats. “As we discussed on Friday, the study of ancient Egypt has been steeped in mystery for centuries. Scholars tried to decode the hieroglyphs over the years, but it wasn't until the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 that they even had a clue how to crack the code. And it still took another twenty years for scholars to decipher all the writings on the stone.”

A student named Bradley raised his hand. “Twenty years? That's a long time. It only took me about twenty seconds to decode the message you gave us for homework.”

“Excellent,” Ms. Stad said. “How about the rest of you?”

Several students raised their hands, including
Cody. She loved how Ms. Stad always made her lessons fun. She often created puzzles for them to solve and made up games to help them learn. She even wore creative outfits, like college T-shirts, historical costumes, and arty jackets. Today she was dressed in safari pants and a khaki top with the words
YOU CAN
'
T SCARE ME
—
I TEACH SIXTH GRADE
! Around her neck she'd draped a long knitted scarf decorated with Egyptian characters. All she needed was a pith helmet to complete the outfit and she'd be ready for an archaeological dig.

The homework assignment had been fun, too. Cody thought it would be cool to send coded messages in hieroglyphs to her Code Busters Club friends. She and MariaElena—M.E.—Esperanto, Quinn Kee, and Luke LaVeau were always looking for new codes to crack. And hieroglyphs were awesome because they looked like pictures.

Cody pulled out her homework and read over her answers to make sure they were correct.

STEGANOGRAPHY

One of the pictographs—the letter
s
—looked like an upside-down hook. The
t
reminded her of a mountain. The
e
was represented by an arm. The
g
looked like a badge. And the letter
a
was some kind of bird. All the rest of the letters resembled something familiar—a zigzag for
n
, a lamp for
o
, a flying saucer for
r
, a shelf for
p
, a square curling in on itself for
h
, two feathers for
y
. The associations made them easier to remember.

“We can now understand the Egyptian alphabet,” said Ms. Stad, “primarily because a soldier named Pierre-François Bouchard found a stone in Rosetta, Egypt. That's why it's called the Rosetta Stone. Years later, a teenager named Jean-François Champollion began decoding the stone. It took him fourteen years! Can you imagine working on a puzzle that long?”

The students shook their heads. Cody was impressed.

Ms. Stad smiled. “The young man finally figured out that hieroglyphs were not really pictures but signs for sounds, just like we use in English. For example, the image of the upside-down hook is the
sound for
s
. So, who can tell us what the homework message says?” asked Ms. Stad.

Most of the students raised their hands. Ms. Stad called on Cody.

“Steganography,” Cody said, hoping she pronounced it correctly.

“Right. Do you know what that means?” Ms. Stad asked her.

“I looked it up. It means ‘the practice of concealed writing' or ‘creating hidden messages.' ”

“Exactly,” Ms. Stad exclaimed. “
Stegano
comes from the Greek word for ‘covered' or ‘hidden,' and
graphia
or
graphy
is Latin for ‘writing.' ” She glanced around at the students. “How many of you got it right?”

Most of the students put their hands up again. Cody noticed that Matt the Brat wasn't one of them. She figured he probably didn't even do the assignment—as usual. How was he ever going to make it to seventh grade?

“Good job, students!” Ms. Stad smiled. “As Cody said,
steganography
means ‘the art of hiding secret messages in plain sight.' When you look at Egyptian
drawings, they appear to be random pictures—at first. But if you study them, you'll find they have hidden meanings. Does anyone know other ways of hiding a message in plain sight?”

M.E., Cody's friend who sat in the back of the classroom, raised her hand. “You could write a message on an envelope and cover it with a postage stamp,” she said, “and then steam off the stamp to read the message.” The Code Busters were very familiar with that method of sending hidden messages. They often mailed each other notes in code, with the key hidden under a stamp on the envelope.

“Yes, M.E., that was a popular method for spies who wanted to send top secret information over long distances during wartime. Does anyone else know how to hide a message?”

Matt the Brat blurted out, “You could shave your head and write a secret message with a marker and then grow your hair back and it would be hidden.”

“True, Matthew,” Ms. Stad said. “Soldiers often did that. But they wouldn't just write a secret message on the person's head. They
tattooed
it.”

“No way!” Matt said, rubbing his head. “That would hurt!”