Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [2]
Almost on their own, my eyes find Sarah. She’s a Connecticut girl, with the superior and privileged vocal intonations to prove it. She’s one of the few on the team who has halted her education with a graduate degree.
But I can tell that she loves the work. She is as attentive, detailed, and driven as any of the others working alongside her. And she’s easy on the eyes. I’ve always been a sucker for a brunette, and Sarah has deep brown eyes to go with her lustrous locks.
As if she can sense my gaze, she looks up and, after a pause, gives me a small smile. That’s another thing about northeastern women: a smile can convey a great deal.
I’m the first to look away, and Brown saves me from having to consider what that says about me.
“Dr. Hawthorne?”
The puzzlement in his voice has me at his side in an instant. I crouch and follow the beam of his flashlight as it passes back and forth over a portion of the outer coffin. All I can see is a slight curve, yet it’s enough to hint that it’s at least vaguely anthropoid. I’m about to ask Brown what I’m supposed to be seeing when the light flashes by a faded irregularity in the wood. I’m not certain how long it takes before I recognize the abnormality as script, but when the revelation comes, it adds another mystery to the tally.
“Coptic,” I say, and Brown nods in my periphery.
The find draws me closer, until I’m breathing the stale air, squinting to make sense of the words carved into the wood. There is little that is new in excavations conducted in the Valley of the Kings; everything has a corollary. KV9 is what comes to mind, with its walls decorated with ancient graffiti in a mixture of Coptic and Lycian. But this isn’t graffiti; this is something else entirely. For a brief moment Nag Hammadi passes through my mind, solely for the Coptic element, but I let the thought go before it can find purchase. Playing connect-the-dots without even the most basic evidentiary support is seldom productive.
The narrow opening and the inconstant lighting make it difficult to decipher much, but I engage in a round of serious squinting until I’m able to pull a few words from the darkness. And, in so doing, I feel a twinge of excitement creep up my spine even as a frown lodges on my face—which is what happens when the happiness of a new discovery is marred by the potential effects the find will have on the timeline of the larger work. I make a conscious decision to allow the former reaction to prevail, since the one phrase I can identify is so unusual. If I’m correct, it translates, albeit roughly, to bones of the holy man. I’d have to look at the whole of the text to verify the translation. What’s more intriguing is how the writing could have appeared inside a sealed sarcophagus that, to this point, had borne every indication of having been preserved inviolate.
A kink in my back cuts my survey short and I stand and place an impatient hand on the lid of the sepulcher. I’m tempted to give it a push, a small nudge—just enough so that I can see what other surprises await me on the other side of the granite. What stops me—besides the ugly specter of archaeological protocol that mandates an incremental removal of the obstacle—is another, equally important, code which says that Jim should be present for this. I don’t know his reasons for missing the opening, but I must give him the option to lead the team in investigating something so unexpected. And this isn’t the kind of thing I can relay over the radio. I want to see his face when he hears the news—that whoever is interred in 65 might be some kind of Egyptian seer. I see the National Geographic guys loading film. I shake my head; Jim might wind up on the cover after all.
“Take a break, folks,” I tell my plebes. The one who looks most disappointed is Brown, who was probably hoping I’d give the lid a prodigious shove. With a last glance around the burial chamber and one long