The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [98]
I got up from my chair and put my arms around Howard and gave him an affectionate hug. “Thank you.”
Howard turned red with pleasure and pale with alarm—for he was only too well aware of my husband’s jealous temperament. Emerson said only, “Hmph.”
I had never really suspected Howard, and I was delighted to be able to enlist his aid. The theories he put forth were not especially useful, but they testified to his excellent heart.
Howard left us after dinner, with assurances of affection and support and a promise to stop for a longer visit at a later time. After a quiet evening with our dearest friends we parted for the night, with no forebodings of the tragedy drawing inexorably nearer.
Having “wasted” three days Emerson was wild to get back to the dig. He had us up at the crack of dawn. Cyrus and Katherine meant to spend the day in Cairo, so we let them sleep, though why Emerson’s loud demands for haste did not rouse them I do not know. We were off soon after sunrise. Greatly as I had enjoyed the interval of amiable social intercourse and communion with friends, it was sheer delight to be abroad in the fresh morning air. We took the road along the cultivation (Emerson refused to allow me to get any closer to the Giza pyramids); the smooth ripples of the river were pink-tinged by reflected sunrise, and waterfowl splashed in the irrigation ditches. Nefret’s high spirits demanded an outlet; she challenged Ramses to a race, and the two of them set off at a run. Our pace was slightly more sedate, but only slightly; I was mounted on David’s lovely mare, Asfur, and she moved like the bird after which she was named.
Increasing my pleasure was the prospect of another visit to the interior of our pyramid. Under Emerson’s direction the men had braced the stones in the shaft above the passageway. In fact, I was fairly sure Emerson had carried out this hazardous task with his own hands, since he had come home one day with a mashed thumb which he vainly attempted to conceal from me. He was eager to try out his latest toy, a new and powerful electric torch which had been one of the Vandergelts’s gifts to him. (Honesty compels me to admit that it was American-made.)
We were there so early that our men had not yet arrived, which of course made Emerson grumble and revert to his threat of camping on site. I assured him I would think seriously about it. (I had.) Nefret said she would like to have a look below, since Ramses had not found her any more bones, and then Ramses said he would go along too. He would have preceded the rest of us had I not demanded the support of his arm.
“Your father is quite capable of looking after Nefret in the event of an emergency,” I said. “Have you any reason to expect something of the sort?”
“Only the fact that we have had several already. The site has been left unguarded.” He hesitated for a moment and then said, “There were signs of the presence of a horse. Fresh signs.”
“Surely not hoofprints in this sand.”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, I cannot imagine an enemy could arrange a trap your father would not detect immediately.”
The passage ahead looked like a lightning storm, as Emerson flashed his splendid new light wildly from side to side. We caught him and Nefret up and he turned a radiant face to me. “Excellent. We must have a dozen more of them, eh? I wonder if the beam will reach all the way down to the bottom of the shaft. It’s almost twenty feet now.”
Selim had replaced the windlass that had been destroyed by the rockfall, and the wooden cage hung empty from the supporting ropes. Emerson leaned over the edge and shone his torch down into the depths.
Ramses’s vision is as keen as his hearing. He breathed out a single word. Before any of the rest of us could move, he kicked the bar aside and leaped onto the cage. It went down like a plummet, and Ramses with it.
Reason told me he