The Last Camel Died at Noon - Elizabeth Peters [42]
“I said essentially the same thing,” I admitted. “To Lord Blacktower.”
Ramses had been uncharacteristically silent up to this point, his wide dark eyes moving from my face to that of his father as we spoke. Now he cleared his throat. “Perhaps Mr. Forthright has received additional information. It would be difficult for him to pass it on to us through the usual channels; the telegraph is reserved for the military, and our whereabouts have been uncertain.”
“Hmph,” said Emerson thoughtfully.
“Well, we can only wait and see,” I remarked. “There is no way of heading Mr. Forthright off, so we had better get as much work as possible accomplished before he arrives.”
Emerson scowled at me. “His arrival will not affect my activities in the slightest, Peabody. How many times must I repeat that I have no intention of going off on a wild-goose chase?”
“But if it were not a wild-goose chase, Papa?” Ramses asked. “One could not abandon a friend if there was any hope of rescue.”
Emerson had risen. Fingering the cleft in his chin, he looked down at his son. “I am glad to find, Ramses, that your principles are those of an English… that is, of a gentleman. I would move heaven and earth to save Forth, or his wife, if I truly believed either of them still lived. I don’t believe it, and it would take overpowering evidence to convince me I am wrong. So much for that. Now, Kemit. I want to do some digging around the second of the pyramids in line—this one.” Unrolling his plan, he indicated the structure in question. “Lepsius shows a chapel on the southeast side. There are no signs of it now, but the cursed scavengers can’t have carried away every cursed stone; there must be some traces left. Confound it, we need to find some inscriptional material, if only to identify the builders of these structures.”
“Why do you lecture the poor fellow, Emerson?” I inquired softly. “He doesn’t understand a word you are saying.”
Emerson’s lips curved in an enigmatic smile. “No? Did you understand, Kemit?
“You want to know who made the stone houses. They were the great kings and queens. But they are gone. They are not here.”
Arms folded across his broad breast, he intoned the words like a priest reciting a mortuary formula.
“Where have they gone, Kemit?” Emerson asked.
“They are with the god.” Kemit’s hand moved in a curiously fluid gesture from the horizon to the vault of the sky, now pale with heat.
“I pray that is so,” said Emerson courteously. “Well, my friend, let us get on with it; our work will make their names live again, and in that, as you know, was their hope of immortality.”
They went off together, and I thought, not for the first time, what an impressive pair they made—and Emerson not the lesser of the two.
“Ramses,” I said absently—for part of my attention was concentrated on the graceful and athletic movements of my spouse’s admirable form—“as soon as you have finished at number six, I want you to move your crew to the largest pyramid, and join me.”
“But Papa said—”
“Never mind what Papa said. He has succumbed to his lust—er—he has postponed his surveying in favor of excavation; he cannot complain if I do the same. The largest pyramid surely belongs to one of the great kings, Piankhi or Taharka or Shabaka. The superstructure has completely collapsed, but there must be a burial chamber underneath.”
Ramses stroked his chin. For a moment he looked uncannily like his father, though the resemblance was one of gesture and expression rather than physical likeness. “Yes, Mama.”
A few days later my crew had moved several tons of stone without finding any trace of the entrance to the burial chamber, and Emerson had shifted his crew from the pyramids of the southeast row to a smaller, half-fallen structure behind them. Shortly after sunrise on the Wednesday I was electrified