The Pharaoh Key by Douglas Preston (19)

IT SEEMED LIKE only a moment had passed when Gideon woke to the sound of prayers drifting through the air. He sat up. It was still night, but a sliver of moon stood above the eastern horizon, bathing the desert in a silvery light. Below it, the horizon was turning a faint blue. Mekky was some distance away in the sand, kneeling on a small prayer rug, chanting in Arabic and bowing in the direction of Mecca.

Finishing his dawn prayer, Mekky rose and rolled up the rug, tucking it under his arm, then approached, calling out cheerfully. “Ding-a-ling goes the alarm! Breakfast!”

In almost no time he prepared a light repast of hot sweet tea, flatbread, and cheese. They ate quickly. Mekky stuffed a betel nut into his mouth and went to fetch the camels. Gideon and Garza helped him pack up and load the beasts. They departed the campsite as the sky in the east turned red.

“Today,” Mekky said as they started off, “we enter the Proscribed Area.”

The mountains still seemed impossibly far away, five hours of riding having scarcely brought them closer. The rising sun tinged their summits pink. Between them and the mountains, a range of sharp hills rose into view. Somehow the great silence of the desert imposed itself on them, and nobody spoke as they rode, the only sound the soft crunch of camel feet on the gravelly floor of the plain. Soon, in the distance, Gideon spied something unnatural: a white rectangle. As they approached, it revealed itself as a sign, faded and scoured with sand. A message had been written in five languages.

The sign stood alone in battered isolation, the level sands stretching away in all directions almost as far as the eye could see. But as if placed in warning, the skeleton of an animal with massive horns lay at its base, upturned eye sockets staring at the sky. The sun cast a long, grim shadow over the sand.

“Barbary sheep,” said Mekky.

Gideon could feel the heat of the sun on his back. The strange black hills loomed closer. They rode on toward them.

“Musaeadat!” Imogen cried out suddenly in Arabic. Her camel shied to one side. Gideon turned and saw what she had seen—a human skeleton lying partially exposed in the sand, a small rill of sand encircling it downwind. A few tatters of clothes clung to the pelvis, and a brass button lay nearby. A bit of hair remained by the skull, and the jaws stood wide open as if frozen in a scream. An ancient army helmet rested nearby, half filled with sand.

“This is where the battle was,” Mekky said. As they rode past he related the story of the famous battle, in which the two sides fought to a draw and then killed their prisoners of war in view of the other. The bodies, he said, were given good Muslim burials in the sand; but they’d had nothing to make coffins with, and now with the passage of years the wind was exposing them.

As they rode on, Gideon saw another skeleton to his right, which almost appeared to be crawling out of the sand, the legs buried, the arms thrown forward, skull facedown. Another skeleton lay behind it, and another. As they progressed, the sandy flat was soon dotted with skulls and rib cages and bones.

“Miss Imogen, may I offer you advice?” Mekky said. “With camels, remain calm. Do not shout again.”

“Sorry,” said Imogen. “That skeleton startled me.”

Garza turned to her. “Interesting how fluent your Arabic sounds.”

“I’ve picked up a few words here and there since arriving in Egypt a few weeks ago.”

“A few weeks,” said Garza. “So what have you been doing? Organizing your expedition?”

“I spent some time in Cairo, playing the tourist. And then it took a while to get to Shalateen. It’s like taking a journey to the edge of the world—as I’m sure you know.”

“I see,” said Garza. “Did you take the ferry?”

“No, I came by bus and rental car.”

“Of course.”

She turned in the saddle to stare at Garza. “What’s your problem, exactly?”

“I just like to know who I’m traveling with.”

“Would you care to check my passport?”

“As a matter of fact, I would. The date of your entry visa stamp would interest me.”

“I’m the one who should be suspicious. I know much less about you lot than you do about me. For example, you’ve been lugging around that camera, but you haven’t yet taken a single picture.”

“We’re not where we’re going yet.”

It sounded lame. Gideon winced; as Glinn had observed, Garza was a terrible liar.

“The photographers I’ve known are always taking snaps.”

“Hey,” said Gideon. “Let’s cut the inquisition all around, shall we? It’s too damn hot.”

The woman laughed. “Tossers,” she murmured. Garza fell silent.

The heat was climbing along with the sun. On the backs of the camels they were fully exposed. Gideon felt his thirst rising, his lips drying out. They passed a row of abandoned army trucks half buried in sand, canvas tops shredded and hanging, door panels riddled with bullet holes.

“Say, Mr. Mekky?” Gideon called out. “How about a halt for a drink of water?”

“We drink at Bir Qidmid when we stop for heat of the day.”

“What is Bir Qidmid?”

“An old well.”

“A well? You mean a well with water?”

“No water now. Just forage for camels. And a ruined mosque where we have shade.” He turned to Garza. “The mosque makes very good photos.” His eyes rolled around in an amused way.

“Right,” said Garza.

They entered the hills. Mekky steered them up an alluvial fan into a dry wash. It wound among gigantic piles of split boulders, pockmarked with holes.

“Interesting geology,” said Gideon to Imogen, trying to be friendly. “Very dramatic, these black hills against the pale-yellow sand.”

“Indeed,” said Garza, looking at Imogen. “Do you know how these hills formed—geologically speaking, I mean?”

“Well,” she said, “I would guess we’re looking at the remnants of an ancient volcanic field. These hills are the eroded remains of lava flows.”

“Why the black color?”

“Basalt is dark to begin with, and it has a lot of iron in it. In the desert environment it weathers into an even blacker desert varnish.”

“And the pale sand? Why isn’t it black, too?”

“The sand is invasive, blown in here from the shores of the Red Sea.”

Garza frowned and fell silent. Gideon hoped he was satisfied; in his opinion the woman not only was beautiful, but was also obviously who she said she was.

They continued on, the hills mounting higher. The ravine, or wadi, they were riding up was now an oven with black walls radiating heat, the temperature inching upward until it was almost unbearable. Gideon’s thirst mounted.

“Mr. Mekky, I really need to get at least a sip of water. It’s not good to get dehydrated in this environment.”

“I second that,” said Imogen.

“When we get to Bir Qidmid,” said Mekky. “Not far! We must ration water. You must get used to thirst!”

But it was far. Finally, they came around a bend in the wadi only to pause at a picturesque sight: in a round valley, at the base of a black ridge of lava, stood a dramatic minaret rising from the sand. Nearby, a maze of adobe walls rose above drifts of sand, amid a scattering of thorny acacia and tamarisk trees.

“Here is where we stop for the rest of day,” said Mekky, bringing the camels around in a circle. “We start again at sunset.” They all drank deeply, then unloaded and unsaddled the camels. They retreated into the shade of the acacia trees, while Mekky hobbled the camels so they could browse, then he spread out his rug and made a lunch of tea, flatbread, and dates.

“Anything else to eat?” Garza asked, squinting unhappily at the simple fare.

“Cheese.”

“We had that for breakfast. Anything else?”

“Chickpeas. But they need to be soaked and cooked. We have chickpeas for dinner. This is very good diet! You can live for months on chickpeas, dates, bread, and cheese.”

Garza sat down, saying nothing.

They remained in the grove of trees all day, dozing fitfully in the extreme heat. No one had the energy to talk. As the sun began to sink toward the horizon, they had dinner—chickpeas and cheese, as Mekky had promised—then saddled and packed the camels for the evening ride.

They rode and rode, the days and nights blending together. The black hills and the winding dry washes never seemed to end, with heat rising off the sand, the camels endlessly plodding. Once in a while a bizarre mirage would appear—shimmering lakes with waving grass; trembling ridges and mountains that vanished as one rode toward them. Mekky rationed their water, their tea, and even their bread and cheese, keeping them in a constant state of hunger and thirst. The water, carried in the packs, sometimes became too hot to drink and had to be set out in an open bowl to cool by evaporation before it could be consumed. This was far worse, Gideon mused, than any trip he had taken in his life. Even when he’d been at sea with Amiko a few months earlier, searching for the Lost Island, they had booze, good food, and beds to sleep in. Garza had fallen completely silent, no longer giving Imogen the third degree, while Imogen, too, remained quiet. It was too hot; conversation took too much energy. The songs Mekky sang periodically to the camels—mournful, wailing tunes that rose and fell—were the only diversion amid the endless black hills.

On the third day of the journey Gideon saw, rising over the tops of the hills, a triple-peaked mountain the color of mahogany, surrounded by lesser peaks, Soon, layer after layer of other mountains came into view, mounting to the horizon. The central peak, Mekky told them, was Gebel Umm. They would reach its foothills on the fifth morning, after sunrise. Finally, Gideon thought, they were approaching their proximate goal. What lay after was beyond imagining.

On the fourth day, they stopped at midnight to camp in a place where four wadis came together. It was a place Mekky identified as Bir Rabdeit. It consisted primarily of a dense stand of tamarisk trees surrounding an ancient stone well, now drifted full of sand. Nearby was a stone corral. Under a sandstone overhang, Mekky—after warning the three to beware of vipers—showed them a panel of rock art of men with spears riding camels, along with faded paintings of antelope and Barbary sheep. The images were decorated with mysterious geometric designs. After a subtle nudge from Gideon, Garza got out his camera and took a series of pretend photos. They went to sleep as usual, rolled up in their galabeyas.

Gideon woke with a start at dawn, torn from a rapidly receding dream of swimming with a naked woman in the pool atop the Gansevoort Hotel. He sat up, blinking. The sun was already close to rising; it was very late. He glanced at Garza, still sleeping, and then all around—and then he realized something was terribly wrong. The two of them were alone. Again he looked around in a panic; he saw nothing but sand beyond the rug they were sleeping on and some items scattered on the ground. The camel jockey and the woman were gone, along with the camels, supplies…and their water.

Everything was gone.