Page 26 of Tomb of the Sun King

The exchange felt oddly formal. Adam had been so distant and quietly stormy since their bizarre conversation the night before that Ellie found herself uncertain quite how to act around him.

He offered her his knee and a hand. The gesture had an unconsciously courtly air—for all that she was standing next to a bored-looking donkey and not a noble steed.

Ellie accepted his grip. The calloused texture of his palm sent a shiver through her skin as she awkwardly planted herself in the saddle.

The donkey shifted beneath her, and she nearly fell backwards.

“Tuck your knees up by his neck,” Adam instructed. “It’ll help you stay balanced. They get nervous when you wobble.”

He stroked a hand down the donkey’s flank, then gave it a scratch behind the ears. The donkey huffed with approval.

Then he turned and walked away without another word. Ellie stared after him, utterly at a loss.

“Yalla! Yalla!” the donkey boy cried, jarring her out of the confused whirlwind of her thoughts. “Mâshi!”

The beast beneath her lurched into motion. Ellie jolted back in the saddle and then clung on for dear life as they trotted down the road.

?

The flat, fertile fields were verdant with sprouts of new wheat, tended by fellahin who tucked their long galabeyas into their loose cotton breeches to keep them from the mud. The donkey boy continued to call out cheerful Masri imprecations at their mounts as they rode along the narrow packed-earth pathways. To Ellie’s ears, the boy’s words sounded like a mix of routine commands and more personal and affectionate compliments.

The fields gave way to tall, orderly rows of date palms interspersed here and there by the occasional tidy farmhouse—and then the fertile land abruptly turned to desert.

The change was like a line drawn across the earth, an immediate and dramatic shift from towering trees to arid, rock-strewn ground. As the date plantation fell away, Ellie finally saw the ragged, humped shapes of the less-well-known pyramids of Dahshur.

Though nowhere near the size of the famous monuments at Giza, they were significantly older, and therefore perhaps even more fascinating. Ellie picked the tiered form of the Pyramid of Djoser from the clustered structures. The tower of stone was nearly five thousand years old and was most likely the first pyramid ever built in Egypt.

The crumbling monuments represented only a fraction of the history that had accumulated at the necropolis of Saqqara, which had been in use for over three thousand years, from the third dynasty to the Ptolemaic period. The arid landscape was peppered with tumbles of ancient mud-brick and scattered debris. Ellie’s eyes immediately picked out the patterns in it—the straight line of a wall, the flat surface of an ancient road. The ground was littered with relics of Egypt’s ancient past.

Ellie had been furiously, painfully jealous when she had learned that Neil had been hired to oversee an excavation here—and at a very promising New Kingdom tomb site, no less. That ache had only deepened when Neil’s initial survey produced strong indications that the tomb had been built for Horemheb, the Eighteenth Dynasty general who had risen to become a pharaoh in his own right despite his lack of royal blood.

Horemheb was a fascinating figure, and the Eighteenth Dynasty was Ellie’s favorite period of Egyptian history. She would have given almost anything to have been able to join in uncovering a new chapter of it.

Not that she had been invited.

The impact of finally being in this storied landscape was somewhat compromised by the hawkers and would-be guides who clustered at the end of the lane.

“Tour guide!” one shouted. “Climb the pyramid of the great pharaoh!”

“Authentic Saqqara souvenirs!” another called out.

Ellie gave the wares on his blanket a careful glare as they rode past, looking out for any genuine artifacts he might be trying to sell.

Mr. Mahjoud dismissed all the would-be helpers with a disapproving glare as he led their party past the entrance and into the necropolis.

As they rode past the pitted openings to abandoned tomb shafts, Ellie thought uneasily of her upcoming reunion with her brother, who had been in Egypt for just over two years now.

When Ellie had still been a schoolgirl, Neil had happily indulged her curiosity about his books and studies. That comfortable intellectual banter had changed when he left for university. Neil had grown more distant. He had always been a bit over-serious, but it began to feel as though his mind was somewhere else when he returned home for holidays.

After Ellie managed to fight her way into university herself, there had been sparks of that old dynamic between them—moments where Ellie had lured Neil into a debate about the antecedents of Ancient Greek or the fall of the Byzantine Empire. But after a little while, Neil always pulled away again, pleading another paper he needed to write or books he had neglected.

There was nothing wrong with that, of course—not in any way that Ellie could point her finger at—and yet something about it had left her feeling oddly frustrated… and perhaps just a bit let down.

She was fairly certain Neil wouldnotbe excited to learn that she had come to Egypt—even without the added complication of Adam Bates. The thought made her hands clench a little tighter on the reins of her donkey as they followed the winding path deeper into the desert.

Adam rode just behind her. He was still oddly quiet as his blue eyes carefully scanned the desert.

Ellie let her donkey fall back a bit until she was bobbing uncomfortably beside him. “Is something wrong?”

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