Page 78 of Tomb of the Sun King

Though it was still morning, the desert sun already beat down mercilessly from above.

“Might need to go for a swim later,” he added with just a hint of a smirk as he deliberately glanced over at Ellie.

Ellie felt the air get a little warmer. “You are incorrigible.”

“Who, me?”

“Just do try to keep your shirt on,” Ellie ordered in a slightly hopeless whisper.

Adam grinned at her before stepping back to make way for another passenger.

“Your cheeks are pink,” Constance observed.

“It’s the heat,” Ellie grumbled back.

“Sure it is,” Constance returned dryly.

On the far side of the Nile, an assortment of donkeys awaited them. There was a great deal of shuffling and complaining as the Swingleys and the Habenschuss brothers wrangled for the best mount.

“But I need one for my canvases!” complained Mr. Beddoe, the Welsh artist.

“Why is this taking so long?” Neil demanded desperately.

“I was hoping for camels,” Adam noted a little sadly.

Finally, they were all mounted. Ellie’s ride lurched forward at the shouts of the donkey boy and trotted quickly up the road.

They passed through verdant cotton fields dotted with simple farmhouses as they headed north along the Nile. Women walked the tracks along the canals balancing urns of water on their heads. Farmers drove their oxen through the newly plowed rows.

A pair of odd, dark shapes emerged from the haze ahead of them where the fertile land gave way to desert. As Ellie drew closer, they resolved themselves into the sun-gilded forms of two enormous statues.

The monuments towered over the landscape, utterly out of proportion with the rows of cucumbers and the little stone ring of an old well. They were weathered and wind-scoured, leaving only the rough shape of crowned forms seated on giant thrones.

History called them the Colossi of Memnon. The faces were entirely gone, chipped and scoured away by time, but Ellie already knew whose features she would have seen a few thousand years before—those of Amenhotep III, the father of Akhenaten.

She stopped her donkey just before the twin figures, craning back her neck to gaze at a feat of engineering that would have challenged even modern builders.

“Awe-inspiring, aren’t they?” Sayyid said from beside her.

Ellie flashed him an apologetic smile. “I must be gawking at them like the worst sort of tourist.”

“The worst sort of tourist stops to take a Kodak and then rides past without another thought,” Sayyid replied.

Ellie took his comment as permission to gape up at the massive statues for a little longer, thrumming with excitement at their sheer, time-weathered splendor. The impact was so great, she barely found herself thinking about how they compared to other monumental sculptures of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty.

When she finally pulled her eyes away, she was startled to realize that the rest of the party had ridden some distance ahead. Adam turned in his saddle to look back at her. Ellie gave him a quick, reassuring wave and nudged her donkey back into motion as Sayyid fell into place beside her.

“Have you spent much time in Luxor?” Ellie asked.

“I have.” He flashed her a smile tinged with nostalgia. “It will always remind me of my father. He served as a foreman on a number of excavations here and often talked my mother into letting me join him, even when I really ought to have been in school.”

“That must have been wonderful,” Ellie said meaningfully, feeling a little pang of envy. “And more than worth making up a bit of missed study.”

“Oh, that wasn’t necessary,” Sayyid countered. “My father was more than capable of tutoring me in whatever I missed. He was university educated himself.”

“He was?” Ellie frowned. “But if he had a degree, why was he working as a foreman?”

Sayyid cast Ellie a careful look. “You know what a concession is?”

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