Danger in the Desert

Supposedly, ancient tomb raiders had stolen a scarab from a small temple in the Valley of the Kings. The temple had been constructed by the legendary female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, and dedicated to Ma’at, the goddess of truth, justice, harmony, balance and cosmic order. For more than a thousand years, Ma’at’s followers had waited for the scarab to reappear. The one who found it—they believed—would be a messenger sent from the goddess herself, heralding the need to restore order to a chaotic world.

Included in the dossier was a digitized photo of a statue now in the Cairo Museum. It depicted Ma’at in lapis lazuli and gold. She was seated on a throne holding an ankh in one hand. A headdress crowned by a towering ostrich feather circled her forehead.

The feather, the ancients believed, was used to weigh the heart of a dead person. If the scales balanced, it meant the deceased had followed Ma’at’s forty-two principles for an orderly existence and his soul would pass into the afterlife. If not, the soul would be devoured by a demon, thus condemning the deceased to a final death.

Heavy stuff for a college librarian from Florida, Ace mused. He spent the last leg of the flight wondering just how the hell Jacqueline Marie Thornton had landed in the middle of a plot to restore Egypt to what some wild-eyed radicals believed was a natural cosmic order.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Jaci?”

Mrs. Grimes hovered a few feet away, facing the hoards of camel drivers who’d descended on their tour group the moment they’d exited their bus on the plateau overlooking the pyramids of Giza.

The late afternoon sun blazed down on the noisy, gesticulating group and made Jaci glad she’d left her lightweight jacket on the bus. She was perfectly dressed for a camel ride in sneakers, loose-fitting slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse with jaunty safari tabs decorating the shoulders and pockets.

One driver proved more vocal and persistent than the others. Shoving his way to the front of the crowd, he practically dragged Jaci to his shaggy mount.

“This way, madam. This way.”

The ends of his green-striped headdress flapped as he steered her toward a beast with a high saddle and a tasseled bridle. The guard from their bus followed them and so did the stalwart Mrs. Grimes. The retired teacher glanced at the other tourists struggling to climb aboard their chosen mounts and reiterated her concerns.

“My guidebook says to be careful,” she worried aloud. “Some of these camel drivers are real rip-off artists.”

Jaci had read that, too, but seeing the pyramids of Giza from the saddle of a camel topped her must-do list. She wasn’t about to forego the experience.

“Here, miss.” Sensing he had his customer on the hook, the doggedly persistent driver dragged off his headdress and plopped it on Jaci’s forehead. “Now you are Bedouin.”

Blinking, she adjusted the lopsided turban. The stained cloth reeked of sweat, human and otherwise. Resolutely, Jaci refused to even think about head lice. This was all part of the thrill of being in Egypt.

The three pyramids looming in the distance only heightened the exhilaration. This was what she’d scrimped and passed up pedicures for! This was what she’d dreamed about even before she’d joined her Thursday night Ancient Civilizations study group.

Eternal Egypt. Land of the pharaohs. Birthplace of a culture older than any other still in existence. Jaci could hardly believe she was finally here, seeing for herself the wonders she’d dreamed about for so long. She couldn’t count the number of books she’d read, the hours of research she’d put into planning this trip.

No book or dry academic treatise could compare with the vibrant reality, however. The dust, the heat, the biting flies, the omnipresent and tenacious souvenir sellers … none of them could dampen her soaring spirits.

“Will you take my picture when I climb aboard?” Still dubious but willing to oblige, Mrs. Grimes accepted the digital camera Jaci fished out of her canvas tote. The silver-haired teacher snapped several pictures while the driver boosted his rider into the saddle. Once Jaci had settled herself comfortably, she grinned and waved at the camera.

Then her camel pushed up on its hind legs.

“Yikes!”

She grabbed the pommel just in time to stop herself from catapulting forward, right over the animal’s head. Her smelly headdress slipped down and covered one eye. She managed to stay in the saddle somehow but came close to tumbling off again when the creature got one front leg under him. Or her. Who could tell?

Swaying from side to side, the ungainly creature rocked up. And up. And up. Jaci looked down, gulping at the distance to the hard-packed dirt, and hung on for dear life. As if mocking her fears, the driver leaped aboard his own mount and brought it to its feet with seemingly liquid grace.

“We shall go to the edge of the plateau, yes?”

She unlocked one hand from the pommel just long enough to push the tail of her borrowed turban out of her eyes.

“Well …”

“You must see the pyramids by themselves. Away from the all these people. To do so is to see Egypt.”

The guidebooks warned about this. Always, always establish a price up front.

“How much?”

“Very cheap, miss.”

“How much?” she insisted.

The driver glanced at Hanif, as if calculating how much he could gouge from a member of the guard’s group.

“Twenty dollars U.S.”

“Done!” Jaci was too excited to haggle. She would have paid twice that for this experience. “Let’s go.”

The driver took her mount’s reins and kicked his own into gear. The animals’ shuffling, rocking gait took some getting used to. Side to side. Forward and back. Feeling like a rag doll strapped into the wooden saddle, Jaci hung on to the pommel with both hands while they descended the sloping plateau.

Then the magic of the pyramids engulfed her. There they were, right in front of her. The great tomb of Cheops, flanked by two lesser pyramids, burial chambers for the king’s wives. They’d been constructed on a windswept stretch of desert many miles from the ancient capital of Memphis.

Egypt’s present capital now formed a dramatic backdrop to these majestic structures. Cairo shimmered in a haze of heat and exhaust fumes just across the Nile, but Jaci had no eyes for the sprawling city. Her fascinated gaze remained locked on the pyramids.

As she and her guide got closer, she could make out the monstrous blocks of stone the builders had positioned one on top of the other. How, she couldn’t imagine. The massive reality of these monuments seemed to make a mockery of every theory her study group had read or researched concerning the tombs’ construction.

She was so enthralled by them that she didn’t realize the camel driver had angled toward the dark green palms lining the river banks.

“Excuse me! Where are you going?”

“You must see the pyramids from the Nile. It is to see them as the ancients saw them.”

“I’d like to, but …” She threw a glance over her shoulder. “I’d better get back to my group.”

“It is not far. Just there.”

Jaci injected a stern note into her voice. “Our tour is on a tight schedule. I need to get back. Turn around, please.”

When the driver ignored her command and kept dragging on her camel’s reins, the light dawned. How stupid was this! How stupid was she! In her excitement and eagerness to view the pyramids from the back of a camel, she’d fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Thoroughly disgusted with herself, she called out to him. “I get it now. Twenty dollars to approach the pyramids. How much to take me back?”

The driver kept going.

Okay, now she was pissed—and just a tad nervous.

“Hey! You! How much to go back?”

When he didn’t respond, she bit down on her lower lip. This had ceased to be fun. Fighting to hang on to both her balance and her composure, she angled around and stabbed a finger repeatedly toward her group.

“Back! Take me back.”