At the site I see Wyatt almost immediately, standing in the glow from a generator-powered lamp. He is bent over paperwork that Mostafa holds, but he looks up when he hears us all enter. “It’s about time,” he says shortly, even though we are fifteen minutes earlier than usual. He begins to bark out orders, reinforcing the jobs he outlined last night. My name is the last one he calls. “Dawn,” he says. “You’re with me.”
I give a quick nod to Mostafa and fall into step behind Wyatt, who is already moving. He doesn’t look back at me, doesn’t speak.
All business then, as though last night never happened.
But this is not the time or the place for that conversation, and anyway, I am the one who cut Wyatt off last night. If he is treating me like a research assistant, like a grad student lucky enough to be in the distant orbit of this discovery, I have no one to blame but myself.
Wyatt stops near the safety fence that has been constructed around the mouth of the shaft. Several local workmen are speaking rapidly in Arabic, pointing and arguing over the best way to secure the ends of a long rope ladder. The rungs curl into the dark pit like the tongue of a viper. Because of the low ceiling of the tomb chapel, it isn’t possible to angle a metal ladder down the shaft, and this is the alternative. Wyatt easily climbs over the wooden barrier, bracing his hips on the inside. I watch him tug on the rope and then hook one boot and the other, heading down. When his head is level with the floor of the tomb chapel, he glances up at me. “Problem?” he asks.
I shake my head and climb over the safety fence.
I wait until the rope ladder goes slack, which means Wyatt has reached the bottom.
His voice floats up to me. “The chamber seems undisturbed,” he says.
I step onto the first rope rung, feeling it swing under my weight. I look at the two men who are holding the stakes in place. The shaft leading down to the burial chamber is about eighteen feet deep, and fairly narrow. I take a deep breath and begin to crawl beneath the surface of the earth, willing them to not let me fall.
It is like sliding down the parched throat of the world. The deeper I go, the darker it is. Wyatt’s headlamp flickers at the base of the shaft, a pinprick I’m driving toward. As the light falls away above me, I imagine the walls are contracting, that I’m being swallowed.
Maybe halfway down, the ladder slips.
I give a small shriek and grab on to the rope and feel my shoulder scrape against the shaft. Wyatt yells in Arabic, and the rope goes taut again.“Ana asif!”I hear above me—a fervent apology.
My shoulder is bleeding, I think. I don’t even have enough room to bend my arm and touch it to see.
“Dawn?” Wyatt calls.
“Yeah,” I say, my heart hammering, my palms slick. “Be right there.”
But I don’t move.
The shaft at this level is only slightly wider than my hips. What if the ladder falls completely? What if there isn’t enough air for both me and Wyatt by the time I get to the bottom? What if—
“Dawn,” Wyatt says, “I want you to listen to me.”
“All ears,” I grind out.
“Take one more step down.”
I give a tiny shake of my head, and my boot slips. I hear loose limestone rubble strike the bottom of the shaft, Wyatt curses as grit hits his face.
“Did you ever hear about Archie Hall?” he asks.
“No,” I say. I force myself to set my foot down one more rung. I wait for Wyatt to respond.
“He was one of the epigraphers for U Chicago in the sixties or seventies,” Wyatt says, as if we are chatting over coffee, instead of practically being buried alive. “Actually, I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him. What kind of Griffin are you, anyway?”
Another shaky step. “Phoenix,” I tell him. “Our mascot was the Phoenix.”
“Ofcourse. Anyway, Hall was transcribing an inscription in a temple—Karnak, or maybe Medinet Habu, I can’t remember. Instead of climbing up and down the ladder to move it to the next spot on the wall he needed to read, he’d hold on to the top rungs and hop it horizontally, like a giant pair of stilts.”
Step. And step again. The toe of my boot nudges the stone, and some more limestone powder falls.
“Dawn?”
“Still here,” I say.
“So. Hall didn’t realize the ladder was set up on a column, and at one point when he hopped, the ladder dropped a foot.”
