I rose and we made our way to the open air. Under the burning sun the gray cast passed slowly from Jim's face. My dank blood stirred again, but I felt a great heaviness of heart.
"What you reckon now, Cap'n?" Jim asked at last.
"Jim, if you tried to keep your direction as we were making up the passage, where do you think we fetched up?"
"I don't think we was very far from 'at big statue at one side of de temple."
"I had the same impression. Well, that could explain all those skeletons. There's probably a hatch of some kind between the temple and that room. Maybe the rites included human sacrifice. Maybe the god was given a libation of blood from a slave's neck. Afterward they pitched the corpses into that vault. If they offered only one a year, on some especially holy day, they could pile up four hundred in due time. Time moved slowly in those days. The Egyptian religion endured without much change for three thousand years."
There fell a long pause. Jim looked straight into my eyes.
"Cap'n Whitman, you got somethin' more 'n 'at to tell me, 'cause I see it in yo' face, and I'd like to have you git it over with."
"I've become convinced that the digging isn't a tomb at all. It's only an underground temple. I guess the painting at the entrance represents the king going down to worship; the cult probably dealt with the mysteries of death—the Jackal-headed god would bear that out. Maybe the boat we found symbolized some hope of the future—the soul's journey to the next world. And if that's the case, which stands to reason, we're wasting our time."
"Why do you reckon they went to all that bother to hide them passageways?"
"It was a secret cult. There have been thousands like it."
"So we better take to iv'ry hunting sho 'nough?"
"Until we can find a better way to make some money."
When I returned to camp, Isabel Gazelle was drying elephant meat on a stick rack over a smoky fire. After one glance into my face, she caught my hand, led me into the tent, and drew the curtain.
"What's happened?-' she asked.
I told her of the charnel-chamber we had found and the conclusions I had drawn. She made an astonishing reply.
"If you looked only at bones, the world would be an ugly place."
"I'll look at you instead."
"At me before you leave me, and at trees growing before you chop them down to burn, and at gazelles before you shoot them to eat, and at great elephants before you kill them to take their ivories. None of that is evil. Suliman, my husband, told me about evil, such as had made Mahound cut my mother's throat; and killing of slaves to please a god would be terrible evil—worse than that Mahound did, although I can't tell you why. I know that evil dogs a man's soul as his shadow follows his body when he walks toward the sun. But if you look only for that, you'd be sorry the world was ever made."
"I take great joy in you, Isabel Gazelle. I'm ashamed that I came in with a sick face. I'll find some other way to get the gold we need. What does one defeat count, compared to having you?"
She had grown more beautiful in these months of our bridal, I could almost believe that her beauty had waxed in the last few days. Surely this was an illusion, yet I could not dispel it, and felt bewitched.
"Don't tell me how many days longer you'll stay with me," she said, as though she had read my mind. "Let me know the day before you go."
"I'll postpone the telling as long as I can."
"Once I thought I could hardly stand to have you go—that I might get on a horse and ride into the desert until I died—but that's changed."
"I'm glad to hear it."
"I'll have someone to love from the moment that you leave."
"So soon?"
"Omar, do you know what day this is?"
I did know. I still kept the count of the days begun when I first went into slavery. But Isabel counted days according to the changes of the moon.
"What day is it?"
"It's the fifth since the full moon, and I've not yet gone to make my bed beside the wall."
I caught my breath. "Perhaps it's only delayed—"
Laughing happily and almost wildly, she threw her arms around my neck. "Then what of the drawing of my breast, and the sharpening of every taste and smell, and the happiness in my heart? Omar, I'm sure! You're a lean old Hon, and this will be your cub."
My heart swelled, and it must be that my soul exulted, for I felt a lifting like that when I had dropped my chains.
"I wish we could return to the tents of the Beni Kabir and live among them all our lives."
"No, when the time comes, you'll go across the sea, and you'll be to me as one who's drunk the cup of death. Suliman told me so, and it will be so."
"Can't we go there and stay until the babe is born—" "I think you'll never see him except in dreams. And for the little while more before we part, we can't go to the tents of the Beni Kabir, because you'll be busy taking gold from the Pharaoh's tomb." "What do you mean? I told you it's only a temple—" "Didn't Jim Effendi tell you that the Sepulcher of Dry Bones weighs in the balance against the Sepulcher of Wet Bones? His vision was true. Today you've proved that he gave it the right name. You think the countless bones you saw were those of men sacrificed to some god of stone. I think they were killed for an evil dream of a wicked king." "What dream?"
"The taking with him of his gold into the Hereafter." "They were the men who had cut through the stone and built the tomb?"
"By his command, they were shut in one of the rooms they made, and the door sealed."
At present I did not dwell upon Isabel's conceiving. I needed a quiet hour—when we were alone, perhaps when she was asleep on my arm and I could look into her face, or when her arms were about me in a tenderness akin to that my babe would know—in order to contemplate the common wonder, the unsolvable everyday mystery.
I called Jim and told him Isabel's explanation of the charnel-chamber.
"I wish we could make it up to 'em mens, somehow," Jim said.
"I wish so, too."
"They was slaves, I reckon, and I was a slave once, but 01' Mas' set me free."
"He did?"
"After 'at I worked wif freemen, in fair weat'er and foul, and when de time came, I fought beside 'em. I reckon they was the freest men who ever lived in de worl'."
"There were none more free that I know of."
"We bof been in Africa a mighty long time. We ain't heard de church beUs ring in de little ports we stop at, and see the people goin' back and forf. But someday—"
"When that day comes, we'll do what two men can."
We had been walking slowly from the camp to the sepulcher. Now our step quickened, and our excitement rose to the pitch we had felt the first day. When we arrived at our cache, Jim got out a piece of carpet I had brought from the tent when we first began our digging, and which we had used for catching rubble as we widened the well.
"Cap'n, I want to try somethin," he told me. "'At bone room is nigh de passage end, and we left de do' open. Don't you reckon if I fan real hard at de opening in de stairs I can blow in fresh air and drive some of de poison into de bone room?"
I answered without thinking. "It won't hurt to try."
So when we gained the stairway aperture, Jim stood on the fifth step and fanned vigorously with the rug. After about ten minutes, as I sat on the step with my legs through the aperture, the inkling came to me that instead of facilitating our afternoon's work, we had quite likely bitched it. Whether or not Jim had fanned out any poison gases, he had certainly disturbed their layers, which alone had permitted us to penetrate the passage.