He crept another foot forward and then, feeling ahead of him, found the rim of the basin into which Rashidi had poured his bucket of mud. The bucket was nowhere to be seen, and the top half of Rashidi’s body, similarly, had vanished.
From outside he heard a voice, DeGroet’s. “What have you found?”
“Nothing,” he called back. It was the truth.
“Well get a move on,” came the shouted reply.
He held the flame of his lighter to the basin—it was empty. How that could be, he didn’t know, given that it had been full just minutes earlier. He felt around the basin for any drainage hole through which the mud might have escaped—nothing.
Turning over, he looked up at the ceiling. At a glance it looked no different from the rest of the tunnel, but upon closer inspection he could make out the concealed edges of a distinct block, much like those of the section of the Sphinx’s paw Zuka and Hanif had manhandled out of the way at ground level. Clearly this block could move, too—specifically, it could come down, with great force, and anything lying beneath it would get driven violently down along with it.
But what would happen then? Wouldn’t the stone block hammering down shatter the basin beneath it when it struck, or at least leave crushed, pulped matter behind when it rose again?
It would—unless, Gabriel realized, the block containing the basin moved as well, swung out of the way at the same time the block descending from above came down. He pictured the block containing the basin and the one above it as teeth on a giant stone gear that rotated when provoked. You poured your mud into the basin, after a moment the weight caused the wheel to turn, the basin block fell out of the way and the new block from the ceiling rotated in to take its place—with a new empty basin of its own on its upper surface.
And anything that happened to be lying between the two blocks at the time got chopped as the upper block rotated down to take the place of the lower.
It was a devilish trap—clever but simple, and a marvel mechanically. The stone gear must weigh tons, many tons; how it had been carved and moved into place and mounted on some sort of axle and hidden within the rock he couldn’t imagine. But then no one had figured out how the Egyptians had managed to build the pyramids either. There was no shortage of mechanical marvels on the Giza Plateau.
Of course, the question of how one might build a trap like this was of secondary importance. The first order of business was surviving this one.
So: what to do?
Not pour the mud, clearly; he couldn’t even move the pail onto the stone surface surrounding the basin, since the weight would set off the trap. Nor could he put his own weight on it—but how could he make it across to the other side without doing so?
Gabriel thought about it. It had taken perhaps half a minute between when Rashidi had poured the mud and when the mechanism had crushed him. In theory Gabriel might be able to rush across in that time and be out of the way of the descending block before it fell. In theory. And in practice, too, if he’d been upright, with room to maneuver. But not in this tight, narrow tunnel—he couldn’t inch his way far enough fast enough, which no doubt had been what the men who built the tunnel had in mind.
But there had to be a way through. Unless the builders were merely playing a cruel game and there was no reliquary to be found, only a tool for slaughtering unwary priests who were foolish enough to follow the instructions you gave them, to deposit the treasure of the Nile in the place you provided for it…
The place provided for it.
If Gabriel had had more room, he might have slapped himself on the forehead. Of course. What if there had been more than one place provided for it? A priest of Sekhmet would know how to follow the instructions properly, while an impostor would make the same mistake Rashidi and Sheba had made, and that Gabriel had nearly made himself.
Where did Hathor’s floods deposit the life-giving silt that brought fertility to the Nile Valley? In a basin at the bottom of the river? No—on the river’s banks, for Egyptians to find and harvest.
And here he was in a V-shaped channel, with the walls angling away to either side—like a river.
Who said the blocks before him were the only portion of the tunnel walls that could move?
Gabriel reached into the pail, grabbed a handful of mud, and smeared it on the wall beside him, as high up as he could reach. He coated the surface and went back for more. He slapped the mud onto the stone, piling it up, replacing it when bits slid down. Bit by bit, he built up the upper portion of the V, filling in the angle, adding the weight of the mud to the stone surface. He felt it move, very slightly, as the mud accumulated—and as he reached the bottom of the pail, he heard a soft grinding noise deep inside the wall.
This was it. A mechanism was turning.
But which mechanism?
He looked up at the deadly stone above him, ominous in the flickering flame of his lighter. If it came down, it would come in an instant, snuffing him out like…well, like the flame went out now as he hastily pocketed the lighter.
The sound grew louder, and apparently it was audible outside, too, because he heard Sheba scream, “Gabriel, no!”
“Gabriel?” DeGroet said, and then he said something else, but Gabriel couldn’t hear what it was because the grinding of the stone was too loud in his ears—
And then the angled wall beside him began to turn in earnest beneath its mantle of mud.
As the wall rotated counterclockwise, the top portion headed downwards—but the bottom portion, the portion closer to Gabriel, turned upwards, and it wedged itself under Gabriel as it went, lifting him, till finally a long section of the side wall was horizontal and he was lying on top of it, his burnoose thickly covered with mud.
And it wasn’t done yet.
One more turn of the hidden mechanism and the wall was now angled downward again—only in the opposite direction, facing away from the tunnel rather than toward it.
At which point gravity took over, and Gabriel went sliding through the mud, off the edge, and out into space.
Chapter 9
He fell for just an instant—then landed with a thud on a stone floor. Standing, he stripped off the ruined burnoose, flung it down and flicked open his lighter again.
The room was large, the flame tiny. But bit by bit it revealed his surroundings. There was a wall covered with hieroglyphs beside him and, leaning up against the wall at an angle, a huge stone carving of a Pharaoh’s face, similar to the face of the Sphinx itself. Just past that were two upright caskets, both standing open. The dead body in one was partially mummified, its head and arms and upper torso preserved in linen bandages, the rest of its body uncovered and worn down by the centuries till all that remained were prominent bones encased in shrunken, leathery flesh. The other casket was empty but for a handful of broken lengths of bone at the bottom.
Gabriel picked up one of these, returned to where he’d landed, and tore the driest strip he could from the burnoose. It took half a minute, after he’d wrapped the fabric tightly around the bone, for the flame from the lighter to catch and the fabric to ignite. What he wouldn’t have given for one of those accelerant-treated torches now…
A voice slithered in through the tunnel, a shout in tone but muffled due to the distance it had to travel. “Hunt! I know it’s you. And I know better than to believe you’re dead. Say something, damn you!”