‘So, what are we looking for?’ Nina asked Macy. ‘You’re the expert.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t exactly call myself that,’ she said, falsely modest.
‘You’re the nearest we’ve got,’ said Nina dismissively. ‘So, what’s the deal?’
Macy turned to the much larger, more intact structure behind them. ‘That’s the Temple of Seti, or Sethos, there,’ she said, ‘which was built by his son Ramesses the Second sometime round 1300 BC. The cool thing about it is that it’s totally unique architecturally. All the other Egyptian temples run in a straight line, yeah? You go in through the entrance, and each hall comes one after the other. But this one,’ she pointed out a section to their right, ‘is kinked.’
‘I like a bit of kinkiness,’ said Eddie.
Nina shushed him. ‘Why’s it that shape?’
Macy looked back at the Osireion. ‘Supposedly, the Temple of Seti and the Osireion were built at the same time. That’s what most of the books say, anyway. So did my professor. But it didn’t really make sense to me, and it turns out some archaeologists think so too. I mean, why would you bend your temple in half to avoid another building if they were being built at the same time? It’s not like they were short of space to put the second one farther away.’ She indicated the empty desert past the ruins.
‘So there’s another theory?’ asked Nina.
She nodded. ‘Some people think the Osireion was already here way before 1300 BC. It’d been buried by sand, but Ramesses discovered it when the Temple of Seti was being built. Things were too far along for him to stop work on the temple, but he didn’t want to knock down the Osireion either . . . so he changed the plans to make the new temple go round a corner.’
‘Why’d he want to keep it so much?’ said Eddie.
Nina knew. ‘Because it was a copy of the tomb of Osiris himself. They’d lost the location of the original tomb centuries earlier, but they realised they had the next best thing.’
‘And if we’re right,’ said Macy, ‘somewhere inside it is the Eye of Osiris.’
‘Which points the way to his pyramid. So all we have to do . . . is find it.’
They crossed the stony sands to the Osireion. The site was practically a pit, a series of stepped walls leading down to the excavated structure. Compared to the ornate elegance of the Temple of Seti, the exposed ruins were almost brutalist, made of unornamented blocks of pale granite. The hall’s floor, some ninety feet long, was hidden beneath a stagnant green pool.
Eddie screwed up his face in distaste. ‘I didn’t expect to come into the bloody Sahara to go wading. I would’ve brought my wellies.’
‘It’s not that deep,’ said Nina, descending the steps into the building proper. ‘I hope.’ She cautiously dipped a boot into the turgid, algae-coated water, finding it was about an inch in depth. ‘Ugh. At least we didn’t come in the rainy season.’ She turned as Macy and Eddie joined her, noticing a dark passage beyond an opening at the northwestern end. ‘Where does that go?’
‘It’s a tunnel that went to the northern entrance,’ Macy told her, examining a diagram in her guidebook.
Eddie squinted inside. ‘Doesn’t go anywhere now - the other end’s buried. Hope this eye thing’s not in there.’ He splashed to the other end of the hall. ‘I just thought of something. If this eye’s supposed to be looking towards the pyramid, and the pyramid’s out to the west somewhere, then it’ll be on one of the east walls, right?’
‘The man in the funky hat makes a good point,’ said Macy, exchanging smiles with him.
Nina unslung her backpack, taking out a flashlight, then waded to an opening in the wall. A ramp rose from the water; the small chamber inside was dry. She entered, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Like the hall outside, the walls were plain, unadorned.
Eddie and Macy followed. ‘See anything?’ Eddie asked.
‘Not yet.’ Nina carefully scanned the walls for any indications of carvings or markings. Macy, meanwhile, took out a flashlight of her own and conducted a much less methodical examination of the chamber, sweeping the beam around at random. ‘Will you cut that out?’ Nina demanded. ‘You won’t find anything just by waving the light about. We need to do a section-by-section search—’
‘Ah-ha! Found it!’ Macy interrupted. She fixed her torch beam on one particular spot, high on the back wall. ‘See? One Eye of Osiris. I rock!’
‘That’s more like it,’ said Eddie, seeing a symbol carved into the stone. ‘Archaeology without all the boring farting around.’
Nina’s patience finally snapped. ‘Will you both goddamn take this seriously!’ she shouted, voice echoing round the chamber. ‘It wouldn’t be boring if you had even the slightest interest in what I do,’ she said to Eddie, before rounding on Macy. ‘And you, if you really want to be an archaeologist, then start acting like one. Or acting like an adult, even!’
Eddie made a sarcastic face. ‘Oh, the schoolmistress voice. I love hearing that.’
Macy, on the other hand, was shocked by the attack. ‘But - but I still found it,’ she said, pointing up at the symbol.
‘By sheer fluke!’ snapped Nina. ‘And because you weren’t being methodical, you did exactly what Logan did at the Sphinx, which was rush straight for the obvious prize and completely overlook anything else that might be important.’
Eddie indicated the plain walls surrounding them. ‘There isn’t anything else.’
‘That’s not the point!’ she protested, before turning back to Macy. ‘You’re treating this like a high school field trip - and you’re acting like one of the cheerleaders giggling on the back seat of the bus with the jocks!’
Macy’s dark eyes narrowed angrily. ‘I suppose you always sat up front with the teachers.’
‘Well - yes,’ said Nina, taken aback by the challenge, ‘but this isn’t about me, it’s about the work. If we want to find the pyramid, we’ve got to be professional about it.’
‘And you think I’m not, is that it? Excuse me, Dr Wilde, but you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who found out about the other entrance to the Hall of Records, I was the one who got us into the Sphinx compound—’
‘By flashing your boobs!’
Macy looked offended. ‘You think I’m just some bimbo, don’t you? Because I’m hot and I don’t get straight As in everything, you don’t take me seriously!’
‘You’re not taking this seriously!’
Eddie stepped forward, moving between them. ‘ “This”?’
‘All of this!’ Nina cried, waving her hands at the ancient structure around them. ‘Everything! It’s all important, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world who actually cares about it!’
Macy’s tone became withering. ‘Oh, I see - the entire world of archaeology revolves around you! Dr Berkeley was right, you really do have to be the centre of attention all the time.’ She pulled out the folded magazine pages and flapped them at Nina. ‘You know, when I read this I thought you were so cool and so smart - that you were somebody really special. But you’re just like everyone else.’ She stalked to the entrance and threw the pages outside. Disappointment overcame her anger. ‘Everything’s about you.’
‘That’s not true,’ insisted Nina, now on the defensive. ‘I don’t care about taking the credit.’
‘You enjoyed it, though.’
‘Of course I did,’ she admitted after a moment. ‘But that’s not why I do what I do. I do it because . . . because I have to!’
There was an almost confessional tone to her voice. Eddie raised an eyebrow. ‘You have to?’