Lady of Heaven (41 page)

“Well,” he
began, grunting when he shifted his weight on the floor. “I’ll tell you what I
think this is.”

“What?” she was
eager to know.

He flashed the
beam directly below them. “See all of that down there?”

She looked at
the leaves. “Yes?”

“Those are
wrappings,” he said. “I don’t even have to get close to know they’re mummy
wrappings. And all of the debris down there look like pieces of wood or even
charcoal.”

Morgan had no
idea what he was saying. “What does that mean?”

He sighed
heavily. “It means that I would hazard to guess that back when the Romans built
their encampment here, there was enough of this temple uncovered that they
could tell what it was.  It was ancient even to the Romans at that point and
so, being Romans, they did what Romans do best; they trashed it.  All of that
stuff down there leads me to believe that some of them might have even lived
down there, totally desecrating the holy Egyptian temple.   I’d really like to
go down there and take a look but I’m concerned I wouldn’t be able to get back
out again if I did.”

Morgan looked at
the clutter below. “I can go down there and take some pictures,” she said
helpfully. “You can lower me with a rope. I’m much lighter to pull up than you
are.”

He nodded
faintly. “That’s an idea,” he said as the beam moved to the pile of leaves.
“I’m shuddering to think what mummy those wrappings belonged to.  The Romans
must have unwrapped it looking for jewels.”

Morgan suddenly
stood up and went to the stairs leading up to the daylight. Allahaba was on the
top stair, looking down at her eagerly, and she called to him.

“Bring the rope
down here, please,” she told him, shielding her eyes from the blinding sunlight.
“And bring the camera and more flashlights.”

Allahaba
scrambled and Morgan went back to Fox, who was now picking himself up off the
ground.  She put her hands on her hips, looking around the dimly lit chamber.

“So that’s what
you think?” she asked. “Was this was an Egyptian temple and the Roman’s trashed
it?”

He nodded. “It
makes complete sense.” He pointed to the stairs. “That stairway right there;
it’s not the entrance. It’s leading to the roof. We came down from the roof
access, which I am totally surprised is still intact.  Look at the columns on
the periphery of the chamber; see how they look as if they’re just part of the
walls? These walls aren’t really walls; they’re centuries of sand and dirt,
built up to fill in the space between the columns.  This was all open-air at
one point, thousands of years ago.  The desert has simply reclaimed it.”

Morgan looked
around the room, wide-eyed. “My God,” she breathed. “I didn’t even notice. It
never occurred to me; I thought it was just another pyramid.”

“No,” he shook
his head. “This thing was wide-open, like Karnak.”

Morgan continued
to survey the room with awe. “You’re so amazing,” she murmured. “You see this
as it was. I can’t even picture that.”

He looked at
Allahaba as the man emerged from the stairwell, noting the expression of awe on
his friend’s face. In the dim light of the ancient temple, Allahaba was toting
ropes and flashlights and other gear, nearly tripping because he wasn’t paying
attention to where he was walking. He was more interested in his surroundings.

“I may see it as
it was, but you were the one who saw it in the first place,” Fox kissed his
wife on the head as he made his way to Allahaba. “Had we not followed up on
your hunch, we’d be digging somewhere else and maybe never have found this. I’m
just sorry the Romans got to it before we did.”

Morgan
contemplated that statement as Fox showed Allahaba around the chamber briefly
before moving to the hole in the floor.  Explaining to the man what they
intended to do, Fox then brought his wife over and tied the rope around her
waist, between her legs, and then secured it all in a big knot near her navel. 
Allahaba handed her the digital camera and away she went.

Morgan had
repelled before during police training so it wasn’t a big deal for them to
lower her into the chamber below; she held on securely, snapping pictures
rapidly until she reached the bottom.  Once her feet hit the floor, she tried
hard to avoid the leaves, which weren’t so much leaves as they were old linen
bindings.  She didn’t want to step on anything and damage it more than it
already was, making her footing very timid.

“Morgan,” Fox
called down to her. “I’m going to commit a cardinal sin here, but I want you to
pick up some of those bindings and bring them back up.”

“Why is it a
cardinal sin?”

“Because you’re
moving archaeological evidence; more than that, you don’t have any protective
gloves on.  Just pick it up a small amount of it and bring it back up with
you.”

She nodded,
reaching down to gingerly pick up a strip of linen that felt more like paper.
As she looked around for more stuff to bring up to Fox, she began to feel very
creepy.  The smell of the chamber was old and musty, the ancient air that
hadn’t been breathed in centuries, and she began to see clearly what some of
the debris were. 

“Fox?” she
called up to him.

“What?”

She peered
closely at something on ground. “It… it looks like a cup or something,” she
told him. “It looks like it’s made of silver. It’s really dented and
tarnished.”

“Get it.”

Obediently, she
picked up the vessel.  Walking deeper into the chamber, she moved towards the
black box she had spied earlier, noting at closer range that it looked like
another sarcophagus.  As the beam of light fell on it, illuminating the dark
and mysterious box, she could see that there was no top or lid to it.  As she
drew closer, the beam fell on the area to the left of the sarcophagus and shock
filled her veins. She yelped, startled, as her eyes beheld something both shocking
and ghastly.

Fox heard her
cry and he hung his head down through the hole, trying to see her. “Morgan?” he
said urgently. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Morgan nodded
even though he couldn’t see her, her eyes fixed on the subject of her horror.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But… there are zombies in here!”

“Zombies?” Fox
repeated.

She made a face
of disgust as she moved closer to the corpse that was now coming to light in
the weak flash of the beam. “Yes,” she called back. “Zombies. Mummies. There’s
a mummy down here.”

“Pictures!” he
commanded. “Take a few shots and throw me the camera so I can take a look.”

Morgan did as
she was told.  About ten frames later, she scooted over to the hole and tossed
the camera up to him. She couldn’t really see his face but she could hear him
hiss as he clicked through the photos on the viewer.

“Bloody hell,”
he muttered after several long moments. “The left arm is bent over the chest.
That’s the tale-tell sign of Egyptian royalty. I really need to get down there
to see it.”

As Fox and
Allahaba discussed how they could lower Fox down and not break everyone’s
backs, Morgan returned her attention to the mummy in the corner.

It looked as if
it had been tossed haphazardly as it leaned casually against the wall.   The
skin was well preserved and very dark, the color of beef jerky, and the facial
features were twisted with time and decay.  Not all of the bindings were off;
most of the bindings around the head and legs were gone but the torso, oddly
enough, seemed to be somewhat intact. The mummy was very tiny and as she peered
more closely at it, she could see long dark hair in hundreds of braids upon its
head.  The left arm was bent up across the chest and she could see that there
was something clutched in the mummy’s withered left hand.

Morgan moved
towards the mummy as Fox and Allahaba collaborated, hearing their faint
conversation as she knelt beside the mummy to study it closer. Now that she was
next to it, she could see broken pieces of a wooden sarcophagus but a fully
intact facial mask that wasn’t like anything she had ever seen before. The
features were broad and flat.  Looking closer at the face, she could see that
one semi-precious eye was missing from the mask but the other one was intact. 
Overall, it was apparent that the mummy and its coffin had been seriously
vandalized. She sighed heavily, looking back to the mummy.

“I’m so sorry,”
she whispered to the corpse. “Damn Romans.

The mummy didn’t
reply. She didn’t expect it to.  Her gaze was once again drawn to whatever it
was the mummy held in its left hand and she touched it just to see how secure
it was. It seemed to be a roll of something, perhaps papyrus or linen, and she
gave a couple of gentle tugs on it before it slipped free with relative ease. 

She inspected it
carefully and closely, realizing it was a scroll of some kind. Without even
unrolling it, she could see hints of glyphs, faded black markings made by
someone thousands of years ago. It was an amazing concept.  She picked her way
back among the debris to where her husband and Allahaba were still figuring out
how to lower him into the pit.

“Fox?” she
called up to him.

He looked down
at her. “What, love?”

She held up the
scroll. “This was in the mummy’s left hand.”

He stared at her
a moment. “You took it out?”

She nodded. “It
came out pretty easily,” she said, not sensing that she probably should not
have done that. She pointed to the mess behind her. “There’s a black box like
the white one upstairs which I’m guessing is a sarcophagus. You can see where
someone smashed it open and pulled out the wooden sarcophagus, which they then
busted up to get at the mummy.  But there’s a really beautiful face mask that
seems to have survived almost intact.”   

By this time,
Fox was leaning down into the hole with a big arm outstretched.  “Give me the
scroll.”

“Can I come out
now? It’s kind of creepy down here.”

“Sure.”

He retracted his
arm and took the rope that was still tied around her. Swiftly pulling her up,
he took the time to untie the rope from her waist before taking the piece from
her hand. Allahaba was still scrolling through the photographs from the chamber
as Fox very carefully unrolled the scroll.

“Bloody hell,”
he hissed softly, getting his first good look at what the scroll contained. “I
should be fired for handling artifacts like this. Bare-handed, without a proper
clean area, without proper study or excavation… any reputable archaeologist
would never do something like this. When this is all over, I may fire myself.”

“I could put it
back.”

He grunted. “Not
on your life.  I want to see what this is.”

Morgan grinned
as he glanced up and winked at her, returning his attention to the object in
his hands.   His dark eyes glittered as he began to read through the symbols.

“What does it
say?” Morgan wanted to know almost immediately.

Fox was reading
carefully; the missive was written on linen, not papyrus, and was surprisingly
flexible for its advanced age.  He began to describe what he was seeing and
feeling to Morgan.

“To begin with,
this is linen,” he told her. “The fibers are broad and rough, not smooth and
smaller as they were in later periods, indicating that this was made in an
earlier phase of Egypt’s history.  Generally, looms that early were just stakes
in the ground and women would weave the thick fiber linen on them. Vertical
looms weren’t used until much later, during the New Kingdom.”

Morgan absorbed
her history lesson. “So this is old?”

He nodded.
“Very, very old,” he replied, holding out his hand for the other relic she had
in her hand; a strip of linen she had picked off the floor. He examined the two
pieces closely. “The weave and fiber resemble each other.”

By this time,
Allahaba had finished with the photos and was standing next to Fox, reading the
symbols on the linen. As Fox scrutinized the symbols without his reading
glasses, and in dim light to boot, Allahaba had a much faster grasp of what he
was reading.

"
’Worship
of Her, Who is Pure Being, Consciousness, Bliss
,” he said softly, slowly. “
Lady
of Heaven, Who Exists in all Forms of Time, And All That is Therein, Who
is the Divine Illuminatrix in All Beings, Mother Isis, as she sails to Her
final Rest, May her Story be Told in Sanctuary, and Know she is One with the
Heavens’
.”

For several long
moments, no one moved.  Fox stared at the linen, confirming Allahaba’s
translation, hardly believing what he was hearing.  Morgan watched the two men
as they studied something older than she could possibly imagine, clues to
something so magical, so divine, that it was difficult to comprehend.  All she
knew was that a spell had been cast over all of them as Allahaba had read the
contents of the linen.  Something holy and enlightening was settling, and
Morgan wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew something of significance had been
realized.

Fox looked up
from the linen, his black eyes on the columns of the chamber around them. He
could see the carvings, row upon row of figures and symbols.  It began to occur
to him that perhaps the message was referring to this chamber as the Sanctuary;
he wasn’t sure what else it could mean.  And there was a story on the columns,
something he had seen when he had first entered but something that held much
more significance to him now.  He lowered the linen and moved towards the
pillars, his gaze never leaving them.