The Pharaoh Key

22

AND THEN SUDDENLY there was silence again. Gideon swam back into consciousness from far away, wondering where he was for a moment. He couldn’t budge. He tried to move his arms but they were frozen. With a muffled scream he struggled, twisting and squirming ferociously in claustrophobic terror—and the sand began to give. With a heroic effort he threw his entire body into a rotational motion and felt more sand slipping around him. With a third, desperate attempt he managed to sit up, the sand cascading away.

An eerie calm had settled. A thin rain of dust was falling, forming a kind of fog. He tried to speak and found that his mouth was packed with sticky sand, which he did his best to cough out. Around him, in the dim light, he could see nothing but mountainous drifts of sand. His companions had vanished.

He realized with a thrill of horror that they must be still buried in the sand. He began digging, scooping like mad and drawing the sand back, and very quickly he exposed a swatch of blue cloth—Imogen’s galabeya. Frantically he cleared the sand away toward where her head would be, uncovering first a thick strand of golden hair and then her face.

“Imogen!”

He cleared sand from around her nose and mouth and then, frantically scooping, from the rest of her face. Her mouth was partly open, packed with sand, and she was not breathing. He cleared away the sand with his fingers, managed to raise her head a bit, and put his mouth on hers, breathing in. He waited; the air came back out; and then suddenly she was coughing like mad, rising up and doubling over, gasping and choking.

And struggling up next to her was Garza, writhing and spluttering as he wrestled out of the sand.

At last all three had freed themselves from their sandy graves. Imogen’s face was covered with powdery dust, her eyes wet and bloodshot, mouth ringed with mud. The air around them was slowly turning from a dark orange to a brighter yellow.

“The camels,” gasped Imogen.

“The camels can wait,” Garza spluttered, still shaking sand out of his hair.

“If we lose the camels, we die.”

They rose to their feet, shaking out their galabeyas. Gideon could feel the sticky wetness of blood where flying sand had scored the flesh of his back.

Imogen stumbled away in the direction where she had couched the camels, beside the rock pile. There was nothing but sand.

“Are they buried?” Garza asked.

“No. They must have stampeded.”

As they stood there, a hot breeze swept through and the air cleared. Gideon looked around. The landscape had become unrecognizable. All trace of tracks and landmarks were gone. The thornbushes had been stripped of their few leaves and many uprooted. Most of their meager supplies had disappeared. There were no tracks of the fleeing camels. The wind had scoured the land clean.

“In dust storms, camels go downwind,” Imogen said. “Gideon, you come with me. Manuel, see if you can dig up our water bags and supplies. We need to hurry.” She set off at a trudge, moving westward down the broad wadi, Gideon hurrying to catch up.

The wash twisted and turned among black lava flows before coming to an open basin, surrounded by sandy hills. They peered in every direction, but saw no camels.

“We need to get higher,” Imogen said.

With much difficulty, they climbed a pile of volcanic rubble forming a loose hill. It was a hand-and-foot climb, and Gideon’s hands, already cracked, began to bleed from the sharp lava. He said nothing and, after a grueling half hour they reached the top. The view was extensive and it revealed, beyond the sandy basin, hundreds of volcanic hills cut by canyons and serpentine washes—a labyrinth of sand and stone—with range after range of mountains beyond.

“Jesus,” said Gideon. “How are we ever going to find the camels in there?”

After a long silence, Imogen said: “We’re not.”

“Surely they must be somewhere.”

“A camel can run thirty miles an hour. Even if we knew where they were, they’ve already gone too far away for us to catch them.” She turned and started back down the hill.

Gideon hustled to follow her. “So what are we going to do?”

“I’m thinking,” she said. “Stop asking questions.”

By the time they got back to camp, Garza had managed to uncover one water bag. The rest had ruptured. Most of their other supplies were gone. He’d found two panniers with maps and some food, but that was it. He was in a dark mood.

They passed around the water bag and all had a drink. Finally Imogen spoke. “Going back isn’t an option. We’ve got one two-gallon bag of water. In this desert, a person should have a gallon a day. A quart a day would be the minimum to keep you alive—if you’re willing to go half crazy with thirst. Eight quarts divided by three people…it’s not nearly enough to get us back to Shalateen.”

“There’s got to be water in the fog oases,” said Gideon. “What do you know about them?” he asked Imogen.

Imogen glanced up toward Gebel Umm, visible in the hazy distance peeking between two lesser peaks. “Well, very little. On the eastern side of the mountain there are supposed to be some high-altitude valleys where prevailing winds off the Red Sea condense into perpetual fogs. It creates a kind of microclimate. Or so it’s said—nothing I read indicated anyone had ever been there and seen the phenomenon firsthand.”

“And how far away are these valleys?” Gideon asked.

“Gebel Umm is maybe twenty miles as the crow flies.”

“That’s where we go, then. And pray to God there’s water.”

At this, Garza spoke abruptly. “Excuse me, but Gideon and I need to talk. Alone.”

Gideon followed Garza off a short distance. “What’s the problem now?” he asked.

Garza turned on him. “No way is she coming with us.”

“We can’t just abandon her.”

“She’s lied to us once already. How can we trust her?”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re lying to her as well. And she brought back the camels, didn’t she? She saved our lives.”

“Look, Gideon, if she comes with us, that means sharing our secret. Do you want that?”

“We don’t know what the hell we’re going to find,” Gideon said angrily. “Maybe nothing.”

Garza opened his mouth to reply and then shut it. “I don’t trust her.”

“Manuel, what exactly is your problem? Do you feel threatened by this woman because she’s so capable and intelligent? Think: if we leave her, she dies—and then we die, too. Because she obviously knows a hell of a lot more about this desert than we do.”

After a moment of silence, Garza spat out some sand. “We tell her nothing. We’ll make her wait at a mist oasis while we go on to the Phaistos location and then pick her up on the way back.”

“Agreed.”

They came back to find Imogen hauling a camel blanket out of the sand. “I guess you two wankers got it through your thick heads that we’re stuck with each other, whether we like it or not,” she said without glancing at them. “I’ve saved your hides twice now, and I expect I’ll have to do it again before this is over.”