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“After you, Mr. Pierce,” Dr. Aziz said.
Rowan stood with his hands on his hips looking dubiously at the small entrance to the burial chamber. By Rowan’s calculation, his broad shoulders would be his undoing. Even after dropping nearly thirty pounds over the past year, he was still a big guy. Big guys hated small tunnels, no matter how svelte they were. He’d never get Lauren in that hole, Rowan mused to himself. Her claustrophobia grew worse with each passing year. She refused to enter tight spaces as a rule now. Maybe it was the cave in Washington State; maybe it was the cenote in Mexico. Rowan had no idea what had spawned her fear, but it was palpable whenever they were faced with entering a cave or tunnel. She wasn’t simply scared, she was terrified.
At this moment, he wasn’t about to go down in that narrow tunnel either. “We need to test the atmosphere before we make entry,” Rowan insisted. “Confined space entry protocols and all. The air might be bad.”
Dr. Aziz eyed him suspiciously. “I have been an archeologist since before you were born,” he sputtered. “I have never once had a problem with bad air.”
Rowan stood fast, his brow creeping towards his receding hairline that was hidden beneath his straw hat. He wasn’t trying to be difficult, but he felt like it was a fair request considering it was his life on the line.
“You have a choice, Mr. Pierce. You can go in and be the first to see the contents of the tomb, or you can stay out here and fail my class. The choice is yours.”
“There’s a third option there, you know?” Rowan offered. The rest of the class stood back waiting to find out what was going to happen to their much older, and much more famous classmate.
“Oh?” Dr. Aziz glowered. His bulging eyes narrowed. His pencil-thin mustache twitched.
“I can go in there and suffocate from a lack of oxygen, and you can go explain to my pregnant wife and my two small sons how you refused to follow protocols and why her husband and their father isn’t coming home.” It still gave him goosebumps when he thought about Lauren being pregnant ... again. Baby number three wouldn’t be here ‘til late summer. They hadn’t told the boys yet. Lauren wanted to wait ... just in case. She argued they were too little to understand. Henry might, but John Carter? No he probably wouldn’t. He was just two.
Rowan had suspected she was pregnant even before Lauren did. She had a glow about her ... a green one. She kept having to run to the restroom to throw up. She blamed it on the Egyptian food. Even after a year in Cairo, she had yet to become accustomed to mutton or the rich variety of spices and seasonings that were so common in the Middle East. Tima had been teaching her to cook and they were often guests in his professor’s home, but nothing had helped her acclimate.
He hadn’t said anything to her about his suspicions. When he came to her one afternoon with and found her with tears streaming down her face, and a pregnancy test on the coffee table in front of her, his suspicions were confirmed. “What is this?” He feigned ignorance.
“I can’t look,” she said, the stick turned over to hide the results. “I haven’t been feeling myself lately ... and Tima asked if I was ... pregnant.”
“Are you?” he asked, sitting down beside her, pulling her into him. She was trembling.
“I can’t look.” Her voice came out in a squeak. Rowan didn’t need to. He already knew.
Aziz grunted, bringing his focus back to the moment. Rowan stood fast. The professor’s face turned three shades of red as his eyes bulged in their sockets. “Miss Bouchard?” He turned to another student. “Would you care to make the discovery?” He pointed towards the entrance with the tip of his walking stick.
Rowan’s classmate took a step back. “No thank you ... sir,” she said. “My fiancé is a safety officer for his company. He would insist on testing the air as well. I agree with Mr. Pierce’s assessment.”
Just when Rowan was confident Aziz couldn’t turn any redder, he was proven wrong. “Anyone else? Or are you all cowards?” He turned, pointing his walking stick at each of the class members as his voice rose into the alto range. His eyes bulged even larger. Sweat trickled down the side of his round face.
Rowan gave a nod to Angeline Bouchard, who’d backed him up. The rest of the class stood fast. No one stepped forward.
“Fine!” Aziz said. “Then you all will receive a failing grade on this assignment.”
“Dr. Aziz.” Dorian Stewart, another of his classmates, a Brit from Oxford stepped up. “Are you aware, the International Board of Higher Education has regulations prohibiting instructors from placing students in harm’s way in exchange for a grade? You can’t threaten to fail us for refusing an assignment due to unsafe conditions.”
“Don’t cite regulations to me, young man.” Aziz looked as if he were about to have an apoplexy right then and there. “I have been an archeologist since before you were born ... before you all were born!” This was the professor’s standard line when confronted by a student. They’d heard it before.
“Mr. Stewart is right,” Rowan crossed his arms. “I believe Dr. Badr will take issue with threatening students with a failing grade for refusing to enter an unsafe space.” Aziz’s mouth twisted, his mustache now contorting and undulating beneath his flat nose. “Look, once it’s safe, I’ll happily be the first to go in.” Rowan glanced at the other students. Several of them nodded. Clearly, they were all behind the international superstar and Travel Adventure Magazine’s Man of the Year, an accolade he’d won three times now.
“It’s safe now!” The professor nearly spiraled out of control.
“Then prove it,” Dorian said. Rowan had to force back a smile as several of the other students nodded in agreement.
This wasn’t Rowan’s first run in with a confined space. When he was still a rookie on his wife’s television show, he’d gone into an underground chamber on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia in search of Captain Kidd’s treasure. Legend said the treasure included large quantities of gold and precious gems. The entrance hadn’t been much larger than the one he stood facing now. Brash and headstrong, and maybe a little treasure-hungry, he hadn’t hesitated to crawl in, despite Lauren’s vehement protests. Everything seemed okay at first, but by the time the camera crews followed him in with their equipment, he began feeling light-headed. Thinking it had more to do with the excitement of the hunt than the conditions of the underground cavern, he didn’t say anything. Standing in knee deep water that was black and covered in slime probably hadn’t helped any either.
It was Jean-René who’d saved his life. When Rowan’s words began to slur, and he slumped to his knees, the cameraman took immediate action. He and the crew wrestled their much larger coworker back to the entrance and got his head up to fresh air. He’d already passed out before the crews topside were able to extract him. The lack of breathable air began to affect the rest of the crew one by one. In the end, three of them had to be taken for medical treatment. Rowan had a headache for over a week. He was lucky, and he knew it. He also knew better than to make the same mistake again. Lessons learned, and all.
“Fine.” Aziz groaned, turning away.
* * *
Two hours later, they finally had the equipment they needed. Rowan made sure the monitor was calibrated and performed the required bump test before sending the probe into the space. He measured the air every three feet, just to be safe. The tunnel wasn’t that long, fortunately. Once everyone had seen the test results, Rowan wasted no time making entry. The entry was a tight fit, but with his arms over his head, he managed to squeeze through. He clipped the air monitor to his belt, and the probe to his collar, to make sure he was alerted to any changes in the oxygen levels.
With a video camera and lamp clipped to a band on his forehead, he made his way through the narrow entry to the chamber. He had to turn and twist to force his way through the narrow break in the crumbling bricks. Once inside the chamber, he had enough room to sit on his knees. He felt a rush of adrenaline as he took in the site. Grave robbers had been here before, but it was clear that the violation had taken place decades, if not centuries before. The crypt had been ransacked, the mummy was gone, but clay jars in the corners remained in excellent condition. He moved closer to study them.
Every inch of the walls were decorated with hieroglyphs. Some of the symbols were embossed in gold. A statue of Anubis guarded the tomb. The jackal-headed god’s eyes were also lined in gold. Tomb raiders had defiled the god, the tip of its nose had been broken off, and an ear was missing.
Mummified bodies of cats were stacked in the corner of the tomb. A stone statue of a leopard stood beside the niche, intact. There, he found stacks of crumbling papyrus scrolls and stone tablets. A glyph that looked like a palm tree was cut into the stone over the niche. Beside it, the second glyph, the half circle configured like a setting sun was placed next to a glyph of a west-facing woman. This told him it was an altar to the Goddess Seshat. Rowan’s heart raced as he realized this was in fact the tomb of a priestesses of the Goddess Seshat herself. He didn’t have to be fluent in Egyptian hieroglyphics to put the pieces together.
Rowan scanned the room making sure his head-cam recorded all of it. He wanted Lauren to see it. While he could make out the names of the goddess, and the priestess who had been entombed here in a place of honor by the Pharaoh she had served, he had little gift for the language or the hieroglyphs. That was Lauren’s strong suit.
“What do you see, Mr. Pierce?” Aziz’s voice broke the eerie silence.
“Mummified cats ... probably leopards, and an altar to Seshat.” Rowan relayed information on the scene. “Tomb raiders have been here before. The tomb was defiled, and the mummy is gone. The canopic jars are intact though.”
“What does this tell you, Mr. Pierce?” Any hint of a grudge from Rowan’s earlier protests seemed forgotten.
“It gives us a date,” Rowan said. “Or at least a range of dates.”
“Continue, Mr. Pierce.”
“These types of funerary jars were used from the time of the Old Kingdom; I think, but no later than the Late Ptolemaic Period.”
“And what is the origin of the term canopic?”
For a moment he wished Lauren were there. She’d know the answer to that off the top of her head. Rowan hesitated, trying to think. “I know it has to do with Canopus.” It came to him suddenly. “But they made a mistake. Early Egyptologists confused the legend of Canopus — the boat captain of Menelaus who was buried at Canopus where he was worshiped in the form of a jar.”
“Very good, Mr. Pierce,” the professor said. “Now, let us talk about how to document a find such as this.”
Rowan sat on his rump, scanning the room with the camera on his headband, knowing the class was watching the feed on the monitors. He listened to Aziz provide instruction to the team on proper management and preservation of an archaeological dig site. All the while he drank in the effort the ancient Egyptians had made, just to honor a priestess after her death.
The engineering of the tomb alone was a marvel. The chamber was built from blocks of limestone that appeared to have been polished before they had been painted. How the ancient builders had accomplished such feats was difficult for his modern brain to comprehend. They had no cranes; no diamond saw blades and no college degrees. Yet, here beneath the shifting sands, the ancients had constructed a marvel. He couldn’t wait to get home to tell Lauren all about it.
* * *
The sun was setting over the desert when Rowan emerged from the tunnel. Sweat poured from his brow and his clothing was soaked. He wasn’t sure what was worse, the sweat running down his back, or the grit that clung to it. Even below ground, the temperatures hovered well over 100 degrees. The sand dunes and mountains rising around them shown golden in the fading light. The cheers of his classmates greeted him. Even Dr. Aziz appeared pleased as he offered him a hand up. “You just made your first major archaeological discovery, Mr. Pierce,” Aziz said. Rowan didn’t have the heart to correct him.
“I need a shower,” Rowan said, groaning as he got to his feet. Dorian handed him a bottle of water. Rowan nodded thanks. “And some food.”
“Let’s load up the equipment. We are going to be getting home late,” Aziz said. “Well done, everyone.”