Rupert had no trouble estimating the height and width. He’d done that automatically as he entered, and was estimating the angle of descent even while he watched the uneven sway of her handsome backside as she preceded him.
Watching her derrière was no small feat, considering he walked folded almost in half on an uneven surface and had his hands on the walls to maintain his balance and keep track of the passages’ features.
In any event, he hadn’t as clear a rear view of the lady as he could wish. The guides’ torches were fighting a losing battle against the darkness.
They’d gone about fifty feet when Mrs. Pembroke enlightened him about the dimensions.
“You’ve measured it, then?” he said.
“I quote Mr. Belzoni’s calculations,” she said. “At the end of this passage, he encountered the portcullis. You can imagine the labor in this constricted space of raising a granite block nearly as tall as you are, five feet wide and fifteen inches thick.”
Though Rupert could work out how it might be done, he let her explain how Belzoni had analyzed and solved the problem, using a fulcrum and levers, and stuffing stones in the grooves to support the block as they raised it by slow, slow inches.
When they came to the portcullis, Rupert didn’t have to feign admiration. Raising it in this small space was no negligible feat. He paused and ran his hands over the sides of the opening and the bottom of the stone.
Then he huddled under and continued for a few more feet until she stopped to turn toward him.
“We must descend the shaft next,” she said. “Belzoni used a rope and later piled some stones to one side, but someone brought a ladder recently, and left it.”
“Much more civilized,” Rupert said. He noted a hole overhead while watching how gracefully she turned, though she was obliged to move in the same hunched-over style as he.
They descended the shaft in the civilized way, continued down another passage, then up, then straight on. The way grew easier. It was high enough to allow Mrs. Pembroke to walk upright, though Rupert still had to keep his head down.
At last they entered the great central chamber, where he could easily stand straight. The tall room’s ceiling tapered to a point, the angle mimicking the pyramid’s.
The guides stood by the door, holding their torches aloft. On the south wall, large letters — proper Roman letters, not the curls and squiggles of Arabic nor yet the curious little hieroglyphic figures — proclaimed, “Scoperta da S. Belzoni 2 Mar. 1818.”
“ ‘Opened by Signore Belzoni,’ ” Mrs. Pembroke translated, though even Rupert could deduce the meaning.
“The sarcophagus in Cheops’s pyramid stands on the floor,” she said, walking toward the west wall of the chamber. “But here, as you see, it is sunk into the ground.”
It was not so easy to see. The darkness was so thick one could practically feel it. The torches made little headway against it.
Rupert gazed about the room. “So many secrets,” he said.
He knew little more of ancient Egypt than what he recalled from the works of Greeks and Romans. There was the ancient Greek traveler Herodotus, for instance, whose Histories comprised a hodgepodge of facts, figures, and myths.
“This tomb may keep its secrets for all eternity,” she said. “No hieroglyphs. Do you see why Miles’s reasons for coming are so puzzling? Besides, the papyrus allegedly came from Thebes — hundreds of miles away in more mountainous terrain.”
Rupert studied the gap between the granite stones surrounding the sarcophagus. What went there? he wondered. An effigy? Treasure chest? Or simply another stone?
“Allegedly,” he repeated. “Is there anything about the papyrus we can be sure of?”
“It’s truly old,” she said. “It took several days to unroll. You can’t be impatient with such things or you end up with a lot of charred crumbs — and sick from the fumes of the chlorine gas.”
She spoke quickly, her voice a note or two above the usual pitch.
But she’d talked that way since they entered the pyramid, Rupert realized. She’d been exceedingly talkative.
He looked up from the puzzling sarcophagus. She seemed to be looking down into it. He couldn’t be sure. It was hard to read her expression in the dim, wavering light.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
“Not everyone would be,” he said. “Some people have a morbid aversion to closed spaces.”
“It is an irrational reaction one must overcome if one hopes to learn anything,” she said. “We shall be exploring tombs in Thebes. They do have writing inside. That was the main point of coming to Egypt: to study the hieroglyphs in the temples and royal tombs. To compare names. We know what hieroglyphs form the name Cleopatra. We’ve deduced some other royal names. With enough pharaohs to compare, we should be able to deduce the alphabet.”
We. Rupert noted the choice of pronoun. Not he or Miles.
“Meanwhile, you’d rather not be here,” he said.
“I wouldn’t mind so much, but we’ve wasted our time,” she said. “There’s nothing. This was a stupid mistake. I should have listened to Lord Noxley. I could have been questioning others in Cairo. What did I think I’d learn from a heap of stones?”
The edgy tone of her voice had softened into despair.
Rupert rose and started toward her, while trying to think of some stupid thing to say to irritate her and rouse her spirits.
From somewhere in the bowels of the pyramid came a bone-chilling scream.
“NO!” Rupert roared, turning toward the door.
Too late.
He had one last, faint glimpse of swiftly retreating light as the guides fled. Then there was nothing. The darkness swallowed them utterly.
Chapter 5
“DON’T FAINT,” RUPERT SAID IN AN UNDERTONE. “I can’t see you to catch you, and a concussion would be a problem.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “I never faint.”
If her voice hadn’t risen a notch above her normal pitch, he might have believed she was perfectly composed. But he was learning the changes in her voice, and he’d noticed her propensity for hiding things. Her body, for instance. That wasn’t all.
He’d work on the other secrets once they got out of the present difficulty.
“Stay put and keep talking, but softly,” he said. He was listening. The guides’ footsteps had faded. Outside the chamber silence reigned. He didn’t trust it. Someone was there, he was certain.
Meanwhile he needed to get his bearings. The dark was prodigious. He’d never experienced anything quite like it.
“I shall not faint,” she said. “I freely admit, however, that our present situation is not conducive to an easy frame of mind.”
Cautiously Rupert inched toward her. He did not want to stumble over one of the stones ancient tomb robbers had pried loose from the floor, or into any of the holes where the stones had been. Broken limbs or a cracked skull would not only slow their progress but hamper his ability to break villains’ heads.
“The circumstances are far from propitious,” she went on in the same high-pitched, pedantic tone. “We hear an unearthly scream. The guides instantly decamp with the only source of light. This leaves us to the tender mercies of whoever caused the screaming.”
Her voice was very near now. Rupert put out his hand, and it slid over a fabric-covered curve.
With a sharp gasp, she stiffened. Then her cold fingers curled about his and lifted his hand away.
“I cannot see my hand when I hold it an inch from my face,” she said, “yet you had no difficulty locating my breast.”
“Was that the part I found?” he said. “What amazing luck.” What a splendid bosom!
“When we get out of this,” she said, “if we get out of this, I shall box your ears.”
“We’ll get out of it,” he said.
“My mind reverts, repeatedly, to the portcullis,” she said. “If they remove the stones holding
it up, we’ll be trapped here.”
“That’s too much work,” he said. “It would be easier to wait in the dark and stab or shoot us as soon as we come close enough.”
“I had not thought of that,” she said. “I was preoccupied with the prospect of being buried alive. With you. I could not imagine what we would find to talk about while we died slowly of starvation and thirst.”
“Talk?” he said. “Is that what you’d want to do during your last hours? How curious. Come, take my hand. So far, no one appears to be hurrying to cut our throats. I think we might risk setting out.”
“Where is your hand?” she said.
There was some fumbling, during which he found the other breast, eliciting another sharp gasp and uncomplimentary muttering under her breath. But at last he had her slim hand in his. It fit perfectly. His spirits rose another few degrees while his heart went faster than before.
“Your hand is warm,” she said accusingly. “Does nothing alarm you?”
He was starting toward where he estimated the doorway was. “Not this,” he said. “I am armed, you know, and it’s simple enough to find the way out.”
“It is simple enough if you can see where you’re going,” she said.
Searching with his free hand, he found the edge of the doorway. “And if you can’t?” he said.
“I can think of half a dozen different ways we could die,” she said. “With or without villains’ assistance.”
DAPHNE KNEW SHE was jabbering, but talking helped keep emotion at bay.
Until this moment, she’d allowed herself to cherish a small hope that her alarms about her brother were as silly as the men in Cairo painted them to be. She’d let herself hope, though logic rebelled against it, that Miles was not in trouble, and Akmed had either lied about or misunderstood what had happened in Old Cairo.
The scream and the guides’ abrupt departure did not strike her as simple coincidence, and the small, silly hope was breathing its last.
And so she babbled facts.
“The way we came is one of two ways into the pyramid,” she said. “Parallel to and below the passage we first entered is another, which leads to a descending passage. This meets the upper one at the shaft. The lower entrance is still blocked, however.”
“So there’s only one way out,” he said.
“Yes, but it is easy to go astray,” she said. “We could end up in the wrong passageway. The lower passage has a shaft, too, and a side chamber, if I remember correctly.” She wasn’t sure. The panic she tried to crush was making a muddle of her mind. She could not clearly picture Belzoni’s diagram.
She was not about to let Mr. Carsington know the state she was in, however.
Coolly she went on, “I trust yours is an unerring sense of direction?”
“Yes, actually,” he said, the supremely confident male.
“I am glad to hear it,” she said, “because it is all too easy, in absolute darkness like this, to become disoriented and wander the few simple passageways endlessly. Or tumble into a shaft.”
“If you don’t want to become disoriented, I recommend you keep close to me,” Mr. Carsington said.
“I ought to remind you as well,” she went on testily, “that even if none of these mishaps befall us, it is possible for villainous persons to close the single way out. They’ve only a small space to block, after all: four feet high, three and a half feet wide. They might roll a few large stones down the passageway without great difficulty.”
“I should think the guides would notice if anybody started hauling large stones up to the pyramid entrance,” he said. “And I expect they’d strongly object to anyone’s trying to block the passage. Taking people into and out of the pyramid is their livelihood, recollect.”
Yes, yes, of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
Because she was living one of her worst nightmares, trapped in a closed space in utter darkness. Panic had suffocated logic and reason.
She was lost, following blindly, clinging to his large hand as they proceeded slowly but unhindered through the taller horizontal passageway and thence into the inclined smaller one. There she had to let go of his hand and grope along behind.
She knew she could not continue holding his hand while traversing the small tunnel. One part of her mind — the small part still functioning — understood the necessity. But the rest was too chaotic to understand anything, and when she let go, she felt wretched and lost and alone.
Telling herself to stop being so childish, she followed as closely behind as possible, listening to his footsteps while she slid her hands along the passage walls. What seemed a very long time later, though she knew they could not have traveled many feet, he put his hand back, touching the front of her turban.
“We’re at the shaft, I think,” he said softly. “There’s room for you to stand upright, at any rate. But stay a moment while I find the ladder.”
Another long wait. Daphne heard rustling, then his familiar rumble, too low to understand. Then a degree more audibly he said, “You’d better let me carry you.”
“Have the villains broken the ladder?” she said.
“No. Where the devil are you?” His voice was clipped and distant. One large hand found her forearm, the other her hip. “Where’s your waist, confound it?”
Though the pyramid’s interior was far from cool, she was acutely aware of a very different warmth where he touched her, and of a strength that the childish part of her wanted to lean into.
She retreated. “I can climb up the ladder without aid,” she said. “I climbed down it, did I not?”
“As you wish, madam. Try not to step on the bodies.”
“Bodies,” she repeated.
“They’re human, they haven’t been dead for very long, and they’ve fallen or been flung onto the pile of stones near the ladder,” he said.
“Good grief,” she said.
“Don’t faint,” he said. “I’ve pushed them out of the way as much I could, but space is limited. If I can get you onto the third rung, you should be clear of them.”
She quelled a shudder. If she gave way, she’d soon be trembling uncontrollably.
“Very well,” she said. She groped in the darkness, about where she reckoned his shoulder must be. She found it, rock hard and warm. Only the thin linen of his shirt lay between her palm and his skin. Within her a welter of unnamable feelings stirred, a hurrying and a prickling and a piercing recollection of her youth and its not-quite-forgotten longings.
She beat them down and quickly worked her way from his shoulder to his hand. She grasped his hand and brought it to her waist. “Here I am,” she said breathlessly.
Two big hands circled her waist. “What in blazes is that?” he said.
“My waist,” she said.
“I mean the sash thing you’ve wound about it. Have you rocks in it?” He patted a place near her left hip.
“It is called a hezam,” she said.
“Yes, but what is it?”
“A scarf girdling the waist,” she said. “Useful for stowing things. Like my knives.”
“Have you the least idea how to use them?” he said.
“I know that you hold it by the handle and the sharp end is the part you stick in,” she whispered impatiently. “What else do I need to know?”
“Hold it with the sharp end aimed upward rather than downward,” he said. “More control, better aim that way.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. I see.”
“Good.” He grasped her firmly about the waist — or the hezam, rather — and lifted her smoothly up. He held her until she had her feet firmly planted on the rung and her hands clutching the sides.
Then, “Don’t move,” he said in an undertone. “We don’t know what’s up there.”
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
“I’d better go first all the same,” he said.
“There’s only one ladder,” she said, “and I’m on it.”
“I’d rathe
r not climb over the corpses,” he said.
“No, no, of course not.”
“I’ll have to squeeze by you, then,” he said.
“Will the ladder hold two persons?”
“We’ll soon find out.”
She felt his hand travel up her back and along her arm to where her hand grasped the ladder. She squeezed to one side, to leave room, but there was little room to leave. A moment later, she felt his hard torso against her back, then a long, muscular leg pressed against her thigh. She sucked in her breath. Flames raced up from the place of contact, and even the cold shame instantly following couldn’t altogether douse them.
Then he was past, and she concentrated on getting out of this beastly place and away from the horror a few inches away. She listened to him climb out, then to the muted sound of his boots moving away from the shaft. She became aware of her own breathing, too fast, and the matching tempo of her heartbeats. Her mind darted to the bodies nearby, then to unknown others, still alive, lying in wait for him.
Panic flooded in, and with it a mad grief. Finally, she heard his returning footsteps. Relief wiped out panic, and the wild grief sank back into whatever dark cave of her being it had come from.
“All’s clear at the moment,” he said.
The ladder was nearly perpendicular. Daphne all but ran up it. At the top rung, she paused and released her death grip to feel for the floor of the passage. Her searching hand found his knee.
Then strong fingers circled her wrist, and she grasped his in the same way. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll steady you.” His other hand slid down from her shoulder over her breast, then caught her firmly under her arm. If he lost his hold, her madly working mind told her, she’d fall to the bottom — or on top of the corpses. But his grip was firm, and in a moment she was clambering over the edge of the shaft and sinking onto her knees, while her heart raced and her breath came in racking gasps.
“Steady,” he said. He did not let go of her.
She tried to steady herself, but her hands trembled, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.