The Sands Of Time Part 15

'You mean you can't read it?'

The Doctor straightened up and whipped off his half-moon spectacles. 'Of course I can read it. But you asked me what it means.'

'Same difference.'

He shook his head. 'Context is key,' he said. 'Ask me again when we've looked inside the hidden room.'

'Why?'

The Doctor visibly braced himself and made a point of keeping calm.

'Egyptian hieroglyphs are not an exact language, Tegan. Their order is important to their meaning, yet the scribes would rearrange them so they looked good rather than meant what was intended. That set of hieroglyphs could be read from top to bottom or from bottom to top, and each way it means something different. It could be that the final symbol in the sequence - whichever that is - gives an overall impression of the word or phrase so as to reiterate and reinforce the thought. Or not. Depending on the exact age, the alphabet may have different inflections and meaning.'

'Not easy, then?'

'Not, as you say, easy.' He picked up the oil lamp which they had rested on the shelf beside the door.

Tegan nodded slowly. 'Why's it got a ring round it?' she asked.

The Doctor glared at her, pushed past, and disappeared into the darkness.

'It's a cartouche,' his voice floated out of the void.

The room was smaller than the chamber they had just left. It was almost completely bare. There was a central dais, and a four large ornate sarcophagi stood upright, one in each of the corners of the room. The walls were covered in hieroglyphics, stretching up to the ceiling which arched above them. The only breaks were for ventilation shafts like the ones in the main burial chamber. There was one in each wall, dark openings about four inches square.

On the raised dais in the centre of the room was a casket. It was a sarcophagus similar to Nyssa's, but the outside was completely devoid of decoration. A matte black oval of polished stone with a thin line of deeper black which marked the point where the lid joined the base. The Doctor was already standing beside it, hands in pockets examining the polished lid, as Tegan entered the room.

'So what's a cartouche?' she asked as she joined him.

'Hmm?' He looked up, eyes focusing at a point somewhere behind her head. 'Oh, French. Coined by Napoleon's team when they arrived in Egypt in 1798. They were the first real Egyptian archaeologists, and thought those oval shapes were like their cartridges. Cartouche is French for cartridge. And for carton.' A puzzled look swept over his face. 'Perhaps it was the cartons the cartridges came in they thought they looked like.

Language again - needs a context.'

'Yes, but what is it, Doctor?'

The Doctor's face cleared as he answered. 'Oh it's a royal name. The oval represents a loop of rope encircling the name. The loop represents eternity, and if you put your name inside it you'll live forever.'

'Will you?'

'No, of course not,' the Doctor admonished. 'But they thought they would.

And everything's about living forever if you're a Pharaoh.' He returned his attention to the sarcophagus. 'Or an Osiran, come to that.'

Tegan folded her arms and s.h.i.+fted her weight to her right leg. 'You keep going on about these Osirans, Doctor,' she said. 'Who are they?'

'Who were they, rather,' the Doctor said. 'An odd sort from Phaester Osiris.

Big on guile and cunning. Short on applied morals, though Horus got moving when his uncle started destroying everything for the h.e.l.l of it. Here, help me lift this back, will you?' He gestured to the coffin lid, and took up position on one side of the casket. Tegan stood opposite him as the Doctor counted to three. Then together they heaved the heavy lid back along the sarcophagus. The Doctor lifted the oil lamp which he had stood at the base of the dais, and they peered through the narrow opening.

'Oh how boring,' the Doctor said as the contents were revealed. 'It's just another mummy.'

They pulled the heavy lid back over the coffin.

'What were you expecting?' Tegan asked.

The Doctor shrugged. 'Nephthys,' he said.

'Who?'

He exhaled loudly and spoke with exagerrated patience. 'The cartouche you found includes the symbol for a door, that square with a section missing. But being within an oval, it should be a name. If you read it from the top down and a.s.sume the horizontal figure is to give some context to the name, then it could read Nephthys Nephthys.'

'Was he an Osiran?'

'She,' the Doctor said, 'was the sister and wife of Sutekh. And sister of Isis and Osiris, though that's less worrying.'

Tegan did not reply.

The Doctor frowned at her lack of response. 'Nephthys was a G.o.ddess, and may not have actually existed. Sutekh, her brother according to legend, was an Osiran. He was cornered on Earth by Horus and seven hundred and forty of his fellow Osirans and imprisoned for all eternity beneath a pyramid.'

Tegan laughed. 'That's all right then.'

'Till he escapes in 1911 it is, yes.' The Doctor waved away her worried expression. 'But that's all sorted out now. All ancient Egyptian culture is based on the Osiran history. And I don't know much about an Osiran called Nephthys, but if the Egyptian myths are half true...' His voice tailed off into the darkness.

'Yes? If they're right?'

The Doctor turned and stepped down from the dais. 'If this time we have to deal with Nephthys, and the myths have a grain of truth in them -' He broke off again, considered, then went on: 'If Sutekh had escaped, no power in the Universe could have stopped him from wreaking havoc and destruction.

This time, it's worse.'

Tegan considered. The Doctor stood in the doorway and surveyed the room. After a moment he pulled out a notepad and a pencil and started to scribble frantically.

'What are you doing?'

He did not look up. 'I'm copying down the hieroglyphics. I'll make a stab at deciphering some of them later. But before that, I suggest we seal up this room, and tell n.o.body about it.'

'But why?'

'Oh Tegan, haven't you been listening?'

Tegan joined the Doctor in the doorway and watched as he scrawled down line after line of symbol with uncanny speed and unerring accuracy. 'I thought you'd be getting into the thick of it all,' she said. 'I mean, it sounds like your sort of thing.' Tegan glanced at the nearest of the four huge sarcophagi where it stood upright in the corner by the door.

'I never get involved in stuff on this scale, if it is on this scale,' the Doctor said. Then he caught sight of Tegan's expression. 'Well, maybe occasionally,' he admitted. 'But what's the most important thing at the moment?'

Tegan had no doubts. 'To save Nyssa.'

'Exactly.' The Doctor turned away and she could not see his expression as he flipped shut his notepad and left the room. 'And I will not do anything to jeopardise that.' Tegan caught up with the Doctor in the burial chamber. He was holding a larger notepad, which she recognized as belonging to Evans.

She half remembered seeing it earlier resting on a low table in the chamber.

'What are you doing?'

The Doctor flipped the pad shut and replaced it on the table. 'Insurance,' he said. 'Come on.'

'What do you mean?'

'You were lucky to find the hidden door,' the Doctor said as they made their way down the corridor towards the desert night. 'But the clues are there in the hieroglyphs. We leave tomorrow, but there's always a danger someone will examine Evans' drawings and wonder what the symbols mean. And I don't think it's a good idea for people to poke about in the room we've just seen.'

'Even if it doesn't have a dead Osiran in it?'

'Yes, well the mummy was human enough. Female h.o.m.o Sapiens, circa five thousand BC. But even then...'

'So what have you done?'

The Doctor held aside the canvas doorway for Tegan. 'I've corrected Evans' drawing,' he said. 'So that the doorway and the name of Nephthys don't appear.'

Atkins ran the final day like a military operation. He had spent the previous evening mapping out an exact timetable for finis.h.i.+ng the doc.u.mentation and providing an inventory of relics to be removed and packed for transport back to Britain. It had been agreeably like planning the details of the servants' duties and listing the shopping requirements for the next day back at Kenilworth House. But without the helpful and agreeable company of Miss Warne.

He stood at the entrance to the pyramid, the early evening sun beating down on him, and ticked off the items on a clipboard as the Egyptians removed them. Nebka had agreed his men would enter the corridor, but they would not go so far as to enter the burial chamber itself. Macready, Evans and Kenilworth boxed up the relics, with help from the Doctor and Tegan. They worked from a hand-copied version of Atkins' list. Then Atkins checked the relics were taken to the packing tent. There, Margaret Evans seemed sufficiently recovered to supervise the loading of the boxes into larger packing cases. The packing cases were designed to fit into the panniers of the camels.

They were almost finished now, exactly to the schedule which Atkins had suggested. He was satisfied, but not surprised. The last few relics were carried out, and Atkins checked the details written on the box lid, then ticked them off.

'Jewelled ring on velvet cus.h.i.+on from shelf by sarcophagus in main chamber.' He scratched a tick against the same wording on his copy of the list. 'Snake statuette from shelf by sarcophagus in main chamber.' Another tick. 'Bracelet with scarab beetle motif from shelf by sarcophagus in main chamber.' Tick. 'Stone figure of Anubis from shelf by sarcophagus in main chamber.'

Atkins looked over his list during the pause before the next relic was brought out. There was only one thing left to be removed - the sarcophagus itself. The sarcophagus and the mummy inside, which only Atkins, the Doctor and Tegan knew was the entire reason for the expedition.

Atkins wondered vaguely what would happen after they sealed the pyramid that evening and made their way back to London, what would happen when they arrived back and Kenilworth House. And found he was still there.

Behind him, the Doctor, Kenilworth, Evans and Macready emerged slowly from the doorway. They carried the sarcophagus high on their shoulders.

Tegan followed them, head down and face shrouded in shadow. They made their way slowly up the incline towards the packing tent, shuffling slowly through the soft sand like a funeral procession.

As they left the pyramid, Nebka and his men pulled shut the door.

The night was quiet and still. Two shadowy figures made their way past the snoring lookout and lurched down the s.h.i.+fting slope of sand into the pit where the entrance to the pyramid had been excavated. The door was tight shut, but the bearers had not yet buried it again in the desert.

Ra.s.sul reached out and pressed on the side of the door. He knew the exact pressure point, remembered it clearly. Just as he remembered the low grating sound as the door swung slowly open. He glanced back towards the rim of the excavations, but n.o.body came running to investigate the noise. In a moment, the two figures had pa.s.sed inside, and the door was an empty hole of blackness.

They made their way quickly up the corridor, pausing only for Ra.s.sul to light his lamp. In the flickering light, the two men surveyed the bare burial chamber, checked the shelf where the relics had stood beside the coffin.

Ra.s.sul nodded slowly, he had known what he would find. He went over to the wall, scanned the hieroglyphs for a moment, then reached for the centre of the unfinished square in the cartouche of Nephthys' name.

Once inside the hidden chamber, Ra.s.sul moved to the nearest of the four sarcophagi and pulled aside the heavy lid. It hinged like a door, swinging slowly open in response the Ra.s.sul's efforts. He repeated the process with each of the other three.

His colleague stood silent and still in the doorway, watching unblinking as Ra.s.sul stepped into the centre of the room and raised his hands high above the raised coffin.

'Biesmey Nephthys,' he called out, 'um wallacha.'

In each of the open caskets, a figure stirred. As Ra.s.sul continued to recite the words of power, the four huge, bandaged figures stretched long-still limbs and stepped forward into the guttering light.

Each of the figures was seven feet tall. Heavy legs moving the body stiffly forward with a rolling motion that transferred the weight of the mummy from one leg to the other as the figure twisted its way forwards towards the central dais. The linen-wrapped arms ended in large hands, fingers apparently wrapped together, thumb clamping against them. The chest was a jutting slope of bandage beneath the enormous shoulders. The head seemed perfectly symmetrical under the bindings, flat surfaces pus.h.i.+ng back from the middle as if the eyes beneath were huge ovals covering the cheeks.

The wind was picking up again outside, amplified and distorted by the corridor so that it sounded like organ music rising in pitch and volume as the mummies stopped in front of the dais and Ra.s.sul slowly lowered his arms.

From the doorway, the pale figure with dark sunken eyes, split skull and bloodstained clothes nodded slowly. 'As it was written,' the corpse of Nicholas Simons rasped.

His words sounded as though they were spoken through broken gla.s.s.

[image]