CHAPTER 8

Funny how easy it was to take even the most alien environment for granted after you'd worked and sweated in it for a few days, Leda thought.

She was walking back to work along the eastern side of the harbor, where the huge stones from the ruins of the palace complex and the Caesarium were found. Leda weaseled her way into working on this part of the excavation because some authorities believed that this was where the warehouse for Cleopatra's books had been before it was burned.

As she began climbing down the ladder leading from the dike on this side of the harbor to the scaffolding crossing the seabed below, she saw the Mediterranean beyond the cofferdam, in that moment looking calm, placid, benign.

And then, just as she set both feet on the scaffolding, she caught a glimpse of the most western edge of the sea dropping its postcard pose to quiver like a bowl of Jell-O. Before that image had quite registered, her feet vibrated, and then the boards under them gave a little buck and knocked her on her derriere.

This phenomenon also captured the immediate and rapt attention of the diggers, who were suddenly aware that they were not digging under normal circumstances but were, after all, standing in an area to which about five and a half square miles of agitated sea held the mortgage. Foreclosure suddenly became a very real possibility.

The dam was attached to land on each side of the semicircular harbor of the island. On the western side it was moored against the far western side of the island containing Fort Quait Bay. On Leda's side it was connected on the seaward side of the dike that was all that had remained of a little peninsula that had held the palace complex and some other structures.

It was possible that Leda, having just descended the ladder, could make it back up to the top of the dike before the water ruptured the dam, but most of the other people in the basin were too far from the ladders, shallow staircases, and makeshift elevators worked by hand pulleys to make it. Besides, there was bound to be some sloshing. Big sloshing. Anyone on the dam would be knocked off. Probably the same thing would happen to anyone on one of the narrow dykes or at Fort Quait Bay. The ladders didn't matter. If the dam broke, they were all screwed and very very wet.

For a few seconds, no one breathed.

The ground shook. The scaffolding rattled as if attacked by hail. A few boards popped up. The dam groaned. The quivering Jell-O did give a slosh, a slight slosh that spewed three glistening spumes of spray over the dam, wetting the upturned faces of the diggers. Then the shaking subsided. For about fifteen minutes, nobody moved. Nothing happened.

Finally, feeling a little dizzy from the lack of oxygen that came with holding her breath, Leda cautiously exhaled. Since the same exhalation was echoed by all of the other people in the basin, it sounded like a single strong burst of wind. Then everyone began fanning out, checking their work areas for damage.

Before she began inspecting the area around her, she looked up toward the top of the dam. Her father was up there, grinning down at her, and made a gesture of swiping his forehead with his hand as if wiping off sweat.

"Phew, for sure, Daddy." She grinned back and waved.

All around him, the engineering crews swarmed over the dam like monkeys.

Duke turned away to prowl the perimeter with such deliberation that she thought of him as a big cat with a long clubbed tail lashing from side to side. He walked up it and on the way back down, scanned the harbor bed.

She was still standing there, staring around her and waiting for her heart to slow down and the blood to stop roaring in her ears, when he hollered. She looked up again to see him standing with his hands cupped around his mouth. He was close to the eastern edge of the harbor, perhaps half a mile away and seventy feet above her, so she could hear him faintly. Then he pointed. She turned and shielded her eyes, trying to read what he was calling to her attention. Several times she looked up and saw him shake his head. Most of the other crew members were on their bellies already, lying across the scaffolding and crawling awkwardly along, examining the sea floor.

She stepped over three of them and walked down another few yards of scaffolding before he raised his hand three times and pointed definitely at the spot where she stood. Two boards had been dislodged and were sticking up at about a twenty-degree angle from the boardwalk.

She dropped to her knees, then to her belly, and examined the boards and the area around them but couldn't see anything. She glanced up. He was still pointing. She waved her arms in a negative gesture. Damn. Next time she should bring the cell phone. He turned his hand palm up and made a shoving motion. She should look under the scaffolding.

Okay. She did. And she saw it. The old man was amazing. He had great eyes. When she glanced back up to let him know she'd seen it, he dropped his binoculars back to where they hung from his shoulder on the opposite side from his pistol. Old fart. He hadn't wanted her to see the binoculars.

Beneath the scaffolding, silt and trash had shifted, revealing a crack between two pieces of what seemed to be hewn stone. That wasn't unusual, as they were always finding parts of the floor of this or that structure down here. But this time there was something wedged between the stones, revealed by the crack but still half buried in the muck. It was the curved belly of a jar. Where its surface had scraped against the boards, pushing them up as the tremor pushed it to the surface, the muck had been stripped away, leaving a shiny white patch in the middle—the patch that caught Duke's eye. The sheen was distinctive, though Leda had seen very little of this substance outside of museums. It could only be alabaster.

She felt light-headed all of a sudden, and her hands shook as she pulled her gloves from her pants pockets and found that putting them on was like trying to hit two moving targets. It was so inexplicably difficult she would have dispensed with the gloves except no one dared dig barehanded in the filth exposed when the sea was pushed back. She wondered if Moses had experienced the same problem, warning the Children of Israel to be sure to don protective galoshes before crossing the part God had provided in the Red Sea. Reed Sea, she corrected herself. The Bible story had been retranslated, and now they knew it was a sea of reeds, but the original version was more poetic, as well as more intriguing.

Her hands protected, she studied the exposed surface of the jar. It could be part of a statue, a vase, or some other item, but somehow she just knew it wasn't. She was being unscientific, silly, gullible to think what she was thinking, but in her gut she knew what its true purpose was. And finding it was a miracle, a genuine, certifiable miracle.

From another pocket in her pants, she took a small camera and a tape measure. Laying the tape measure atop the jar, she snapped three shots, two bracketing the first. She looked around like a criminal casing a likely house, but nobody was paying her any attention so far. She turned the tape measure sideways and snapped three more photos, then replaced camera and tape in her pocket.

Just for a moment, suspicion crossed her mind. Had it maybe been salted here for her to find? Were the others playing a trick on the newbie? Or maybe it had been put here to impress Rasmussen so it could be "found" and the project therefore made more worthwhile in the board member's eyes. But nobody else was looking up or paying any attention, and she was sure either she or Duke would catch onto the joke if that was what it was.

Maybe Duke was the one playing a joke on her. If so, he'd have had to con someone else into planting the jar for him. He almost never came down into the harbor bed. He said it gave him the creeps. After the tremor, she knew just what he meant. But he was pretty tight with most of the Egyptian guards and workers. They liked macho old guys like him: friendly, amiable, good storytellers, dangerous if crossed.

Nah. He wouldn't play that mean a joke on her. He knew what this meant to her. Besides, he knew he would find sugar in the tank of his bike and both tires slashed the next time he tried to ride it if he did such a dastardly deed to his baby. He wasn't the only one who was dangerous if crossed, and he knew it. She glanced back up at the dam again thoughtfully, just for a moment. Pete now, he might do it, for malice, to run her off. But he had become friends with the old man, and surely he was a shrewd enough judge of character to figure out that a trick of such proportions played on her would not endear him to her daddy.

The hell with it. Her gut was jumping around as if she'd swallowed a flea circus. If she was cool about this and called the others over, then she would lose out altogether. Better to extricate the jar and have faith in her knowledge that she would be able to tell whether or not it was genuine.

But, as she pawed the dirt and muck away from the jar's surface with her gloved hands, a little brush, and a very gently applied pocket knife to loosen the soil around the vessel, she felt as if an elevator inside herself was going all the way to the penthouse.

More of the jar's curve emerged from her patient digging. She kept expecting to find a jagged edge where the vessel had been broken but encountered only the deliberate indentations of its carving on an otherwise smooth and un-marred surface. She was panting and sweating as she worked, trying to keep herself calm and her pace steady. Most of all, she was trying not to hope that this would be what she thought it was. If it was, surely it would be empty after all it had been through. But from the feel of the outside of it, somehow she couldn't believe that. Her hand worked downward and inward, toward the mouth of the jar. Her fingers encountered, instead of space, another shape.

She had her toes hooked over the far edge of the scaffolding, and now she unhooked them and scrabbled forward, so that from the waist down, she was bending over the scaffolding until the topknot of her long brown hair brushed the sea floor. Removing a pen flashlight from another pocket in her cargo pants, she stuck it between her teeth and kept working, though the sweat ran into her eyes and plastered her T-shirt to her.

Alternately brushing and working the object free, she finally made out the shape of the carved lid. It was in the shape of a dog, Duamutef, one of the guardians of the dead, as she had deduced from groping its shape. That made it exactly what she thought it would be, hoped it would be. A canopic jar. Still apparently sealed. Still apparently a very useful as well as a very important find, being the first evidence of human remains in this area, especially human remains mummified in the ancient Egyptian fashion, which was by no means the preferred funeral style throughout the latter part of Alexandria's history. A jar of alabaster, of this quality, could only belong to someone of nobility, even royalty.

She had been working with such concentration she hadn't noticed the crowd gathering around her until she pulled the jar free. She would be paying for this heroic straining of her back for years to come with visits to her chiropractor. She hauled the jar up to the scaffolding and had to swat sandals and tennis shoes aside to put it down while she twisted around to a sitting position again.

The excited babble of voices was drowned out by the ringing in her ears.

Dr. Yussuf, the scientist in charge of this particular section of the harbor, leaned forward with hands outstretched for the jar, but she swatted at him with the rubber glove she'd just removed. She had been pleased that he had condescended to allow her to do grunt work on his section of the dig, but now was the time to pull rank, with all of the privileges thereof.

"Ah ah ah," she said. "Off limits! Nucore, meaning me in this instance, gets first crack at any possible human remains and this," she said, patting her find in a proprietary way her father referred to as "putting one paw on it and growling." "This is definitely a canopic jar, and as such it would definitely hold human remains."

"Perhaps," Yussuf said, kneeling to inspect what was visible of the inscription on the jar but keeping out of range of her glove. "But you have not the experience to judge, Leda. It is most likely a false canopic jar, though of very fine workmanship. It is very close to the surface to be from the more ancient times when such jars were used in the way you're thinking of them. In later periods, the viscera were wrapped and returned to the body cavity and the jars, such as this one may be, were merely carved to resemble those which once held viscera. They were used strictly for ceremonial purposes."

"Ceremonial purposes, for sure. I never thought otherwise. But most of the funerals of the well-to-do were highly ceremonial. And there were always cults of holdout traditionalist priests who liked to do things the old-fashioned way. Maybe some of those guys did the mummification of this person."

"Yes, and maybe it fell off a British ship when our esteemed British colleagues were looting Egypt," said Habib, an Egyptian grad student who thought he was a full tenured professor already. He eyed the jar's rounded middle critically. "That shape was not in use during the reigns of the Ptolemys. Rectangular boxes were more often used."

"It might be one of the finds Goddio made at the end of the twentieth century and returned to the ocean," Solange Cousteau, a descendant of one of Goddio's divers, opined. "Perhaps something collected from upper Egypt and brought here."

"Don't wake Leda from her dream world," Yves Dulac said. "She thinks she has in her canopic jar the womb of Cleopatra."

Leda regarded him with her best imitation of the sphinx. "Could be. If I was dreaming, I would have picked someone from an earlier dynasty than the Ptolemys to make my discovery. But this isn't exactly the Pick your Favorite Pharoah of the Month Club, is it? If you'll all get out of my way now, I'm going to examine my find."

"You don't just pluck something from a site and carry it off with you! Its location must be documented, it must be photographed and measured, it must—"

"I took its picture with a tape measure," Leda said patiently. "I will measure it better when I get it back to the lab. Meanwhile, there is the hole. Document its location all you want. Knock yourselves out. But remember, these things usually come in sets, and even if you find one, I have dibs on being the first kid on this dig to collect all four."

"There is no need for such haste."

"Actually, there sort of is. Haven't you ever heard of aftershocks? This probably isn't the only tremor we're going to have, and 1 think this thing was coughed up by a new fissure in a stone floor. If you want any more goodies before another little quake closes it back up again or breaks things, you might want to get right on it."

"We scientists do things in an orderly and methodical fashion. We must examine this artifact and I must read the inscription," Yussuf said. "That is what I am here for, after all."

She smiled up at Yussuf, which he must have enjoyed for once. He was about five four, and she was five ten. He was also in his early thirties and she was forty-five. What happened to all of the white-haired old dignified guys she thought all senior archaeologists were? Maybe she just assumed they were mostly old because what they studied was. "I'll be sure to call you if I need any help, but I was reading hieroglyphics while you were still in grade school."

He shrugged. "Your interest does you credit, of course, madame, but you are an armchair archaeologist. That does not make you a reliable field Egyptologist."

"I am a fully qualified forensic anthropologist, actually. Furthermore, I have spent considerable time training in techniques to preserve and restore such finds as this so that they will yield more information than they ever have previously about the lives of their owners. Your conventional methods would ruin what I need to implement my own." She was only lying a little bit, evading one truth by making a sharp left before she got to its core, and exaggerating the dangers of letting the sample out of her control. What would ruin it for her purposes was that she was pretty sure she'd never get it back if she let Yussuf and Namid have it.

"This is what I am here for," she told him firmly. She shoved sweaty strings of hair from her forehead, wrapped her arms around her find, and stood. She may not have published in any fancy journals, but she certainly knew her way around dead people. "In exchange for spending heaps and gobs of its shareholders' money on this project, Nucore gets first crack at anything resembling human remains. I'm sure this was explained to all of you during orientation," she said, clucking like an officious file clerk. "I represent Nucore here. If you don't like it, have your company's lawyer call my company's lawyer."

"Me, I am not budging," Habib said. "You will damage the jar, and it will be lost to my people."

"Sorry you feel that way. But you could get damaged yourself if you don't get out of my way. I'm feeling all hot and cranky now. So all of you scoot." They continued to surround her. Hugging the jar closer, she cleared her throat and hollered, "Dad-deeee!"

Fortunately, she didn't really have to yell that loudly. Right after he pointed out the jar to her, her father's curiosity had overcome his dislike of the harbor floor so much that he had clamored down one of the ladders. Now he jogged across the scaffolding toward them, the boards bouncing under his feet and then bouncing some more as three of his security crew followed right behind him.

"What's the matter, Kid?" he asked her.

"Take this, will you? It's heavy."

"Officer Hubbard," Yussuf protested, "you must not allow personal considerations to enter into this. Dr. Hubbard is behaving badly."

"Nah, she's doing good," Duke said. "She hasn't stamped her foot yet or held her breath till she turns blue, but I suggest you give her her way. And incidentally, this isn't a personal consideration. Helping her retrieve and take care of this stuff is what I was hired to do."

When Duke had the jar clasped firmly to him, Leda stood and looked down on Yussuf. He hated that. As she figured he would, he stormed off, looking for Dr. Namid. Duke and his men momentarily cleared the scaffolding of the rest of the muttering onlookers.

Duke then handed the jar back to Leda and, with him walking point and his posse protecting her flank, Leda abandoned the corpse of the sunken city for the belly of the beluga. As they left the basin, the other diggers, like the Red (or Reed) Sea, re-converged upon the place where they had been and began searching the basin floor with renewed dedication.