Gideon was not at his most scintillating. He was, in fact, having trouble keeping awake. It had been a long couple of days.

He and Julie had left Port Angeles before dawn the previous morning, starting with a three-hour trip by car and ferry to the airport. Then a long wait at SeaTac, followed by sixteen grubby hours and ten increasingly debilitating time-zone changes to Cairo International Airport. This was followed by a hair-whitening forty-five-minute taxi ride into the city to clear up a problem with their visas, and then back to the airport by means of a taxi journey that was marginally less bloodcurdling than the first one (or were they already getting used to it?). They’d missed their flight to Luxor and had had to wait for two hours in the grungy, noisy airport, fidgety and disoriented, until the next one left.

They had arrived at Horizon House in time for a shower, a dazed tour of the facility and a round of introductions, followed by cocktails that they hardly needed but accepted anyway, and a heavy “roast beef” dinner that Gideon was fairly certain had been water buffalo, not that his taste buds were at their most discriminating.

Afterward, as he did most evenings, Haddon had invited a few people to his study for after-dinner drinks and a little anthropological chitchat. Julie had wisely declined, going off to bed instead, but Gideon had accepted for courtesy’s sake. Grainy-eyed and dopey, he was doing his best to participate, but it was a losing battle. And the subject matter wasn’t helping things. Since halfway through dinner they had been mired in a lexicological discussion, or rather a lexicological lecture by Clifford Haddon, on the vagaries of Middle Egyptian script.