Gideon felt the same way and said so.
Arlo Gerber, who had sat next to Gideon at dinner, was another sort, a defeated, indoorsy kind of man with an ashy pallor that was common enough in Seattle, but must have been no mean trick to maintain living year-round in Luxor. In his early forties, he could hardly be called a fossil yet, but it wasn’t going to take long. Hunched, narrow-shouldered, and restrained-well, stuffy-with graying temples and a sorry little cat’s-whiskers mustache, Arlo was a classically trained Egyptologist whose job it was to supervise the intricate, exacting process of Horizon’s epigraphic unit. There, weathered and broken stone texts and scenes were reconstructed, interpreted, and recorded through a complex technique involving photography, line drawings, blueprints, and-above all-the scholarship of men like Arlo.
To be honest, five years of it was enough, he had told Gideon. But what he was excited about, and he knew Gideon would be interested in this, was the book he was working on, Personal Ornamentation from the Time of Akhenaten. Saying the title did for him what saying “Shazam” did for Billy Batson. Behind that modest brow, mental muscles of steel had suddenly flexed and rippled. His pale eyes had gleamed. He had pulled his chair a few inches closer to Gideon’s, the better to talk about it. Wasn’t it extraordinary how little had been done on Amarna Period jewelry? There was some material in Aldred, of course, but that was about it as far as anything of breadth and substance went. Wasn’t it high time that this sad situation was rectified?