“Perhaps. But we do not have such a society, so we are forced to plod ahead through the mire,” Holmes complained.
“I still say I should love to have your problems, old chap.”
“So you are interested in her, then?”
“I… find her very attractive,” Watson confessed, as circumspect as he knew how to be, yet still give his friend an honest answer. “But Holmes, if you DO… care for her, in… that fashion, I should never…”
“I do not, nor will not, my friend,” Holmes said with certainty, leaning forward and resting his hand on Watson’s shoulder. “If I can find a way to divert her attentions to you, it may well be the solution to all our difficulties.”
“Then may all our difficulties be less complicated than the favour of a woman,” Watson declaimed.
“Amen to that,” Holmes replied, fervent.
CHAPTER 4
The Curse Rises
—::—
“Oh, Holmes, come have a look at this,” Phillips called as Holmes entered the artefact tent after breakfast the next morning—alone this time, to his relief. “We found this several days before your arrival, but Professor Whitesell wanted to wait for translation efforts until you arrived. There are a couple more over there, but they aren’t in very good shape, and I think we will have to do some work on them before you can translate those… if they ever reach the point where they are translatable. But I was supposed to bring this one to your attention right off, only it slipped my mind in the flurry of your and Dr. Watson’s advent.”
“Indeed,” Beaumont affirmed, as Holmes walked over to Phillips. “It looks to be very interesting, based on what little I could make out; I am not especially adept at the hieroglyphics. But you are quite the ancient script expert, I have it to understand, mon ami.”
“I have certainly made a thorough study of such matters as ancient scripts and texts,” Holmes admitted, “though ‘expert’ is perhaps overstating the case, at least at this point in my career. Nevertheless, I am confident I should be able to do well by the archaeological team.”
“Then sit down and get started, man!” an enthusiastic Phillips recommended, though Holmes detected some challenge in the younger man’s tone and demeanour. “We’ll work around you. And sing out if you see anything about Ka or Sekhen!”
* * *
Holmes spent the rest of the day studying the inscribed stone tablet, producing a small pad and scribbling notes. He never noticed when the others departed at the sound of the luncheon bell, nor when Leighton came—and went, thoroughly discouraged from bothering, or so much as speaking to, Holmes by the other members of the archaeological team—though to her credit, she seemed to realise the need on her own. As the sun sank lower in the west and dinnertime neared, Professor Whitesell, who had arrived at the tent mid-afternoon and worked with the others on organising and cataloguing their finds, started toward Holmes with obvious intent. But Phillips stepped in front of the archaeologist, blocking his way, and both Beaumont and Nichols-Woodall caught his shoulders.
“Leave him be, old chap,” Beaumont murmured.
“But dinner,” Whitesell began.
“Can wait,” Nichols-Woodall said in an undertone. “Look at him, Willingham. He is deep into the translation, and disturbing him now will only impede his train of thought.”
“And it might be wise,” Beaumont added as an afterthought, “if you keep your daughter from fetching him to dinner, or after dinner. Though I did note that she seemed to understand and approve Holmes’ absorption, earlier. Still, it would not do to distract him at this time.” Phillips glowered at that.
“Good point,” Whitesell rumbled to himself. “All right. We may make the occasional exception to the rule, in the circumstances, I suppose. I’ll just have the kitchen take a tray to his tent afterward, perhaps.”
“Capital idea,” Nichols-Woodall determined. “That way, he may eat at his leisure, when he has come to a stopping-place.”
“Come, Professor, let’s all slip out and let him work,” Phillips suggested in an undertone. “I’ll be sure to let Dr. Watson know where he is, so he won’t worry. And I’ll take charge of keeping Leigh occupied, so she won’t interrupt him.”
“Good man,” Whitesell whispered, clapping him soundlessly on the shoulder, and they all decamped—silently—for the dinner tent.
* * *
It was well after dark before Holmes came back to the tent. Watson sat in the corner, reading a book, and looked up when he came in, prepared to point out the covered dish awaiting him, which Professor Whitesell had insisted upon; seeing the preoccupied expression on his friend’s face, he chose to say nothing instead, and simply watched. Holmes moved to the rear of the tent and laid a dark grey stone tablet, roughly twice the size of a sheet of telegraph flimsy in area and some inch to inch and a half thick, on the small table in the back of the tent, placing his note-pad next to it. Then the sleuth went to one of his trunks, opened it, and rummaged inside, extracting his microscope from its packing, as well as several items of chemical apparatus. These went on the folding table next to the inscribed stone. Holmes pulled a camp stool up to the table and extracted his jack-knife from a pocket, unfolding it. Watson decided that might be a good sign to interject a cautionary statement at the detective’s apparent intent.
“Holmes? Should you risk damaging it?”
“I must,” Holmes said, looking up. “There is something not right here. Don’t worry, I shall be careful. Such testing as I intend is sometimes done, at any rate, to… verify matters.”
Tearing out a sheet of paper from the note-pad, he laid it on the table, then raised the stone. Delicately wielding the razor-sharp jack-knife against the back corner edge of the tablet, he shaved off a small bit of the relatively soft, dark stone onto the paper. Then he extracted a magnifying lens from his waistcoat pocket and studied the cut edge for several moments before turning back to Watson.
“Watson, I need your help. Would you mind…?”
Watson rose without hesitation and moved to Holmes’ side. “What do you need, old fellow?”
“This will be a bit awkward. I need you to hold this slate with the cut bit under my microscope’s object glass. But let me move it and adjust the positioning. It is obviously far too big for the slide platform, and it would be deucedly cumbersome to try to hold it myself while still using the microscope.”
“Oh, yes, quite. Let me see, here.”
Watson gingerly took the tablet, located the tiny mar Holmes’ knife had produced, and eased it under the microscope’s objective lens as Holmes bent to the eyepiece, adjusting the focus. Holmes grunted, and without raising his head, reached out and shifted Watson’s hand positioning ever so slightly, before tweaking the focal knobs again. Then Holmes grew silent and still, studying the view through the microscope for long minutes, while Watson held the stone slab as steady as he possibly could. Finally Holmes raised his head.
“Thank you, Watson, you make a fine sample stand.” He shot his friend a slight smile of appreciation, and Watson chuckled, setting down the tablet. “Now for the other.”
Holmes picked up the paper containing the shavings and upended it over a ceramic mortar, dumping them inside. He ground them down to a fine powder with energetic application of the pestle, then extracted only a couple of drops of some sort of reagent with a pipette, dribbling it into the mortar on top of the powder. He stirred the mixture with the tip of a glass rod, and Watson briefly wondered how he had managed to so pack such delicate equipment that it had arrived all the way in Egypt with no breakage. Another pipette went into another reagent bottle, and the contents dropped into the mortar; the glass rod stirred, and the detective pondered the results again. He extracted a glass microscopic slide, fished out a bit of the solution on the tip of the glass stirring rod, and smeared it across the slide; put on a glass slide cover, and placed it under the microscope, studying the magnified image for long moments. Finally Holmes returned his attention to his friend.
“This is bad, Watson, and I find I am uncertain how to proceed,” he admitted. “I intend to smoke for a goodly time to-night while I consider the matter, so be forewarned.”
“Well, it should produce a less-thick atmosphere in a tent than in our flat at home!” Watson laughed. “Especially if I tie the tent flaps back. And you can eat that, at some point,” he added, pointing at the tray of food. “Would it also help to discuss it?”
“It might. Are you offering your ear?”
“I am.”
“Capital. Do you sit down and let me tell you what is afoot, whilst I light my pipe. The food can wait.”
“Very well.”
Both men fetched pipes and tobacco, packing and lighting those items, as Holmes composed his thoughts. They slouched companionably on their cots facing each other, and Holmes began.
“I was rather enthusiastically asked to examine and translate that,” he waved his pipe at the slate on the table, “this morning, it having been evidently discovered perhaps some two or three days before our arrival here. I spent all day studying it, though it did not take so long to actually translate it. For when the others stepped out at luncheon, I checked the log of found relics, and ascertained it had been ostensibly discovered by Dr. Thomas Beaumont on the said date, though the log did not detail the location of the find. This is sometimes an oversight, however, and so I inspected both log and artefact most thoroughly, for it was an… interesting… relic. It appeared to be possibly some stonemason’s practise tablet, created before inscribing the actual engraving, for it did not have the usual accuracy of a true inscription, and sometimes such things are in fact found, where the writing was exceptionally complex and the circumstances did not bear mistakes being made in the engraving. Sometimes it even amounts, apparently, to what the engraver WISHES he could write, for not all of them are… ah, shall we say, of a delicate nature. Some are quite crude, to say the least.”
“Very well. Go on.”
“And so I translated this one, and it reads as follows.” He extracted his note-pad again, flipped to a heavily-scribbled page, and read.
“‘Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the Pharaoh Sekhen. Curséd be he! They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no physician can diagnose nor cure. I shall cast my fear into him; there will be fierce judgement, and an end shall be made of him. He shall descend in torment to Anubis at a time he does not expect.’”
“Mm,” Watson murmured, in some disquiet. “A pharaoh’s curse, to protect his body, his mummy.”
“So it would sound, does it not?” Holmes agreed. “But there is a problem. Several, actually.”
“What, then?”
“The writing style is wrong, for one.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Watson,” here Holmes leaned forward, gaze sharp and keen, “that it is the wrong form of hieroglyphics. Just as our modern Roman script is different from that of, say, two or three centuries ago, so too did hieroglyphics change over the course of ancient Egypt’s millennia-long history. This,” he tapped a long finger on the tablet, “is Middle Kingdom script. But the inscription plainly invokes the pre-dynastic Sekhen, so the script SHOULD be what some are now calling ‘proto-hieroglyphics,’ not the fully-developed form, let alone the sophistication of the Middle Kingdom. It should be much more crude, Watson. It is not right.”
Watson drew deeply on his pipe, then exhaled the smoke through his pursed lips, taking in the information and considering it. Finally he nodded. “Very well. Go ahead. You have something else, it sounds like.”
“I do,” Holmes conceded. “That is why I had to slightly damage the corner of the tablet. Here.” He rose and fetched the slate and his magnifying lens, offering them to Watson. “Do you study the cut I made, and tell me what YOU see.” Watson took the proffered items and did as Holmes suggested.
“It is a fresh cut,” he observed. “The stone is lighter there.”
“Yes, of course; you saw me make it. Look closer.”
Watson did.
“Hm. There is a… a rind around the edge,” he noted.
“Indeed. That is normal; it would ordinarily denote weathering, both physical and chemical, of the outer layers of stone by the elements,” Holmes instructed. “But do you see anything unusual about it?”
“It seems remarkably sharp-edged in its end, within the rock,” Watson decided after a few more moments’ study.
“Precisely! Very good eye, Watson! You can see it much more clearly under the microscope, of course; there can be no doubt, in that view. Whereas Nature would normally produce a more gradual, less even tapering of the weathered stone, this is uniform, and quite abrupt in its ending.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It means the stone has been soaked in something for a limited time, and recently,” Holmes explained. “Were it older, the material would have slowly migrated within the stone, and produced more blurring of the boundary. The sharp delineation shows its newness, and marks how far the liquid penetrated. Which is why I then performed a few chemical tests upon the scrapings.”
“And?”
“The slate has been washed with acid,” Holmes revealed, “most likely acetic acid. This would lightly etch the stone and increase its porosity. And then…”
“Then?”
“Watson,” Holmes began, lips twitching, “someone soaked that bloody damned rock in black tea!”
“WHAT?!” Watson exclaimed. “You’re joshing!”
“Not in the least,” Holmes replied, and both men doubled over in laughter.
* * *
“But what was the point, Holmes?” Watson demanded to know, when they managed to sober at last.
“There can only admit to one reason,” Holmes declared. “As I said earlier, the acetic acid—easily obtained from vinegar—would lightly etch the surface and make the outer layers of the stone very slightly more porous. Then the tea would be able to soak into the stone and dye it a darker shade.”
“But WHY?”
“Think for a moment, Watson. If you had just carved an inscription into a block of stone, what would it look like? The letters, I mean.”
“They…” Watson hesitated, and Holmes saw approaching comprehension in his eyes, “would be lighter in colour than the rest of the stone. Just as when you cut the corner of it.” He pointed at the tablet to provide antecedent.
“Exactly. And if you wanted to make it appear agéd?”
“I would wash it… or soak it… with a dye, to darken the letters,” Watson sighed, leaning back. “The thing is a ruddy forgery, from start to finish.”
“It is. And the probability is that Beaumont, the ostensible ‘discoverer,’ is the perpetrator of the forgery. The more so, as he did not record the location of his find.”
“But why would he do it? He is part of the expedition!”
“Ah, but only this first time,” Holmes pointed out. “It is my understanding that, until he approached Professor Whitesell with something of an olive branch in late summer, they were in fact so competitive as to be unpleasantly acrimonious. You have seen the animosity between him and Dr. Nichols-Woodall, who has long been a respected member of Professor Whitesell’s team.” Holmes paused, then added, “Moreover, he has spent most of his expeditions in recent years in Western Hemisphere rainforests, not in Egypt. He is not up on his hieroglyphics. And so he erred in his linguistics, by using a much later version of the ancient Egyptian ‘letters’ than were appropriate for Pharaoh Ka-Sekhen.”
“I see. So your dilemma is…?”
Holmes sighed.
“What to do with that knowledge,” he admitted.
* * *
The pair quietly discussed the situation until late into the night, clear through Holmes’ dinner, even after retiring, and finally came up with a reasonable plan. So in the morning after breakfast, Holmes subtly drew Professor Whitesell aside.
“What is it, Holmes???
? Whitesell wondered a few moments later, from the sanctuary of his private tent.
“It… is about the stone tablet Dr. Beaumont found,” Holmes began.
“Oh, excellent! Did you get it translated?”
“I did. But—”
“Let’s hear it, then! What does it say?”
“It is a curse, and translates to, ‘Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the Pharaoh Sekhen. Curséd be he! They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no physician can diagnose nor cure. I shall cast my fear into him; there will be fierce judgement, and an end shall be made of him. He shall descend in torment to Anubis at a time he does not expect.’” Holmes paused, then added, “But I do not think—”
Just then Udail entered.
“Professor,” the foreman began, “I—oh, I am sorry, Mr. Holmes. I heard voices, but I thought it was only Mr. Phillips, and… Forgive me! I will come back.” And he began to bow out of the tent.
“No, no, Udail, what is the matter?” Whitesell asked, for the Egyptian was uncommonly pale.
“The carbide lamps have finally arrived, Professor, and the supplies master—ah, the quartermaster, rather, forgive my rusty English—wished to know where you would like them kept.”
“Ah, very good. Tell the quartermaster that I shall come by shortly, once Mr. Holmes and I have finished.”
“It shall be done, Professor.” Udail bowed again. “Mr. Holmes?”
“Yes, Udail?”
“Does it make you fear?”
“What?”
“The curse.”
Holmes bit his lip, realising the man had evidently overheard him quote the inscription just before coming in. “No, Udail, it does not,” he replied, as calm as he knew how to be. “I can assure you, there is absolutely nothing to fear here.”
Udail bowed, a look of scepticism on his sun-bronzed face, and left.
“Well, that was ill-timed,” Whitesell grumbled, and Holmes grasped that the archaeologist also understood the significance of Udail’s reaction. “Udail is a good man, and an excellent foreman for the archaeological work, very knowledgeable, but inclined to be somewhat superstitious, and a bit of a gossip. The news of the curse will be all over the dig site by sundown, if not sooner. Along with his fear of it.”