It was only after Albray had gone that I thought to tell him that I suspected I’d had a vision whilst in the Cave of Hathor. I fancied that my psychic ability was kicking in. But why now, when I had never shown any aptitude, or taken any ability-enhancing elixir? I couldn’t help but feel it was due to Albray’s influence: not that he’d developed my talent, but, rather, inspired it. He made me feel, for the first time, that anything was possible. Albray had done the same for Ashlee by granting her physical liberation from the constraints of her era. He had given me spiritual freedom, despite the restraints of my scientific mind. A week ago, I would never have considered psychic ability possible, let alone that I was psychic. Or perhaps it was just wishful thinking, because I wanted to impress Albray the way Ashlee obviously had.
‘Paid work first,’ I resolved.
Armed with tea and chocolate, I found the silver key that opened Lord Hamilton’s big green journal and, placing the book on my desk, I opened it up under the lamplight and sat down to read.
I skipped over Hamilton’s account of his early days in the Middle East and the funding troubles they’d had with the excavation of the mountain. I took up the tale where the discovery of the superstrong doorway had led to the project being served notice to wrap up their dig—their excavation permit had been revoked.
LESSON 11
DARKNESS FROM THE JOURNAL OF LADY CLARISSA HAMILTON
The night before our departure from Serabit el-Khadim, Lord Hamilton was in a highly-strung, depressed mood, and quite the worse for drink. This was understandable when one considered that my husband had devoted twenty years to the excavation of this mountain, only to be locked out when he was on the verge of a major discovery.
In the middle of the small section of the site we’d managed to unearth, my dear Mr Hamilton had taken to the mountain with a shovel. He dug by lantern light, determined to make use of every hour he had left to excavate.
We’d seen all our fellow archaeologists depart in the past few weeks, and all our hired hands had left to find new work. Only a couple of guides and the camels kept us company in the barren wilderness in those last few days.
I stood there and watched my husband dig for some time that evening, but he was unaware of my presence before I made it known. I asked him what he hoped to achieve at this late hour of our stay in the Holy Land. He was certainly in no fit state to stumble into a potentially precarious situation. And even if he did manage to find the key to unlock the mysterious door we’d unearthed, we had to leave by noon the next day or we would not have enough water to comfortably sustain us for the journey back to civilisation.
‘If I find something tonight then we will bloody well ration—’
My Lord Hereford was not given the chance to finish his sentence, for as he slammed the tip of his spade into the earth, the soil gave way beneath him and he disappeared from my sight.
Fearful for my husband’s wellbeing, I went forward and dropped on to my stomach to call into the dark abyss. My cries resounded in the space that opened out below the hole that Hamilton had fallen through. I knew he was alive; I could hear him coughing.
Fortunately, the drink had relaxed him and small piles of soft sand on the floor of the chamber had also cushioned his fall. He hadn’t broken any bones, which was a great relief indeed, considering our imminent departure. Hamilton requested that I tie a lantern on a rope and lower it down to him.
He had landed in a room filled with hieroglyphs—the walls and the square central pillar were covered in them. The floor was entirely covered by fine white sand, and both doorways leading out of the chamber were collapsed and blocked. When Hamilton bent down to dig into the floor, he realised the substance that covered it was not sand. It felt like ash to the touch, and yet it was as white as snow. The tiny particles were so fine that they began to rise and dance toward the lantern flame. When he held his hand down close to the powder, it was attracted to his skin. ‘Must be the heat,’ he’d concluded, then was flabbergasted at the sight of his lantern slowly levitating toward the ceiling.
When I heard my husband chuckling, I leant over the hole to see what amused him.
‘Boo!’ Hamilton stuck his head through the ground and startled the life out of me.
I squealed at the unexpected apparition and then laughed with relief as I recognised my husband. ‘How did you get up here?’ I had been wondering if I was going to have to wake our guides to hoist Mr Hamilton out of the hole he’d dug for himself.
‘I’m floating!’ he announced with a chuckle. He hoisted himself out of the hole to sit on the side and dust the mysterious powder off, so that he wouldn’t float away into the stratosphere. ‘I believe I’ve had a revelation regarding the key to our mysterious door.’
‘Evidently,’ I concurred, as his lantern floated into my grasp. I looked at him, confused as to how this could be happening.
‘This powder reacts to heat,’ he said, laughing at the simplicity of the solution. ‘I strongly suspect that the sun will open the door for us.’
The next morning we were up with the sun. We had covered the gaping hole in the mountain with a boulder after withdrawing several buckets of powder from the chamber—the last thing we needed was for the sun to heat, and float away, all the mysterious powder.
Since uncovering the entrance door in the side of the mountain, we had noted how the mysterious substance used in its construction was heated to extreme temperatures during the day. So our plan was this: wait for the door to heat up and then we would cast this powder over the metal—even if it didn’t all instantly stick to it, the door was the hottest thing in the immediate area and the particles would surely be attracted to it. Our theory was that once the sun baked the powder the door would lift right out of its frame.
If we did get the entrance open, there was every reason to believe that it would be dark inside. We had our guides prepare some torches for us. For this they used rags, doused in an absolutely foul-smelling oil, which were then bound tightly to the top of a stake—not only did the oil burn well and slowly, the locals swore that the scent kept the insects at bay too.
And so we waited for the day to heat up and here in the Sinai one did not have to wait very long.
I stood by, shaded under my umbrella, while Mr Hamilton tossed buckets of powder over our mysterious round entrance into the mountain. As anticipated, we lost very little of the powder to the hot breeze. Exposed to the
