Gideon turned from the window. “Leave something back there?”
“No. I forgot all about it. In all the fuss. The ledger.” She put her hand on his arm. “Yesterday.”
“Maybe complete sentences would help,” he said.
“I found the chronological ledger,” she told him as if he were being particularly dense. “I went looking for it and I found it.”
He sighed. “I think I missed something.”
“You missed the chronological ledger, is what you missed.”
“That’s not too surprising. What’s a chronological ledger?”
It was a register, she explained excitedly, in which new accessions to a museum were recorded as they came in, as an adjunct to the object cards. It had occurred to her that there might have been such a register in Lambert’s time, that it might still be around, and that a record of the head that Haddon had described, the head that was at the center of every strange thing that had been going on, might be in it.
She squeezed his arm. “And it was.”
Gideon shook his head, still bewildered. “Do you mean a field catalogue, a site notebook? But they wouldn’t have been using one here in 1924. It wasn’t part of the standard archaeological method yet. Cordell Lambert wasn’t Howard Carter.”
“I’m not talking about archaeology, I’m talking about museumology.” She started rummaging in her duffel-sized canvas purse. “I went into the old office in the annex before dinner yesterday and browsed around. There were some dusty old ledgers down on the oversized shelves.”
“I never saw them.”
“You’d have to be looking for them. They were in there with the bound periodicals. Anyway, they were the Lambert Museum’s chronological ledger from 1920 to 1926. Damn, where is that thing? Ah…”
She pulled out the soft leather pocket notebook that was always in her purse, the one that he’d given her on her promotion to supervisor so that she would have her own little black book. “Here it is. ”21 March, 1924. Head of—‘ Here, you read it.“
He snatched it from her. “ ‘Head of young woman or girl, inscribed, made of yellow jasper…’ This is it, Julie!”
“Really?” she said mildly. “You know, I wondered if it might be.”
He laughed and read on. “ ‘Height five and one-eighth inches to base of neck, not including one and one- quarter-inch tenon for insertion into mortise joint in shoulders.” “ This was it, all right. The head Haddon had seen, the head he’d described. Something like an Ali Hassan-type chuckle rumbled around inside Gideon’s chest. ” ’Chipped left ear and some abrasion of tip of nose. Slightly elongated skull shape, possibly for mounting of wig.“ ”
He slapped the notebook against his palm. “Julie, this is great. It confirms everything we—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, scowled, and tore the notebook open again.
“Look at this,” he said wonderingly. “ ‘Head of a young woman or girl, inscribed…’ ” He slapped his forehead. “Where’s my mind been? I should have figured this out days ago, before we ever got back to Luxor!”
“I’m afraid
“Remember my telling you how Ali Hassan was leering at me and muttering about ‘the final element, the last part’?”
“Yes, but—”
“I know what it is, I know what he was talking about!” He sobered. “My God, no wonder this thing was worth killing over. If—”
The van, which had been bobbing timidly along the sandy road the last time they’d noticed, suddenly rocked heavily to the right and went through a jolting series of bumps, throwing Julie against Gideon and knocking the notebook to the floor.
“Hey, take it easy,” Gideon called to the front, “we’re not in any hurry, we—”
Another tooth-rattling set of shocks bounced both of them two inches off the seat. The notebook jumped about on the floor. Everything else on the seats—Julie’s purse, their hats, somebody’s clipboard, somebody’s jacket, a couple of empty soda pop cans—was flung to the floor. In front of them Gawdat hung rigidly on to the wheel with his left hand, fighting to keep his turban from toppling off with his right.
“What is he doing?” Julie said anxiously. “This can’t be the way to the ferry.”
It wasn’t the way to anywhere. Two hundred yards in front of them, so bright it hurt to look at, was a squat, rugged cliff of weathered limestone eighty or a hundred feet high, blocking their way like a dam. On either side of the van, but much closer, similar stone walls closed in, craggy and forbidding.
A box canyon, Gideon thought. He’s driven us into a box canyon. What…
“Gawdat,” he said sharply. “Stop the van. Right now. Turn around and—”
The rest of the sentence was jarred out of his mouth as the van bucketed on. His teeth clicked painfully together. Gawdat turned panicky eyes on him for a moment—Gideon saw white all around the pupils, as in a frightened horse— and stepped on the gas, rigidly clutching the wheel with both hands now while his turban went flying. Julie and Gideon grabbed at whatever they could to keep from being tossed into the air. Limbs flopped, heads knocked against the padded roof.
“Damn it,” Gideon managed to get out, “you’re going to—”
They were thrown forward against the backs of the front seats as the car juddered to a standstill, so that Julie and Gideon wound up falling all over each other in the narrow space, like a pair of Keystone Kops, knees in ribs and
