“Whoa, Anubis has some creepy teeth. Are you sure he’s not warning you to stay away?” Colton said.
Dallas was closer now. “Could be.” She reached up and touched the statue’s forearm. It was silky smooth and cold as ice. Gold bands circled his upper arms and wrists. They had clasps on them. The ankh necklace was loose around his neck. The massive gold ankh could also be removed. All the jewelry had been placed on the statue. It could be removed, and yet hadn’t. This filled Dallas with excitement and the certainty that she was the first person in centuries to have seen it.
“You’re right Colton,” she said. “It’s likely they placed the statue here, to warn grave robbers. The best news is that it is completely untouched. The statue is pretty heavy to move I bet, but grave robbers would have at least taken all of the jewelry.”
“As soon as we saw the footage of Anubis, we cleared the tent,” Colton said in a low voice. “It’s just me, Danny, and Sam. Even so I’m hoping the crew doesn’t go back to town and tie a few ones on and talk about the gold down there.”
Dallas nodded. “At least we’ve got the Daughters of Isis guarding the temple now.”
They both grew quiet remembering the deaths from the other night.
Standing before the statue, Dallas couldn’t shake the feeling that it was alive and watching her. That’s when she remembered the supposed curse on Cleopatra’s tomb. The one Safra had spoken about. She shook the ominous feeling off as she crouched down to examine the carvings on the round pedestal. From across the room she’d assumed it was Osiris and Isis. But it wasn’t.
“You guys seeing this?”
“Oh yeah.”
Two figures faced one another, arms outstretched, hands entwined. It was Cleopatra and Marc Antony.
Her mouth had grown dry.
“Okay,” Dallas said, clearing her throat. “I’m going in.”
Making sure she didn’t look as she did it, so the camera could not see, she placed the gold coin with Cleopatra’s likeness on the pedestal base of the statue.
A terrific sense of peace and relief filled her returning the coin she had smuggled to the temple site. It would most likely be excavated later with the rest of the artifacts, but for now she felt absolved of her crime.
As she stepped around the statue, its cold bulk grazed her and sent a chill down her spine. Holding the flashlight before her, she saw that the tunnel went on for quite some ways but then it either was a dead end or a curve. She was counting on it being a curve she couldn’t see from where she was.
Dallas took a deep breath. “Okay...”
The tunnel wasn’t very tall. Only a few inches lay between the top of her head and the ceiling. If she outstretched her arms, she could lay her palms flat against the dirt walls on each side. As she stepped inside, the flashlight illuminated the tunnel before her, leaving the circular room and Anubis in the darkness behind her.
She didn’t like that. Her imagination was going wild, picturing the statue coming to life in the dark behind her and following her, creeping up on her.
She whirled and the flashlight revealed the back of the statue, immobile, of course.
“Everything okay?” It was Colton.
“Yes. Just creeping myself out.”
“Don’t do that,” Danny said.
“We’re right there with you,” Colton said. “Well, sort of.”
Dallas knew if she got hurt or needed to be rescued for any reason, it would be a tough fit for either of the men to get down the hole. But maybe still possible.
But the gold on the statue proved that Dallas was down there alone. The only other people who might be down there were harmless, dead for centuries.
“I’m definitely heading deeper,” she said. “It’s a steep incline and the air is noticeably colder.”
“The reception isn’t quite as good,” Danny said. “You have cut out a few times.”
“Oh,” Dallas said, and then added, “If I don’t hear you for a while I’ll just plan on backtracking until we have comm up again.”
“Sounds good. We do want to keep in touch with you.”
“Yeah,” Colton added.
She smiled. She had to admit that it was nice to have someone concerned about her, someone who cared about her, who worried about her like a mother might. It had been a very long time since Dallas had felt that.
Dallas was soon able to confirm her theory: the tunnel didn’t end, it curved.
She pointed the flashlight in the new direction. It showed the tunnel dipping so rapidly that she couldn’t see very far down the darkness.
“I don’t see anything do you guys? It does look like it gets really steep quickly.”
“Proceed with caution,” Danny said. “We’ve got about another thirty minutes and I’m probably going to ask you to turn around and call it a day.”
That made Dallas pick up her pace. The tunnel was very steep now. Dallas wondered how far underground she was. The software on the computer had revealed several caverns and tunnels that dipped to sea level. Even without the nearby aquifer, Dallas didn’t like the thought of that since the Mediterranean Sea wasn’t very far away.
Just as she thought that, she took a step and the ground crumbled beneath her boot.
The next thing she knew she was tumbling through the black air.
When Dallas Jones’s eyes flickered, open there was nothing to see but a deep, velvet dark. Disoriented, she took a quick inventory. Although her shoulder stung like hell and she was sprawled flat on her back, nothing felt broken.
For a second, she was disoriented, unsure where she was or why she was on the ground injured. Then it came back to her: the ground crumbling underneath her boots. A black chasm opening up under her feet,
