** The horror slumbers buried under many meters of rubble and desert sand. Nameless cartouches, desecrated relics, and a sarcophagus containing an ancient riddle. **
"Ancient lands lost in time.
Storms of sand, walls of lime
Surround this mask of de...
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Arabella hardly noticed the astonished or dismissive looks she received as she hurried towards the commotion.
"What happened?" she asked any workers who came within her earshot or sight. "Hello, can you understand me? What has happened? Is anyone hurt?"
Although she guessed that the men neither understood her nor were likely to answer, somewhere inside her hovered the hope of finding someone to tell her what had happened.
She walked past numerous pits dug into the ground in what seemed to a layman to be random places. Sand piled on top of several piles of rubble, while racks of wood had been placed over seemingly endless holes. Winches that could be used to bring the sand or any treasures from the depths to the light of day. She knew from her uncle that the Egyptians had often dug numerous 'mock tunnels' when there was a tomb to hide somewhere. With worry and excitement, the young Englishwoman could not rejoice at the clues that would have filled any archaeologist with hope.
At last, among the hurrying workers full of dust, she spotted a face she could assume spoke her language. A slim, tall man, glasses perched on his curved hooked nose, stood next to a fellow with broader shoulders and arms folded in front of his chest. Like most locals, the more petite, bespectacled man had black hair and a sun-tanned skin tone. A black beard shadow had perhaps once been neatly shaved but had visibly not received any care over the last few days. His hair looked untidy, but he was already wearing light-colored linen trousers and a shirt with a buttoned-up waistcoat. So he didn't seem to have just fallen out of the cot like others hurrying around.
The man next to him ... hah, American. Arabella saw that at first glance, as much as she would have tried to avoid superficial judgments. The man fulfilled all the stereotypes, from the beige trousers and high leather boots to the gun he carried in a leather harness. The three-day beard gave him something unpolished, and the dialect immediately resonated with her ears. Arabella had always thought American English a rough, unattractive form of her language. Now it suited the man she could have imagined as a wild-eyed big-game hunter in Africa. His features were grim, and the men listened to an excited worker whose hair was caked with blood and sand.
Immediately their pace quickened. The dust was already hanging in the air, so she had to blink several times when she reached the gentleman.
"Gentleman," she tried to bring the last vestige of English politeness to the surface with the last of her self-control, though she had already turned unhealthily pale around her stubby nose, "... Please, what happened?"How many times had she asked that in the last few minutes? With each time, the lump in her stomach grew more prominent. At the sight of the worker, red blood mingling with the whitish stone dust over his temple, it only hardened more.
The men's gazes latched onto her, and Arabella noticed how the hook-nosed gentleman, embarrassed, turned his gaze intently in another direction a moment later, clearing his throat softly. On the other hand, the American eyed her from head to toe in a way that bordered on impertinence. Only now, embarrassed, did she reach for the dressing gown of shimmering silk, which she pulled together a little in front of her chest.'Impudent fellow,' she thought bitterly before her chin straightened in lack of submission. Arabella cleared her throat, and only then did the gentlemen seem to snap out of their brief stupor of surprise and consider her question.
