Born of Shadow - Book 1 (complete)

Chapter 15

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"Does the heat or arid conditions bother you?" Yasmin broke Kami's reverie. "Most foreigners complain about the environment as though they had no idea what it was like before coming here."

"I'm used to the sun, but the heat here is different. More intense," she answered.

Yasmin smiled.

"I would love to visit California someday," she said a bit wistfully.

Kami imagined giving her cousin a grand tour of their trailer. It would take all of two minutes, if that. She wondered what her cousin would think of their living conditions when she had grown up in such luxury. Her face warmed. Fortunately, her cousin changed the subject.

Haji turned onto a desert road. Hot, gritty expanses of sand stretched in every direction, its smooth surface shimmering in the heat making it appear wet. But it was only an illusion. The wasteland was unforgiving. There was barely any life here. Very few shrubs and plants grew along the way, and most of them looked half dead.

"About fifteen years ago, a donkey stumbled in a hole in the sand at the Bahariya Oasis, a little over 300 kilometers south of Alexandria," Yasmin said. "When they investigated further, they found over 250 mummies, many of them plated with gold. They named it the Valley of the Golden Mummies. It is estimated there are up to 10,000 mummies buried there."

"The Valley of the Golden Mummies? Very dramatic! Like something out of Hollywood," Kami said.

"It sounds more exciting than The Valley of the Old Decaying Wrapped People anyway," Liam quipped.

"I don't know. Indiana Jones and the Old Decaying Wrapped People has a certain ring to it," Kami joked back.

"Listen to this," Yasmin said, drawing them back to her story a little impatiently. "There is a temple nearby, the oldest building on the site. It is the only known temple in the Western Desert to be built in the name of Alexander the Great. A painting on the wall depicts Amun-Ra and Alexander. Some believe that Alexander passed through this oasis on his return from Siwa."

Haji slowed as he passed an old man driving a cart. The cart was the sawed off back half of a Toyota pickup truck which was being pulled by a mangy donkey. Kami smiled. That type of ingenuity wasn't something you'd see back home. The others didn't even seem to notice. She wondered if this was a fairly common sight.

"So Alexander's body could have been moved there?" Haji asked.

"It is possible," Yasmin said. "That is what Gedo was trying to find out. He was leading a group of students who were helping excavate mummies in Bahariya. On the drive, he saw a strange rock poking out of the sand. He stopped to examine it and cleared the earth away to discover a separate structure. He and his students got permission from the authorities to work on this site instead. He hoped to find more of the same as what had been found in the Valley of the Golden Mummies, like mummies, pottery shards, coins, and things of that nature.

"Instead, he found the greatest discovery of his life—artifacts that linked the site to Alexander the Great. He found a badly damaged map, a dagger of Greek origin that dates back to when he was alive, and a fragment of papyri with Alexander's name written on it. That's why he thinks he might find Alexander's body."

"Just because it has his name on it doesn't mean anything," Liam protested.

"It does when the fragment is a portion of the Secret of Secrets, written in Greek."