The Nightmare Beneath the Sand

The Nightmare Beneath the Sand 2

First and foremost: Thank you for the views, votes and comments. It means a lot to me! Enjoy chapter 2!

Leon frowned as he shuffled through the notes that had been handed over the night before by the students, putting them into various binders. Alaric frowned as he read a book, writing down his own notes on it to add to Leon's notes on the same book.

"There's a lot of nothing about this spot," Leon muttered as he flipped through the various piles of papers. "Just the information that I found when packing to come. Last time the stamping was finished was just last year if my calculations are right. I'm surprised that no one has noticed this when coming to the village."

"I think that they keep this part of their life hidden. Many cultures do have things that they hide. This might just be one such thing," Alaric said, looking at his lover with a thoughtful look. "Do you think..." he trailed off.

Leon eyed him. "What? Do I think what?"

"Do you think that the land is just a piece of mythology for the people in general?" he asked. Alaric snapped the book closed and put it to the side. "We've run across three that are said to be a part of the culture's mythology but this one might be an actual myth."

"The thing is that we don't know all of the old myths. So many have been lost because of shifting politics, people, cultural wipe outs." Leon groaned as he flopped into a chair, rubbing at his face before frowning. He stared at a small baked clay tablet that was covered in carefully inscribed Greek lettering. He had found it at a dig near the Valley of the Kings during one of his first archeological digs and could travel with it since he was the one decoding it.

That and because their backers had made it so that those who found the tablets were the ones to translate it unless they found someone else to do so.

He narrowed his eyes and stood from his chair, heading into the curtained off area of the tent, digging around in his travel locker before pulling out a three-inch binder that was half full of notes. Coming back into the main area, he found a clear spot on the tables near the tablet and dropped the binder down.

"Do you think it's connected with this and the other tablets?" he asked, opening the binder to the carefully protected pictures. He looked up at his lover. "It's just a thought really. We have five of them total so far." He laid out the pictures, each of the five tablets that had been found beyond his own. it was thought that there were at least three more that were still missing but they had enough of them to work out what they could.

"Well, the first tablet speaks of the first Pharaoh of Egypt. Not the one that history remembers but rather the one that was Blessed or Cursed, depending on who you asked, by the Nile Herself," Alaric said. "Yours is number three. Two talks about how their rule went, while three talked about the damages to the land. At least what we have translated. And four and five talk about the death of the Pharaoh and how the 'first' Pharaoh took over to bring prosperity to the land."

"Menes if I remember right. As far as history is concerned, he was the one to conquer Lower Egypt, or the Red Crown, and united them into one kingdom," Leon said, rocking on his feet. "That was the start of the First Dynasty. But if the tablets are right..."

"There was someone else who conquered the two kingdoms and was wiped from history much like what they tried to do with a few of the kings who pissed off the people," Alaric said, shaking his head. "Okay. You have the translations of the other four, right?" he asked.

"Yeah. They were found first, and the code was figured out. As we found out though, for every word, there seems to be three to four options with the way they set it up," Leon said. "Someone talked a coder into creating a program to run through the possibilities that are encoded into the word options," he continued, tapping the thick sheath of paper. "I've been inputting the words whenever I have had ten minutes. The program is running the first half of the tablet, including what I translated myself, and the second half looks to be about the Nile. Or something from the Nile."

"I think we might need to work on inserting more of it in tonight," Alaric said. "I'll make coffee and set up the firepit outside. It's going to get cool tonight."

Leon grunted and moved to make sure that his solar panel set up was fully charged, finding it just the way he wanted. Pleased with that, he plugged in the computer with the program to the solar panel, knowing that it would only drain the panels halfway down through the night to run. He and Alaric would type out the words onto small SD drives using their tablets before transferring the files into the program.

With the laptop up and running, and Alaric working on setting up the firepit that would spread heat into the tent over the night, Leon found their various lanterns, hanging the candle lanterns up onto the hooks and lighting them up. He placed the oil lanterns on their own steady tables and lit them, flooding the tent in light.

Alaric came in once the pit had been set to burn slow and started to go through the high-resolution pictures of the tablet that Leon had been working on, separating them in half, taking the bottom half while Leon took the top half. It didn't take them long to have a pot of coffee at hand and were working hard on getting the last of the tablet typed out in just the right format for the program to work with it.

Leon frowned as he translated a few of the sentence's mentally, writing out some notes to check a few books when they were in the village. He knew that the professor would be getting a hotel room to use the high speed wifi to call their benefactors. Even as a rather expensive school program, one that was paid for by those who wanted to get the experience while getting school credit for the most part, they still had backers.

Workers, travel expenses with very large items to ship around the world, food, and checks for those who did the classes all added up. Thus, they had benefactors whose name would be a part of the find credits and would be there for the various showings if they found things.

Leon had worked with the group that was backing them this time a few times before. He didn't mind them but found them rather intense on certain things.

Still, he had a feeling that they were going to push for this dig, and he wasn't looking forward to this fact. Looking up to Alaric about three in the morning as the man came back from using the bathroom, such as porta-potties could be, shaking off his hands and having tossed a new piece of wood into the fire, Leon frowned.

"We can not allow this dig to go through until we're sure what is under the dirt," he said. Alaric sighed, and nodded, curling hair falling into his eyes.

"You are right. I may call mother while we're in town. She has esoteric knowledge about everything Egyptian and African," he said.

"Considering that she's an American whose entire family line hails from Alexandria or Thebes? Not surprised," Leon said. He plugged in the SD card and transferred his files into the program, allowing it to run. "There. All we can do now is get some sleep for a few hours before getting up and out of bed at six."

"Come on, let's go rest," Alaric said, leaving the front flap open but letting the bug netting down and zippering it in place. They walked into the curtained off area, changed and crawled into their sleeping bags with alarms set. Leon was just thankful that his dreams were fleeting and forgettable. 

As of chapter 2 - Total word count for both chapters: 2,962