Chapter 2

The next morning Johnny sat down for breakfast with Mia. Then, surprisingly, Doctor Stone dropped into the seat on the other side of Mia. Johnny was agog that both women had only oatmeal and fruit on their plates. He was biting into a crispy piece of bacon when Mia spoke.

“I had the craziest dream last night, and both of you were in it,” she said.

Rachael’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. “Were we up on the Second Pylon?” she asked.

Mia was nodding her head in surprise when Johnny added his two cents. “Yes we were, and we were armed with antique weapons.”

“Okay, this is weird,” Mia pointed out needlessly. Then she turned to Johnny. “Is there some sort of medical or mental condition that could cause us to have the same dream? Like mass hysteria or something?”

“Not that I know of,” he replied. “Let’s ask the team if any of them had the same dream.”

Johnny casually asked the students if any of them had any unusual dreams last night. No one had. Johnny relayed that fact to Doctor Stone at the dig site as she was examining a large shard of limestone covered in hieroglyphics.

“Thanks, Johnny,” she said distractedly. “Let’s meet up over by the wall in an hour and talk about it.”

Johnny wandered over to his treatment tent when a woman and a little boy showed with Gamil and Hala. Gamil was carrying the little boy who had a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his left foot.

“Tabib Johnny, a thousand apologies this is sister named Kareena and her son name of Harun. He has cut himself most badly.”

The woman was distraught and crying, but the young boy was stoically refusing to act hurt or scared. Hala was putting pressure on the wound to staunch the bleeding.

Johnny took the rag off the boy’s foot and clucked his tongue. The cut was on the bottom of the boy’s foot at the inside of his arch. The cut was deep, about three inches long but the bleeding had slowed considerably.

“This is a nasty cut,” he said in Arabic, “but not hard to fix.”

Johnny injected lidocaine under the skin on both sides of the wound. While waiting for the numbing effect to begin, Johnny directed Hala to take his vitals. The heart rate and blood pressure showed no sign of hypovolemia, so Johnny discarded the need for a blood expander IV. To a former Combat Medic, a wound like this was a common occurrence. He reassured the mother and Mister Gamil, complemented to boy for his bravery and cleaned the wound with betadine solution. Then Johnny closed the wound with a locking running suture, bandaged him, and sent mother and son on their way.

Mia and Doctor Stone arrived while Johnny was bandaging the boy’s foot. Johnny figured Stone would dress him down for treating someone not involved in the dig. Instead, she exchanged greetings with Mister Gamil and patted the boy on the head.

“Treating children is excellent publicity! Good job, Johnny,” Rachael said.

Johnny shot Mia an incredulous look; Mia shrugged and twirled her fingers around. Johnny nodded his understanding. Mia was letting him know it was this place making Stone nice.

The three of them walked to the location where they thought they saw the stairs.

“I’m going to ask the Ministry of Antiquities for permission to excavate here,” Doctor Stone said. “It’ll take a couple of days, but supposedly they are very accommodating.”

The local Ministry representative was in Luxor a few kilometers away. Stone was back by three in the afternoon with the completed request endorsed locally and emailed to Cairo.

Johnny had another dream that night. This one even more vivid than the last...

He was once again atop the Second Pylon only this time he was looking west toward the Nile. Two women were standing with him, now they were all attired in long white linen robes with dark blue trim. They were looking down on the Avenue of Ram-headed Sphinx that lined the way from the River of Life to the Second Pylon gate. A large, colorful and highly decorated Barque was tied against the quay rocking gently on the Nile’s current. A platoon of soldiers wearing the Falcon head masks of the Warrior God Montu was leading a procession of gilded sedan chairs. The sedan chairs carried richly attired women toward the Temple. Somehow Johnny knew these were the Pharaoh’s lesser wives. Many of the women’s eyes lingered on Johnny as they passed below.

“Pharaoh’s women are eyeing you like dinner, Alaric,” the shorter of the women said with a smile.

Alaric grunted and walked to the other side of the pylon. The Great Temple Courtyard was filled with the lesser priests and priestesses all bowing obsequiously. Inside the first row of columns of the Hypostyle Hall, shaded from the noonday sun, stood the High Priests and Priestesses. The women walked over to stand beside him, and he knew the tall one was an Israelite called Ruth and the short exotic woman from far away China was named Li Na. Alaric, he knew, was a Visigoth from the frigid lands to the far north. Thinking of north made Alaric look that way.

The northern enclosure wall was about a hundred meters from the pylon while the southern wall was half a kilometer away. The southern wall enclosed the Sacred Lake, the Temple of Mutt and the pylon gates leading to Luxor Palace and Pharaoh’s Temple.

Along the north wall was a low narrow building with a heavy wooden door at the west end. Alaric knew the structure covered the stairs that led to ... and Johnny woke up.

After his run the next morning, Johnny met up with Mia and Doctor Stone for breakfast. They quickly discovered they had again shared a dream. It was curious and odd but not frightening to them because bad things weren’t happening and none of them were superstitious. Instead they were intrigued ... and frustrated that the dream seemingly ended on the cusp of revealing what was down those stairs. Their conversation uncovered that, although they were sharing a dream, they stayed a version of themselves in it. They all saw the dream from their own individual perspective.

Mia pretty much summed up their feelings when she said, “It’s as if someone or something is sending us a message. The dreams center around the pylon and the wall so they are not random. There has to be something over by that corner we are meant to find.”

That day passed with agonizing slowness for Johnny. Except for a spate of family members of the workers seeking medical help in the morning, Johnny had nothing to do. He poked around the vast Temple enclosure. He was exploring on his own, always in touch with Hala, Mia and Mister Gamil via the Motorola walky-talky clipped to his belt. Karnak was the largest religious site ever built. It covered more than one hundred and fifty acres, so there was much to see.

It took three more agonizing days for the antiquities bureaucracy to grant Doctor Stone permission to conduct an exploratory dig near the northwest corner of the wall. It took another day to square away the new workers Hany Gamil had recruited but, eight days after the first dream they started to excavate.

Doctor Stone had them start digging against the outer wall to get an idea of how deep the accumulated sand was. Then she had them dig a trench three feet wide and three feet deep away from the wall. They backfilled the trench as they moved forward to keep the site in its natural state. On the second day of trenching and about twenty-five feet from the wall the work crew struck loose rocks. The find excited Rachael because the ancient Egyptians filled the entrances to tombs with stone to discourage tomb robbers. An hour after finding the rocks and rubble, the diggers uncovered the first step. Stone stopped the excavation and sent for the on-site Ministry of Antiquities representative.

The Ministry person was an archaeologist named Mahmoud Bashar. He showed up right before two in the afternoon seeming bored with it all, and slightly irritated at being called from his air-conditioned office.

“You may continue work but I must be notified with what you find,” Bashar said, and his English was barely understandable.

Doctor Stone thanked him and scowled at his retreating back.

When he was out of earshot she grumbled, “He wants to be notified so he can take the credit for whatever we find down there.”

By the time Gamil called a halt for the day they had uncovered seven steps. The rocks from the trench were carefully laid out to be examined by Stone’s students. The students checked the rocks for markings of any sort. Those that bore some sort of inscription were laid aside and the plain rubble was piled near the wall.

That night Johnny dreamed again...

The old man dropped his arms to his sides allowing the white linen robe to fall into place around his scrawny body. A pair of females in snow white linen shifts straightened the robe until it draped correctly. One of the maids set a dark blue conical hat in place on his bald pate as the other efficiently tied a matching blue sash around his narrow waist.

“Be quick my beauties,” the old man ordered, “for the heavens move not at our whim.”

“Amun-Ra will like what he sees tonight, Exalted Lord,” one of the girls replied.