The Lure of Egypt

Beneath a copper sun that scorches the Theban cliffs, Professor Lampton—gaunt, parchment-skinned, a man who converses more fluently with shards of faience than with the living—stoops over a half-cleared stairway plunging into darkness. His pick strikes bedrock: the lost sepulcher of the heretic pharaoh who tried to remake gods in his own image. Yet the ledger is merciless—excavation costs devour francs faster than desert jackals strip a carcass. Enter Prince Dagmar, Balkan aristocrat in exile, silk-gloved panther draped in bespoke linen, whose smile promises patronage while his eyes appraise each bas-relief like a pawnbroker weighing gold teeth. Coins clink, shovels resume, but the bargain is Faustian: Dagmar’s purse strings yoke Lampton to a midnight larceny that will spirit Akhnaton’s funerary trove into European drawing rooms where collectors sip absinthe and barter antiquities like baseball cards. Michael Amory—draftsman, dreamer, his pupils dilated with color theory and hashish—sketches lotus-capped columns by day and sketches Margaret’s clavicles by lamplight, believing her heart belongs to the prince’s cosmopolitan glamour. Misreading a single glance, he tears himself from camp and wanders into the dunes with Gondo Koro, a Bedouin oracle whose beard smells of myrrh and whose prophecies arrive on the backs of swirling dust devils. Meanwhile Dagmar dispatches Millicent—scarlet-lipped, pistol-hipped adventuress who could teach Cleopatra table stakes— to coax the tomb’s location from Michael’s lips using every weapon in her armory. Moonlit confrontation inside the honeycombed corridors: torches gutter, bronze daggers flicker, Michael bleeds onto hieroglyphs older than conscience, but the thieves are trussed like desert hares and dawn finds Margaret cradling the artist’s bandaged head while the first ray of Ra glints off the unviolated sarcophagus—love restored, treasure preserved, colonial guilt momentarily absolved.