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treacherous and requiring the use of added river pilots for navigation. What was happening to the river due to all the traffic and commerce festered in his bones.
    The mournful sound of a rival steamboat reached him as he opened his door. He inhaled the faint aroma of wood smoke curling from fires along the banks. This, mixed with the stench of a bloating cow carcass wedged against a log jam, lent an interesting pong to the heavy morning air. He closed the door tight behind him.
    Jameson cleared his workbench of jeweler’s tools and an accumulation of miniature gears, tiny springs, and various parts. He was assembling a new navigation device that would chart the movement of the stars as well as river currents. The archaeologist smoothed out a rather worn parchment rubbing he’d made of the stone tablet on his first Egyptian expedition. Through the lighted magnifying loupe of his monocle, he examined the marks scribed onto a tablet eons ago. He’d discovered the ancient tablet along with the scarab beetle, a canopic jar, and other trinkets in his first tomb.
    He’d managed to conceal the scarab and a few other artifacts in the many pockets of his safari jacket, but the tablet was too heavy and large. There had been barely enough time to make a rubbing and escape with his life from a league of murderous desert thugs that preyed on foreigners.
    It had taken decades, but he knew he was so very close to finally deciphering every last bit of it, completing his life’s puzzle. The canopic jar he’d smuggled from the tomb contained a strange coal-like rock and a chunk of brittle silvery white metal hidden beneath the mummy’s liver. Perhaps they were connected, he’d thought then.
    Now he was certain of it.
    Jameson had devoted months to testing these materials, secretly so no one would discover his theft. In the end, he learned that the rock with the brownish-black crust was a meteorite, and contained the smooth cool metal he named Isidium, after Isis, his favorite Egyptian deity. Deciphering enough of the glyphs from the tablet revealed a formula to extract this metal from celestial rubble.
    Jameson stumbled on the power of this silvery element quite by accident. When his pocket watch was close to this mysterious metal the hands sped up until they became nothing but a blur. He repeatedly tested this compact power source and found it would animate other objects . . . such as his automaton deck scrubbers and dishwashers. Best of all, this strange metal was powering the Evangeline’s large steam engine without burning wood as fuel. When the metal was under extreme pressure it produced heat, which in turn produced steam in the boilers.
    The ancient Egyptians—at least the ones buried with his finds—must have used this amazing energy source. Soon Jameson would share their knowledge with the world.
    Markings carved into the canopic jar, such as a scepter, represented dominion. This didn’t seem to be the same kind of power reserved for pharaohs and rulers but power that could be held in one’s palm. So Jameson believed that the tomb had not been the final resting place of a king—but a scientist. The archaeologist felt a kinship with the man whose jar he held.
    What had the ancient scientist powered with the Isidium? And why had the tablet with the formula for extracting it been buried? Had someone—the scientist perhaps—in those long-ago days not wanted the discovery revealed? The answers were lost beneath a mummy’s liver and lay undisturbed in the desert’s shifting sands in the Valley of the Kings.
    Jameson used shavings of this incredibly hard metal to animate his inventions, and with a slightly larger piece the Evangeline’s steam engine served as a prototype for all engines and machinery. Only Captain Keel knew of this magnificent energy source that made Jameson’s shipping line the most successful one on the river. Rumors circulated in the waterfront