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thought that she’d already lived through this seemed to frighten her even more. Finally she said, ‘If it is, maybe it should stay buried.’ Restless, she got out of bed and went over to her desk.
    ‘Isabella, you need sleep.’
    ‘I couldn’t possibly sleep now. Besides, going over the plans for tomorrow will help relax me.’
    Naked, she put on her reading glasses and switched on a desk lamp, illuminating several maps of the bay and the seabed. I knew she referred to two sources of expertise on the geography of the harbour. One was Kamel Abdou el Sadat who had campaigned tirelessly to try and get the Egyptian authorities to fund exploration. The other was an earlier enthusiast - Prince Thosson, who had created early twentieth-century aerial maps of the bay. And it was these two men’s own hand-drawn maps that now lay before her. She picked up a ruler and pencil and began to retrace her route for the dive, the defencelessness of her bare shoulders an innocent contrast to the intense expression on her face. My gaze moved down her body, along her legs curled together under the table and to the tattoo on her ankle - a sparrowhawk with a human face turned in profile. It was her Ba, the Egyptian representation of the soul after death. Traditionally these birds were sparrowhawks unless the deceased was a pharaoh in which case they were falcons - although, depending on the period of history and the school of thought, the Ba could also be a butterfly or even a heron. Isabella had had the tattoo for as long as I’d known her. She’d told me she’d got it on a drunken trip to London with a couple of her wilder girlfriends when she’d been a student. Isabella loved the hieroglyph for the Ba. It was like her personal totem. The Ba was always considered attached to the body and was only freed in death after which it could fly anywhere, even into open sunlight.
    Isabella talked about Bas often, describing how, for Egyptians, they also represented individuality, the emotional characteristics that made up a personality - even a person’s own morality and inspiration. The other elements were Ka, the life force, defined as the spirit that entered the body at birth, Ren - name, Sheut - shadow, and Ib - the heart. A third significant hieroglyph was Akh, which depicted the successful union of the Ka and Ba that enabled the deceased to progress to the afterlife. A successful passing-over into the afterworld could only take place if the Ba was united with the Ka at the moment of death. If this union did not happen, the soul was thrown into oblivion, an annihilation that was the equivalent of Hell for the Ancient Egyptians whose afterlife was an imagined parallel world full of earthly pursuits and pleasures. Isabella herself was terrified of such a fate.
    As I stood and walked over to the desk I noticed Isabella slip a small envelope under the ink blotter: a movement so tiny and mostly blocked by her turning her back to me that a second later I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d imagined it. She swung back around and smiled. ‘Recognise this?’ she said, and held up the drawing of the astrarium I’d seen on the floor the night before. ‘It’s a great rendering, I really think it’s going to look like this. Gareth’s a genius.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I replied gruffly; I couldn’t help thinking about my brother’s complete inability - genius or otherwise - to look after himself both physically and financially. I took the drawing from her and peered at it. The elegant ink drawing showed the jagged teeth of cogs set against more cogs, while another perspective demonstrated how the interior workings fitted within a wooden frame. Beneath the diagram was a series of six symbols or letters of an ancient script. I hadn’t noticed them before. ‘What’s this? It doesn’t look like Greek - is it meant to be Ptolemaic?’ I asked.
    ‘It is, but this is a cipher made of hieroglyphs. The Ptolemaic rulers took every