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forgotten, not so long as you existed with your irrational passion.
    For a moment the old feelings came back to him, assailed him, the first excitement he’d ever felt as a student. When? Fifteen years ago? sixteen? twenty? It didn’t matter: time meant something different to him than it did to most people. Time was a thing you discovered through the secrets it had buried—in temples, in ruins, under rocks and dust and sand. Time expanded, became elastic, creating that amazing sense of everything that had ever lived being linked to everything that existed in the now; and death was fundamentally meaningless because of what you left behind.
    Meaningless.
    He thought of Champollion laboring over the Rosetta stone, the astonishment at finally deciphering ancient hieroglyphics. He thought of Schliemann finding the site of Troy. Flinders Petrie excavating the pre-dynastic cemetery at Nagada. Woolley discovering the royal cemetery at Ur in Iraq. Carter and Lord Carnarvon stumbling over the tomb of Tutankhamon.
    That was where it had all begun. In that consciousness of discovery, which was like the eye of an intellectual hurricane. And you were swept along, carried away, transported backward in the kind of time machine the writers of fantasy couldn’t comprehend: your personal time machine, your private line to the vital past.
    He balanced the replica of the idol in the center of his hand and stared at it as if it were a personal enemy. No, he thought: you’re your own worst enemy, Jones. You got carried away because you had access to half of a map among Forrestal’s papers—and because you desperately wanted to trust two thugs who had the other half.
    Moron, he thought.
    And Belloq. Belloq was probably the smart one. Belloq had a razor-blade eye for the quick chance. Belloq always had had that quality—like the snakes you have a phobia about. Coming out unseen from under a rock, the slithering predator, always grasping for the thing he hasn’t hunted for himself.
    All that formed in the center of his mind now was an image of Belloq—that slender, handsome face, the dark of the eye, the smile that concealed the cunning.
    He remembered other encounters with the Frenchman. He remembered graduate school, when Belloq had chiseled his way to the Archaeological Society Prize by presenting a paper on stratigraphy—the basis of which Indy recognized as being his own work. And in some way Belloq had plagiarized it, in some way he had found access to it. Indy couldn’t prove anything because it would have been a case of sour grapes, a rash of envy.
    1934. Remember the summer of that year, he thought.
    1934. Black summer. He had spent months planning a dig in the Rub al Khali Desert of Saudi Arabia. Months of labor and preparation and scrounging for funds, putting the pieces together, arguing that his instincts about the dig were correct, that there were the remains of a nomadic culture to be found in that arid place, a culture predating Christ. And then what?
    He closed his eyes.
    Even now the memory filled him with bitterness.
    Belloq had been there before him.
    Belloq had excavated the place.
    It was true the Frenchman had found little of historic significance in the excavations, but that wasn’t the point.
    The point was that Belloq had stolen from him again. And again he wasn’t sure how he could prove the theft.
    And now the idol.
    Indy looked up, startled out of his reverie, as the door of his office opened slowly.
    Marcus Brody appeared, an expression of caution on his face, a caution that was in part concern. Indy considered Marcus, curator of the National Museum, his closest friend.
    “Indiana,” he said and his voice was soft.
    He held the replica of the idol out, as if he were offering it to the other man, then he dropped it abruptly in the trash can on the floor.
    “I had the real thing in my hand, Marcus. The real thing.” Indy sat back, eyes shut, fingers vigorously massaging his eyelids.
    “You told me,