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the Queen of Sheba took any inspiration away from Solomon’s legendary Temple, then her own palace must have been extraordinary, greater than the ruins of the nearby Temple of Isis.
    Conrad climbed out of his jeep, slipped on his pack and looked around the dead graveyard of pharaohs under the stars. The cool desert air made him shiver.
    Forty generations of Nubian royalty were buried here, and every royal Nubian tomb was housed within—or rather beneath—a pyramid. The problem was that the tombs were built and buried first, independent from the pyramids on top of them later. Some alignments were so off that the tombs weren’t even under their associated pyramid. Often the entrance to the tomb was a good way beyond the pyramid and chapel.
    Indeed, everything was so poorly aligned that Conrad could only wonder if the effect was intentional.
    Which was why the stars were a far better guide here than the eye.
    Conrad took out his phone and held it up to the night sky. He clicked his modified Google Sky app icon. His screen now framed the stars like a window through the camera lens while a GPS readout fixed his location in time and space. He moved his thumb in a circular motion to “dial back” the stars to their positions around 950 BCE.
    Eureka.
    Based on his own celestial map, he was standing out in the open over the Queen of Sheba’s tomb, which had no pyramid, landmark or monument to speak of. That being the case, he had to find the stairway entrance.
    His contrarian gut told him that since many of these Nubian tomb entrances were found outside their pyramids, it stood to reason that the stairway entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s tomb, which had no landmark, was actually beneath and sealed off by another tomb.
    It made a wild kind of sense. It took a few calculations based on the alignments of his position, but he found the axis he was looking for. It pointed him forty meters away—to one of the cemetery’s several “anonymous queen” pyramids.
    The pyramid was imposing enough, belonging to a Nubian queen and all. It was about 20 meters tall, made of solid sandstone and a cultural treasure. It was also, if his celestial calculations were correct, directly on top of the entrance to the lost tomb of the Queen of Sheba.
    The stairway entrance to the surface pyramid was east of the surrounding wall and north of the pyramid’s central axis. Above the stairway was an offering chapel decorated with various reliefs, but nothing to suggest the identity of the anonymous Nubian queen it honored, let alone any secret Queen of Sheba tomb deep below it.
    Conrad strapped on a small headlight and tiny camera around his head, slipped his pack over his shoulders and started down. He descended 19 steps to a passageway cut into the bedrock beneath the pyramid. He followed the long tunnel east to the burial chamber, like many archaeologists and tomb raiders before him.
    Nothing new here.
    The framed doorway opened to another tunnel, which grew wider and taller the further Conrad walked until he found himself in a cavernous antechamber with a barrel-vaulted ceiling.
    Again, so far he was hardly the first to set foot here.
    Eight massive pillars carved from some kind of green alabaster divided the burial chamber into two side aisles and a central nave. It almost looked like the kind of set-up he’d expect to find around one of Hank Johnson’s multidimensional portals, as the alabaster pillars seemed to almost glow.
    In the middle of the floor was a massive pile of skulls and bones. And not just human bones either. Conrad could pick out horse, camel and dog bones, as well as some other bizarre shapes from creatures he’d rather not imagine.
    The Nubians, he knew, had a fine and longstanding tradition of sacrificing or ritually slaughtering humans and animals upon the death of a ruler or important personage. But this anonymous queen didn’t seem to warrant such a fine display. Unless of course the priests understood from their