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cloud of sand, in which O’Connell—unarmed—stood and faced the fierce quartet, helplessly.
    The Tuaregs raised their shining curved swords, and O’Connell, Chicago boy to the end, sneered at his executioners, raising his hand to his face, placing his thumb to the tip of his nose and waggling his fingers.
    Suddenly the horse closest to O’Connell reared back and whinnied, eyes and nostrils flaring, and then the other horses joined in, rearing back, going bughouse, Arabian steeds transformed into Texas broncos!
    The steeds screeched, they bucked, they bellowed, they snorted—and then they took off! Took off like somebody fired the starting gun, and their equally alarmed riders made no effort to rein them in; it was as if the devil himself had chased them away.
    Wide-eyed, O’Connell looked at his hand as if perhaps it could explain why thumbing his nose had worked with such amazing success . . .
    Then he felt the world moving beneath him.
    Later, he would wonder if he imagined it; still later, he would know he hadn’t.
    But right now, the sands, the earth, were shifting under him, not trembling like an earthquake, something else, something much stranger, something unmistakably evil . . .
    . . . and as he glanced around him, he saw the looming ancient statue, just behind him in the remains of that shrine he’d been running toward. He knew enough about Egypt and its history to recognize a statue of Anubis when he saw it.
    Was this what had stirred the horses? Or had the beasts, with their keen instincts, simply perceived the shifting sands before he had?
    Decrepit, sections of it shattered, half-buried in sand, the jackal-headed statue stared at him with sinister indifference, almost as if Anubis were amused by O’Connell’s startled reaction to the sands beneath him shifting and forming shapes, like snakes wriggling and writhing just below the surface.
    And as those sands shifted, an artifact was revealed, a small octagonal gold box that he impulsively plucked up from the squirming desert floor and pocketed.
    It was then that he realized something that frightened him more than anything this gruesome afternoon had yet leveled at him: Not just meaningless shapes were forming in the sand, but lines, as if a ghostly finger were drawing a picture!
    He had had enough of this terrible place. If there were other riches here, beside the golden trinket he’d just tucked away, well let the desert have them.
    The Tuaregs, all of them, had ridden off, leaving behind a massacre that would lead to more battles still. But Richard O’Connell would not be part of them. He ran from the ruins, knowing he would never return to the legion, knowing he’d be assumed dead, never dreaming he would return to this ungodly place.
    He left without seeing the face that the sands had drawn upon themselves, a screaming face that he would not have recognized, anyway, though the group of riders on horseback high on a ridge, watching him stumble from the fragmented temple complex, would have . . .
    . . . Imhotep.
    But they did not; they saw only O’Connell, and that was enough.
    These observers on the ridge were not Tuaregs though they were indeed Arab warriors, in the loose-fitting robes of their breed.
    “He has found Hamanaptra,” one of the riders said to Ardeth Bay, their leader. “He must die.”
    “Let the desert kill him,” said Ardeth Bay, tall, sinewy, robed in black, golden scimitar at his waist, crossed by a gold dagger that was nearly a sword.
    And the cruel dark eyes set like glittering stones in the face of Ardeth Bay—a face that might have seemed handsome were it not marked with strange tattoos—watched the legionnaire survivor stagger off into the open desert.

  4  
    Another Worthless Trinket
    C airo, capital of the Mohammedan world, the majestic minarets of mosques rising above the squalor of crowded slums, was the African continent’s largest city, and among its oldest. The stars themselves had changed position in the