Page 16 of A Discovery: Love and Other Things

There was something big troubling him, but I doubted I would ever figure it out, nor would I ever get that apology I sought from him. He was a man of walls stronger than the ones that had housed this temple for thousands of years.

It was near time for me to head back to wait for the shuttle, but instead, I slipped my backpack off my shoulders and fished out my notebook and pen. I had brought them in case my confrontation went south and I needed to document it. Taking a seat on the ground, I faced the hieroglyphs on the wall and set to work on deciphering them. It was one thing to read them out of books or photos, but to see them in real life was astounding. The images in our textbooks benefited from camera features like zoom and focus. Seeing the images in real life, clustered together like an elaborate mosaic of history, was something completely different. It was harder to decipher them on aged stone where the figures were faint as a result of weathering.

“What are you doing?” Dr. Campbell was studying me quizzically from his stooped position.

“Curing the common cold. What does it look like?” I flashed a cheesy smile.

He stared at me incredulously. “You want to stay here on your day off?”

I couldn’t help but nod eagerly. I had missed being on-site and now that I was back, there was no way I was being pushed away again.

All Dr. Campbell could offer in response was a shake of the head and a disbelieving grin.

“Any headway on figuring out who built this thing since I’ve been gone?” I asked, waving my hands in the air at the stone around us.

“None.”

I grinned. “Maybe that’s because I wasn’t here to figure it out.”

He smirked at my remark. He wasn’t the only one who had an ego. I was tied with Angela for the top of our class and absorbed everything I learned like a sponge.

I turned my attention back to the wall of hieroglyphs before me. My pen found paper, sketching figures that I saw to create a clearer image so I could puzzle the bits of information together for easier reading. I was still new to this, so I couldn’t read columns and columns of symbols like a seasoned expert could.

“Need any help making them out?” Dr. Campbell had taken a seat just behind me, his presence warming my back.

I looked over my shoulder, catching his interested expression. He was a handsome man by nature, but when he wasn’t scowling, he looked downright dreamy. The kind ofdreamythat had a girl seeing stars. Kind of like the ones I was seeing right now.

I blinked furiously to get them to stop rotating and flashing like in those oldLooney Tunescartoons where Pepé Le Pew kept ogling that poor black cat. “Um, sure.”

“You probably already learned this, but hieroglyphs are meant to be read from right to left in the columns that they’re inscribed in.”

“I remember that from class.”

He nodded. “We’d usually start reading this from the right-most part of the wall and complete each column as we moved right. But sometimes hieroglyphs can be written left to right, making it more confusing to decipher. One of the easiest ways to figure out the direction is to locate an animal symbol and read into its face.” He leaned in close to me and pointed over my shoulder. “Do you recognize that symbol?”

It was a series of hieroglyphs inside of a rope. “It’s a cartouche.”

“That’s right. Do you know what the rope represents?”

“It’s used as protection for the name enclosed inside.” Usually, it was used for the names of people deserving great respect, like pharaohs and queens.

“Smart girl.”

His voice had dipped lower, and the compliment sent an unexplained shiver down my spine.

“Do you recognize the name inside?”

I did. It was arguably one of the most well-known names of all of ancient Egypt. “Tutankhamun.” It wasn’t written out phonetically in hieroglyphs, but if you pieced together the syllables, you could deduce his name.

“Beautiful.” His warm breath tickled the back of my neck. Involuntarily, my body leaned ever so slightly closer.

I continued reading. “The first three symbols resembling a reed, a small checkerboard, and a zig-zagged line represent the god of creation.”

“Amun,” he clarified while nodding.

It was exciting to see this side of him, encouraging me and not ready to rip anything I said to shreds. I almost felt like I was on one of those highs you get when you hit a breakthrough while writing an essay or taking an exam.

My eyes jumped to the next line. “The bird with the two loaves of bread means ‘Tut.’”

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