The Scorpion’s Bite Read Online Free Page B

the other toward her in greeting.
    His long hangdog face was framed by patches of hair that were neither beard nor stubble, his dark eyes looked as if they were on the verge of tears. A faint mustache quivered above his upper lip. His face had all the discreet pathos of a basset hound.
    “ Ahlen we Sahlen ,” he said. “You are most welcome.” He glanced at the Buick and back at her. “Abu Huniak said you will be wanting a horse to take you through the Siq.”
    He went back to the horses and led out the saddled pair, Arabians who had seen better days. Their unwashed coats, sore with bare spots, had an acrid stench, their once-proud tails were sagging, and their long Arabian faces were sad and menacing.
    The Bedouin cupped his hands for her to mount and gave her a boost. She landed with an ungainly bounce in the saddle. He mounted the other Arabian and reached for her makeshift bridle to lead her into the Siq, a cleft in the earth created by some long-ago earthquake.
    “ Ismi Awadh el Bdoul ,” he said as they passed through the Bab es-Siq into the shade of the canyon. “ Shu ismik ? What is your name?”
    Lily nodded. “ Ismi Lily.”
    They rode past the spare remains of a monumental arch hewn out of the living rock by the Nabateans that once had topped the entrance to the Siq. Around a curve, they came upon three massive carved blocks that stood in front of the facade of a rock-cut tomb, and Awadh began to sing.
    “Careful when we pass here,” Awadh sang. “Those blocks were carved by djinn.” His nasal voice sang out as he said in a tuneless song, “No one knows what they will do. Djinn are fiery spirits, older than beasts. They are smokeless fire, like electricity. Very dangerous. They can burn your soul.” He reached into a sack on his belt for some worry beads, and kept on singing. “I can take care of them. The djinn, they are afraid of song.”
    The horses plodded on, weary under the weight of their riders, the sound of their hoofs echoing off the cliff walls, past a tomb carved into the rock then around a bend as the Siq began to narrow.
    Some votive niches were hewn into the rock. Dwarfed by the high walls of the Siq, Lily looked up. The sides leaned toward each other like an enormous corbelled arch, blocking out the light.
    The remains of water channels that had brought water into Petra from the spring at Wadi Musa were cut into the sidewalls. As they clomped through the narrow winding gorge, claustrophobic within its towering walls, Lily noticed the faint deposits left from the levels of water that had run through the Siq during countless winters.
    Sometimes water poured through the Siq in a roaring flash flood when a desert torrent raged. Lily recalled the story of Madame X who was drowned in the Siq during a sudden downpour. No one knew who she was, and now she was buried in one of the tombs of the Iron Age cemetery on the grounds of the École Biblique in Jerusalem next to Pere Vincente.
    Would there be a flash flood today, and would she be buried there in Jerusalem, next to Madame X, as Madame Y, in The Tomb of the Unknown Tourists?
    “Are there flash floods here often?” she asked Awadh.
    “No, never.” He kicked his horse to speed it up and gave a pull on Lily’s rope. “Only sometimes.”
    The Siq seemed to go on forever, darker and narrower, in some places with room for only one horse at a time. Awadh handed her the rope that served as a bridle for her horse and let her lead as the horses trudged further and further. At last, around a twist in the narrow chasm, Lily saw a shaft of bright yellow sunlight.
    Awadh hung back and smiled.
    And then, around the next bend, at the end of the narrow cleft of the Siq, she saw it and took in her breath.
    There, in front of her, rosy-bright in the afternoon sun, cut into the living rock of red sandstone was the Khazneh, the magnificent rose-pink Khazneh el-Far’un —the Pharaoh’s treasury.
    Rising to the sky, with steps leading to a columned