The Eye of the Serpent by Philip Caveney

the walls to illuminate the treasures; the resulting fumes made it hard to focus on them at first. Alec looked around in wide-eyed wonder. He saw statues and jars and murals and jewellery and scrolls and more jars . . . Behind the almost perfect remains of a battle chariot there was another doorway and he noticed something strange about it: a small oval of midnight-black that must have been an opening into another room beyond the first.
    â€˜We’ve still got a lot to do,’ explained Ethan. ‘Everything was shut down when Will became ill so we lost the best part of a month. I’ve only just got things running again.’
    There were various people working in the antechamber. A man whom Alec recognized as the team’s medic, Doc Hopper, held a sketchpad and was painting a watercolour of a bas relief carving on a wall. Like all members of the team, he had a secondary talent to supplement his main function, and it was his artistic abilities that came to the fore; but at any moment he might be obliged to drop his sketchpad and run to help deal with a broken leg or an infected scorpion sting. He noticed Alec and nodded to him with a welcoming smile.
    On the other side of the chamber an Arab workman with a box camera was photographing a statue of Apophis (once again, the snake god, Alec thought), and every so often the space was lit by the brief glare of flash powder, the resulting smoke making it even harder to breathe. Over to Alec’s right, a couple more Arabs were carefully brushing away the fine dust that had accumulated around a necklace, the cord of which had long since rotted away, so that it could be photographed intact before being removed bead by bead and reassembled somewhere else.
    This was the world Alec wanted to belong to. He realized it wasn’t something that would appeal to everyone. It was a world of painstaking research, where the wheels turned slowly and a week’s hard work was deemed as nothing when compared to the long passage of centuries. And yet he felt that it was what he had been born to do.
    Ethan was looking around impatiently. He spotted a young woman standing alone in a corner, studying an elaborate mural, and he made a beeline for her.
    â€˜Say, honey, you must be with Dr Duval. Any idea where he is?’
    The woman turned to look at Ethan. She was probably in her mid twenties, Alec thought, strikingly pretty with bobbed black hair and dark brown eyes. She was dressed in a khaki shirt, jodhpurs and brown leather boots and she was looking at Ethan as though she was having trouble understanding him.
    Ethan tried speaking louder and slower. ‘You go fetch Dr Duval,’ he said. ‘Tell him Ethan Wade is here.’
    â€˜Dr Duval
knows
you are ’ere,’ said the woman, in a pronounced French accent.
    Ethan did a slow 180-degree turn to look around the tomb, but clearly saw nobody he didn’t recognize. The obvious answer began to dawn on Alec and he stepped forward to try and intervene, but he was too late.
    â€˜Sorry, sister, you’re not making much sense,’ said Ethan flatly.
    The woman stared at him. ‘
I
am Dr Duval,’ she said.
    There was a long moment of silence while the awful truth registered, and Ethan’s face went through a silent pantomime of open-mouthed shock.
    â€˜You . . . oh . . . my . . . God,’ he said. ‘I am sosorry,
madame
, I had no idea. You see, I was expecting . . .’
    â€˜A man,’ said Dr Duval tonelessly. ‘Obviously.’
    â€˜Well, yeah, tell you the truth. See, I had no idea that . . .’
    â€˜. . . a woman could be a doctor? Perhaps this is against the law in America?’
    â€˜Yeah . . . NO! No, not against the law. Just . . . you know,
unusual
. I was expecting some crusty old guy in tweeds, not a woman. Especially such a pretty one.’
    Alec winced. Now the look on Dr Duval’s