She was touched that he had been paying attention to her from the first. “Basketball. Have you ever had the pleasure?”

“Oh, yes! We play basketball here for amusement. My young men all played for their colleges. How your team must relish you! You are so magnificently tall.”

Camilla stared at Dr. Lightner's weathered face. Sun had burned it to bronze and split it in cracks.

They walked slowly toward the tents, finding much to say. How marvelous to be with a man who was not letting go of her hand. How marvelous, in fact, were hands.

A boy about Camilla's own age suddenly came bounding and yelling toward them.

Camilla was pretending to be thirty, which seemed like the right age for a seasoned reporter sent halfway across the world to write about scientific events, but in fact, she was seventeen. The boy too had the air of somebody pretending to be older, but in fact, still in his teens.

She had the oddest sense that he was racing toward her. That they knew each other. She even had the thought that she shocked him; that he was not prepared for the sight of her.

It was not until he pulled up next to them, breathless and excited, that Camilla saw he was astonishingly handsome and very unkempt. His jacket was in desperate need of button reattachment and his trousers needed mending.

“Dr. Lightner! Sir!” he cried. “I have found an undiscovered tomb.”

Camilla laughed out loud at this pathetic claim. It was surely the daydream of every tourist: I'll stoop down, find pottery with hieroglyphs, kick away a rock and expose a tomb, which will be filled with gold.

“I knocked over my tripod whilst preparing my camera,” said the boy. “The wooden legs are heavy and topped with brass casings. They hit against a desert stone and when I looked, it was not stone at all, but plaster camouflaged as a rock!”

Dr. Lightner quivered. “Perhaps I should take a look.”

He and the boy walked with measured pace, though Camilla thought they wanted to fly through the air, dive into the sand and come flailing to the surface with their arms full of Egyptian gold.

In moments, the entire expedition was trooping along, whispering and wondering. What a gathering of fine young men! Camilla gathered that these were intellectuals from the great universities of the world, taking six months or a year to indulge a passion for archaeology. She wondered what it could be like to have the money to do such a thing.

“What is the significance of the plaster?” she asked one of them.

“In my studies at Yale,” he told her, “I learned that in ancient times, the entry to a tomb was often disguised with plaster dyed to match the desert.”