THE AMUN CHAMBER
By: Daniel Leston
Kindle e-Book, 2nd ed.
2011
In August of 1956, Lionel DeCaylus, an amateur
archaeologist/drifter/dreamer/scoundrel, died under mysterious circumstances
in Cairo, Egypt. His legacy was that of a family embittered by his
desertion of them and an apparently unfulfilled obsession to find the tomb
of Alexander the Great.
More than fifty years later, Professor David Manning,
successful author, scholar and classical archaeologist, finds himself at
professional loose ends as he embarks on a lecture tour that focuses on the
tomb of Phillip II of Macedonia, father to Alexander. His career is at a
standstill; his excavation near Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia, has
been shut down indefinitely by government authorities wrangling over private
property rights, and while he has had great success with a best-selling work
of historical fiction and his publisher is clamoring for another magnum
opus, he has hit a towering writer’s block! His one hope for bursting
through that block lays in a cache of letters, written by Lionel DeCaylus to
his great-aunt, Edith Whitely, emeritus professor of ancient studies at the
University of Thessalonika. Edith had apparently been a close confidante of
DeCaylus back in the old days, and possibly the only person the increasingly
paranoid DeCaylus trusted. The wild tales included in the letters
concerning his search for the treasures of Alexander seemed to provide the
plotline grist to David’s novel-writing mill.
It seemed to David almost karmic when, during his
Cornell University lecture, he was challenged by none other than a lovely
young doctoral student who turned out to be none other than Lionel DeCaylus’
grand-daughter, Elizabeth. She agrees to help provide him further
background on her ne’er-do-well grandfather once he convinces her of the
authenticity of the letters written to his great-aunt, and together the two
of them explore the nearly-abandoned DeCaylus family home on Cape Cod. They
discover a small trunk in the attic that has apparently gone undisturbed an
un-opened since its arrival more than a half-century earlier. The shipping
bill is still attached, postmarked Alexandria, Egypt, and dated August 11,
1956—the day Lionel was killed! Within the trunk is a beautifully molded
golden disk—the sunburst symbol of Macedonian kings. David is
thunderstruck—could Lionel actually have discovered the resting place
of Alexander? Was his obsession actually realized before he died?
From this point on David and Elizabeth form a
partnership to follow the winding trail left by the enigmatic Lionel
DeCaylus—to perhaps re-discover the secrets he might have unearthed in his
search for Alexander’s final resting place. Alexander had been interred in
a magnificent sarcophagus for nearly four hundred years under the rule of
the Ptolemy’s and then the Romans, but then the body disappeared to history,
although he remained the revered last true son of Amun-Ra, the supreme god
of the ancient Egyptians.
The quest for Lionel DeCaylus begins with a visit to
Edith Whitely at Salonika and more background information on the strange
peripatetic life of the long-dead archaeologist. Edith urges David and
Elizabeth on to Cairo and the aid of her old friend and colleague, Dr. Lewis
Gobeir, retired Director of Antiquities at the Cairo Museum. They soon find
themselves mired in the sordid and dangerous world of antiquities thieves
and smugglers, but their dogged investigations lead them back in time to an
excavation at Tell El Amarna that likely set Lionel on the trail of
Alexander’s tomb—and unfortunately his death, not by accident as originally
believed, but by murder. Their hunt for Lionel leads David and Elizabeth to
Alexandria, and from there to Mersa Mutruh, a port town on the
Mediterranean, and ultimately to the Siwah Oasis in the Western Desert of
Egypt. It is in this desolate land that all the deadly forces arrayed to
find the sarcophagus of Alexander clash and David and Elizabeth must battle
for their very lives.
Daniel Leston has created an exciting and engaging
archaeological thriller, filled it with sympathetic protagonists and
thoroughly evil villains. Vivid descriptions of exotic locations add to the
enjoyment of reading the novel. Unfortunately, the limitations of e-books
are often annoyingly apparent as shoddy editing leads to too many
typographical and grammatical errors, including the egregious mis-spelling
of Heinrich Schliemann’s name!
Three trowels for this enjoyable leisure-time read.
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