Additional ebook reading formats available at: Smashwords.com

The next day Michael was in Maurice Laurent's office, watching him examine the glyph. Laurent was about his age, but looked younger. The archeoastronomer was tall and lanky, his face freckled. His red hair was cut so short that Michael could see his sunburnt scalp. A pair of reading glasses gave him an owlish appearance.

"The star cluster is definitely in the constellation of Orion." Laurent brought the glyph closer to the light. "Hmm. Strange." With a magnifying glass, he continued to scrutinize the tablet. "The stars are configured in a very odd position, and the anchor star is missing. Where did you get it?"

"It was supposedly found at the bottom of a gorge in the Grand Canyon. The person who found it claims it was buried under silt near the waterline of the Colorado River. What's an anchor star, Maurice?"

"It's the star farthest south in a constellation. In the case of Orion, it's Alderban."

"Maybe it was omitted by accident," Michael said without much conviction.

Maurice took another look at the glyph. "The rendition of the pyramids and the Sphinx are remarkable. I've never seen such clarity...and that bird...the epigraphy is extraordinary, the scribed detail superb." Maurice became pensive. Then he said, "I'd say whoever did this knew what they were doing. Alderban is one of the most prominent stars in Orion. I don't understand why it wasn't included..."

more excerpts

An ancient tablet scribed with inexplicable hieroglyphic-type writing found in the Grand Canyon prompts four scientists with different backgrounds and ideologies to search for a secret passage leading to the Sphinx. Their aim? To discover a ten-thousand-year-old link between Egypt and Arizona.

But once the cryptologist gleans the full import of the tablet's message, they realize that before the mystery can be solved, they must first find a cave in El Tovar Canyon.

A murder by an unscrupulous dealer in antiquities ends up complicating matters. When the U.S. government threatens to seal off the cave for reasons of national security, the scientists decide to take matters into their own hands.

What they uncover forces them to make a choice. If they reveal the secret, it could compromise the security of the United States. And if they don't, they could relegate future generations to an inhospitable world.

While surfing the net one day, I ran across a newspaper article that piqued my interest. An archeological expedition had located a previously unexplored cave around the Grand Canyon area in Arizona. There were strange symbols and hieroglyphic-type inscriptions on the cave's wall as well as a rendition of the Horace Falcon.

Although scientists have ascertained that the writing on the cave is over ten thousand years old, they have yet to decode the language.

What interested me most was the drawing of the Horace Falcon. What in the world is an Egyptian symbol doing in a cave in Arizona? And if the scientists had determined that the symbol had been scribed ten thousand years ago, how would it have been possible for someone to have crossed an ocean to put it there?

I thought the premise was very interesting so I decided to spin a yarn that might explain the inexplicable—namely a connection between Egypt and Arizona.

Michael Cole