What the River Knows

Inside the temple, Isadora and Inez bond over their shared experience as young women who are expected to be prim and proper but crave adventure. Isadora leaves to find out what Ricardo is doing and why he seems in such a hurry. Whit confronts Inez and demands to know who was in her room the night before, but she refuses to share her secrets when he guards his own so closely. Inez storms into another room in the temple, where she senses magic. Together, Inez and Whit find a hidden door at the base of a column. They descend a staircase, push open another door, and find themselves surrounded by “untold treasures that had been hidden away two thousand years earlier” (259).

Exhilarated by their discovery, Inez and Whit laugh until they cry. Whit wants to inform Ricardo and Abdullah that they have found the antechamber to Cleopatra’s tomb, but Inez tells him that she doesn’t trust her uncle. Before she can explain why, Ricardo enters the tomb. Ricardo sends Whit to find Abdullah, and he hurries back with the other man as quickly as he can. Inez and her uncle both realize that her father found the ring in this chamber and sent it to his daughter rather than sharing his discovery with his brother-in-law.