While Indy prepares the expedition, you are loaned a bicycle courtesy of Salah's brother-in-law. Riding around in the streets is pleasurable after having been shipboard, stuck inside for days.

While you journey you see poverty and despair all around. It was getting dark when you decided to return to the hotel, if you could call it that. On the lawn trimmed in tessellated patterns and framed with low scalloped hedges you rest and look skyward at strange illumination darting through the air.

It moves in spurts very far above leaving clouds and imperceptibly small white motes fall from them. Just before they reach you they cleave red to the north and blue to the south in hundreds of glowing dust like particles. They fascinate you and seem to be attracted to you while they play about you like fairies.

Your attention is now thrown, no grabbed by crude flashes followed by reports of mortar blast. Are we under attack? Just as the shells achieve the highest part of their arch and begin to return to earth only a few hundred feet above, another flash and a harsh spray of glaring light spreads.

Unlike the first lights you saw this one rains orange, is neither attracted or repelled by you, and some of it lands in your eye, burning it.

Hustling inside you are called to the registration desk by the waving attendant and asked if you wish to take up the mail, please, if you are going that direction. Not a problem you say rubbing ash away with your finger in your eye glancing at the address. They are all addressed to Indiana Jones or Salah.

Your bungalow is among several others just like it and is a strange affair. It resembles an H with the legs cut off. Upstairs is one apartment for the guys and across a high walled patio is Marion's room. (You wanted to stay with her, but the management forbade it.)

You walk into Marion's room offering her the mail.

"What's this?" she notes the scribbled message on the back of the telegraph bill. "It reads, 'Come to the lobby asps to see you I must.' and has no signature?".

Through her one small window with intricately designed thick wooden screen you see the large windows of your room across the patio illuminate and quiver as if someone had lighted a candle inside.

"I think Indy's home" say you.

"That's bad and good, local tradition of this hotel doesn't allow you to be in here, you should leave without anyone seeing you."

"O.k." you turn toward the door.

"Wait, don't you want to hear the good news?"

"Oh! What?"

"Indiana Jones is here and I don't like the feeling of this letter. Here," she hands you the amulet, "If I hold onto this it will get me killed. Put it around your waist like a belt and hide inside your pants. Take the mail over to Indy when you are done."

He is just taking off his fedora hat wiping his brow with his sleeve and about to collapse onto the chair when you present him with the letters.

"This one has extra value!" you present the odd note face up.

"Bills! They want the shirt off my back. Here, I'll trade you..." he drops his hat on your head and takes the mail with the freshly emptied hand while collapsing onto the chair.

"Asps!" he jumps to his feet. "take this to the lobby quickly!" he quickly writes a note on the pad before him. How strange you think as he writes from right to left. Tearing it from the pad with haste he hands it to you. "Tell the clerk to give it to the one that was asking for me!"

"What does it say?" it looks like scribbles.

"It's written in Arabic, The note reads strip your clothes and bring nothing but the map here to the patio."

Marion has entered while this was going on and Indy instructs her to take his gun and stand behind her window and wait with it.

You descend the stairs two at a time when a shadow moves at you from the bottom. It's Eric the dark one from the ship. You stop in your tracks.

"I have decided to come early, no need to meet me in the lobby." You hear four wisps.

"This must be yours." you hand him the note. "I have to go to the bathroom."

"Your just a child! I though that you were Professor Henry Jones, Junior."

"He hates being called junior, and I'm not a child." you say as you squeeze cautiously by him on the stairs. Your forehead itches but it can wait. "Wait! you call up. "Take off your clothes."

"I will do nothing of the ..."

"Read the note if you want to see the top of the stairs."

He reads it and removes his jacket, tie and shirt. A large knife is removed with them and he proceeds up the stairs.

You see something in his pants. "I'll have that too." you point to the outline.

"A map." he displays.

"And your shoes. O.k. go on up." you duck as he throws his tan linen suit over your head.

He leans down and hisses "Asps, very dangerous, don't go in."

The bathrooms here aren't like the ones in the states at all and this one is hard to find. You didn't need to visit anyway. It was a good ruse though. As you fumble around in the dark you scratch where the amulet hangs and discover two cold metal darts dangling from the cloth of your trousers.

Remembering the sound of breaking air you reach to the hat Indy left with you and discover that it has four more darts it. It is a good thing it fit too generously.