"A wizard completely erased from history."
A trace of interest entered Douglas's voice.
"That's far more interesting than finding a famous wizard."
"That was exactly what I thought!"
Bill's voice rose again.
"I'd hit a dead end, with no progress for an entire month. Then one night, while looking at that fake fairy-tale book, I suddenly thought-if you wanted to hide a wizard's story from the wizarding world, what would be the best way?"
He did not wait for Douglas to answer.
"Turn it into a Muggle story and throw it into Muggle history! No one would search through a heap of dusty Muggle records for traces of a powerful wizard."
"And then you plunged straight into the basement of the Cairo Museum?"
"And the Library of Alexandria."
Bill shook his head, as though recalling those grueling days.
"Do you know how dry Muggle archaeologists' records are? I almost thought I'd gone mad, chasing a hallucination sparked by a forgery."
Douglas continued leafing through the notes and found a page devoted to compiling keywords.
"Morning dew, resin, blue lotus, star patterns, Horus with his eyes closed..." he read softly. "You picked apart all the clues in the stories."
"Yes, I treated them as a code. I believed those recurring natural elements were the media that wizard used to cast his magic."
"Then I found a photocopy of a Muggle archaeological document-the Dahshur Archaeological Memoir."
Bill spoke faster, as though he had finally reached the most exciting part.
"It contained a map drawn by a French expedition in 1898. Just west of the Bent Pyramid was a stretch of dunes whose contours matched the arrangement of seven stars in this fairy-tale book's illustration exactly! Beside it was a penciled note in Arabic: القمرالمذاب."
"The melted moon," Douglas translated softly.
"Exactly. The