Undeterred by world war and enemy submarines, Amelia and Emerson set sail once again for Egypt, where ghosts of an ancient past and spectres of a present-day evil hover silently over an inscrutable land.

In the autumn of 1915 Cairo is transformed into an army camp teeming with enemy agents and shockingly bold tomb robbers are brazenly desecrating the ancient sites. Amelia seeks refuge at a remote dig in Luxor, but this provides no guarantee of safety when she discovers a fresh corpse in an ancient tomb. But are the Emersons in even darker danger with the intervention of one of Amelia's oldest and most dangerous adversaries? Tanatalising clues suggest this might be so, and point towards an archaelogical discovery of unparalleled importance - and the resurrection of a voice that has been silent for milennia.