She had heard them -- a pack of them, young, a litter and their mother, calling to the moon for their supper. Aliyah did not change her pace, did not look away from the towering rock before her, now so much clearer in the gray outline of morning. They were the tricksters, her people would say -- quick to take human form, to manipulate the weak-minded to swim in their own soup pot, to steal the lioness' mane and blame it on the antelope. In reality they were merely hungry, and she was easy if leather-tough prey.

"What are you doing there?" she demanded of the jackal on the dune, one gnarled hand clutched to her shawl. She waited, but no pups came to join her -- only a mournful yowl in the distance. Anger flared in the old woman's eyes. "You terrible, selfish mother. How dare you leave your babies behind. How dare you hunt for yourself while your children are starving. I'm more than a meal for you and them together, you know it, and you don't care. You turn your back on them." She took a shuddering breath, and she set her old teeth, and she waved her walking stick like a sword. "You go back and you fetch them. You tell them that if I fail today there'll be breakfast enough for all of you, but give me the time to try. I've waited long enough. Give me time." And she set the stick in the sand and shuffled off again, aching and creaking and panting, but she could see the cavern from here.

The great stone pillar was parted like a curtain near the sand, and the old woman ran her fingers over the dusty ancient paintings on the cavern wall. They depicted great wars and winged beasts, golden temples and gods long since lost, painted by the fingers of a dead people. She shuffled slowly along the wall, lit dimly by the first glimmers of sunlight, reading the pictures as if she had a clue what they meant.

She stopped, and her breath caught in her throat. Her finger rested on a small keyhole in the wall, at the eye of a bird-god. She licked her lips, and she turned one aching foot at a time to face it, to press her eye close to it, but there was nothing but darkness, as she knew there would be. She brushed the dust away from the keyhole, and she felt its edges with a shaking finger. For fear of failure she didn't want to try; she didn't want to know whether her hopes had all been for nothing. But she took the brass key from her pocket, and she ran her thumb over it and she whispered a prayer for luck.

"Please," she whispered to the wall, "I'm sorry. Please, just this once, only this once, for a moment, whatever you think of me, let me find what's become of him. I promise I will rest in peace, only knowing. I've left everything else finished, except this. I made a promise. I promised." She slipped the key into the lock in the wall and closed her eyes. "Please."

It did not turn.

She tried turning the other way. She took it out and shoved it back in. She jiggled it and wriggled it. She stabbed the wall with it as if she might make it bleed. The key clattered to the floor, and she slid down with her back to the wall. "So that's it, then." She smiled bitterly, and she laughed, and she laid her head back and sighed, while the sun illuminated the dead pictures.

She pulled a folded letter out of her skirt pocket -- several pages long -- and she read it over, and she read it aloud, and she added a few more lines to the bottom with a stick of charcoal, but never imagined anyone would read them now. She folded the letter to her breast with the key pressed against it, and she told the story of her life to the keyhole in the wall. And when the sun had risen higher and she had finished telling the story of her beautiful, beautiful grandchildren, her crackled voice faded from the echo of the cavern for the last time, and she was still.