The novel opens with a Prologue, relating a boy of 14 coming home in a carriage in the snow. The carriage passes a woman and her son and continues to the house, where his widowed mother awaits. She tells him the woman was his late father's mistress, the boy, their son. His mother refuses to help them, and orders her son locked in his room so that he cannot help them.
The scene shifts to autumn 1914, after the outbreak of war, when women give out white feathers for cowardice to any young man not in uniform, like Ramses. Emerson's annual archaeology trip is not stopped by the war, though the Suez Canal, quite close to the dig site, is an immediate focus of the conflict; Britain formalized its protectorate of Egypt to strengthen its position to keep control of the canal. Ramses is working on the dig with his parents. Foster sister Nefret Forth returns from studying medicine in Switzerland, fully qualified as a physician and fully recovered from her brief and mistaken marriage. David Todros, grandson to the late Abdullah, is married to Lia, and he is a fully qualified artist and Egyptologist. The three young adults are close.
