Going for Gold Read Online Free PDF

forehead. “Yes, sorry, almost got myself in big trouble there! And by the way, these female blenders guarded their secrets very fiercely. You might be interested to know that a Seshet perfumer was once commissioned to create a perfume for Queen Nefertiti.” He noticed a few blank faces. “Have you all heard of Nefertiti?”
    “I know she was pretty,” Yoko said shyly. Khaled made a tisking sound. “No, Nefertiti was not pretty. She was the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen! She ruled Egypt with her husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, more than three thousand years ago. They were an extremely eccentric couple, possibly a little bit mad!”
    I imagined the perfume maker sleepily opening up her shop one morning, to find a royal messenger waiting on her step with a summons to design an exclusive fragrance for the supernaturally beautiful, possibly a little bit mad, Queen Nefertiti.
    “Does anyone know what was in Nefertiti’s perfume?” an angel girl asked in a hopeful voice.
    Maryam laughed. “Women have been asking that for centuries! The blender had to swear to keep the ingredients secret on pain of death. This perfume was for Nefertiti and only her until the end of time.”
    “Was it really special?” Lola asked wistfully. “It would seem so!” smiled Maryam. “Apparently no man could refuse her anything when she wore it.”
    I pictured the lovely Nefertiti removing a golden stopper from an exquisite glass bottle, dabbing a single precious drop behind her ear, and calmly going about her day leaving a trail of dazzled males.
    Khaled sneaked a hasty glance at his watch, “However, we didn’t bring you to Seshet to speak of perfume. Being virtually untouched by the twenty-first century, this site is an ideal place to practice time-stream skills for the first time.”
    Several kids whipped out their palm pilots, but Khaled said we didn’t need to take notes. “Time-stream theory can be summed up in a simple sentence,” he smiled. “Vibes never die.”
    Khaled explained that every soul has its special cosmic signature, a totally unique vibe. Because vibes don’t die, you can still detect that special vibe in the planet’s energy field centuries after the soul in question has left his or her human body. Not just that, once you learn to tune into someone’s soul vibes, you can literally see events from their life playing over again, like a cosmic DVD!
    “But really, why go to so much trouble?” Khaled asked us. “In times gone by, sure, but we have made technological advances since then. We can program a capsule to take us to a specific moment in history and see these events unfolding in real time. Why do
    it the hard way?”
    “To make us more effective celestial agents?”
    suggested someone.
    Everyone hooted. Every time our teachers make us do something that strikes us as completely pointless, they always say it will make us more effective agents!
    Maryam looked amused. “Khaled and I could give you a long list of reasons why acquiring time-stream skills is a good thing, but hopefully you’ll discover them for yourselves!”
    As this was our first attempt, we were allowed to work with someone we knew. I grabbed Lola and we found ourselves a patch of shade under a date palm.
    “Once upon a time, trainees learned time-stream skills as a matter of course,” Maryam told us. “After they had mastered the more advanced techniques, they would be taught how to use them to travel through time.”
    “Don’t worry,” Khaled put in with his warm smile, “we won’t be asking you to attempt time travel today!”
    We had to get into a comfortable sitting position and link hands with our partner. We were instructed to keep our eyes open, as Maryam got us to imagine we were floating in a vast ocean of cosmic energy, with multicoloured currents swirling this way and that. These were the time-streams. Since Nefertiti’s name had come up, our brief was to try to pick up this ancient queen’s