“This is the place,” said Kit, gazing around. “Here is where we make camp.” The bowl-shaped gulley was much the same as he remembered it, with only slight variations-so slight, in fact, that Kit had difficulty remembering that this was not the place he had been before. In this world, it was 1822 and there were neither tents nor Burley Men, and no excavated tomb either: just the sheer dust-coloured rock walls and the dry and empty wadi floor winding away on either hand. The great empty temple was there and still empty-though the interior, when inspected later, bore signs of scavenger activity. Indeed, there was no guarantee that Anen had even lived in this world, much less that he had been buried in the wadi.
“Are you certain this is the place?” Thomas, sweating beneath his big white straw hat, patted his brow with a handkerchief and looked around doubtfully. “I have to say, I have never heard of a tomb located in such a remote and inaccessible location. I would never have thought of digging here.”
“If the tomb is here at all, it will be in this wadi,” Kit assured him. “Somewhere…” He paced along the eastern branch a few dozen steps and stopped at a bend in the rock that looked faintly familiar. “Just about here, I’d say.”
He pointed to the base of the curtain wall. “Somewhere along here is the entrance. There are steps leading down to the burial chambers below.” He looked along the seamless wall for any sign of the tomb but saw nothing to betray a hidden entrance. “At least, that’s the way I remember it from the other place.”
“Then that is where we will begin.” The doctor told Khefri to have the men unload the animals, unpack the equipment, and set up camp.
Soon the area resembled a bedouin village, complete with low, wing-shaped tents and a tiny campfire of twigs and dried dung over which flat bread baked on the bottom of an upturned pot. Sweet acacia smoke drifted on silvery threads into the air, and as the sun sank below the surrounding hills, an air of peace and calm descended over the ancient burial ground.
While the evening meal was cooking, the doctor took a long, thin iron rod and began probing the sandy floor of the wadi where Kit had indicated, thrusting the tip of the rod deep and waggling it around, searching for any fissure or other anomaly that might betray a manmade structure. “This is how we begin,” Thomas explained. “You would be surprised what can be learned by literally poking around.”
Working methodically, he applied the rod along the base of the wadi wall; when he finished, he had identified a half-dozen places where exploratory trenches would be dug. Kit was satisfied that at least one of them would turn out to be the sealed entrance of the tomb.
Darkness claimed the day, and after their simple meal the men rolled in their cloaks to sleep, and soon the camp was at rest in the silence of the desert. Kit himself spent a restless night troubled by dreams of finding the bones of Cosimo and Sir Henry, or worse: being locked in the tomb with their rotting corpses.
Those unhappy thoughts cast a dark cloud over his soul that lingered through the next day until, at the third trench, the diggers uncovered a large capstone set in the wadi floor. Khefri came running with the news. “Sir! Sir, come quickly. Dr. Young is calling for you.”
“What is it?” Kit was lying on his grass mat in the shade of the tent, having completed a tiring stint at the second trench. “Have they found something?”
“It is the entrance of the tomb.” Khefri dashed away again. “Hurry!”
Kit jumped to his feet and rushed after the swift Egyptian. “That’s what I’m talking about! Now the fun begins.”
CHAPTER 20
It took two days to clear the rubble from the tomb entrance and the small forechamber, filled as both were with sand and rocks and bits of shattered pottery. On the morning of the third day of the dig, Thomas and Kit stood together and viewed the main chamber of High Priest Anen’s tomb. “Someone was in a terrible hurry,” Thomas pronounced upon seeing the extent of the wreckage.
A new worry snaked through Kit. “You mean the tomb has been robbed?”
“Oh, no. That is not my meaning at all-quite the reverse, if I am not mistaken.”
“Then…” Kit puzzled over this, but the sense eluded him. “What?”
“The burial crew would seem to have been in some haste to discharge their duties and seal the tomb before it could be discovered. See here”-he gestured at the box-like room filled chockablock with debris-“in a funeral of state, the priests would have taken care to preserve the sanctity of the tomb. Egyptians loved ostentation-have you noticed how they decorated every inch of every available surface in a temple with all manner of paintings and carvings?”
“I have, yes.” It was true, thought Kit. Egyptian temple art was nothing if not spectacularly busy.
“It is the same with their tombs. Ordinarily, the chambers are filled floor to ceiling with objects the deceased required for his journey through eternity. A high priest would have anticipated a sumptuous afterlife surrounded by the objects he valued and all that was most needful for his eternal existence.”
“But they didn’t do that here,” said Kit, grasping for the meaning, “because they didn’t have time?”
“Precisely,” affirmed Thomas. He gestured towards the great heap of broken stone, the remains of building rubble. “We may learn the reason for their unseemly hurry when we have cleared all the chambers. There are two more, I believe?”
“That’s right.” Kit pointed across the room to a barely visible wall. He tried to visualise the chamber as he last saw it. “The room we’re interested in is somewhere back there. At least, it was the last time I was here.”
“Correct me if I am wrong,” suggested Thomas, his steel-rimmed glasses glinting in the faint light as he turned to address Kit directly, “but strictly speaking, you have never been in this tomb.”
“Strictly speaking, you’re right.” The tomb Kit remembered was in a different dimension-a fundamental fact, but one he had trouble remembering.
“We will begin clearing this chamber today,” Thomas said, rubbing his hands in anticipation. “But we want more workers. I think I shall send Khefri back to fetch Khalid and his crew from Luxor. Have you any objection?”
“None whatsoever. You’re the doctor.”
Three days later Khefri returned with the new workers-seven expert excavators, including Khalid-and three donkeys and five pack mules laden with additional tents, tools, water, and provisions for an extended stay in the desert. After half a day’s rest from the journey, the dig shifted into a higher gear, and Kit was glad to see the work progressing by leaps and bounds. At the end of the second day, the main chamber was cleared of rubble and the back wall fully exposed to reveal an expanse of white plaster with vertical bands of hieroglyphs in black and yellow.
“There is a door to a smaller chamber,” Kit explained, stepping to the wall. He ran his hands along the surface, turning his palms white from the plaster. “It should be right about here.” He brushed his hands on his trousers and turned to Dr. Young. “But you have to remember, none of this was here when I saw it before.”
“The plaster will be removed-starting in the area you have indicated,” Thomas told him. “That will be tomorrow’s exercise.”
The labourers were sent out to sift the rubble for any fragments of interest, while the doctor assembled his drawing instruments and drew up a scaled representation of the wall. Then Thomas, Kit, and Khefri set about painstakingly recording the hieroglyphic bands covering the area of the hidden doorway, a task that occupied them far into the night-and would have taken far longer but for Khefri’s native facility with rendering the old symbols.
The next day they were back at work before sunrise. The more skilled workers were detailed to chisel away the plasterwork covering the doorway to the hidden chamber-but only after Thomas was satisfied he had matched every symbol against the rendering copied the night before. “I will save these to decipher at my leisure,” he explained, rolling up the last long scroll of paper. He gave a nod to Khalid, who commanded the workmen to ply the hammer and chisel to the wall.