HE PULLED HIS HAND back as if scalded. He listened tensely in the darkness. No sound, no breathing.
Tentatively, he reached forward again, lower.
A foot. Five toes encased in a sandal. He ran his hand up the leg. Hairless, cold, smooth.
Mummies were always wrapped in cloth, weren’t they?
Emboldened by this thought, he reached up to the knee, then felt the folds of a stiff tunic.
He rapped it with his fingers: wood.
It was a statue. He sighed and relaxed.
“A goddamned statue.”
He stood and measured himself against it. It was big, nearly seven feet tall. With his hands, he felt the outlines, forming an image of the pose in his mind. It was a classic Egyptian stance—erect, one foot forward, one hand down, fist clenched, the other arm bent at the elbow, holding a staff.
Several minutes passed before he realized the significance of his discovery.
“A statue!”
They had found it. This must be it. This must be the tomb itself.
“Christ.”
They had found it.
He looked at his watch. Three-forty. Wouldn’t they ever come? He was practically choking with excitement. The last tomb. It was right here; he was in it.
A sobering thought came to him—it might be his tomb, too.
He decided to explore further. A few moments of groping brought him to a second statue, apparently identical to the first. They were standing on both sides of the passageway through which Pierce had entered.
He felt like a child with a new Christmas present. It had all come true, all his hopes, his desires. They had done it.
They had done it.
Later, he crawled back to the wall and leaned against it. The excitement, the exertion of the evening, and his own fear combined to make him utterly exhausted. He fell asleep.
When he awoke, he found he was breathing rapidly. He forced himself to slow down, but in a few moments found his breathing was again fast.
What would McKiernan have said?
Pierce had interviewed him eighteen months ago; he was a physiologist working for NASA. He allowed his mind to wander back through the conversation. They had talked about problems astronauts faced. Acceleration, where the forces made a man’s blood as thick as liquid mercury; vibration, which could flap your kidneys against your backbone until they were a bleeding pulp; heat and cold; air.
McKiernan had talked about air. What had he said? Something about carbon dioxide.
He could not remember. The time was eight-twelve.
He fell asleep again, and when he awoke, he remembered. Too much carbon dioxide stimulated respiration—it made you breathe faster.
That meant Pierce was running out of air.
He winced in the darkness.
“The last goddamned tomb.”
For any man, his first tomb was his last.
He looked at his watch. It was eight-twelve. It must have stopped. Hours ago—or minutes ago.
Where were they, anyhow?
The next time he checked his watch, he could no longer read the luminous dial; so obviously, time had passed. He was weak now, unable to do more than lie against the wall, breathing shallowly.
He tried to count his breaths. It gave him something to do. He quit at 1,791.
Then he heard scratching.
At first, he could not be sure, it was so faint. Then there was a tapping sound. He turned to the passage and tapped back.
Next, a metallic ringing. There were tapping to him with the crowbar.
They were out there.
Thank God.
He sank back against the wall. The tapping stopped. It was silent, then a crunching sound, and the stone moved slightly. A moment later, it fell back into place.
Then silence.
They were having trouble.
He felt dizzy, unable to think clearly. He waited passively.
More crunching.
Silence.
“The problem is air,” Barnaby said. He had come back from Cairo just as the other three were about to leave in the Land Rover. Conway and Nikos had been grim; Lisa was obviously upset, struggling to control herself.
Now they stood hunched in the passage, looking at the stone that blocked their way.
“Air,” Barnaby said. “These people knew the secret of airtight construction. We’ve already seen that. We must get air to him.”
He turned to Conway. “How long was the original length of the passage?”
“Are you kidding? We didn’t stop to measure, man.”
“It would have helped if you had,” Barnaby said. “Then we could measure the new length, and determine how big this block is. It could be four feet long and weigh several tons.”
“Talk, talk,” Nikos said irritably. “Get away from there.”
The others stepped back. He wedged in the crowbar and pushed.
A crunching sound, and the rock moved slightly. “It doesn’t weigh several tons,” he said. “Five hundred pounds at most.”
“That still doesn’t help much,” Barnaby said.
“Try to look on the bright side, will you?” Conway said.
From the sunken chamber, Lisa called: “Can I do anything?”
“No,” Barnaby said.
“Yes,” Nikos said. He turned to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“Use your head,” Nikos snapped. “We have to move a heavy object. What have we got to work with?”
Barnaby shook his head.
“The jack from the Land Rover,” Nikos said. He hurried down the tunnel, and they heard him say to Lisa, “Come on.”
Barnaby and Conway looked at each other.
“The man is forgetting something,” Conway said. “That jack requires several inches of space to wedge itself in. This rock sits flush with the ground.”
“What do we do?”
“Look, man, you’re the one who’s supposed to be all rested up and fresh. I’m tired.” He was; he had not slept since he and Pierce had gone out the night before.
“I don’t know.”
Conway bit his lip. “Remember Easter Island?”
“What about it?”
“Do you remember,” Conway said patiently, “the big stone heads?”
“Yes.” Barnaby did not see the point. Easter Island was an isolated place in the South Pacific where there had been erected huge stone heads in the earth.
“You remember how they managed to raise those heads?”
“Sure,” Barnaby said. “With little rocks…”
“That’s right,” Conway said. “The man is right. Now will you get me some rocks?”
“Where?”
“Well, there’s a whole mess of them in the other room. That door fell out and shattered on the floor, remember?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wedge this mother up with the crowbar while you slip the rocks under. Then Nikos can fit the jack in when he comes back. Right?”
That was what they did.
A grinding sound, different from the crunching he had heard for the last half hour. This sound was smooth, continuous. Pierce blinked as pale light spilled into the room. Cool air rushed in; he breathed deeply and relaxed. Dimly, he heard voices.
“There he is.”
“Give me your light.”
“Just a minute, just a minute. Stand back. Give the fella air.” Somebody was shaking him. “Robbie, you okay, man? You still got the old pizzaz?”
Something soft and warm. Hair in his face. Perfume.
“Oh, Robert, Robert. I was so worried.”
Tears.
“Now look at that. Here the poor fella has been suffocating, and the first thing she does, she smothers him.”
Kisses. He felt her lips and opened his eyes.
“Oh, Robert.”
He put his arms around her.
“He has the old pizzaz, after all.”
He began to feel better. He looked up at the three flashlights glaring down at him.
“Hey,” he said, “can’t a guy have any privacy?”
They laughed, blowing out their relief.
She kissed him.
The flashlights turned away. Then Conway said, “Son of a bitch!”
They all looked over.
In the flashlight, they saw a huge statue of a man, stiffly erect. His clothes were gold.
The beam moved. It caught the glint of a second statue. Then around the room, heaped with articles of all sorts—chests, weapons, clothes, urns of alabaster and brightly painted clay, canes, miniature statues of the gods, golden stools, oars, a full-sized gold chariot.
“Welcome to the tomb,” Pierce said.
“It’s not much,” Conway said, “but he calls it home.”
On one wall was a monumental frieze showing the Pharaoh being embraced by Horus, the god with the head of a hawk. The colors were still vivid—reds, blues, purples. On another wall was a large rendering of the scarab beetle, a sacred animal to the Egyptians; above it was a depiction of the sacred procession carrying the king’s mummy to its final resting-place.
Across the ceiling stretched a long line of gods, each dressed like the pharaoh: Anubis, the jackal-god, Sebek, the crocodile, Hathor, the cow, Thoth, the ibis, Horus, the hawk.
Men’s bodies with the heads of animals. Barnaby ticked off the names, then stopped. Nobody said anything for a long time.