IN HIS DUSTY WORK clothes, Pierce felt out of place in the lobby of the Winter Palace. The clerk looked at him in suspicion. “You wish to send a telegram to Tangier?”
“That’s right.”
“Please fill out the form. Are you a guest in the hotel?”
“No.”
“That will be five pounds.”
Highway robbery, Pierce thought, as he paid and filled out the form.
REQUEST ADDITIONAL 7500 DOLLARS IMMEDIATELY
PIERCE
Four days later, Lord Grover sat with them around the evening fire.
“What have you done so far?”
“Nothing,” Conway said. “We haven’t touched a thing.” He nodded toward Barnaby. “He’s playing archaeologist.”
“We must proceed slowly,” Barnaby said. “We must learn all we can.”
“Have you found the coffin?”
“Sarcophagus,” Barnaby corrected automatically. “No, not yet. The room we have discovered seems to be an antechamber or storage room. It communicates through a plaster door to another room, which we suspect may be the actual burial chamber. But we have not yet opened that door.”
“I want to see the mummy,” Grover said, rubbing his hands.
“In good time,” Barnaby said. “We must go about this in an orderly fashion.”
“You shouldn’t have called me,” Grover said, “until you had the mummy. I was all set for the mummy.”
“You ought to be able to amuse yourself until then,” Conway said. Grover had brought along a new pair of girls: a silently beautiful girl from Hong Kong and a robust, hugely-proportioned German. They made an absurd pair, but he seemed to relish variety.
Pierce sat by the fire, holding Lisa’s hand. They had been inseparable for the last week. The tension between them had snapped abruptly, after the accident.
“In Cairo, I tried to buy some marijuana,” Grover continued. “And you know what they told me? That it was illegal. Illegal. Bloody wogs.” He turned to Pierce. “I understand you had a bit of trouble,” he said. “Feeling better now?”
“He feels fine,” Lisa said.
Grover blinked but said nothing. He shot Pierce a quick glance, then turned to Conway.
“How’s the weather been?”
“Nice. Real nice. A little unpredictable, but that makes it interesting.”
Barnaby said, “How long will you be here?”
“Long enough,” Grover said, “to see the mummy. I just want to see the mummy. Then I can die a happy man.”
“Nobody dies a happy man,” Nikos said.
Barnaby bent over the alabaster vase. It was delicately shaped like a lotus bud. They had moved floodlights into the antechamber to give them working light.
Barnaby read the inscription on the vase: “May your ka live eternally; may you pass millions of tranquil years, you who loved Thebes, seated with your face turned to the north wind and your eyes contemplating happiness!”
“Very nice,” Nikos said. “Who’s ka?”
“The ka is the soul,” Barnaby said, turning the vase in his hands. “And a north wind is the prevailing direction of wind on the Nile. It was then and still is.”
“That’s nice. When do we open the door?”
“You mean to the next room? Soon.”
Lord Grover walked gingerly among the objects in the antechamber. This was his first chance to see it all, and he said very little. He walked up to the twin statues and peered into the faces, which stared solemnly forward.
He looked down at the base of one statue. “What’s this?”
“Don’t touch!” Barnaby said.
“I wasn’t going to touch,” Grover said, withdrawing.
“They’re offerings. Olive and persea.”
Grover peered down at the branches and leaves. “Three thousand years old,” he said. “Remarkable.” He looked over to Nikos. “Do you suppose they used hashish? I wouldn’t be adverse to a little three-thousand-year-old hashish.”
Nikos shrugged: “It’s all the same.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Perhaps that’s the point, isn’t it?”
He walked over to the gilded chariot and ran his hand over the golden rim of one wheel, which was inscribed with hieroglyphics. “What does this say?”
“Don’t touch!”
“All right, all right.”
“That’s a chariot,” Nikos said.
“For the use of the soul in the afterlife,” Barnaby said. He was busy deciphering an inscription on a small wooden chest. Inside the chest was clothing, carefully packed in linen—sandals, necklaces, robes. The cloth had rotted in places, but it was still easily identifiable.
“Thought of everything, didn’t they?” Grover said.
“Don’t touch!”
“God Almighty,” Grover said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “The man’s gone berserk.”
Later, Grover spoke to Pierce alone. “What’s the matter with Barnaby? He wasn’t like this before.”
“It’s the tomb,” Pierce said. “He’s been officious ever since we found it. Believe it or not, in the last few days, he’s improved considerably.”
“I should never have suspected.”
“Well,” Pierce said, “in a way, I can see his point.”
Grover’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Just that, considering what’s in there—what it’s like and what it must have been like—we can’t really barge through and plunder it, can we?”
Lord Grover thought to himself, I am a good judge of character after all. He said, “No, I suppose not.”
“You’re new here,” Pierce said. “Barnaby will relax in a day or so, and I’ll show you some of the things we’ve found. They’re really quite interesting.”
Pierce showed him everything.
A clasp, tooled in red gold, depicting the pharaoh in his chariot, returning with prisoners from a triumphal war.
A scabbard of gold, ornamented with prancing horses, which held a gold knife and a jeweled hilt.
A fly whisk made of thin pounded gold, fan-shaped. It showed the king hunting ostriches on one side, waterfowl on the other.
An unguent box shaped like an oval cartouche and inlaid with lapis lazuli. It was empty; Barnaby thought it was probably used for rituals only.
A footrest of blue glass and another of wood, on which was carved the images of the pharaoh’s enemies—Assyrians and Nubians, Libyans and Sudanese. A small box with a secret catch, containing a piece of soft wood and a hand drill for starting fires.
Gloves of soft skin.
Boomerangs, constructed in all shapes and sizes, for killing the wild birds that lived in the marshes along the riverbanks.
Small jeweled statues of the cobra and vulture, royal symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt.
A square box inlaid with ivory; inside was a round wooden knob at the end of a stick. Barnaby thought it was a box for storing the king’s wigs.
A remarkable collapsing bed that unfolded to three times its stored length. Probably for the pharaoh’s use on the battlefield.
Dried food: meat and grains, as well as various kinds of seeds. Large jars of wine.
Alabaster lamps elaborately carved in decorative motifs—the lotus and papyrus and other flowers. One lamp was carved in the shape of a crocodile.
Lord Grover watched Pierce carefully as the objects in the room were shown to him. He found Pierce’s own attitude toward the objects unusual. There was pride in his voice as he explained them, but it was not simply pride in the quality of the work or pride in his own discovery of the tomb. It was neither, or both. Grover could not be sure.
At the end of the evening, Conway came up and said to Grover, “How do you like it?”
“Fabulous,” Grover said.
“Well, I’ve been thinking. This was a rich fella, all right, but he had a few extra things going for him.”
“Like what?”
“No income tax,” Conway said, and laughed.
Several days later, they broke down the plaster door. First, they cut open a small hole, a foot in diameter, and shined a flashlight through. Barnaby peered in.
“What do you see?”
“Gold.” He sucked in his breath. “A solid wall of gold.”
They continued work, widening the hole. It was soon clear that the room was almost entirely filled by a huge gold box, intricately chiseled. There was barely room for a man to slip around it, so completely did it fill the room. When the door was cleared away, Barnaby entered the next chamber and examined the carvings and inscriptions and tapped the box.
“Gilded wood,” he said. “A gilded wood shrine.” He looked at it, estimating the dimensions. “Say ten feet by sixteen. It must contain the sarcophagus.”
He edged his way around the box. The others followed.
“Careful,” he said. “There are things on the floor.” He stooped to pick up a necklace of semiprecious stones.
“This room is oriented on a north-south axis,” he said. “The door should be over…ah, yes. Here it is.”
“Door?” Lord Grover said. “Wait a bit. I must see this.” He was having difficulty squeezing his bulk through the narrow space between the shrine and the walls.
At one end was a set of hinged doors.
“I thought it opened upward,” Grover said.
“No. This is just the shrine. The sarcophagus itself will open upward.”
Grover nodded. The others clustered around.
“Well, go ahead man, go ahead.”
Carefully, Barnaby freed the latch and swung the doors open.
Another shrine sat inside, covered with a yellow veil and sprinkled with tiny daisies of solid gold. The veil was held in place by a wooden frame. Barnaby pushed it aside and opened the next set of doors.
Still another shrine was revealed.
“My God,” Grover said. Outside the shrine were stacks of weapons and linen bandages neatly rolled in small bundles.
Barnaby broke the seals on the third shrine and found a fourth. Like nesting boxes, each fitted with close precision inside the next larger.
“Bring the light closer,” Barnaby said. His voice was tense; a rivulet of sweat ran down his forehead to his neck. “This one is different.” He examined the door, which showed Isis, arms raised, protecting the contents of the shrine.
“I think this may be the last one.”
He broke the seals. The doors creaked open, with the dust of centuries fluttering down from the hinges.
A glimpse of red stone. The doors opened wider. The sarcophagus.
There was still room within the fourth shrine for a man to walk inside. Barnaby stepped in and circled around the sarcophagus, which was square and smoothly finished.
“Red sandstone,” he said, “A very nice job.”
“The mummy’s in there?” Grover said.
“Yes. There will be several nesting coffins, just as there are several shrines. The first coffin is probably gilt wood. The second may be an alloy. The final coffin may be solid gold.”
“Hey,” Nikos called from another part of the room. “Look at this.”
The others came around the shrine to where he was standing.
A low opening led from the burial chamber to another room. The entrance was guarded by an immense statue of a black crouching dog, ears pointed, nostrils flaring.
“Anubis,” Barnaby said. “The black jackal. He opens the roads to the other world for the dead and supervises embalmings. They called him the usher of Osiris.”
The statue glared fiercely at them.
“Wouldn’t like to tangle with that,” Conway said. He patted the forepaw. “Nice doggie.”
“Let’s see what’s in the room he’s guarding,” Barnaby said, ducking through the opening. “You see, Anubis was responsible for seeing that the gifts given to the deceased by mourners actually—”
“What’s the matter?”
“Come inside and look.”
Nikos entered and whistled softly.
“Yes,” Barnaby said, “I was right. This is the treasury.” Gently, he lifted one of the many chests and boxes stacked around the room.
It was filled with jewels.
“Merry Christmas,” Conway said. He opened another chest and found stacks of gold weapons and canes. Solid gold.
Grover went over to a small gilded box, inside which rested an urn draped in linen. He plucked away the linen, and started to lift the lid. “What do you suppose is in here?” Urns in the antechamber had contained rare spices and oils, frankincense, and myrrh.
“Probably,” Barnaby said, “the guts of the king.”
“Oh.” He stepped away from the urn without opening it.
“How do you know?” Pierce said.
“I don’t. But you’ll notice there are three other urns, set around the room in a rough square. Probably all four are canopic jars containing the pharaoh’s viscera, which were removed at the time of embalmment.” He went to one urn, picked it up and pointed to the figure painted onto it.
“Hapy, the dog-headed ape, guardian of the lungs.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Grover said. “Show me some of those jewels.”
The next chest they opened was a beautifully inlaid piece containing a scribe’s complete equipment—an ivory pallet, a small alabaster bowl, three cakes of ink, and a reed pen.
Behind the chests were stacks of furniture, carelessly jumbled, for the king’s use in the afterlife. Then several ankhs, the staff of life, in gilded wood and numerous small statues.
Finally, they came upon a miniature coffin shaped like a human body but only six inches long. It was made of copper inlaid with colored glass. Conway opened it and handed the lid to Barnaby.
“A royal cartouche,” he said, puzzling over the inscription. “But a woman’s name. Probably the queen.”
Conway found only a small object wrapped in linen. It turned out to be another sarcophagus. Within this, wrapped in more linen, was a curl of auburn hair.
“What do you know,” he said.
“The soul of a romantic,” Grover said.
“It was probably his mistress,” Nikos said.
Pierce had wandered back to the shrine and the sarcophagus. He was curious to know how heavy it was and whether they could remove the lid. A few moments of inspection convinced him that it would be quite difficult; the lid was a single slab of stone, six feet by three and nearly a foot thick.
Nikos came back, and together they examined the problem. They decided it would be necessary to dismantle the four shrines and then to jack up the lid. That would take several days.
“Of course,” Nikos said, “we already have enough without breaking into the sarcophagus. It’s not necessary.”
“Yes,” Pierce said. “It is necessary.”
“Barnaby says that there are probably several more interlocking coffins inside, but not much easily transportable—”
“We have to do it,” Pierce insisted.
“Why?”
“Because I want to have a look at him.”
A week later, grunting and straining, they removed the lid. Lying inside the stone sarcophagus was a coffin of gilt wood. The Pharaoh lay on his back, arms folded across his chest, each hand gripping a scepter. He wore the headdress of the vulture and cobra, twin symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt, and his beard was carefully braided. His lips were set in a firm line, and his eyes stared upward at the ceiling.
The expression was peaceful but expectant, as if the king were awaiting the gods who would carry him through the twelve chambers of the underworld, down the eternal Nile in the sky.
Pierce looked at the face and said nothing for a long time.
“Meketenre,” he said at last. “He’s lucky. If we didn’t discover him, nobody would ever remember him. But he’s going to be famous. We’re doing him a favor.”
“You’ll have to pardon him,” Conway said, “if the man doesn’t say thank you.”
The next day, Nikos left for Aswan.