Half a second later we were lying flat on the ground, even the camels. Something large and white loomed in front of us – a canvas tent. My heart was going like mad, and I’d a mouthful of dust, but when I heard voices I realised just how close to Carter’s site we were. In fact, we were in it, exactly as we’d wanted to be. Only it suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea.
‘Pah! As I suspected – guards!’ Pepe muttered in disgust.
Tulip groaned. ‘Just what we need.’
Propping myself up on my elbows, I peered around the tent. The torch had gone out. The voices had stopped too. I didn’t dare move an inch more, in case the people were still there.
Oz wriggled alongside me. ‘Torch batteries aren’t very reliable. Though it depends on the type—’
‘For crying out loud, shut up!’ Tulip hissed violently.
Oz sniffed. ‘You never listen to me. Not about torches, or the man at the station.’
Why was he on about that again? The only man at the station I could think of was the one with the nice smile who’d told me to keep an eye on Mr Carter. What it meant to Oz I didn’t know, but he was awfully upset about it. And when I tried to touch his arm, he turned his back on me.
‘It’s this valley.’ Pepe shivered. ‘It casts bad spells on people. Makes them argue and fight.’
Like Grandad and Professor Hanawati, I thought grimly, who’d come here and never been friends again.
We fell into a tense silence. Without the torchlight flitting around it was easier to see things. Just in front of the tent was a heap of rocks, a wheelbarrow, what looked like the electric cables we’d seen earlier running past us in the sand. Beyond that, I saw hooves and swishing tails. Four donkeys were tethered, nosing through a pile of dry grass that’d been left for them.
Beyond it, the sides of the valley rose almost straight up. My stomach fluttered. Somehow, we had to climb that rock face without being seen. Shifting my satchel to the side, I got into a crouching position: ‘I’m going to have a closer look.’
‘Be careful,’ Pepe warned.
Heart in mouth, I inched around the tent. The cables seemed to all lead to one particular spot, where the dark turned deepest black. I blinked, my eyes adjusting.
There it was.
Set into the mountainside like a cave was the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb. Despite all the newspaper headlines, all the gossip and stories buzzing around the world, it looked disappointingly ordinary. Just as Lysandra had described it, in fact, a tomb that didn’t stand out or seem particularly royal.
There was a gate fastened across it – a wooden one, padlocked, which made it look rather like a coal bunker or a garden shed. Lysandra had told us about the rushed, shabby burial, and Maya storming off in disgust. I could see why. Even though Mr Carter must’ve put this gate here, it still felt sad and strange to have a person’s grave under lock and key.
I moved a few steps closer. And a few more. The others were behind me in the shelter of the tent, too far away to call to. I supposed myself very alone. So when I heard voices again it caught me completely off guard.
‘We’re looking, remember, that’s all,’ said a woman.
I froze.
‘Do you have the key, Pecky?’ asked Mr Carter, whose voice I knew instantly and who clearly wasn’t at the cocktail party at all.
‘Here.’ A jingle of metal. The shuffling of feet on grit, and four people came out of the shadows to stand at the top of the steps to the tomb.
‘Not a word of this to anyone, remember. If it gets out we’ve been here, we’ll lose our permit entirely,’ Mr Carter said.
They weren’t officials or guards. They were Howard Carter, Lady Evelyn, a smaller, older man I recognised as Lord Carnarvon, and the person called Pecky with the key, whose silhouette was as huge and wide as a tree.
I dropped to the ground. Not that there was anything to hide behind: I was out in the open. And if I could see Mr Carter’s group, then all it’d take would be a glance over their shoulders and they’d see me.
Oz was right; their torch had given up. Instead, the man called Pecky lit a kerosene lamp. Four faces huddled round it, all yellow-cheeked and shadowy. Once the gate across the tomb was open, they went inside, or rather, clambered in; the passage they disappeared into was still ankle-deep in rubble. All I could see now was the flicker of the lamp against bare walls. I glanced behind me to where Tulip and the others waited. Now was my chance to get back to them without being seen. But Grandad would want to know what Howard Carter was up to – and so did I. I crept towards the tomb.
From inside came a muffled banging noise: something fell to the ground. It sounded like a wall being knocked down. I inched even closer. What were they doing in there?
The banging stopped.
‘This is where they broke in centuries before. Look, you can see where they patched up the hole,’ said a loud, jolly voice that I assumed was Pecky’s.
‘Robbed in antiquity, eh? Just like the rest of the tombs here.’ This was Lord Carnarvon, sounding annoyed. ‘What if we open this up tomorrow, with everyone here, and find nothing but a few old pots inside? We’ll be a laughing stock!’
‘That’s why we’ve come, Papa,’ said Lady Evelyn. ‘We’re just going to check, that’s all. We have to know it’s not been plundered.’
There were more knocking sounds. Something heavy was being moved.
‘If we take out those stones …’
‘There, that’s big enough to climb through …’
‘You try first, Eve, you’re the smallest.’
I couldn’t believe they were going in, without any permission to do so. I supposed that made them almost tomb raiders themselves. If what Pepe said was right, then they’d certainly be so in the eyes of Egyptian law.
Yet part of me couldn’t blame them. I mean, who wouldn’t – after all that digging and money spent, all those hopes and dreams – want to have a sly, secret look at what they’d discovered? Tomorrow, in daylight, it would all be official. Maybe tonight, when they thought they were alone, they could pretend what they’d found was theirs.
Hadn’t I felt that too, that night in my bedroom when I’d unwrapped the jar for the first time? What about Grandad and Professor Hanawati when they’d seen it on a market stall? They knew the jar was valuable, and they’d wanted it for themselves.
So imagine being the first person inside the burial chamber for thousands of years. The last feet to have taken those steps would’ve probably been Lysandra, Ay and the rest of Tutankhamun’s mourners. The thought made me dizzy.
Inside, Mr Carter called for another lamp.
‘What can you see in there?’ Lord Carnarvon asked.
I shuffled forwards till I was at the very top of the steps, holding my breath, waiting for the answer.
Mr Carter laughed. A great, thunderous, disbelieving laugh.
‘Carter, tell me, can you see anything?’ Lord Carnarvon insisted again.
‘Yes.’ Mr Carter sounded choked. ‘Wonderful things.’
I clenched my fists, fighting the urge to run down the steps and have a look myself, and blow the consequences. But I knew already what was in that chamber: Lysandra had told us, so I could see it in my head. Chariot wheels, statues, swords, jewellery and baskets, which Mr Carter and co. were gazing at now in absolute amazement. Little did he know the room might well have been a dumping ground for the palace’s unwanted things. Maybe it didn’t matter: Lysandra’s junk was his treasure. That seemed to be how history worked, sometimes.
As if to prove the point, from inside the tomb, someone squealed with delight. I was almost envious of Mr Carter, then. His dream had come true: he’d finally found what he’d been looking for all these years.
The curse hadn’t put him off. He didn’t fear that ‘death would come on swift wings’ to anyone who touched the pharaoh’s tomb.
But then he didn’t seem the type to be scared of anything. Nor did he have a desperately sick grandfather or a best friend with a scorpion sting. He hadn’t read Lysandra’s account, either.
Anyway, I reminded myself, we weren’t here to take from a dead boy’s tomb: we were here to put something back.
Frantically, I waved to the others behind the tent. With Carter inside gloating over his treasures, we could break our cover. Oz came out first, scuttling low like a spider. Then Pepe, leading the camels, with Tulip on Chaplin’s back.
‘Carter’s inside the tomb. They’ve broken in,’ I whispered once they’d reached me. Tulip and Pepe looked shocked.
‘How on earth did he manage that? Where are the guards?’ Tulip gasped.
‘Money.’ Pepe rubbed his fingers again. ‘He’ll have bribed them to keep quiet.’
‘Well, he’s in there now, so this is our chance to start climbing,’ I said urgently.
Pepe tipped his head back to gauge the cliff. ‘Straight up from here?’
I nodded. ‘Can we leave the camels behind?’
‘No. Both your suggestions are –’ Pepe tapped the side of his head – ‘cuckoo.’
I glared at him, but then I caught sight of Tulip’s leg: it wasn’t realistic for her to walk anywhere, or climb. The swelling wasn’t just in her foot any more, but had spread halfway up her calf.
Desperate, I turned to Pepe. ‘We need to find a way up there. Is there a path?’
He thought about it for a nerve-rackingly long moment. ‘I have local knowledge of the area, yes. Follow me.’
He walked steadily, his light-coloured galabiya visible in the dark. That would also make us easy to spot, so it was a relief when we rounded another heap of stones and were finally out of sight of the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb. The trouble was, Pepe kept walking. The part of the cliff we needed to climb was getting increasingly far behind us.
‘Um, Pepe?’ I spoke up. ‘Where are we going?’
He stopped to point to our left, where the valley side towered above us. In the dark, it was just an outline against the sky, but it did look slightly less terrifying than the other way. ‘You can climb quickly, or you can take the camel way around.’
We had to trust him.
Yet even this route got tricky. The climb was so steep, we soon had to get off the camels and lead them – apart from Tulip, who clung to Chaplin’s neck. All too quickly, I was stupidly out of breath. Either side of the path was loose shingle. Sometimes, bits would fall on us from higher up the cliff.
‘Ouch!’ Oz yelped more than once. ‘That hurt!’ It did too, like someone with a pea-shooter was firing down on your head.
We’d been climbing for over an hour, when Tulip vomited. She did it very neatly over Chaplin’s shoulder, and then insisted she was fine. She didn’t sound it, mind you. I was anxious she was getting worse, and again I thought that we should’ve taken her back to the boat. It was too late now.
The path got even narrower the further we climbed. Under my satchel, my blouse was stuck to me with sweat. Our little rest stops soon started to become more frequent. Oz kept asking for water. Tulip told him to be quiet.
‘How much further to the top?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Not far,’ Pepe assured me. ‘You can almost see it from here.’
You couldn’t, but it was kind of him to lie.
When we set off again this time, the path looped back on itself. I started to feel more optimistic. At least now, I guessed, we were heading back in the direction of Mr Carter’s dig. It was a hard climb, though. We went zig-zag fashion across more of the shingle, which was horrid stuff to walk on: it kept shifting and sliding away from you like loose snow. The camels, with their huge plate-like feet, managed it better than we did, though they didn’t much like it when little stones from higher up the hillside started falling on us again.
‘Arrggh!’ Tulip cried, as one pinged off her cheek. Her camel lurched forwards like he’d been stung by a whip. Luckily, Pepe was leading him and quickly calmed him. Oz and I were holding Charlie, the sensible one, who just grunted and flicked his ears.
The stones kept raining down on us – nasty little things that hurt like anything – and I was worried the whole hillside was about to slide out from under our feet. Something higher up the path seemed to be disturbing the shingle.
Pepe, who’d stopped and was squinting upwards, clearly had the same idea. ‘Oh dear me. I believe we’ve been spotted by a guard.’
‘What? Where?’ Following his gaze, I glimpsed a shoulder, a swinging arm, heard the crunch-crunch of footsteps. Someone was on the path above us.
‘And there’s a little detail I didn’t tell you,’ Pepe confessed. ‘The guards here carry guns.’