He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [163]
“Yes. I have no objection to what you are doing, but perhaps you could do it a little less vigorously. All those buttons and buckles—”
“They are also easily dealt with.”
“I presume you’ve got some tomfool costume for me to wear this evening,” Emerson said. He finished lacing his boots and stood up.
“I have a costume for you, yes, but I shan’t show it to you until it is time to put it on. You always complain and protest and bellow and—”
“Not this time. Peabody, is there any way you can conceal my absence as well as that of Ramses? This is the first time they have left the weapons to be picked up later instead of delivering them directly. I want to be there.”
“Do you think it’s a trick—an ambush?”
“No,” Emerson said, a little too quickly. “Only I—er—”
“Want to be there. Are you going to ask Ramses if you may go with him?”
“Ask him if I may . . .” Emerson’s indignation subsided as quickly as it had arisen. “I can’t do that. The boy is a trifle touchy about accepting my assistance, though I don’t see why he should be.”
“Don’t you?”
“No! I have the greatest respect for his abilities.”
“And you have, of course, told him so.”
Emerson looked uncomfortable. “Not in so many words. Oh, curse it, Peabody, don’t practice your bloody psychology on me. Make a practical suggestion.”
“Very well, my dear. Let me think about it.”
I did so, at intervals during the day. We had got the second chapel cleared down to floor level; the walls had all been painted and there was a delightful little false door, with a rock-cut half-length (from the waist up) statue of the owner, looking as if he were emerging from the afterworld with hands extended to seize the foodstuffs placed on the offering table before him. Ramses rambled about the room reading bits and pieces of the inscriptions and commenting on them: “ ‘An offering which the King gives of bread and beer, oxen and fowl, alabaster and clothing . . . a thousand of every good and pure thing . . . ’ They had such practical minds, didn’t they? An all-inclusive ‘every thing,’ in case some desirable item had been overlooked. ‘One honored before Osiris, Lord of Busiris . . . ’ Nothing new, just the usual formulas.”
“Then stop mumbling over them and help Nefret with the photography,” Emerson ordered.
This was a more complex process than it might appear, for photographs were the first step of the method Ramses had devised for copying reliefs and inscriptions. They had to be taken from a carefully measured distance in order to allow for overlap without distortion. A tracing was then made and compared with the wall itself. The final version incorporated not only the reliefs but every scratch and abrasion on the surface. Ramses did not suffer from false modesty regarding his talents as a linguist, but he would have been the first to admit that some future scholar might find something he had missed in those seemingly unreadable scratches. It was an extremely accurate method, but it took a long time.
Ramses began setting up his measuring rods. I went out to watch Emerson, who was directing the men who were clearing the section south of the mastaba. The intervening space between ours and the one next to it had been filled in, by extensions and/or later tombs. There were bits of wall everywhere, looking like an ill-organized maze. Emerson’s scowl would have told me, had I not already realized, that he had a hard task ahead trying to sort them out.
“Come here!” he shouted, waving at me.
So I went there, and began taking notes as he crawled about measuring spaces and calling out numbers and brief descriptions.
My mind wandered a bit. I had managed to draw Ramses aside long enough to squeeze a little information out of him. He would not tell me where he had to go that night, but he did give me a rough estimate of how much time he would need. Not less than two hours, probably not more than three.
“Probably,” I repeated.
“To be on the safe side, we had better allow for more. What I propose . . .”
What he proposed was that I plead fatigue or indisposition and ask Emerson to take