Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [57]
“Someone will have to do it someday, Peabody. Can’t leave a thing like that standing. There may be tombs under it.”
“There are plenty of tombs right here. And pyramids.”
Emerson was beginning to react unfavorably to that word. After he had finished expressing himself, he announced we would go back to clearing the chapel before we opened another burial shaft, and I congratulated myself on finding something with which to distract him from his wretched dump heap. Little did I know that we were about to come on something that would distract him even more effectively.
We found it an hour later. To be strictly accurate, the discoverer was Ismail, one of Daoud’s young sons, whom he was training as a basket man. Working under the critical eye of his father, Ismail was removing the fill from the interior of a small chamber that had been added to the larger adjoining mastaba at a much later date by a man who could not afford a separate tomb of his own. Like most of the later additions, it was in wretched condition, and if there had been any reliefs on the upper parts of the walls, they were completely gone. Many excavators demanded no particular skill from the men who performed this heavy task, but our men were taught to watch for anything that might be an artifact or a piece of one. Sometimes, if one of them came across a particularly interesting item, he would call out.
Ismail did not call out; he screamed at the top of his lungs. His cry was echoed by a bellow from Daoud that brought Emerson running and jolted me out of the dreamy state which generally affects me after several hours of sifting rubbish. When I arrived on the scene, Emerson was down into the pit brushing sand away from something and William had joined me, and Daoud was shaking the afflicted Ismail.
“What way is that for a man to behave? You will not hear the Sitt Hakim scream when she finds a dead body.”
“No,” Emerson said. “She is accustomed to them. Don’t scold the boy, Daoud. Let’s have some light down here.”
“What is it?” William asked. “Another skeleton?” He turned on his torch and aimed it at the corner where Emerson was kneeling.
I was able to catch the torch before he dropped it. I had been conscious of the smell for several minutes. It was no skeleton Ismail had found, nor an ancient mummy. Some of them can be rather nasty looking, but a fresh corpse in which the process of decay is well advanced is even nastier. The unfortunate youth had uncovered, not a hand or foot, which would have been bad enough, but a face. The eye sockets and open mouth were filled with sand.
I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone being violently sick, and deduced, since he was no longer beside me, that the sufferer was William. I was not feeling very well either, but I kept the torch steady. Emerson rose to his feet and held up an object for my inspection. It was the twisted wire frame of a pair of eyeglasses.
From Letter Collection T
Dearest Mother and Father,
I write from your “open-air drawing room” on the upper deck of the Amelia. It is late afternoon, almost teatime, and the awning has been rolled back; there is a lovely breeze and the cliffs on the east bank are turning gold. We will stop tonight at el-Til and spend a few days at Amarna checking on the condition of the tombs and “making our presence known,” as you suggested. We will of course invoke the dread names of the Father of Curses and the Sitt Hakim, and I don’t doubt that will be all the authority we need.
I meant to begin this letter earlier and give you a kind of running journal of the voyage, to be posted when we reach Luxor. Laziness is my only excuse—if that is an acceptable excuse! It is astonishing how quickly the time passes on the river, and how easy it is for even energetic persons to relapse into a pleasant languor. Mother and Father, I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you for suggesting and arranging this—especially for arranging it as you did. Believe me,