Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [64]
“Every day there was a letter! From the Father of Curses, from Selim, from the Sitt Hakim, telling us what to do. Never have I had so many letters in a few days!”
“It is a good thing you had Jumana to read them to you,” Nefret said without so much as the hint of a smile.
Jumana’s father grunted.
The tomb was in an inconvenient location, halfway down a narrow cleft that split the cliff from top to bottom, and originally it could only be reached from above, by means of a rope. Emerson had widened the lower opening and had had steps built for their convenience while they were working on the tomb; he had torn them down when they finished, in order to make access less convenient for thieves (and the members of the Service des Antiquités). In place of the former stairs there was now a rope ladder, with odd-shaped pieces of wood fastened to the supporting ropes at irregular intervals.
“It is safe,” Yusuf insisted, as Ramses eyed the structure dubiously. “I have been up and down it many times. And it was Jamil, Brother of Demons, who took it to the tomb, descending a rope from the top of the cliff, with great danger to himself.”
“It was not difficult,” Jamil said. “Dangerous, yes, but not difficult for me.”
Modesty was not an attribute admired by Egyptians. Jamil’s boasting was not unusual; and, Ramses had to admit, it was probably justified. The boy was slim and well-built for his size, and the young men of the west bank were accustomed to scrambling up and down rock faces and along precipitous paths that would have daunted most Europeans.
However, he refused Jamil’s offer to ascend first—“to help you and Nur Misur.” Even with Yusuf’s weight anchoring the structure from below, it swayed alarmingly, but it seemed sturdy enough. When he reached the ledge outside the tomb entrance he called down to Nefret to follow. Jamil stood staring up at her as she climbed. That will teach him not to underestimate women, Ramses thought; she was unafraid and as nimble as a boy. The cleft was narrow and the sun was not high enough to shed light into it; when she joined him on the ledge they stood in a gray shadow, enclosed by stone, with only a slit of sky visible high above.
“I’d forgotten what a gloomy place this is,” Nefret murmured.
Ramses put his arm round her and drew her away from the edge. “Let’s have some light.”
The heavy iron gates added a Gothic touch; oil had been pumped into the locks with such excessive zeal that it had dripped, leaving dark streaks and a puddle or two. Nefret held the torch while Ramses got out the keys his father had given him. The locks yielded at last and he pushed one of the gates back. It groaned appropriately and Nefret chuckled.
“All we need now are a few bats and a perambulating mummy.”
“I doubt if there are any bats. We sealed the place up as tightly as we could.”
There were no bats and no mummy, only stale air that caught at the throat. When they reached the antechamber with its beautifully painted reliefs, Ramses was pleased to see that the preservatives they had used, with all due caution, had not darkened or flaked. The rock-cut steps leading down to the burial chamber were uneven. She let him take her hand. He continued to hold it when they stood in the room they had emptied of its incredible litter—broken boxes, fallen jewelry, the queen’s dismembered chariot. The only thing remaining was the huge stone sarcophagus.
Nefret moved the torch slowly round the walls. The closed-in chambers were very warm. Her face glowed with perspiration and curling locks of hair had escaped from under her hat to frame her temples. Ramses said, “I’ve never kissed you in the burial chamber of a tomb, have I?”
“Not yet.” She turned into his arms.
A short time later the torch went out. He didn’t know whether she had switched it off or dropped it, and by then he didn’t care. The darkness of that enclosed space, deep in the cliff, was like a black blanket, muffling all sensations except the exquisitely refined and concentrated sense of