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A cylindrical seal was found on the bier and Davis deciphered a name from it. Tu-api, along with a designation for a highborn woman. A princess, not a priestess, then. We also found a golden amulet, carved in the shape of a goat standing on its hind legs. There’d been a second goat, a matching partner, but that one was crushed beyond mending. Pictures of all the ornaments had to be finished in a rush and sent off to Lord Wallis. The goat is really lovely and my photograph showed it well; no one need feel apologetic for that find.

But best of all were the stones and shells that Davis had been excavating. Mallick believed there’d once been a wooden box with pictures pressed into its sides. The box had disintegrated and the two sides fallen together, but Davis was slowly putting them to rights. One side showed scenes from ordinary life. There was a banquet with guests and musicians, farmers with wood on their backs, oxen and sheep. The second side was all armies, prisoners of war, chariots, men with weapons. Before and After, Miss Jackson called it, but Mallick called it Peace and War to clarify that it represented two parts of a cycle, and not a sequence, that peace would follow war as well as precede it. The artist must have been remarkable as the people were quite detailed, down to the sorry look on the prisoners’ faces.

Patwin criticized me for taking more pictures of Tu-api than of the kneeling girls or the poor musician. Tu-api, he guessed, had the good fortune to die of natural causes. He said that I must fight the bourgeois impulse to care more about the princess than about the slave. It would be even harder, he conceded, now that the princess had a name.

“Does he always lecture at you like that?” Miss Whitfield asked.

Because I was busy developing pictures of golden goats and verdigris bowls, because we’d already sent Lord Wallis plenty of photographs of skeletons, I left my shot of Tu-api untouched for a couple of days. It was late at night when I put it through the wash and hung it up. I didn’t look at it closely until the following morning. In my photograph, Tu-api had a face. This wasn’t part of the picture exactly, but a cloudy, ghostly spot superimposed over the skull. It made my skin crawl up the back of my neck and I took it to the dig to show the others. It was a hot day and the air so dry it stung to breathe. I found Mallick, Davis, and Miss Jackson all together in the third chamber.

They were not as unnerved as I was. A human face is an easy thing to find, Davis pointed out, in the paint on a ceiling, the grain in a wooden board. “I once saw the face of God in the clouds,” Miss Jackson agreed. “I know how that sounds, but it was sharp and perfect, like a Michelangelo. Sober and very beautiful. Thin Chinese sort of beard. I got down on my knees and watched until it melted and blew away.”

This sudden display of fancy from solid, cylindrical Miss Jackson obviously embarrassed Mallick. He came over scholarly in response, with his dry voice and those sad eyes. “I’ve heard of places where bodies are naturally preserved right down to the facial expression,” he said. “In the Arctic ice, for example. At very high altitudes. I’ve always thought those discoveries must be rather grim.”

“Buried in the bogs,” Patwin said. He had arrived with Miss Whitfield while Mallick was speaking. He held out his hand for my photograph and looked it over silently. He handed it to Miss Whitfield. “I knew a man who’d met a man who’d found a thousand-year-old woman while digging for peat. He said you can’t look into a thousand-year-old face and not find yourself just a little bit in love. You can’t look into a thousand-year-old face and think, I bet you were an annoying old nag.”

“You’ve just put your thumb here on the print,” Miss Whitfield suggested to me. As if I were eight years old and playing with my father’s camera.

I imagined myself with my hands about her throat. It came on me all of sudden and shocked