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Maspero was not in Egypt when Mohammed’s revelation broke, but his assistant, Emile Brugsch, went at once to Thebes. He was led to the cache, which was entered by a deep shaft descending from a small opening at the base of a sheer rock wall. Brugsch was stupefied by what he found—the coffins of the mightiest pharaohs of Egypt piled one atop the other like kindling wood. According to his later account, he read some of the cartouches as he moved slowly along the dark, cluttered passages, squeezing past mummy cases and stepping carefully over a litter of smaller objects. The liberator, Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the warrior Thutmose III—thirty-five mummies in all, including the family of the later priest-king Pinudjem, whose coffins filled the final chamber.

Dazzled and disbelieving, Brugsch had to make a hard decision. He knew that he had to get the coffins into safekeeping as soon as possible; it was not unheard of for fellahin to attack archaeologists, and the richness of the find was a strong incentive to violence. He was probably right, but the result was that no records were kept, no plans or sketches made. Wrapping and securing the objects, maneuvering the heavy coffins through the narrow passages and up the shaft, took fewer than six days. They were then carried across the river and loaded onto the government steamer. It is said that as the slow vessel moved downstream the villagers gathered on the shore, wailing and keening in a form of mourning millennia old. It was a touching sight, but one wonders whether they were mourning the loss of their ancient kings, or the removal of a reliable source of local employment.

The Deir el Bahri cache was perhaps the most dramatic discovery ever made in Egypt: the actual physical remains of men who ruled one of the world’s mightiest empires thousands of years ago, men whose names and reputations were as old as legend. Scholars found it a trifle disconcerting to acknowledge that the momentous discovery was made by a pack of crooks, but these lucky intuitive moments do occur, even to the uneducated. They were willing to forgive and forget. In a burst of generosity, the Antiquities Department hired the stool pigeon, Mohammed. It was a good demonstration of the practical value of high moral gestures. In 1891, some ten years after the Deir el Bahri find, Mohammed came to Eugene Grébaut, Maspero’s successor, and ended what must have been a long and painful mental struggle—his new loyalty to the Antiquities Department against his instincts and family ties. The uneducated but inspired Abd er Rassul boys had found another tomb and had made good use of it while Mohammed was wrestling with his principles (the fight had lasted quite a long time). It was the third of the big multiple reburials, that of the high priests of Amon-Re. The second, in the tomb of Amenhotep II, had been found in 1898 by Loret, a professional Egyptologist, who thus retrieved some of his colleagues’ battered reputation for luck. With Amenhotep II’s mummy were, among others, those of Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III, and Seti II.

The royal remains found by Loret were eventually brought to Cairo and united with those of their peers in the Cairo Museum, where, after many journeys, they lie today. Tutankhamon’s sadly decayed mummy, marred by the very unguents and ointment that were meant to increase its hopes of survival, and dismembered by the modern archaeologists who discovered it, still rests within its gilded and guarded outermost coffin in the Valley of the Kings. The skeleton of his brother, Smenkhkare, is also in Cairo.

One might assume that after the bodies of the kings were found in modern times they could expect a final end to their wanderings, in whatever dignity the museum could afford. But such was not the case. The royal mummies had one more journey to make—a short trip but one that, unfortunately, had touches of macabre comedy.

In the early 1930s, when the National Party came to power in Egypt, the prime minister, Nahas, erected a costly mausoleum