The Ape Who Guards the Balance - Elizabeth Peters [181]
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Sixteen
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The final catastrophe, as I must call it, took place on the following Friday. Nefret was the only one of us who was allowed to be present when the mummy was finally exposed. How she managed it I do not know, and I prefer not to inquire. Her qualifications were as good or better than those of many of the persons who were there, but I suspect it was not her professional expertise that won her permission from Mr. Davis and M. Maspero. We watched them pass: Maspero and Weigall; Ned and Mr. Davis, in his absurd gaiters and broad-brimmed hat; the ubiquitous Mr. Smith.
It was late afternoon before she returned. We were waiting for her—like a flock of vultures, as Ramses remarked—outside our own tomb, for our mounting curiosity had made work difficult, and we had finally dismissed the men and found places in the shade. Emerson was smoking furiously and I was attempting to distract myself by making additions to my diary. Ramses was scribbling in his notebook, apparently impervious to curiosity; but he was the first on his feet when Nefret came unsteadily up the path. He went to meet her and found her a handy rock, while I uncorked my water bottle.
Emerson removed his pipe from his mouth. “Is there anything left of the coffin or the mummy?” he inquired.
The quiet purring voice warned her, but she was too upset to care. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and gave me the bottle.
“The coffin lid is in three pieces. They’ve got it on padded trays. The mummy . . .”
The head and neck of the mummy had already been exposed. When Maspero and the others raised the lid of the coffin they found that the body was entirely covered with sheets of thick gold. They removed these, and then they lifted the body.
Emerson let out a cry like that of a wounded animal.
“It gets worse,” Nefret said. She was talking very quickly, as if she wanted to get it over with. “There was water under the mummy. And more gold. One of the sheets was inscribed. M. Maspero said it had one of the epithets of Akhenaton. The body itself was wrapped in linen, very fine, but dark. Mr. Davis took hold of the linen and tried to pull it back, and the skin came off with it, exposing the ribs. There was a necklace—a collar, rather. Mr. Davis took it off, and poked around looking for loose beads, and then the rest of the mummy just—just disintegrated into dust. There’s nothing left but bones.”
“What about the head?” Ramses asked. He sounded quite calm, but he took a tin of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. I did not comment.
“Mr. Davis removed the pectoral—he still thinks it’s a crown. The face was damaged, but there was some skin remaining. At first. One of the teeth fell out when he . . . Well, to make a long story short, they all pranced around and congratulated one another, and Mr. Davis kept shouting, ‘It’s Queen Tiyi! We’ve found her.’ Only they haven’t, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Emerson raised his bowed head.
“They wanted to send for a doctor to look at the bones,” Nefret explained. “To see if they could determine the sex. There wasn’t . . .” She glanced at me. “At least I didn’t see . . . But I might not have.”
“No,” I said. “Not if the body fell apart so completely and so rapidly. But you were there; why did they want to send for another qualified medical person?”
“Don’t be absurd, Aunt Amelia. Do you suppose any of them would consider me qualified? A woman? Ned did speak up for me, and Mr. Davis consented to allow me to have a look—chuckling merrily at the very idea. I told him it wasn’t a female skeleton, but he just went on chuckling.”
“Are you sure of the sex?” Ramses asked.
“As sure as I can be after such a brief examination. I didn’t dare touch anything. The skull was damaged, but the undamaged portions were typically masculine—the supraorbital ridges, the overall muscular markings, the shape of the jaw. They wouldn’t let me measure anything, but the angle of the pubic arch looked—”
“The skeleton was intact, then,