The Ape Who Guards the Balance - Elizabeth Peters [35]
After chatting a little longer we took our leave, and had our hands kissed again.
“Curse it,” said Nefret, as we made our way toward the Mummy Room, where we had arranged to meet the others.
“Don’t swear,” I said automatically.
“That was not swearing. What an obdurate old man Maspero is!”
“It is not altogether his fault,” I admitted. “He exaggerated, of course, when he said Emerson could have any other site in Egypt. A good many of them have already been assigned, but there are others, even in the Theban area. It is only Emerson’s confounded stubbornness that keeps us chained to our boring task. Where the devil has he got to?”
We finally tracked him down where I might have expected he would be—brooding gloomily over the exhibit Maspero had referred to. Mr. Davis’s discovery—or, to be more accurate, the discovery of Mr. Quibell, who had been supervising the excavations at that time—was that of a tomb that had survived until modern times with its contents almost untouched. The objects were not as fine as the ones WE had found in Queen Tetisheri’s tomb, of course. Yuya and Thuya had been commoners, but their daughter was a queen, the chief wife of the great Amenhotep III, and their mortuary equipment included several gifts from the royal family.
“Ah, there you are, my dear,” I said. “I hope we did not keep you waiting.”
Emerson was in such an evil temper that my sarcasm went unremarked. “Do you know how long it took Davis to clear this tomb? Three weeks! We spent three years with Tetisheri! One can only wonder—”
I cut his fulminations short. “Yes, my dear, I am in complete agreement, but I am ready for lunch. Where are Ramses and David?”
“They went to look at papyri,” Emerson said. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the doorway.
Though M. Maspero’s methods of organization left a great deal to be desired, he had gathered most of the papyri together in a single room. Ramses and David were in rapt contemplation of one of the finest—a funerary papyrus that had been made for a queen of the Twenty-first Dynasty.
The Book of the Dead is a modern term; ancient collections of spells designed to ward off the perils of the Underworld and lead the dead man or woman triumphantly into everlasting life bore various names: the Book of That Which Is in the Underworld, the Book of Gates, the Book of Coming Forth by Day, and so on. At certain periods these protective spells were written on the wooden coffins or on the walls of the tomb. Later, they were inscribed on papyri and illustrated by charming little paintings showing the various stages through which the deceased passed on his way to paradise. The length of the papyrus and, by extension, its efficacy, depended on the price the purchaser was able to pay. Yes; even immortality could be bought, but let us not sneer at these innocent pagans, dear Reader. The medieval Christian church sold pardons and prayers for the dead, and are there not those still among us who endow religious institutions in the expectation of being “let off” punishment for their sins?
But I digress. More relevant to the tale I am about to unfold is the origin of certain of these papyri. They were buried with the dead, sometimes at the side or between the legs of the mummy. The particular roll the boys were inspecting had come from the royal cache at Deir el Bahri. The mummies of a miscellaneous lot of royal personages had been rescued from their despoiled tombs and hidden in a cleft in the Theban hills, where they had escaped discovery until the 1880s of the present era. The discoverers were tomb robbers from the village of Gurneh on the West Bank. For several years they had sold objects such as papyri to illegal dealers, but finally the Antiquities Department got wind of their activities and forced them to disclose the location of the tomb. The battered, abused mummies and the remains of their funerary equipment had been removed to the Museum.
Nefret went at once to join the lads. She had to nudge Ramses before he moved aside,