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By Root 1014 0

a ways up the cliff wall, examining it for jarring unevenness or excessive smoothness, symmetrical markings, anything at all that seemed man-made. My other three men hiked some hundred yards out from the cliff, looking upward while the sun was still low, to examine the higher reaches of the cliff wall for likely clefts, marking off anything I missed in my first sketch. Meanwhile, beginning at the landmarks Marlowe and I had made to help us find our way back here, I continued farther to the north and west, simply trying to get a sense of what if anything had been trampled over by Winlock. While the men marched along in their gowns and head wraps, covering their eyes, touching the cliff wall, I found the two boulders leaning against each other that Marlowe and I had noticed when we parked the motorcycle, and the pile of smaller stones we had placed atop one of them when we realised we had discovered something.

“It will be near here,” I called to Ahmed in Arabic.

“Was he a rich king?” Ahmed asked, and to the point. I would have to keep an eye on this one, and no mistake.

Ahmed led me up a path he knew to the top of the cliff wall, some 300 feet above the valley bed. It took us an hour to ascend to this high position, from which my four workers below seemed the merest mice in a vast field searching for one particular twig. Unfortunately, standing on this point, we would be visible to parts of the Valley of the Kings on one side of the wall, and Winlock down in the main basin of Deir el Bahari on the other. So, if there were discoveries to be made from the top down, I would have to work quickly. Clearly, the high clefts would have to be our first priority.

The trouble with these clefts, and their appeal as secret tombs, is that they are invisible from the cliff path above and inaccessible from the ground below. I sent Ahmed back down to the base and then out far enough onto the main valley floor so that he could signal to me with waving arms when I stood directly above the clefts in my drawing, which procedure we repeated until I had placed markers on the cliff-top path, a dozen positions from which ropes would be hung for my close inventory of the cliff face. By this time, our day was nearly complete. We trooped back to the riverbank following our wide safety loop and bid each other salaam until first light tomorrow.

On the gramophone: “No Man’s Land Belongs to Me, Otto.”

Dominoes: A snake up and then back down the stairs ending in a spiral formation under my main worktable. The clicking sound brings the cats!

Wednesday, 1 November, 1922

Ahmed and I disagreed for some time (he with a restrained menace in his voice) as to how best to secure a rope 300 feet above a rocky death. Even as he asserted an expertise with knots (not without some thin-skinned pride), he was praising my upper-body strength (accurately), and claiming a Mohammedan contravention (new to me, but he was adamant) against undertaking any action that would show a hubristic desire to fly in the manner of the Prophet’s ascension to Paradise. Doctrine is doctrine, so with my heart pounding in my ears, I flung myself down 100 feet of cliff while my four labourers wasted valuable time gawking at my bumping, yelping descent until I reached Cleft 1. I alit on a smooth ledge, still in sunlight, but found it was the front porch of nothing at all; the sun easily lit the far back wall of the aperture, no more than four or five feet deep. No inscription, pottery shard, sealed or secret door. I spent an hour assuring myself of this, brushing at every available surface, jabbing with a long metal rod to see if any wall resisted more or less than any other, but I was exploring a water-worn cleft in a cliff face and nothing else. I may have been the first man ever to set foot on it, or I may have been preceded by mediaeval hermits (though I would well understand if they found the perch too isolated and depressing), or perhaps by ancient tomb architects, scouting out possibilities, tetchily shaking their heads at another poor-quality cleft. And another morning vanishes,