The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [47]
“The entrance to the substructure?” I inquired, leaning over to peer in.
“Yes, ma’am. Do be careful, Mrs. Emerson, if you lost your balance you would roll quite a long way.” Geoffrey took me gently but firmly by the arm.
“Ten meters to the bottom of the stairs,” said Emerson. “Then a long gallery which makes a right-angle turn to another stair, with several corridors opening off from it; one leads to an empty burial chamber. The plan indicates a perpendicular shaft going straight up to the surface from the end of the first gallery. Its upper entrance must be …” He shaded his eyes with his hand and went trotting off.
We followed Emerson to the west, where a largish dimple, or concavity, suggested a hollow beneath. “Here’s where the shaft reaches the surface,” Emerson said dogmatically. “What’s in it?”
“In it?” Jack repeated, looking puzzled.
“There must be something in it,” said Emerson slowly and patiently, “or we would be able to see the bottom. It was not left open by the men who constructed it in the first place; that would have constituted an invitation to tomb robbers. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes, sir, that is obvious,” said Jack.
“Ah. I am glad you agree with me. So the builders of the shaft must have filled it with something, eh? Barsanti indicates the existence of masonry in the upper portion. Reisner’s report makes no mention of it. What I am endeavoring to discover, in my clumsy fashion,” said Emerson, “is whether the original filling is still there—and what it consists of—and how far it extends—and whether the shaft contains anything else, such as offerings or funerary deposits or subsidiary burials.”
Jack had, I believe, begun to sense something odd in Emerson’s manner, but having very little sense of humor he could not quite put his finger on what it was. A line in Geoffrey’s thin cheek deepened into a dimple, but he tactfully repressed his amusement. “So far as I know, Professor, no one has excavated the shaft,” he said. “Our team certainly did not.”
“Good gracious,” Emerson exclaimed. “How I admire your courage! If the material, whatever it may be, that fills that shaft, had fallen down into the passageway, you might have been buried alive.”
“We spent most of our time on the subsidiary graves and the exterior of the pyramid,” said Jack. Emerson’s sarcasm had become too exaggerated to ignore; the young man was biting his mustache and glowering.
“Oh, bah,” said Emerson, tiring of the game. “The published reports are shamefully inadequate. Where are Reisner’s field notes?”
Jack was visibly taken aback. “I couldn’t say, sir. I’m sure he would be delighted to show them to you, but without his permission I couldn’t possibly—er—even if I knew how to locate them.”
“Never mind,” Emerson muttered. “I’ll have to do it all over again anyhow.”
“Emerson,” I said. “It is getting late.”
“Yes, yes. Just hang on a minute, Peabody.”
And without further ado he began to climb the crumbling slope, scrambling agilely upward above a miniature avalanche of pebbles and broken stone.
“Goodness to gracious, look at him go!” Jack exclaimed, staring. “I wouldn’t have believed a fellow his size could move so fast.”
“He surpasses his own legend,” said Geoffrey Godwin with an odd little smile. “Do you know, Mrs. Emerson, that before I met the Professor I doubted most of the stories I had heard about him?”
“The only apocryphal stories are the ones about his magical powers,” I said with a laugh. “Though he performs a superb exorcism when called on to do so. As for the other tales, it is impossible to exaggerate where Emerson is concerned.”
“The same is true of the rest of you,” Geoffrey said gallantly. “You too have become a legend in Egypt, Mrs. Emerson, and Ramses is fast becoming