The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [68]
Emerson caught hold of my belt and pulled me back. “Come out of it, Peabody, we’ve been down here over two hours. You are wheezing.”
Selim, who had accompanied us, was the first to step onto the plank, and although I could have managed quite well unassisted, he and Emerson insisted on holding my hands as I crossed. Hot and sticky though he was, Emerson paused for a moment to look down into the lower part of the shaft.
“Clumsy arrangement,” he remarked disapprovingly, indicating a rope that had been tied round the plank. “That’s how we’ve been removing the rubble, hauling up filled baskets from below. We’ll have to rig up something more solid if we are to go on with this.”
“It was good of you to oblige me, Emerson,” I said. “It is a very nice pyramid after all. I apologize for my disparaging remarks about it.”
Nefret was waiting for us when we emerged. “Goodness, how hot and sticky you both are! Come into the shade and have a drink. You were gone such a long time I had begun to be worried.”
“Obviously Ramses was not,” I said, as he came sauntering toward us, hands in his pockets and hat on the back of his head.
“Did you enjoy yourself, Mother?” he inquired.
“Very much. I am surprised you didn’t join us.”
“When oxygen is limited, the fewer people who breathe it the better. I assume there is nothing down there for me?”
“No inscriptions, if that is what you mean,” his father said hoarsely. “There is plenty to do, however.”
“The most exciting thing,” I said, wiping mud from my face, “is that the shaft is deeper than Barsanti indicated. He did not finish clearing it! The floor is not cut stone but rubble and sand!”
Emerson gave me a companionable grin, his teeth gleaming in the muddy mask of his face. “I suppose you want me to dig the rest of the cursed stuff out.”
“How can you doubt it?” I took the cup of tea Nefret handed me, and went on with mounting enthusiasm. “There may be other passages opening off it farther down, leading to the real burial chamber. Even you must find that prospect exciting, Ramses.”
“Enormously,” said Ramses.
“Don’t let archaeological fever get the better of you, Peabody,” my husband warned. “It is deuced unlikely there is anything down there except rubble. I don’t mind sparing two or three of our fellows to finish clearing it, but there are more important projects.”
“Such as the surrounding cemeteries,” said Ramses. “I had a look from the top of the pyramid while you were down below. The area to the north looks promising. I believe there is at least one large mastaba Mr. Reisner didn’t find.”
“Oh?” Emerson jumped up. “Show me.”
I caught hold of his sleeve. It was soaking wet, like the rest of his shirt, partly from perspiration and partly from the water he had poured over his hot face. “Emerson, sit down and rest a bit first.”
“Later, my dear, later.”
Smiling, I watched him stride off, in animated conversation with Ramses. At least Emerson was animated. Ramses seldom was. I did hope he could find something to interest him. Over the past years he had been something of a scholarly vagabond, studying in one city and working in another, never spending more than a few months a year with us. Emerson missed him a great deal. He had never told Ramses so, for fear it might sound like a reproach and a demand. He must go his own way and follow his own path, said Emerson nobly.
Ramses was a skilled excavator—no man trained by Emerson could be anything else—but his primary interest lay in the various forms of the Egyptian language, and it was most unlikely we would find inscriptions here; none of the earliest pyramids had them, and this was clearly a very early pyramid.
“A nice mastaba,” I murmured. “Full of potsherds with graffiti all over them.”
FROM MANUSCRIPT H
“I did knock,” Nefret said virtuously.
Ramses looked up from his book. “I didn’t say ‘Come in.’”
“When you really don’t want me to come in you lock the door.” She was looking extremely