The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [77]
For the past half hour they had been going roughly southwest, and must now be near the mouth of one of the wadis that spread out northward from the plain. It wasn’t the one they had visited twice before; this configuration was quite different from that of the Cemetery of the Monkeys. There was ample evidence of ancient occupation: several deep pits, too obvious to have been overlooked by modern tomb robbers, and more remains of ancient stone huts.
Once he had his pipe going, Emerson opened his knapsack and began fumbling in it. “Hmph,” he said, as if the idea had just struck him. “I suppose I ought to have thought of bringing some water. Are you thirsty, my boy?”
“A little.” It was the understatement of the day; his mouth was so dry it felt like sand. He unstrapped his own knapsack. “I asked Fatima for a few bottles of water. And a packet of sandwiches.”
“Good thinking. No, no—” Emerson waved the bottle away. “You first.”
Ramses took a long pull and watched, with the admiring vexation his father continued to inspire, as Emerson went on rooting round in his knapsack. He had flung his pith helmet aside and the sun beat down on his bare black head. His pipe lay beside him; it was still glowing, and Ramses remembered a story his mother had once told him, about Emerson putting a lighted pipe in his pocket. She had thought it very amusing.
“Ah,” said Emerson, removing a long roll of paper from his knapsack. “Here it is. Hold this end.”
Once the paper was unrolled and held flat by rocks, Emerson said, “I did this some years ago. Very rough, as you can see.”
It was a map of the area, annotated in Emerson’s decisive handwriting, and although it was obviously not to scale, it made the general layout of the wadis clear. They resembled the fingers of a hand that stretched out to the north, penetrating deep into the rising cliffs; below the flatter “palm” was a common entrance, very wide and fairly level, opening onto the plain below. Emerson had labeled the separate wadis with their Arabic names.
“We’re here,” Emerson went on, jabbing at the paper with the stem of his pipe. “We’ll have a look at Wadi Siqqet e Zeide first. Hatshepsut’s tomb is at the far end of it.”
“What are these x’s?”
“Spots I thought worth investigating.”
“You never got round to doing it?”
“There isn’t enough time!” Emerson’s voice rose. “There never will be. If I had ten lifetimes I couldn’t do it all.”
“Have a sandwich,” Ramses said sympathetically. “I know how you feel, Father. We must just do the best we can.”
“Don’t talk like your mother,” Emerson growled. He accepted a sandwich, but instead of biting into it he stared at the ground and said rapidly, “I’ve come round to your way of thinking, you know. The most important aspect of our profession is recording. At the rate the monuments are deteriorating, there won’t be much left by the time your children are grown.”
Considering that they aren’t born yet, that will be a long time, Ramses thought.
The subject of children was one he and Nefret avoided, and so did everyone else in the family. Some of them, including his mother—and himself—knew that her failure to conceive again after the miscarriage she had suffered a few years earlier grieved her more than she would admit. He wanted a child, too, but his feelings weren’t important, compared with hers.
His father appeared not to have noticed the gaffe, if it could be called that. He went on, in mounting passion, “But, confound it, leaving undiscovered tombs to the tender mercies of thieves is inviting further destruction. Finding them first is a variety of preservation, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t agree with everything I say!” Emerson shouted.
“No, sir.”
“You do agree, though.”
“Yes . . .” He cut off the “sir.” Emerson’s morose expression indicated that he was not in the mood for raillery. Ramses went on, “In