Valley of the Kings Read Online Free PDF

was trying to catch my eye. He was smiling.
    â€œCarter,” he said, “it’s about time you brought me an adventure.”
    I was thinking about the lion. I had seen it for only a few moments but the figure was familiar: it closely resembled a larger stone lion that had been unearthed some years before at a quarry in the south, where it had obviously been carved. The lion was lying down, its head turned slightly, and its forepaws crossed. As I thought of the little figure I had just seen, my blood quickened, and I began to walk faster; Carnarvon had to catch my arm.
    â€œHow far is it now?” I asked the old man.
    He gave me an eloquent Egyptian shrug.
    We were now well into the marsh, and the insects had found us. I felt their lancet jaws at my neck and in my ears. The shriek of the marsh bird sounded again, this time to the far right. Stretches of rushes alternated with open water. The path twisted and circled around deep black pools that reflected the moon.
    The lion could have been his talisman. Or a fake, of course, copied from the other stone lion. I began to fret, wondering.
    Ahead, the path pinched down to a thread and wound into a tall thicket.
    Carnarvon said, “Steady.” He had stumbled; his hand caught my arm and he held me. Surprising. He seldom asked for any help. We went into the dark of the thicket, the lacy branches shutting out the moon.
    Abruptly the old man, just ahead of me, darted off into the brush. I yelled, warned. The thicket erupted with men rushing at me and Carnarvon. Carnarvon’s hand tightened hard on my arm; he was pulling me down. The Egyptians shrieked like banshees.
    A piercing whistle cut through the racket. I jumped a foot at the sound. The Egyptians did not hesitate. In unison the whole crowd wheeled and took to their heels. Within seconds the thicket was deserted except for Carnarvon and me.
    Carnarvon laughed. I straightened up out of my crouch, my ears cocked, and looked around. We were alone. The close quarters of the thicket made me nervous; I rushed out onto the open moonlit path. Carnarvon followed.
    â€œWho were you calling?” I said.
    My hands were shaking. I had been ambushed once before, and been badly beaten; I thanked God we had escaped that.
    Carnarvon held out a silver whistle. “I wasn’t calling anyone. You see the power of authority.”
    â€œGood God! Do you mean that was all? They ran from that?”
    He laughed again, this time jubilant. We started down the path toward home, keeping a watchful eye out.
    â€œDamn it,” I said bitterly, after a time, “then it was a fake. Damn, damn.”
    Carnarvon laughed again. He tossed his silver whistle up and caught it in his hand. “A genuine adventure. Let me tell the ladies, Carter.” He tossed the silver whistle up; it sparked in the moonlight.
    Davis kept the licenses to dig in the Valley of the Kings until 1914, damn him, while I wasted my time in Saïs. In the course of it he found a number of tombs and some sensational finds, none more sensational than the ambiguous mummy of Tomb Number 55.
    The Valley of the Kings is a narrow gully cut into the desert just to the west of ancient Thebes. At one end of this wadi, on the lower slope, Davis uncovered the doorway to a corridor that led back into the steep, flinty hillside. It ended at a chamber cut from the cold rock. That chamber was empty, stripped of all the funeral equipment that should have filled it, save for a few wrecked pieces of furniture. But in the alcove in the rear of the chamber, Davis found a mummy, laid out in the conventional pose of a woman, one fist clenched to the breast, and the other arm extended down straight along her side.
    Davis, with his talent for misunderstanding what he found, proclaimed this oddly disposed body to be that of Queen Tiye, the Royal Wife of Amenhotep III, and mother of Akhenaten.
    I say oddly disposed, because, on closer examination, the mummy turned out to be a