The Book of the Dead (13 page)

She had asked for accession files to the Tomb of Senef and all related documents in the archives, from its discovery in Thebes to its final 1935 closing as an exhibition. It looked like Oscar had done a thorough job. The oldest documents were in French and Arabic, but they switched to English as the tomb’s chain of ownership went from Napoleon’s army to the British. There were letters, diagrams of the tomb, drawings, shipping manifests, insurance papers, excerpts from journals, old photographs, and scientific monographs. Once the tomb arrived at the museum, the number of documents exploded. A series of fat folders contained construction diagrams, plats, blueprints, conservators’ reports, various pieces of correspondence, and innumerable invoices from the period of the tomb’s construction and opening; and beyond that, letters from visitors and scholars, internal museum reports, more conservators’ evaluations. The material ended with a flurry of documents relating to the new sub way station and the museum’s request to the City of New York for a pedestrian tunnel connecting the 81st Street subway station with a new basement entrance to the museum. The final document was a terse report from a long-forgotten curator indicating that the bricking-up of the exhibition had been completed. It was dated January 14, 1935.

Nora sighed, looking at the spread of bundled documents. Menzies wanted a summary report of them by the following morning so they could begin planning the “script” for the exhibition, drawing up label text and introductory panels. She glanced at her watch: 1:00 P.M.

What had she gotten herself into?

She plugged in her laptop and booted it up. At the insistence of her husband, Bill, she had recently switched from a PC to a Mac, and now the boot-up process took a tenth the time—zero to sixty in 8.9 seconds instead of two and a half plodding minutes. It had been like trading up from a Ford Fiesta to a Mercedes SL. As she watched the Apple logo appear, she thought that at least one thing in her life was going right.

She slipped on a pair of crisp linen gloves and began untying the twine that held the first bundle of papers together, but before she could get the century-old knot undone, the twine parted with a puff of dust.

With infinite care, she opened the first folder and slipped out a yellowed document, written in a spidery French script, and began the laborious process of working her way through it, taking notes on the PowerBook. Despite her difficulties with the script and the French language, she found herself becoming absorbed in the story Menzies had briefly touched on in the tomb the day before.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon had conceived a quixotic plan to follow Alexander the Great’s route of conquest across the Middle East. In 1798, he mounted a huge invasion of Egypt, involving four hundred ships and 55,000 soldiers. In an idea radically modern for the time, Napoleon also brought with him more than 150 civilian scientists, scholars, and engineers, to make a complete scientific study of Egypt and its mysterious ruins. One of these scholars was an energetic young archaeologist named Bertrand Magny de Cahors.

Cahors was one of the first to examine the greatest Egyptological discovery of all time: the Rosetta stone, which Napoleon’s soldiers had unearthed while digging a fort along the shore. The stone inflamed him with the possibilities that lay ahead. He followed the Napoleonic army as it pushed southward up the Nile, where they came across the great temples of Luxor and, across the river, the ancient desert canyon that became the most famous graveyard in the world: the Valley of the Kings.

Most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were cut out of the living rock and could not be moved. But there were a few tombs of lesser pharaohs, regents, and viziers, built higher up in the valley out of blocks of cut limestone. And it was one of these—the Tomb of Senef, vizier and regent to Thutmosis IV—that Cahors decided to disassemble and take back to France. It was an audacious and even dangerous engineering feat, since the blocks weighed several tons each and had to be individually lowered down a two-hundred-foot cliff in order to be carted to the Nile and floated downstream.

The project was plagued with disaster from the beginning. The locals refused to work on the tomb, believing it to be cursed, and so Cahors dragooned a group of French soldiers to undertake the job. The first calamity struck when the inner tomb—which had been resealed in antiquity after the tomb was robbed—was broached. Nine men died almost immediately. Later, it was hypothesized that carbon dioxide gas from acid groundwater moving through limestone far below had filled the tomb, causing the asphyxiation of the three soldiers who first entered, along with the half-dozen others sent in to rescue them.

But Cahors was singularly determined, and the tomb was eventually taken apart, block by numbered block, and barged down the Nile to the Bay of Aboukir, where it was laid out on the desert sands in a vast array, awaiting transport to France.

The famous Battle of the Nile ended those plans. After Admiral Horatio Nelson met Napoleon’s grand flotilla—and soundly defeated it—in the most decisive naval battle in history, Napoleon fled in a small ship, leaving his armies cut off. Those armies soon capitulated, and in the terms of surrender, the British appropriated their fabulous collections of Egyptian antiquities, including the Rosetta stone—and the Tomb of Senef. A day after the signing of the terms of capitulation, Cahors stabbed himself in the heart with his sword while kneeling amid the stacks of blocks on the sands of Aboukir. And yet his fame as the first Egyptologist lived on, and it was a descendant of this same Cahors who was bankrolling the museum’s reopening of the tomb,
à la distance
.

Nora put the first sheaf of documents aside and picked up the second. A Scottish officer with the Royal Navy, Captain Alisdair William Arthur Cumyn, later Baron of Rattray, managed to acquire the Tomb of Senef in a murky transaction that appeared to involve a card game and two prostitutes. Baron Rattray had the tomb transported and reassembled on his ancestral estate in the Highlands of Scotland, went bankrupt doing so, and was forced to sell off most of his ancestral lands. The Barons of Rattray limped along until the mid-nineteenth century, when the last of the line, in a desperate bid to save what was left of the estate, sold the tomb to the American railroad magnate William C. Spragg. One of the museum’s early benefactors, Spragg shipped the tomb across the Atlantic and had it reassembled in the museum, which was under construction at that time. It was his pet project and he spent months haunting the site, hounding the workers, and otherwise making a nuisance of himself. In a tragic irony, he was crushed under the wheels of a horse-drawn ambulance just two days before the grand opening in 1872.

Nora took a break from her perusal of the documents. It was not quite three o’clock, and she was making better progress than she’d expected. If she could get this done by eight, she might have time to share a quick bite with Bill at the Bones. He would love this dark, dusty history. And it might make a good piece for the
Times
’s cultural or metropolitan section when the tomb’s opening neared.

She moved along to the next bundle, all museum documents and in much better condition. The first set of papers dealt with the opening of the tomb. In it were some copies of the engraved invitation:

Nora held the crumbling invitation in her hand. It amazed her that the museum commanded such a presence in those days that the president himself signed the invitation. She shuffled further and discovered a second document—a menu for the dinner.

Roast Squab & Cress
Pâté de Foie Gras en Croûte
Baba Ghanouj
Waldorf Pudding

Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly

There were a dozen blank invitations in the file. She set one aside, along with the menu, in a “to be photocopied” folder. This was something Menzies should see. In fact, she thought, it would be marvelous if they could duplicate the original opening—without the costume ball, perhaps—and offer the same menu.

She began reading the press notices of the evening. It had been one of those great social events of late-nineteenth-century New York, the likes of which would never be seen again. The guest list read like a roll call at the dawn of the Gilded Age: the Astors and Vanderbilts, William Butler Duncan, Walter Langdon, Ward McAllister, Royal Phelps. There were engravings from
Harper’s Weekly
showing the ball, with everyone dressed in the most outlandish interpretations of Egyptian costume…

But she was wasting time. She pushed the clippings aside and opened the next folder. It also contained a newspaper clipping, this time from the
New York Sun
, one of the scandal sheets of the time. It had an illustration of a dark-haired man in a fez, with liquid eyes, dressed in flowing robes. Quickly she scanned the article.