The Book of the Dead (9 page)

Wicherly’s teeth gleamed in the dim light. “The problem is, much of the meaning of these ancient tombs still eludes us. They’re easy enough to date, though—this seems a fairly typical New Kingdom tomb, I’d say late XVIIIth Dynasty.”

“Right on target,” said Menzies. “Senef was the vizier and regent to Thutmosis IV.”

“Thank you.” Wicherly absorbed the compliment with evident satisfaction. “Most of these New Kingdom tombs had three parts—an outer, middle, and inner tomb, divided into a total of twelve chambers, which together represented the passage of the Sun God through the underworld during the twelve hours of night. The pharaoh was buried at sunset, and his soul accompanied the Sun God on his solar barque as he made the perilous journey through the underworld toward his glorious rebirth at dawn.”

He shone his light ahead, illuminating a dim portal at the far end. “This staircase would have been filled with rubble, ending in a sealed door.”

They continued descending the staircase, at last reaching a massive doorway topped by a lintel carved with a huge Eye of Horus. Wicherly paused, shining his light on the Eye and the hieroglyphics surrounding it.

“Can you read these hieroglyphics?” asked Menzies.

Wicherly grinned. “I make a pretty good show of it. It’s a curse.” He winked slyly at Nora. “To any who cross this threshold, may Ammut swallow his heart.”

There was a short silence.

McCorkle issued a high-pitched chuckle. “That’s all?”

“To the ancient tomb robber,” said Wicherly, “that would be enough—that’s a heck of a curse to an ancient Egyptian.”

“Who is Ammut?” Nora asked.

“The Swallower of the Damned.” Wicherly pointed his flashlight on a dim painting on the far wall, depicting a monster with a crocodilian head, the body of a leopard, and the grotesque hindquarters of a hippo, squatting on the sand, mouth open, about to devour a row of human hearts. “Evil words and deeds made the heart heavy, and after death Anubis weighed your heart on a balance scale against the Feather of Maat. If your heart weighed more than the feather, the baboon-headed god, Thoth, tossed it to the monster Ammut to eat. Ammut journeyed into the sands of the west to defecate, and that’s where you’d end up if you didn’t lead a good life—a shite, baking in the heat of the Western Desert.”

“That’s more than I needed to hear, thank you, Doctor,” said McCorkle.

“Robbing a pharaoh’s tomb must have been a terrifying experience for an ancient Egyptian. The curses put on any who entered the tomb were very real to them. To cancel the power of the dead pharaoh, they didn’t just rob the tomb, they destroyed it, smashing everything. Only by destroying the objects could they disperse their malevolent power.”

“Fodder for the exhibit, Nora,” Menzies murmured.

After the briefest hesitation, McCorkle stepped across the threshold, and the rest followed.

“The God’s Second Passage,” Wicherly said, shining his light around at the inscriptions. “The walls are covered with inscriptions from the
Reunupertemhru
, the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

“Ah! How interesting!” Menzies said. “Read us a sample, Adrian.”

In a low voice, Wicherly began to intone:

The Regent Senef, whose word is truth, saith: Praise and thanksgiving be unto thee, Ra, O thou who rollest on like unto gold, thou Illuminer of the Two Lands on the day of thy birth. Thy mother brought thee forth on her hand, and thou didst light up with splendor the circle which is traveled over by the Disk. O Great Light who rollest across Nu, thou dost raise up the generations of men from the deep source of thy waters…

“It’s an invocation to Ra, the Sun God, by the deceased, Senef. It’s pretty typical of the Book of the Dead.”

“I’ve heard about the Book of the Dead,” Nora said, “but I don’t know much about it.”

“It was basically a group of magical invocations, spells, and incantations. It helped the dead make the dangerous journey through the underworld to the Field of Reeds—the ancient Egyptian idea of heaven. People waited in fear during that long night after the burial of the pharaoh, because if he buggered up somehow down in the underworld and wasn’t reborn, the sun would never rise again. The dead king had to know the spells, the secret names of the serpents, and all kinds of other arcane knowledge to finish the journey. That’s why it’s all written on the walls of his tomb—the Book of the Dead was a set of crib notes to eternal life.”

Wicherly chuckled, shining his beam over four registers of hieroglyphics painted in red and white. They stepped toward them, raising clouds of deepening gray dust. “There’s the First Gate of the Dead,” he went on. “It shows the pharaoh getting into the solar barque and journeying into the underworld, where he’s greeted by a crowd of the dead… Here in Gate Four they’ve encountered the dreaded Desert of Sokor, and the boat magically becomes a serpent to carry them across the burning sands… And this! This is very dramatic: at midnight, the soul of the Sun God Ra unites with his corpse, represented by the mummified figure—”

“Pardon my saying so, Doctor,” McCorkle broke in, “but we’ve still got eight rooms to go.”

“Right, of course. So sorry.”

They proceeded to the far end of the chamber. Here, a dark hole revealed a steep staircase plunging into blackness. “This passage would also have been filled with rubble,” Wicherly said. “To hinder robbers.”

“Be careful,” McCorkle muttered as he led the way.

Wicherly turned to Nora and held out a well-manicured hand. “May I?”

“I think I can handle it,” she said, amused at the old-world courtesy. As she watched Wicherly descend with excessive caution, his beautifully polished shoes heavily coated with dust, she decided that he was far more likely to slip and break his neck than she was.

“Be careful!” Wicherly called out to McCorkle. “If this tomb follows the usual plan, up ahead is the well.”

“The well?” McCorkle’s voice floated back.

“A deep pit designed to send unwary tomb robbers to their death. But it was also a way to keep water from flooding the tomb, during those rare periods when the Valley of the Kings flash-flooded.”

“Even if it remains intact, the well will surely be bridged over,” Menzies said. “Recall that this was once an exhibit.”

They moved forward cautiously, their beams finally revealing a rickety wooden bridge spanning a pit at least fifteen feet deep. McCorkle, gesturing for them to remain behind, examined the bridge carefully with his light, then advanced out onto it. A sudden
crack!
caused Nora to jump. McCorkle grabbed desperately for the railing. But it was merely the sound of settling wood, and the bridge held.

“It’s still safe,” said McCorkle. “Cross one at a time.”

Nora walked gingerly across the narrow bridge. “I can’t believe this was once part of an exhibit. How did they ever install a well like this in the sub-basement of the museum?”

“It must have been cut into the Manhattan bedrock,” Menzies said from behind. “We’ll have to bring this up to code.”

On the far side of the bridge, they passed over another threshold. “Now we’re in the middle tomb,” said Wicherly. “There would have been another sealed door here. What marvelous frescoes! Here’s an image of Senef meeting the gods. And more verses from the Book of the Dead.”

“Any more curses?” Nora asked, glancing at another Eye of Horus painted prominently above the once-sealed door.

Wicherly shone his light toward it. “Hmmm. I’ve never seen an inscription like this before.
The place which is sealed. That which lieth down in the closed place is reborn by the Ba-soul which is in it; that which walketh in the closed space is dispossessed of the Ba-soul. By the Eye of Horus I am delivered or damned, O great god Osiris
.”

“Sure sounds like another curse to me,” said McCorkle.

“I would guess it’s merely an obscure quotation from the Book of the Dead. The bloody thing runs to two hundred chapters and nobody’s figured all of it out.”

The tomb now opened up onto a stupendous hall, with a vaulted roof and six great stone pillars, all densely covered with hieroglyphics and frescoes. It seemed incredible to Nora that this huge, ornate space had been asleep in the bowels of the museum for more than half a century, forgotten by almost all.

Wicherly turned, playing his light across the extensive paintings. “This is rather extraordinary. The Hall of the Chariots, which the ancients called the Hall of Repelling Enemies. This was where all the war stuff the pharaoh needed in the afterlife would have been stored—his chariot, bows and arrows, horses, swords, knives, war club and staves, helmet, leather armor.”

His beam paused at a frieze depicting beheaded bodies laid out by the hundreds on the ground, their heads lying in rows nearby. The ground was splattered with blood, and the ancient artist had added such realistic details as lolling tongues.

They moved through a long series of passageways until they came to a room that was smaller than the others. A large fresco on one side showed the same scene of weighing the heart depicted earlier, only much larger. The hideous, slavering form of Ammut squatted nearby.

“The Hall of Truth,” Wicherly said. “Even the pharaoh was judged, or in this case, Senef, who was almost as powerful as a pharaoh.”

McCorkle grunted, then disappeared into the next chamber, and the rest followed. It was another spacious room with a vaulted ceiling, painted with a night sky full of stars, the walls dense with hieroglyphics. An enormous granite sarcophagus sat in the middle, empty. The walls on each side were interrupted by four black doors.

“This is an extraordinary tomb,” said Wicherly, shining the light around. “I had no idea. When you called me, Dr. Menzies, I thought it would be something small but charming. This is stupendous. Where in the world did the museum get it?”

“An interesting story,” Menzies replied. “When Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1798, one of his prizes was this tomb, which he had disassembled, block by block, to take back to France. But when Nelson defeated the French in the Battle of the Nile, a Scottish naval captain finagled the tomb for himself and reassembled it at his castle in the Highlands. In the nineteenth century, his last descendant, the 7th Baron of Rattray, finding himself strapped for cash, sold it to one of the museum’s early benefactors, who had it shipped across the Atlantic and installed while they were building the museum.”

“The baron let go of one of England’s national treasures, I should say.”

Menzies smiled. “He received a thousand pounds for it.”

“Worse and worse! May Ammut swallow the greedy baron’s heart for selling the ruddy thing!” Wicherly laughed, casting his flashing blue eyes on Nora, who smiled politely. His attentiveness was becoming obvious, and he seemed not at all discouraged by the wedding band on her finger.

McCorkle began to tap his foot impatiently.

“This is the burial chamber,” Wicherly began, “which the ancients called the House of Gold. Those antechambers would be the Ushabti Room; the Canopic Room, where all the pharaoh’s preserved organs were stored in jars; the Treasury of the End; and the Resting Place of the Gods. Remarkable, isn’t it, Nora? What fun we’ll have!”

Nora didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking about just how massive the tomb was, and how dusty, and how much work lay ahead of them.

Menzies must have been thinking the same thing, because he turned to her with a smile that was half eager, half rueful.

“Well, Nora,” he said. “It should prove an interesting six weeks.”