The Quest of Julian Day (42 page)

He dropped the few remaining inches of the flaming tape into the great man-trap and, as it fluttered down into the unseen depths, we caught a glimpse of the shaft's sheer, perpendicular sides. On the far side of the bridge the passage took a sharp right-angle turn and, ten yards further on, turned again just before entering the sarcophagus-chamber.

Sayed lit another length of magnesium tape and on glancing round I saw at once that the tomb really was worth a visit for its own sake. More people would undoubtedly go there if it were not so difficult of access and the guides so reluctant to undertake the venture. It was decorated in much the same
manner as the tomb of Amenophis II; painted texts and figures upon a dull ground; but in shape it was quite unlike the sarcophagus-chamber of any other tomb, as it formed a long oval similar to the cartouche in which the Pharaohs always enclosed the hieroglyphics representing their names.

‘Burial place of King Thothmes the Third,' Sayed announced parrot fashion. ‘Very great King. Make all neighbouring nations bow down to Egypt. Very long reign; fifty-four year. This one of the deepest tombs in whole valley. We are now three hundred feet below ground; over four hundred feet below cliff top. Tomb robbed and mummy removed long, long ago, but coffin still here.' With his hand he struck the sarcophagus a resounding blow which echoed hollowly round the chamber.

It was not a very big coffin compared with the hundred-ton affairs I had seen in some of the other tombs. On the floor near it I noticed a little heap of broken fragments from alabaster vases and carved faïsance figures which clearly showed that very few people ever visited the place, otherwise such interesting souvenirs would have long since been mopped up by the tourists.

Oonas remained standing in the entrance of the chamber as I moved forward with Sayed to examine the pile of pieces. Just as I was stooping over them she spoke.

‘Well, now we're here, what do you think of it, Julian?'

‘It's far more interesting than I expected,' I said. ‘I'm awfully glad we came.'

‘I wish we could see some more of the tombs together,' she said slowly.

‘So do I,' I replied, ‘but I'm afraid that's not possible as I have to get back directly after lunch.'

‘You have quite made up your mind to go, then?'

‘Yes; you know that. I can't let the others down.'

‘Can't you possibly persuade them to let you take me with you?'

I straightened up and turned towards her. ‘Now, please!' I said. ‘Don't let's spoil our last few hours together by going into all that again. With the five of us, day after day, never out of each others' sight for weeks on end there would be the most frightful quarrels. You and Sylvia hate the sight …'

I got no further. By the light of the candle she was holding I saw Oonas' expression change with incredible swiftness from one of meekness to frenzied, diabolical rage.

‘Sylvia!' she screamed. ‘It is for her you are determined to leave me!' Next second she shrilled out a hysterical command in Arabic.

Before I could turn Sayed, who was standing just behind me, hit me a heavy blow on the back of the head with some sort of bludgeon he had been concealing in his robe.

I pitched forward on to the floor and for a moment I must have been knocked unconscious. A blinding pain seemed to split my head in two and when I could see again the sarcophagus-chamber was lit only by a faint glow barely outlining its entrance. Oonas and Sayed had disappeared and I could hear their footfalls as they hurried back along the corridor.

I tried to stagger up but fell again. With a supreme effort I forced myself to my knees, then to my feet, and lurched towards the fast-dimming square of the entrance. Filled with ungovernable horror at the thought that they meant to leave me there, I blundered out into the ante-chamber and across it. My feet seemed weighed down with lead and my head swayed limply from side to side on my shoulders. But the light was brighter here and somehow I managed to reach the middle of the passage where it was divided by the deep pit.

At its edge I fell again and a fresh access of terror shook me. I saw that Oonas and Sayed were standing on the far side of the gulf and had removed the plank bridge so that I could not cross it.

‘Oonas!' I gasped. ‘Oonas!' but a croaking whisper was all that I could manage.

She held her candle aloft so that I could see her face and the light glinted on her great, widely spaced blue eyes but they held no trace of mercy as she cried harshly:

‘You thought you were going to have a fine time in the desert with that tow-headed stick of an English girl, didn't you? What a fool you must be to think that I would let you leave me for her. She loves you. I know that; but now she shall eat her heart out believing that you've thrown her over to remain with me.'

Before I could whisper a plea for mercy or attempt to reason
with her, Oonas turned away. My strength was ebbing and the light from the candles faded as their echoing foot-falls receded in the distance. The pit now cut me off from them. Even if I had had the strength to rise again it would have been impossible for me to reach them before they locked the iron gates at the entrance of the tomb and passed out into the daylight hundreds of feet above my head.

My last thought, before I sank into black unconsciousness, was the appalling certainty that there was no hope of escape and that I must die there in the darkness.

For the first few seconds after I came to I did not realise where I was or what had happened to me but, all too soon, full consciousness returned and my numbed brain recovered sufficiently to savour racing thoughts that made me shake with abject terror.

I was lying face-downwards where I had dropped in the passage-way with one arm dangling over the sharp edge of the shaft that had been cut nearly thirty-four centuries before to trap tomb-robbers. Withdrawing it hastily I scrambled up into a sitting position and shrank back against the wall. My head ached abominably from a dull pain which increased and diminished regularly with the rhythm of my pulsing blood. Very gingerly I felt the back of my head and the dampness my finger-tips encountered told me that it was bleeding; but my dark hair is thick and I thought it unlikely that my skull was cracked particularly as the blow had only knocked me out for a few seconds after it was first delivered.

An icy sweat had broken out on my forehead. As I brushed it away I knew that I must try to control my panic. Almost instinctively, with fumbling fingers, I searched for my cigarettes and lighter. As I lit one the flame threw weird shadows on the walls and, beside me to the right, I could see the black gulf of the pit.

For a moment I wondered whether I could get across in one desperate flying leap but almost as soon as I thought of it I knew that it was impossible. The part of the passage where I sat took a right-angled turn almost immediately on my left which meant that I could not get more than a two-yards' run and with a ghastly sinking of the heart I admitted to myself that I was trapped in the lower portion of the tomb. If I
attempted to jump the pit I should only precipitate my end by falling short and crashing headlong upon its bottom.

The impossibility of getting across did not depress me quite so much when I'd had time to realise that had I been able to do so I should have been little better off. Even if I could have reached the iron gates of the tomb, situated as they were in the bottom of a gully a hundred feet below the track along the cliff which was their only approach, I might have shouted until my voice cracked but the chances were a thousand to one against anyone's hearing me unless they were actually descending the ladders to the tomb.

The chance that someone might pay the place a visit, and find me there before I died, seemed my only possible hope and I began to wonder how much likelihood there was of that. The tomb guardian had told us that the grave of Thothmes III had not been opened since the previous winter which showed clearly that visits to it were of very rare occurrence, while the bits of alabaster and pottery scattered about the sarcophagus-chamber substantiated the fact that it was almost unheard of for a casual traveller to come there.

Every Egyptologist worthy of the name would certainly inspect the tomb of such an important monarch at one time or another but having once viewed its unique oval burial-chamber there was nothing else to call for a second visit. Most of the members of the archæological missions then digging in the neighbourhood of Luxor were old hands and would have been down into my prison during their first seasons. It seemed that my hope of life hung upon the slender chance that some newcomer to one of the missions might decide on making the descent; or, perhaps, an Arab who had to do so once before he could qualify as a licensed guide. But unless one of them arrived in the next two days, which I reckoned was about the limit to which I could hold out without water, I felt that there was no chance of my ever seeing daylight again.

Curiously enough, by the time I had got that far in my speculations all panic had left me and for the time being, at least, I felt almost resigned to die. I have never been afraid of death; since it can only be one of two things; either a complete black-out into nothingness or a passing on, as all religions encourage us to hope, into some more pleasant state.

The black-out theory is argued very soundly by materialists but it has always seemed inconceivable to me that life should be quite meaningless and, if it is governed at all, the laws which govern it should be logical; in which case all-effort towards mental growth automatically leads us somewhere and, as there is no adequate reward for striving visible in this present life this postulates another where we shall reap what we have sown. Having once arrived at the conclusion that all the probabilities lie in favour of there being some form of life after death I had long since come to regard death as the beginning of the greatest adventure of all.

On the other hand, while I had no fear of death, I have always had a very great fear of dying. It is a regrettable fact that only a very small percentage of people are fortunate enough to die from old age, quietly in their sleep, or painlessly under an anaesthetic. The great majority are cut off before their time by some sort of violence which is almost inevitable painful or, perhaps worse, linger for weeks or months before they are finally carried off by some agonising disease.

Now that I began to think about dying as a personal matter which I should have to face within a time that could be more or less measured by hours, I shrank from the ordeal; particularly as it seemed that death from thirst must be my portion and by all accounts that is a very painful form of death indeed.

I wondered how I could circumvent it. If I had had my gun on me I could have blown my brains out, but I had left it in my room at the hotel. Whether I should have had the courage to put a pistol to my head and pull the trigger I do not know. Time is an illusion, as we see by our experience of everyday life, from the dreary dragging of school hours as opposed to the fleeting of lovers' moments; and I have often thought that although it may only be a fraction of a second in
our
time from the explosion of a suicide's pistol to the moment when he lies limp and dead, he may experience what seem to him hours of appalling torture as the bullet smashes in the bone formation of his skull and sears like a white-hot comet through the delicate membrane surrounding his palpitating brain.

I could always throw myself down the pit but it was far from certain that I should die instantly; I might quite well lie there
broken, bleeding and in agony for hours before I actually expired.

Then I had an inspiration. I could open the veins in my arm with my penknife. In the dark I should not see the blood and as it drained away from me I should slip out of life by the easy road of gradual weakening till I fell into a state of unconsciousness. I recalled with some perturbation that a doctor had once told me the reason the Romans always lay in a hot bath when adopting this highly civilised form of suicide was because unless the body were kept at an even temperature during the draining of blood, which naturally lowered it, violent cramp was liable to set in. I had no hot bath in which to die gracefully like the immortal Petronius but I felt that the pains of cramp when I was just on the point of expiring could be borne with much more fortitude than countless hours of agonising thirst.

It cheered me a lot to think that opening my veins would always provide a way of escaping the worst horrors that beset me; but for the moment I was much too full of life to think of putting it into practice and with a sudden dread that later I might temporarily forget my bearings in the pitchy blackness and fall into the pit by mistake, I decided to make my way back to the sarcophagus-chamber. Taking out my lighter I snapped it open and by the aid of its tiny flame, which did no more than dispel the gloom for a few feet round me, I limped painfully down the passage into the big, oval vault.

As my hopelessly inadequate torch lit only a small section of the chamber I made a tour round it and found, as I already believed, that it was completely empty except for the stone coffin which had once contained the body of the Pharaoh, near its far end, and the broken bits of funeral offerings, the larger of which showed as faintly white patches upon the floor each time I lowered the lighter to see where I was stepping.

Only one thing came of my inspection, but that filled me with more elation than the finding of a casket of jewels would have done in the same circumstances. I came across the piece of candle which had fallen from my hand at the moment Sayed had knocked me out. It was a good five inches long and although I knew quite well that it brought me no nearer to any prospect of escape I regarded the finding of it almost as
Heaven's direct answer to a prayer. The petrol in my lighter was liable to run out at any moment; whereas the candle would at least ensure me several hours of blessed light.

Dusting a clear space on the floor I set it up carefully between two good-sized fragments of pottery, lit it and snapped my lighter shut; then I sat down beside it with my back against the big stone coffin and, as well as my aching head would permit, did my best to review the situation calmly.