The next night, they returned with Barnaby to the ledge. They examined it again and placed three more stones. “It has to be here someplace,” Barnaby said. “It has to be.”
There was nothing to do but keep looking.
Lord Grover made preparations to go. Three days later, he emerged from his tent wearing his sport coat and ascot and found Pierce.
“Well, I’m off,” he said, extending his hand.
“Have a good trip.”
“We’ll be in touch,” Grover said, “I’ll be in Beirut for the next month.”
“All right.”
“Don’t get discouraged,” Grover said. “And don’t hesitate to order anything you might need.”
Pierce nodded.
Grover lit a cigar and shifted his stance. He seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “Robert, there’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about”
“Yes.”
“Well, I can’t help noticing that you’ve taken an interest in my secretary. I should appreciate it if you would be kind to her.”
The surprise must have shown on Pierce’s face.
“I’m just asking you as a friend,” Grover said, holding up his hand. “You do what you want. But I’m very fond of her, that’s all I mean. All right?”
“All right,” Pierce said.
That night, they resumed digging. It was slow, exhausting work, under a waning moon in the shivering cold. They dug beneath the first marker rock and found nothing. The second was particularly roughgoing, requiring more than ten days of concentrated effort. They found nothing.
Pierce and Conway celebrated a gloomy Thanksgiving with a half-starved chicken and a bottle of Scotch. Another week passed, then another.
“Three thousand years,” Barnaby would remind them. “You can’t expect miracles after that much time.”
Christmas was now approaching. They had spent more than two months in the desert and had absolutely nothing to show for it. Not a clue, not a hint, not the slightest reason to hope they were on the right track. An informal meeting was held in the camp; charts were reviewed, steps were retraced. Pierce and Conway decided to survey the area once again, in the morning. Then, Lisa and Barnaby went to work on the tombs, while the others slept. Word had come back from Cairo that the pictures thus far were superb, by far the finest ever taken.
The surveying was completed by noon the next day. Pierce found what he had expected—that the original survey had been correct. According to the directions in the hieroglyphics, the tomb was up on that ledge. That meant that somehow they had missed it in the seven trenches they had dug so far.
But to dig the entire ledge—that was impossible. There had to be another approach, another answer, another way to attack the problem. He was irritable at lunch, lost in his own discouraging thoughts. Perhaps there had been a landslide that had changed the face of the terrain, burying the tomb beneath tons of rubble. Perhaps, it was not on the ledge, but above it, cut into sheer rock. Perhaps, perhaps…
Lisa came up to him as he was finishing coffee.
“Unhappy?”
“I’m not overjoyed.”
“Would you take me for a walk?”
He looked up at the midday sun, beating down on them fiercely. “Isn’t it a little hot?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t mind.”
They walked north from the camp, toward Hatshepsut’s temple. Neither said much, until finally Pierce said, “You’re looking out for me, aren’t you? Not letting me get depressed, keeping me out of fights.”
“Not really.” She was watching her feet, kicking up little puffs of sand.
“Why?” he asked, ignoring her answer.
“To tell the truth, I don’t really know.”
They came to the temple, huge and empty in the sun, and walked under the colonnades to get out of the heat. There were hieroglyphics everywhere, depicting scenes in the life of Hatshepsut. She had been a strong, domineering queen, one of the most famous women in Egyptian history—perhaps the most famous after Cleopatra and Nefertiti. The daughter of Thutmose I and Ahmes, she had married her half-brother, Thutmose II, in order to be queen. Then, when her husband named a boy as his successor, she seized power and ascended the throne. She often wore a false beard while acting as pharaoh.
Later, the boy she replaced became Thutmose III and proceeded to destroy all her monuments. Only two remained: the obelisk in Karnak, the tallest in Egypt, and the mortuary temple in Thebes.
“Tell me,” Lisa said. “Why are you so interested in the tomb?’
Pierce shrugged. It was a good question, one he had never been able to answer for himself.
“Do you need the money?”
“No.”
“Then what is it? The challenge? You’re not like Lord Grover. It isn’t a game for you, a way to kill time. I’ve watched you; you’re serious about this, more serious than anyone else.”
“Maybe it is the challenge,” Pierce said. “A chance to prove something, to do something concrete.”
“And dangerous?”
“I suppose.”
They stopped at a pillar, and she leaned back against it. She looked at him and said, “I would like to be kissed.”
He kissed her, pressing her against the warm stone, feeling her breasts against the rough cloth of his shirt. She did not draw back, but held him tight. When he stopped for breath, she said, “You’ve gotten much stronger since this started.” She ran her hand over his forearm.
“It’s all the clean living. No women, lots of exercise. I’ve spent most of my life sitting in front of a typewriter, you know.”
“Were you happy as a writer?”
The question surprised him—he hadn’t really stopped to think that he was no longer a writer. What was he now? He could not analyze it; he smelled her perfume and bit her ear.
“What kind of perfume is that?”
“It’s called ‘Desert Flower’.”
“No kidding.”
He kissed her again, and then she reached for his hand, and they began walking again.
“You know, I think you’re much nicer than you act,” she said.
“Oh, I’m mean and tough.”
“I wonder,” she said.
Later, when they had explored the temple, she said, “I’ve been thinking about the tomb. What if it isn’t there on that ledge?”
“That’s been worrying me, too.”
“No, I mean, what if the directions were wrong?”
Pierce shook his head. “The directions are precise and unambiguous. Barnaby thinks they’re accurate, and we have to take his word. They—”
Something occurred to him. Something so clear, so beautifully simple, that he was surprised he had not thought of it earlier.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to camp.”
They parked the Land Rover in the foothills, looking up at the cliff and the ledge. As soon as they stopped, the neat settled around them; it was two-thirty, the hottest part of the day, and the air was like a palpable thing, a stifling, dense blanket
“Is that where you climb?” Lisa asked, looking up at the cliff. “Way up there?”
Pierce nodded, recalling all the evenings they had spent negotiating their way in the dark.
“It looks dangerous,” she said. “Why have we come out here?”
“I have an idea,” he said. “Look at this translation of the passage. The directions are explicit, but all the fixed points are dependent on one particularly crucial point.”
He took out the map and sketched briefly.
“We’ve assumed, as a starting point, that the halfway mark of the road to Hatshepsut’s temple is here.” He pointed. “But the Nile has shrunk, as Barnaby said. We don’t know exactly how much, though we have a fair idea from ruins which presumably were once docks and landings. But if our estimate was wrong, even by a little bit, the location of the tomb could shift radically.” He sketched the variations on the cliff face.
“Now,” he sai
d, “back to the record. ‘…to the high cleft where the birds fly, for they draw near to [heaven] even as my majesty …’ Let’s look for a high cleft and forget about the ledge. Do you have the binoculars?”
With a puzzled look, she handed them to him. He got out of the jeep and scanned the cliff. A cleft, that was what they needed—a chink in the rock, a fault, a gash. He swept the rock face and saw nothing. It was difficult to distinguish details. The sunlight was so bright it washed out shadows.
“You can see better late in the afternoon,” Lisa said.
“You may be right.”
He swept again, slowly, looking hard. Nothing to the right of the ledge, then the ledge, then left, along the face…Wait… He stopped, went back. There was something there. A cleft, a true cleft though it was fifty yards south of the ledge and apparently inaccessible. How would they reach it?
It seemed awfully small. At the bottom of the niche, perhaps one hundred feet below the top of the cliff, there would hardly be room for a man to stand. Could a tomb actually be there, in so small a working space?
There was only one way to find out.
“Possibly,” Barnaby said, tapping the map with his pencil. “Quite possibly. How are you going to get to it?”
“We’ve got to ignore all our past work. The path to the ledge leads nowhere. We need to find a new route that takes us all the way to the top. We’ll look for it tonight.”
They searched that night, and the next, and the next each time without success. The third night Pierce could not sleep. He lay on his cot, staring at the tent cloth. Alongside him, Nikos slept soundly. Pierce envied the Greek’s ability to relax in tense situations—Pierce was wound tighter than a spring, a bundle of nervous frustration.
He got out of bed and went outside, shivering in the cold air. A drink would relax him. He trudged across the sand to the supply tent and pulled aside the flap.
Lisa was there, eating a sandwich. “Can’t sleep?”
“No. What’s around to drink?”
“Some gin left.”
He poured himself three fingers. “Cheers.”
Lisa watched him; he was aware of her eyes on him. “Something the matter?”
She shook her head. “You fascinate me, that’s all.”
“Well, I don’t understand you, either. How did you become Lord Grover’s secretary?”
“It’s a dull story.”
“Maybe it’ll help put me to sleep.”
“Well,” she said, “I’ve known Lord Grover for a long time, ever since the war. He was a good friend of my father. My father and mother both died in the London Fire. So later, he came back and looked after me, sending me to Girton College and seeing that I got all the proper things. It was quite a change, because Daddy had been a bank clerk.” She pronounced it “clark.”
“I had a super debut, and a year on the Continent, and schooling in Switzerland. Of course, I was grateful; I decided I wanted to repay him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Finally we compromised, and here I am. He takes me with him wherever he goes. Sometimes I think he looks upon me as a daughter. It’s odd.”
“I think he does, you know.”
“What about you? Were you always a writer?”
“No.” Pierce sipped his drink. “I was a student until Korea. After the war, there didn’t seem much point in going back to that; I sniffed around for a year or two, working on newspapers and trying to write a book about Korea. I never did, but I had a chance to go to Brussels in 1958 to do a piece on the fair. It turned out well, and I never went back to the States. I don’t really like America.”
“Everyone in England wants to go there.”
“Well, they’re welcome to it. It’s a vulgar country.”
“Nobody is ever satisfied,” Lisa said, almost to herself. Pierce smiled. “It’s too late to get philosophical.”
“Yes,” she said, “perhaps it is.”
Pierce was awakened the next morning by the sound of a gunshot. He rolled quickly out of bed, pulled on his boots, and stepped outside.
Conway was standing there, holding the gun in his hand.
“What happened?”
“Son of a bitch gets hot,” he said, looking at the gun. “Did you know they got hot?”
“What’s going on?”
“I believe,” Conway said, blowing smoke from the barrel, “that at one time you expressed an interest in the flora and fauna of the region.”
Pierce said nothing.
“If you look behind my tent, you will see a superb example of local color.”
He walked around the tent and saw the snake—curled, still writhing, the hood drawn back. It was large, nearly five-feet long, and as thick as a man’s wrist.
“Any others?” Pierce said.
“Come one, come all,” Conway said.
“Christ,” Pierce said, and went back to bed.
In the afternoon, he helped Lisa and Barnaby with the photographs. They were working in the tomb of Nakht the Scribe of the Granaries for Thutmose V; the walls displayed scenes of reaping and harvest. One wall was particularly well preserved. It showed the scribe overseeing the winnowing, reaping, and pressing of the grain into net baskets.
Another wall, partially ruined, was famous for its scene of feasting: a blind harpist and dancing girls entertained seated guests. Nakhtandtu’s wife could be seen to one side, sitting at a table. At their feet, a cat devoured a fish.
“We’ll get this whole wall,” Barnaby said, moving the lights into position. The tombs did not have electric lighting, as did the Valley of Kings; traditionally, visitors saw the paintings with the help of a mirror which the guide held, reflecting the sunlight which came through the door onto the walls. “Then a close-up of the dancers and the family and cat.”
Pierce adjusted the tripod and focused on the ground glass. All their color work was being done on 4 x 5 plates.
As he worked, Barnaby said, “It’s going to be slow, Robert. Remember, Carter spent six years looking for Tutankhamen.”
“We don’t have six years.”
“It isn’t the worst thing in the world if we don’t find the tomb.”
Pierce looked quickly at him—it did not sound like the Barnaby he had met in Cairo, quivering with excitement at the prospect of gold. The archaeologist had changed, and casting his mind back over the past two months, Pierce recalled the symptoms of change, which he had ignored at the time.
When the expedition began, Barnaby had talked feverishly of the tomb each night, his eyes glowing. In succeeding weeks, he had spoken of it less often; the pretense of complete absorption in his translating and photographing—begun for Hamid Iskander’s benefit—had become reality. Barnaby was no longer so interested in the tomb. His daily work satisfied him.
Pierce felt a mixture of jealousy, frustration, and anger. “Perhaps we should stop looking.”
“Not at all,” Barnaby said quickly. “Don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted you to relax a little and realize that impatience will get us nowhere.”
“All right,” Pierce said. “I’ll relax.”
That night, they found a path to the top of the cliff.
It was arduous and nerve-wracking, but it could be done. Standing on the top, the three men paused to catch their breath and smoke a cigarette. Pierce looked south, trying to see the cleft, but it was hidden somewhere in the dark. It was very quiet and cold—each night was colder now—and they could see their breath hiss out in the moonlight.
He sighed and tossed away his cigarette. On these night forays, they always brought Egyptian cigarettes, so that anyone who came upon the butts would not be suspicious. “Ready to go?”
They set off in a line, three shadows in the dark. Pierce led the way, picking a path among the boulders and sandy rubble. It took them half an hour to reach the cleft.
From above, it was not much to look at—just a jagged, V-shaped notch in the face of the cliff that cut back into the hillside about nine or ten feet. They could not see down t
o the bottom, which was pitch black.
Pierce shined his light down. The beam dimly illuminated a small sandy area at the bottom, perhaps four feet square. “Only room for one,” Nikos said.
Pierce moved the light up the side of the cleft, looking for footholds. The walls were sheer. “You’ll have to lower me down,” he said. “Maybe it would be better if I go,” Conway said. “No, I’ll do it”
Nikos began uncoiling his rope. It was good Dacron line, three-quarters of an inch thick. “Be careful,” he said. “There is no room for error down there.”
Pierce shined the light to the bottom again, one hundred fifty feet from where they stood. It was literally the size of a card table, and if he slipped, he would tumble down the rest of the cliff face, perhaps another five hundred feet.
“I’ll be careful.”
He took the line and knotted it around his waist, then tied a loop for a handhold. He was nervous, his breathing rapid and shallow. He clipped the flashlight to his belt and waited while Conway and Nikos took a firm grip on the line. Then, he swung himself over the lip and began his descent.
6. The Cleft
IT WAS COMPLETELY BLACK. He could not use his light because both hands were working the rope. They lowered him slowly, and he held himself away from the rock surface with his feet but it was a slow, tense business. Occasionally, he would begin to twist on the end of the rope, and he would reach out with his hand to grip the rock; it was sharp, and he cut himself.
“Wait a minute,” he called. His voice sounded odd, muffled. He felt himself stop.
How far down was he? It was impossible to tell—he was suspended in a void, a perfect blackness. He took out his flashlight and clicked it on. It showed the bottom, forty feet below. The rock wall was very near his face.
He needed the light, he needed to see. Something like a miner’s cap was called for. He hesitated, then stuck the flashlight in his mouth. It was heavy, but he could hold it with his teeth. He tugged at the rope, and the descent continued.
The bottom came up toward him, slowly, slowly…
His feet touched the sand, and he stood cautiously. He removed the flashlight from his mouth and said, “Okay. I’m here.”