There was a King in Egypt. Norma Lorimer
she was actually helping to forge a link in one of the minute chains of Egyptian archaeology.
Her brother's memory amazed her and his intelligence stimulated her. He had been such a boy at home. Egypt had converted him into a strong serious scholar. His fair head, bent over his work, with the lamplight shining on it, was so dear to her that impulsively she put her long strong fingers on the glittering hair; she longed to kiss it.
"Dear old boy!" she said. "Isn't it all just too exciting? Isn't life thrilling? Isn't it lovely to be alive?"
Freddy did not look up. "Some girls," he said, "mightn't think this being very much alive—the sorting out of bits of broken rubbish, thrown out of a tomb which has been forgotten for two or three thousand years. Did you ever think you'd care to know whether a prickly pear was indigenous to Egypt or was not? Or whether canopic jars had their origin in family grocers' jars being lent by the head of the house to hold the intestines of some dear-departed?"
Meg laughed. "It is all too odd, but being in it, and actually knowing that we are going to see into that tomb in a few days and discover who the king was who was buried there, and all about his personal and family affairs, and be able to touch the jewels he was buried with, it's too interesting for words, I think!"
"I hope you won't be disappointed. It may have been robbed."
"But you don't think so?"
"No, I don't—not at present. There was a tomb opened at one of the camps, not long ago, which told a tragic story of the end of robbery and plunder. The roof had fallen in while the burglar was busy unwrapping the cloths from the dead mummy. He was evidently trying to get at the heart-scarab, I suppose, and at the jewels which the windings held in their place. He had been smothered, taken in the act. Probably he had left his fellow-plunderers at the entrance; the roof may have looked unsafe, but he had hoped to collect all the jewels and scarabs before it gave way. Fate played him a nasty trick. The roof caved in, and we have secured all the jewels he had collected together and have learned a lesson of what must have often happened. The mummy's body was, of course, still perfect. Of the intruder only bones were visible and some fragments of his clothes. Things keep for ever in these hermetically-sealed Egyptian tombs, where neither rust nor moth ever entered in, but where thieves did break through and steal."
"How thrilling!" Margaret said. "How did you guess that the skeleton was the skeleton of a robber? I suppose as he never returned, his friends just went off and left him?"
"By the scattered jewels and the way the mummy was lying. Why should a skeleton be inside a royal tomb? Why should the mummy be out of its coffin and partly unrobed? We have actually found before now plans which the sextons and the guardians of the tombs had made for themselves, of all the tombs in the cemetery which was in their care. They knew how they could be entered one from another. Of course, this valley is different. The tombs are isolated and carefully hidden. It was never a public cemetery."
"Was Akhnaton's tomb intact? Had it been robbed?"
Freddy laughed. "Back again to the tabooed subject?"
Meg laughed too. "We shan't fight this time, I promise."
"His city and palace and tomb were utterly desolated, but his mummy had been taken away from his own tomb, before it was desolated, and brought to his mother's."
"Oh, you told me—I forgot." Into Meg's mind came again the words spoken by the sad voice, "My earthly body was brought to my mother's tomb in this valley."
When the night's work was completed, Meg voted that they should sit for a few minutes in front of the hut and try to get the "mummy-shell" and the microbes of Pharaonic diseases out of their nostrils. Freddy had never allowed them to sleep right out in the open, much as they had wished it. It was not safe, even with the dogs and his trustworthy house-boys. He would not hear of it; and he was wise.
Gladly he agreed to refreshing their lungs with the beautiful night air. Indeed, they were all three so happy together and there was so much to talk about and discuss, that bed seemed a bore. Physically tired as they were, owing to the nervous excitement in the atmosphere of their day's surroundings, sleep seemed very far off.
"Just half an hour, Freddy," Margaret said, as she threw herself down on a long lounge chair, and clasping her hands behind her head, gazed up to the heavens. "How glorious it is!" she said. "I'm so happy."
They all three lighted cigarettes and smoked in silence. Freddy was as happy as Meg; Mike was restless.
At the end of the half-hour Meg got up and said, "Who'd exchange this for a city? Freddy, you ought to get to bed—you're dead tired, really."
He rose reluctantly. "I suppose I must." His thoughts were on the morrow's work. If the tomb was going to be a really big thing, it meant a lot more to him than Meg understood. He was very young; he had not as yet struck any remarkable find; he had his reputation to make. His theories had caused much comment.
"I could never live in a city again," he said. "This life has made it impossible. And the odd thing is that it has made cities seem to me the loneliest, most desolate places in the world. I never feel in touch with anyone. Even the other night at the ball, jolly as it was, I never once talked to anyone about anything that really interested me. I never felt that anyone would understand a single thing about all that is my real life. I suppose everyone feels the same—that their real selves are lost in crowds."
Michael and Margaret looked at each other. They had experienced the feeling; they had lost each other. In the valley they had come back to the things of Truth.
"You know I always abhorred town-life," Mike said, "and all its artificiality and rottenness and needless accumulation of unnecessary things."
"Brains congregate in cities, all the same," Freddy said, "if you can only strike them. We'd get too one-sided here, too lost in the past. It's never wise to let your hobbies and work exclude all other interests."
"I begin to think there is no past," Meg said. "Time lost itself in Egypt. Three thousand years mean nothing. The people who lived and ruled before Moses was born are more alive and real to-day for us than the events of yesterday's evening paper. I think I have learned just a tiny bit of what infinity means."
"Or rather, you have learned that you haven't," Mike said. "By the time you have discovered that three thousand years are just yesterday, you have grasped the truth of the fact that no mortal mind can conceive the meaning of the word infinity."
"Have you ever seen a ghost in Egypt, Freddy?" Margaret said, irrelevantly.
"No, never," he said.
"Did the ancients believe in them?"
Freddy was locking up the hut. "We never come across any writing or pictures to show us that they did, so I don't think it's likely. They have told us most things about themselves and about what they saw and feared."
"I wonder?" Margaret said meditatively. "I wonder if they did or didn't?"
"Of course they believed," Michael said, "that the soul of a man, the anima, at the death of the body, flew to the gods. It came back at intervals to comfort the mummy."
"That's nothing to do with what we call ghosts," Freddy said, "and no one but the mummy is supposed to have been visited by it. It took the form of a bird with human hands and head; it was called the ba."
"Oh, my friendly ba!" Meg said. "I have just been reading all about it—in Maspero's book you see pictures of it sitting on the chest of the mummy."
"That's it," Freddy said. "You're getting on. But as for real ghosts, there's no record of them—not that I know of. Good-night," he said, "I'm off."
"Good-night," Meg said, "and the best of luck to tomorrow's dig."
For a moment Michael and Meg stood together. "I know what is in your heart," she said. "I begin to think that Egypt is making practical me quite psychic."
"I feel I ought to be up and doing. I believe there is work I can do—I believe it is the work