LUXOR,EGYPT
My parents have set up camp at the site. Underneath their open-sided tent with its walls of netting, they perch on the edge of the pit. Eager and ready to see what Howard and I unearth.
I’d been right about the ridge in the sand, that subtle line in the earth. It is a threshold—one that opens to a set of hewn stone stairs. As we oversaw the men’s efforts to shovel out each of the six steps, our shared excitement grew, becoming compounded when a fragment of a travertine jar was found in the dirt around the stairs. When I brushed the soil from the jar’s surface, we saw half of a name underneath: Queen Ahmose-Nefertari. I almost shouted with excitement, and, I swear, Howard did as well. A great queen in her own right and the very first God’s Wife of Amun, Ahmose-Nefertari was a relative of Thutmose I, Hatshepsut’s father. To us, it seemed logical that Hatshepsut might include an object honoring Ahmose-Nefertari in her tomb, making us optimistic that we might be near Hatshepsut’s burial place.
When the workers finally hit a vertical stone slab at the bottom of the sixth and final step, Howard and I spontaneously squeezed each other’s hands. A find such as this is every Egyptologist’s dream, and is certainly mine, even though I’m not a formal archaeologist.
Now we stand at the base of those six stairs, ready to descend and see what’s behind that slab, the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a door. The workers have just finished chiseling around its edges andare ready to lever it open. Silently, I clasp my hands together and pray that Hatshepsut lies inside.
“Would you care to be first?” Howard asks me.
“Me?” I am shocked. The honor almost always goes to the lead archaeologist or the dig’s patron.
“Yes, you,” he says with one of his rare, wide grins. “I asked your father, of course, but he suggested you might like to have the honors. You’ve earned it with all your labors on this site, he believes, and I quite agree.”
My hand flies to my heart, quite without planning. “Only if you’re sure,” I say.
“Completely,” he reassures me, and hands me an electric torch. “You’ll need this once you step inside.”
I take the torch from him and wedge it into my tool belt. I lift the hem on either side of my skirt and tuck it into my belt as well. I want nothing to trip me up, nothing to stand in my way.
“Eve, what on earth are you doing with your skirt?” Mama calls down. Only my mother would be worried about propriety at a time like this. She’s lost the war to keep me from archaeology, so she engages in skirmishes over small matters whenever the opportunity arises.
Ignoring her, I remove my hat, and put it on the ground next to the threshold. Then I descend the uneven steps, taking one at a time.
Four men crowd around the eight-foot-high stone rectangle that Howard and I have been calling a door, but is really more like a multi-ton barricade. They ready their levers and crowbars, but I put up a hand for them to pause. I want to study the door up close.
To the naked eye, the stone surface has no markings. But I want to be absolutely certain before they wrench it open, which could cause it to break or splinter. Running my hands along every inch of it, I feel nothing but the grooves and indentations of the stonemason’s tools from millennia ago.
“It’s clean!” I call up to Howard.
“You can go ahead then!” he calls back.
Stepping back a bit, I nod for them to proceed. The men inserttheir tools in the crevices around the door and try with all their might to pry it open. Sweat forms on their foreheads, and yet the stone does not budge.
The men pause, and one of them yells out in Arabic. In less than a minute, Ali scurries down the steps with a larger lever in his hand. We exchange smiles as he passes me, and I ruffle his hair.
The workers push their levers harder. Sweat pours down their faces with the effort and darkens their tunics. Finally I see movement in the stone. They give it one enormous, concerted effort, and the door clatters to the side, intact.
“It’s open!” I practically scream.
“What do you see?” Howard shouts back.
The men move to the sides to allow me to proceed toward the opening. I step toward the darkness of what can only be a chamber. Shining my torch into the interior, I see nothing but undecorated walls and ceilings and a pile of rubble in one corner. No objects.
“It seems empty!” I yell.
“Empty?” My father’s voice drifts down from the surface.
“Hold steady, Eve. I’m coming,” Howard calls to me.
I know I should wait. I know Howard will be at my side within a minute or so. But I cannot stop myself. I rub the scarab in my pocket for luck—I’ve become as superstitious as my father—and step into the chamber.
The blackness envelops me once I enter. It is as if the blinding Egyptian sun exists on an entirely separate plane than this space. Even the light from my torch illuminates only the tiniest of circles; the rest of its beam seems to be sucked away by the very air.
I feel rather than see Howard next to me. We are silent, allowing our torches to explore every inch of the walls. Once I scour the floor for signs of a single artifact—to no avail—I hunt for another entrance, perhaps to another, more plentifully filled chamber. I assume Howard is searching for the same.
“Looks like it was plundered in antiquity,” he mutters. “Or abandoned for a more impressive tomb before anything of significance could be entombed here.”
