Knowing that tourists frequent the same places, Erica wondered why the man made her feel alarmed. She knew she was acting absurdly and that her fear was just a combination of the weird events of the last few days plus the hot, stuffy atmosphere of the tomb. Hiking her tote strap higher on her shoulder, Erica forced herself out into the burial chamber. The man was not in sight. A small flight of steps rose to the upper part of the room, leading to the exit. Erica started up the steps, her eyes scanning the area. She had to keep herself from running. Then she stopped. Moving quickly behind one of the square pillars on her left was the same man. It was just a fleeting glimpse, but now Erica was convinced she was not imagining things, that the man was acting strangely. He was stalking her. Impulsively she mounted the remaining steps and slipped behind a column. The room contained four pillars, each facade decorated with a colored life-size relief of Seti I before one of the Egyptian gods.
Erica waited, her heart pounding, unwillingly remembering the way violence had been exploding around her during the last few days. She did not know what to expect. Then the man appeared again. He walked around the pillar in front of her, looking at the giant mural on the wall. Even though his lips were only slightly parted, Erica could see that the right-front incisor came to a sharp point. He passed without looking at her.
As soon as her legs would move, Erica first walked, then ran, retracing her steps through corridors and up the stairways until she emerged into the shocking bright sunlight. Once in the open, her panic evaporated and she felt foolish. Her certainty of the man’s evil intentions seemed like pure paranoia. She glanced back but did not return to Seti’s tomb. She’d look for the name Nenephta on another day.
It was after noon, and the concession stand and rest house were jammed. As a consequence, Tutankhamen’s comparatively meager tomb was almost empty. Earlier there had been a line to get in. Erica took advantage of the lull in the crowds and descended the famous sixteen steps to the entrance. Just before going in, she looked back toward Seti’s tomb. She saw no one. While walking down the passageway, she considered the irony that the smallest tomb of the most insignificant pharaoh of the New Kingdom was the only one found reasonably intact. And even Tutankhamen’s tomb had been broken into twice in antiquity.
As she crossed the threshold into the antechamber, she tried to recreate in her mind that wonderful day in November 1922 when the tomb was opened. How exciting it must have been when Howard Carter and his party stepped into the most dazzling archaeological treasure ever uncovered.
With her knowledge of the discovery, Erica could mentally place most of the objects found in the tomb. She knew that the life-size statues of Tutankhamen stood on either side of the burial-chamber entrance and that the three funerary beds stood against the wall. Then she remembered the strange disarray that Carter had found in the tomb. That was a mystery that never was explained. Presumably the chaos was from the tomb robbers, but why hadn’t the funerary objects been put back to their original state?
Stepping out of the way of an exiting French tour group, Erica had to wait to enter the burial chamber. While she stood there, the man in the black suit who had frightened her in Seti’s tomb entered, carrying an open guidebook. Involuntarily Erica stiffened. But she successfully fought her fear, convinced that she was just imagining things. Besides, the man did not seem to notice her as he passed. She got a good look at the hooked nose that gave him the appearance of a bird of prey.
Mustering her fortitude, she forced herself to enter the crowded burial chamber. The room was divided by a banister, and the only free spot at the railing was next to the man in the black suit. She hesitated for a moment but then walked up to the banister and looked over at Tutankhamen’s magnificent pink sarcophagus. The wall paintings in the room were insignificant when compared with the stylistic perfection of those in Seti’s tomb. As her eyes roamed the room, Erica happened to see the open page in the man’s guidebook. It was the floor plan of the Temple of Karnak. It had nothing to do with the Valley of the Kings, and all Erica’s fears returned with a rush. Quickly stepping away from the railing, Erica hurried out. Again she felt better in the sunlight and fresh air, but now she was convinced she was not paranoid.
There were no tables available in the concession stand, which stood a mere thirty feet from the entrance to Tutankhamen’s tomb, but Erica was thankful for the crowd; it made her feel safe. She sat on the low stone wall of the veranda with a cold can of juice she’d purchased and her box lunch from the hotel. She’d kept her eye on the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and now as she watched, the man emerged and walked across the parking area to a small black car. He sat on the seat, leaving the door ajar, his feet on the ground. She wondered what his presence meant; if his intention had been to harm her, he’d had multiple opportunities. She concluded that he must be merely following her, perhaps working for the authorities. Erica took a deep breath and tried to ignore him. But she also decided to stay in the company of other tourists.
Her lunch consisted of several sliced lamb sandwiches, which she chewed thoughtfully while looking across the path to the nearby opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. It helped her to relax to think of the thousands of Victorian visitors to the Valley of the Kings who had unknowingly sipped their cool lemonade ten yards from the hidden entrance to the world’s greatest buried treasure. The Seti I tomb was also reasonably close to the concession stand.
Biting into the second sandwich, she pondered the proximity of Ramses VI’s tomb to Tutankhamen’s. It was just above and slightly to the left. Erica remembered that it had been the workers’ huts built during the construction of Ramses VI’s tomb over the entrance to Tutankhamen’s which had delayed Carter’s discovery. It hadn’t been until he’d thrown a trench right into the area that he had found the sixteen descending steps.
Erica stopped eating, drawing the information together. She knew that the ancient plunderers had entered Tutankhamen’s tomb through the original entrance, because Carter had described the breaks in the door. But because of the location of the workers’ huts, the entrance to Tutankhamen’s tomb had to have been covered and forgotten by the time the construction began on Ramses VI’s tomb. This meant that Tutankhamen’s tomb had to have been plundered in the early twentieth or perhaps the nineteenth dynasty. What if Tutankhamen’s tomb had been plundered during the reign of Seti I?
Erica allowed herself to swallow. Could there be some connection between the defilement of Tutankhamen’s tomb and the fact that Tutankhamen’s name appeared on the Seti statue? While her mind wandered over these thoughts, Erica looked up and watched a lone hawk spiral on still wings.
She began putting her sandwich papers back into the box. The man in the car had not moved. A nearby table vacated, and Erica carried her belongings over to it, putting her tote bag on the ground.
Despite the heavy heat hanging over the valley like a thick blanket, Erica’s mind kept racing. What if the Seti statues had been placed inside Tutankhamen’s tomb after the tomb robbers had been caught? She immediately dismissed the idea as preposterous; it made no sense. Besides, if the statues had been in the tomb, they would have been cataloged by Carter, who had a reputation for being uncompromisingly meticulous. No, Erica knew she was on the wrong track, but she realized that the whole issue of robbers in Tutankhamen’s tomb had been given short shrift because of the enormity of Carter’s find. The fact that the boy king’s tomb had been defiled might have significance, and the idea that the tomb had been entered during the reign of Seti I was intriguing. Suddenly Erica wished she were back at the Egyptian Museum. She decided she wanted to go over Carter’s notes, which Dr. Fakhry said were on microfilm in the archives. Even if she did not learn anything astounding, it would be the subject of a good journal article. She also wondered if any of the people present during the initial opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb were still alive. She knew Carnarvon and Carter had died, and thinking of Carnarvon’s death, she remembered the “Curse of the Pharaohs” and smiled at the resourcefulness of the media and the gullibility of the public.