Free The Sleeper in the Sands by Tom Holland Page A

greatest of the Pharaonic mortuary temples, barely visible when I first arrived upon the site but gradually revealed to be a masterpiece of art. The excavation was a back-breaking one, and I found nothing which could shed any direct light upon the mysteries of El-Amarna. But I was not impatient, and indeed I have ever looked back upon those years with the most cheerful of reminiscences. I have often considered how, if life had dealt me some other hand of cards, I might have made an excellent detective: not a Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, producing solutions with some great flash of insight, but rather one who accumulates his evidence with a steady care, hunting out every scrap of information, observing and analysing every clue. Certainly, I had realised that to pursue my ambitions I would need all the grounding I could possibly obtain -- and this I drew from my six years’ work upon the temple. For I learnt more there about the Ancient Egyptians, their history and their way of life, than in any other place or time; and it left me well equipped for the great adventure of my life.
    Not that I had wholly neglected - during this period of my apprenticeship -- to explore those mysteries which had first set me out on such a course. Beyond the temple on which I was working there rose a mighty cliff; and beyond that cliff there stretched a bleak and wild ravine, remote from every mark or sound of life. The Valley of the Kings! Of all Egypt’s wonders, there is none, I suppose, which makes more instant appeal to the imagination. Here in ancient times whole dynasties of Pharaohs had been entombed within the rock, and still to this day, thousands of years after its abandonment, it can seem an awesome, holy, death-haunted place. One might almost believe that one is on another world, and the very paths which wind across the contours of the valley, whiter and more blinding than the sand and rocks themselves, can seem like the veins of some calcified monster, the beat of its life long since drained and turned to stone. Certainly, it is hard to explain those impressions which go to make the entering of the tombs themselves so unsettling, for one cannot adequately express the silence, the echoing steps, the dark shadows, the hot, breathless air; nor describe the aura of vast Time, and the penetrating of it which stirs one so profoundly.
    Yet although the tombs of the Valley possessed an incomparable magnificence and beauty, I found nothing on the walls which could compare with the portrait of Nefer-titi, whose face, beauteous and deathly, still rose on occasion before my mind’s eye, surprising my fancy, or sometimes my dreams, as though luring me onwards to some unglimpsed goal. Nor did I discover any of those strange symbols and Arabic inscriptions which I had traced at El-Amarna; yet in truth, the finding of such marks would have surprised me more than their absence did. For the Aten had never been the guardian of the Valley; it was not the radiant image of a single god who had kept watch upon the tombs, but rather the ancient divinities of the underworld -- those same divinities Akh-en-Aten had been so desperate to suppress.
    Above all, reproduced again and again upon the walls, I found the image of Osiris -- Osiris, the first King of Egypt, whom his own brother Seth had sought to overthrow. Inspecting the artwork, I would recall the legend which Newberry had related to me; how twice the god of evil had murdered his brother, first by sealing him within a sarcophagus, then by dismembering and scattering his limbs across the world. Yet I was also reminded of how Osiris had then been brought back from the dead by Isis, his sister, the Great Goddess of Magic, to reign for ever in the Underworld; and it was in this role that he had been portrayed upon the walls of the tombs, as the eternal King of the realm of the Dead. The legends did not reveal how Isis had achieved the mystery of his resurrection; and yet his presence as a guardian over the