Free The Sleeper in the Sands by Tom Holland Page B

royal sarcophagi - his expression inscrutable, his lips faintly smiling -- appeared to hint that the secret had somehow been vouchsafed, to the souls of the Pharaohs at the very least. Again, thinking of this, I would find myself puzzling over Akh-en-Aten; at what had persuaded him to abandon such a god, and the prospect of an eternity of life after death.
    Regrettably, without the opportunity of excavating in the Valley I had little chance of discovering answers to such questions. Indeed, only one faint avenue of investigation suggested itself. Recalling Newberry’s discovery of the legend of the restless King, it struck me that there might perhaps be similar folk tales abroad in the neighbourhood of Thebes. Certainly, there was one tradition which had been preserved from time immemorial amongst the villagers of the area, for the Valley remained what it had been since the age of the Pharaohs, the profitable hunting-ground of tomb-thieves and robbers. Evidence of their labours was everywhere to be found: open or half-filled mummy pits, heaps of rubbish, great mounds of rock debris with, here and there, fragments of coffins and shreds of linen mummy-wrappings protruding from the sand. Surely, I thought to myself, the accumulated wisdom of such professionals might contain some fragments of information which I could put to my own use. By this time I was able to converse in Arabic with tolerable ease, and on the darker nights, when the pestilential gnats and midges had tired me out of all patience, I would sometimes rise from my quarters and visit the headman of a neighbouring village. It is true my inquiries met with no immediate response, but I was neither surprised nor especially disheartened by this. For I had the impression, when I asked about the legends of the ancient tombs, that something was being kept back from me, and I found evidence enough that such legends might indeed be still alive. Sitting by the coffee-hearth of the headman of a village, one could often listen to reciters of romances who, without any books at all, had committed their subjects to memory, and afforded the villagers wonderful entertainment. Their recitations contained a good deal of history and ancient lore, and I would occasionally hear, with reference to the Valley, vague allusions to some great and wonderful secret, protected, so it seemed, by a terrible curse. It was hard to make anything specific of such stuff, but it certainly served to pique my curiosity, and I would often find myself wondering what more the village poets might not know.
    While I was being employed upon the mortuary temples, away from the Valley, such a question might not have seemed an urgent one. But then in the autumn of 1899, towards the end of my sixth year of field work at Thebes, a dramatic upturn in my fortunes occurred which was to place the question into the sharpest of focus. It appeared that my efforts to prepare myself for the excavator’s life had not gone wholly unnoticed, for I was suddenly offered, as though from the blue, the post of Chief Inspector of Antiquities. This was a doubly unexpected honour, for not only was I still very young -- a mere 25 years old -- but I had the far worse disadvantage of not being French. Petrie’s prejudices had influenced me strongly: I had always assumed the worst of the Service des Antiquites. But the head of that organisation, Monsieur Gaston Maspero, was in reality a man of remarkable discernment, and it may be, indeed, all the more so for his not being English -- only a Frenchman, I suspect, would have appointed a man of my humble background to the post. I accepted it, of course, with the utmost alacrity, and with a sense of excitement intermingled with the utmost anticipation; for henceforth I was to be responsible for the antiquities of the whole of Upper Egypt -- and in particular, for the exploration of the Valley of the Kings.

    At last, then, I reflected with a measure of satisfaction, I could count myself a