Free De Potter's Grand Tour by Joanna Scott

recently purchased from a dealer in Luxor.
    â€œI sense that you are an inexperienced collector,” the man said. “Allow me to give you a short lesson.” As the law stood in Egypt, he explained, the national museums had the right to acquire all antiquities found during excavations, but at a price fixed below what could be obtained elsewhere. For this reason, the dealers preferred to offer their wares to foreign collectors. But these transactions had to be conducted in utmost secret, and collectors needed to prove that they could be trusted not to disclose the source of their acquisitions to the Egyptian authorities.
    â€œMy advice to you, sir, is to offer my name as a reference,” the Dutchman said, handing him the card of the dealer who had sold him the gold coin. He added that he’d heard about some Arab brothers who had dug up a cache of treasures in the Valley of the Kings. If Armand was interested, he’d better hurry to Luxor, the man advised, for the treasures would surely be gone within the week.

 
    A Trip up the Nile

    I N THE HILLS outside Luxor, in the early morning before the sun rose and before the tourists disembarked from their steamers and the donkeys were saddled and guides assigned, the four Abd-er-Rasoul brothers climbed the cliff behind the Ramesseum, cleared the rocks they’d used to hide the cave they’d made, and resumed their digging.
    The government called them criminals, the representatives of museums called them vermin. They were the inheritors of a tradition that was as old as the first mastaba of Saqqâra. Seal the entrance of a tomb with a three-ton slab of granite, and they would break that slab apart. Hide a secret chamber behind a false one, and they would find it. In the land of the living, even a withered finger was worth enough piastres to buy food for the day. What did the dead need with fingers anyway? The less weight carried into the afterlife the better, and industrious thieves were ready to help lighten the load. Besides, any treasure they dug out of the earth was rightfully theirs, since the land belonged to their father. In a just world, it would be so, but in the unjust world of Luxor in the 1870s they were whipped with a bastinado on their bare soles and thrown into jail if they were caught peddling their wares to tourists.
    The trick was to not get caught. So they dug in the predawn darkness, when the night sky was just beginning to lighten and the first whisper of the sun’s torrid presence was carried by the breeze. Deep inside the cave, with the stones re-piled behind them to camouflage the entrance, the four brothers felt no breeze. Instead, they felt the heat of the torch carried by the youngest brother and smelled the limestone dust that mixed with their sweat, staining their faces with a thick gray paste.
    These skilled grave robbers had learned the craft from their father and uncles, who’d learned from their father, who’d discovered that plundering the old tombs was a good way to supplement the income from his small farm. How strange that foreigners were willing to pay—even pay handsomely—for a mummified head or pieces of broken crockery. But the grandfather of the four Abd-er-Rasoul brothers had understood that the law of supply and demand will always prevail. For years, the family had been meeting the foreigners’ demand for relics with a steady if trickling supply, passing along the secret maps of the tunnels from one generation to the next.
    Beneath the peak of el-Qurn, the trickle was about to erupt in a flood. One of the brothers widened a gouge in the wall, the rock crumbled from the impact, and the flickering light of the torch revealed the engravings of the cartouche above the entrance of a subterranean passage. The passage was six feet square, and the fearless brothers followed it westward for twenty-four feet and then turned northward, continuing deep into the mountain before the passage