I wonder whose tomb it is? Is it charted? Oh, will that throbbing never stop? Won’t someone come? Help! Help!
As if in answer to my cry, high above me I saw a queer, yet strikingly familiar figure, a figure silhouetted black against the sky.
The figure leaned over and gazed downwards into the shaft. I noticed its long and thickly curled wig.
“Ha, ha! A wig of the New Empire,” said I to myself.
Its owner’s face I could not see, but he—or she—yes, it was a woman, peered long and earnestly into the gloomy depths of the shaft where I lay.
Suddenly, and as though through the medium of some unnatural light, her face was revealed.
“I was right,” thought I. “It is a woman, and by her robes, a woman of the New Empire!”
But what features, what an expression! Never shall I forget it. A face of the most exotic beauty; of a type I knew instantly. It could only have belonged to one of the ladies of the house of Amenhotep the Magnificent! Such a face the Royal Sculptor Beq might carve, or Amenhotep, Superintendent of the Royal Craftsmen.
The beautiful apparition addressed me in the soft tones of the educated Egyptian.