There was a King in Egypt

by Norma Lorimer

These were the sort of discussions with which Margaret had already grown familiar. She felt that in piecing together and sketching as accurately as possible the cactus-like branch of the little plant engraved on the broken vase, she was actually helping to forge a link in one of the minute chains of Egyptian archaeology.

Her brother's memory amazed her and his intelligence stimulated her. He had been such a boy at home. Egypt had converted him into a strong serious scholar. His fair head, bent over his work, with the lamplight shining on it, was so dear to her that impulsively she put her long strong fingers on the glittering hair; she longed to kiss it.

"Dear old boy!" she said. "Isn't it all just too exciting? Isn't life thrilling? Isn't it lovely to be alive?"

Freddy did not look up. "Some girls," he said, "mightn't think this being very much alive—the sorting out of bits of broken rubbish, thrown out of a tomb which has been forgotten for two or three thousand years. Did you ever think you'd care to know whether a prickly pear was indigenous to Egypt or was not? Or whether canopic jars had their origin in family grocers' jars being lent by the head of the house to hold the intestines of some dear-departed?"

Meg laughed. "It is all too odd, but being in it, and actually knowing that we are going to see into that tomb in a few days and discover who the king was who was buried there, and all about his personal and family affairs, and be able to touch the jewels he was buried with, it's too interesting for words, I think!"

"I hope you won't be disappointed. It may have been robbed."

"But you don't think so?"

"No, I don't—not at present. There was a tomb opened at one of the camps, not long ago, which told a tragic story of the end of robbery and plunder. The roof had fallen in while the burglar was busy unwrapping the cloths from the dead mummy. He was evidently trying to get at the heart-scarab, I suppose, and at the jewels which the windings held in their place. He had been smothered, taken in the act. Probably he had left his fellow-plunderers at the entrance; the roof may have looked unsafe, but he had hoped to collect all the jewels and scarabs before it gave way. Fate played him a nasty trick. The roof caved in, and we have secured all the jewels he had collected together and have learned a lesson of what must have often happened. The mummy's body was, of course, still perfect. Of the intruder only bones were visible and some fragments of his clothes. Things keep for ever in these hermetically-sealed Egyptian tombs, where neither rust nor moth ever entered in, but where thieves did break through and steal."

"How thrilling!" Margaret said. "How did you guess that the skeleton was the skeleton of a robber? I suppose as he never returned, his friends just went off and left him?"

"By the scattered jewels and the way the mummy was lying. Why should a skeleton be inside a royal tomb? Why should the mummy be out of its coffin and partly unrobed? We have actually found before now plans which the sextons and the guardians of the tombs had made for themselves, of all the tombs in the cemetery which was in their care. They knew how they could be entered one from another. Of course, this valley is different. The tombs are isolated and carefully hidden. It was never a public cemetery."