The Book of the Dead

He shone his light ahead, illuminating a dim portal at the far end. “This staircase would have been filled with rubble, ending in a sealed door.”

They continued descending the staircase, at last reaching a massive doorway topped by a lintel carved with a huge Eye of Horus. Wicherly paused, shining his light on the Eye and the hieroglyphics surrounding it.

“Can you read these hieroglyphics?” asked Menzies.

Wicherly gri

There was a short silence.

McCorkle issued a high-pitched chuckle. “That’s all?”

“To the ancient tomb robber,” said Wicherly, “that would be enough-that’s a heck of a curse to an ancient Egyptian.”

“Who is Ammut?” Nora asked.

“The Swallower of the Damned.” Wicherly pointed his flashlight on a dim painting on the far wall, depicting a monster with a crocodilian head, the body of a leopard, and the grotesque hindquarters of a hippo, squatting on the sand, mouth open, about to devour a row of human hearts. “Evil words and deeds made the heart heavy, and after death Anubis weighed your heart on a balance scale against the Feather of Maat. If your heart weighed more than the feather, the baboon-headed god, Thoth, tossed it to the monster Ammut to eat. Ammut journeyed into the sands of the west to defecate, and that’s where you’d end up if you didn’t lead a good life-a shite, baking in the heat of the Western Desert.”

“That’s more than I needed to hear, thank you, Doctor,” said McCorkle.

“Robbing a pharaoh’s tomb must have been a terrifying experience for an ancient Egyptian. The curses put on any who entered the tomb were very real to them. To cancel the power of the dead pharaoh, they didn’t just rob the tomb, they destroyed it, smashing everything. Only by destroying the objects could they disperse their malevolent power.”

“Fodder for the exhibit, Nora,” Menzies murmured.

After the briefest hesitation, McCorkle stepped across the threshold, and the rest followed.

“The God’s Second Passage,” Wicherly said, shining his light around at the inscriptions. “The walls are covered with inscriptions from the Reunupertemhru, the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

“Ah! How interesting!” Menzies said. “Read us a sample, Adrian.”

In a low voice, Wicherly began to intone:

The Regent Senef, whose word is truth, saith: Praise and thanksgiving be unto thee, Ra, O thou who rollest on like unto gold, thou Illuminer of the Two Lands on the day of thy birth. Thy mother brought thee forth on her hand, and thou didst light up with splendor the circle which is traveled over by the Disk. O Great Light who rollest across Nu, thou dost raise up the generations of men from the deep source of thy waters…

“It’s an invocation to Ra, the Sun God, by the deceased, Senef. It’s pretty typical of the Book of the Dead.”

“I’ve heard about the Book of the Dead,” Nora said, “but I don’t know much about it.”

“It was basically a group of magical invocations, spells, and incantations. It helped the dead make the dangerous journey through the underworld to the Field of Reeds-the ancient Egyptian idea of heaven. People waited in fear during that long night after the burial of the pharaoh, because if he buggered up somehow down in the underworld and wasn’t reborn, the sun would never rise again. The dead king had to know the spells, the secret names of the serpents, and all kinds of other arcane knowledge to finish the journey. That’s why it’s all written on the walls of his tomb-the Book of the Dead was a set of crib notes to eternal life.”

Wicherly chuckled, shining his beam over four registers of hieroglyphics painted in red and white. They stepped toward them, raising clouds of deepening gray dust. “There’s the First Gate of the Dead,” he went on. “It shows the pharaoh getting into the solar barque and journeying into the underworld, where he’s greeted by a crowd of the dead… Here in Gate Four they’ve encountered the dreaded Desert of Sokor, and the boat magically becomes a serpent to carry them across the burning sands… And this! This is very dramatic: at midnight, the soul of the Sun God Ra unites with his corpse, represented by the mummified figure-”

“Pardon my saying so, Doctor,” McCorkle broke in, “but we’ve still got eight rooms to go.”

“Right, of course. So sorry.”

They proceeded to the far end of the chamber. Here, a dark hole revealed a steep staircase plunging into blackness. “This passage would also have been filled with rubble,” Wicherly said. “To hinder robbers.”

“Be careful,” McCorkle muttered as he led the way.

Wicherly turned to Nora and held out a well-manicured hand. “May I?”

“I think I can handle it,” she said, amused at the old-world courtesy. As she watched Wicherly descend with excessive caution, his beautifully polished shoes heavily coated with dust, she decided that he was far more likely to slip and break his neck than she was.

“Be careful!” Wicherly called out to McCorkle. “If this tomb follows the usual plan, up ahead is the well.”

“The well?” McCorkle’s voice floated back.

“A deep pit designed to send unwary tomb robbers to their death. But it was also a way to keep water from flooding the tomb, during those rare periods when the Valley of the Kings flash-flooded.”

“Even if it remains intact, the well will surely be bridged over,” Menzies said. “Recall that this was once an exhibit.”

They moved forward cautiously, their beams finally revealing a rickety wooden bridge spa

“It’s still safe,” said McCorkle. “Cross one at a time.”

Nora walked gingerly across the narrow bridge. “I can’t believe this was once part of an exhibit. How did they ever install a well like this in the sub-basement of the museum?”

“It must have been cut into the Manhattan bedrock,” Menzies said from behind. “We’ll have to bring this up to code.”

On the far side of the bridge, they passed over another threshold. “Now we’re in the middle tomb,” said Wicherly. “There would have been another sealed door here. What marvelous frescoes! Here’s an image of Senef meeting the gods. And more verses from the Book of the Dead.”

“Any more curses?” Nora asked, glancing at another Eye of Horus painted prominently above the once-sealed door.

Wicherly shone his light toward it. “Hmmm. I’ve never seen an inscription like this before. The place which is sealed. That which lieth down in the closed place is reborn by the Ba-soul which is in it; that which walketh in the closed space is dispossessed of the Ba-soul. By the Eye of Horus I am delivered or damned, O great god Osiris.”

“Sure sounds like another curse to me,” said McCorkle.

“I would guess it’s merely an obscure quotation from the Book of the Dead. The bloody thing runs to two hundred chapters and nobody’s figured all of it out.”

The tomb now opened up onto a stupendous hall, with a vaulted roof and six great stone pillars, all densely covered with hieroglyphics and frescoes. It seemed incredible to Nora that this huge, ornate space had been asleep in the bowels of the museum for more than half a century, forgotten by almost all.

Wicherly turned, playing his light across the extensive paintings. “This is rather extraordinary. The Hall of the Chariots, which the ancients called the Hall of Repelling Enemies. This was where all the war stuff the pharaoh needed in the afterlife would have been stored-his chariot, bows and arrows, horses, swords, knives, war club and staves, helmet, leather armor.”