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uncomfortable. But no, I assured myself. Ramses was older and more responsible now, and not even in his younger days would he have tried to rob the Cairo Museum. Not without an excellent reason, anyhow.
    So we went next to the Jewel Room, where Ramses gravitated to the cases containing the Treasure of Dahshur, as the guidebooks called it-the jewels of the Twelfth Dynasty princesses discovered in 1894 and '95. The labels on those cases attributed the discovery to M. de Morgan, who had been Director of the Service des Antiquites. I had my doubts about the accuracy of that attribution and, to judge by his expression, so had Ramses. Since he had never actually admitted finding the jewelry before M. de Morgan-which would have been tantamount to admitting he had been guilty of illicit excavation-I had never asked him.
    Nefret and Emerson stood before the case containing the Cushite royal scepters. Here again the official label was not entirely inaccurate. The scepters, magnificent examples of their kind, had been found in a remote wadi near the Valley of the Kings, by Professor and Mrs. Radcliffe Emerson; but they had been found in that location because we had put them there. Nefret had brought them away with her from the Lost Oasis, and since the very existence of that spot must never be disclosed to the world, we had been forced to engage in a small spot of misdirection in order to make the scepters accessible to the scholarly world.
    Baedeker had given the Dahshur Treasure two stars. Tetisheri's jewelry awaited a new edition of that invaluable book for its evaluation, but I did not doubt it would rate at least as high. The queen's parure had included several massive gold bracelets, even finer than the ones that had belonged to her daughter, Queen Aahhotep, which rested in a nearby case. My favorite pieces were the beaded collars and bracelets, multiple strands of carnelian and turquoise, lapis lazuli and gold. They had been only a jumble of color when I first set eyes on them, lying on the floor of the burial chamber where they had fallen from the collapsed wooden case.
    Standing beside me, David studied them with the same pride and interest. It was due to our joint efforts that the exquisite things had survived in their present form. We had spent hours studying the patterns of the fragments that had not fallen apart and restringing hundred of tiny beads in the same order. I had had considerable experience with such work, but I daresay I could not have done it so well without David. He had been trained by one of the finest forgers of antiquities in Luxor, and he had an artist's eye.
    I gave his arm a little squeeze and he looked down at me with a reminiscent smile. "There will never be anything like it again," he said softly. "What an experience that was!"
    "You have hardly reached the peak of your career at eighteen," I assured him. "The best is certainly yet to come, David."
    "Quite right," said Emerson. Jewelry is not one of his principal interests, and he had become bored. "Well, my dears, what shall we see next?"
    "The royal mummies," Nefret said promptly.
    Emerson was agreeable. Mummies are one of his interests, and he was certain he could find something in the exhibit to complain about The royal mummies had come for the most part from two caches, one in the cliffs above Deir el Bahri, the other in the tomb of Amenhotep II. In the old museum they had been dispersed in different rooms. Maspero had brought them together here, at the end of the same vestibule off which the Jewel Room was located. It was a very popular exhibit, and as we approached Emerson burst out, "Only look at those ghouls! The whole business is so unseemly it makes me wild with rage! I told Maspero he had no right to put those poor cadavers on display, as if they were artifacts; how would you like, I asked him, to be exposed naked to the stares of the vulgar?"
    "That is certainly a grisly thought," said Ramses.
    Nefret raised her hand to her mouth to hide