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to check his equipment, then eyed Costas. ‘You up for it?’ he said. ‘I mean, going deep?’
    Costas raised his eyes, then gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Let me see. Our last dive was in an underground passageway beneath the jungles of the Yucatán, being swept towards some kind of Mayan hell. And before that it was inside a rolling iceberg. Oh, and before that, an erupting volcano.’
    ‘You saying you’ve had enough, or can manage one more?’
    Costas gave his version of the thousand-yard stare, then gave a haggard grin and began pulling up his diving suit. ‘You just say the words.’
    ‘Time to kit up.’

2
    M aurice Hiebermeyer leaned back against the wall of the passageway, panted heavily a few times and eyed the ragged hole ahead of him. He would not be defeated. If the Bourbon King Charles of Naples could do it, an ample girth if there ever was one, then so could he. Once again he heaved himself up on his hands and knees, aimed his headlamp at the hole and threw himself bodily forward, his hard hat clattering against the ceiling and the jagged protrusions tearing at his overalls. Once again he ground to a halt, stuck like a cork in a bottle. It was no good. He looked through the filthy sheen on his glasses at the dust cloud he had created in the tunnel beyond. He could hardly believe it. The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, the greatest unexcavated treasure in Italy. Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, rediscovered by the Bourbon kings of Naples in the eighteenth century, hardly excavated since. And then an earthquake, a rushed international response, and here he was, first archaeologist ever to reach this far into the villa, stopped dead by his own girth. He felt like weeping. They would have to get in a pneumatic drill, widen the hole. It would mean more delays, more frustration. Already they were two weeks behind schedule, days spent pacing and sweating in the superintendency lobby while the bureaucracy inched towards releasing their permit. Precious time he could ill afford to lose, with his new excavation in full swing in the eastern desert beside the Red Sea.
    Then he saw it.
    He gasped, and whispered in his native German. ‘ Mein Gott . No, it can’t be.’ He reached out, and felt the smooth surface. A snout. ‘Yes, it is.’ He let his hand drop, and stared in amazement.
    The guardian god of the dead.
    A few feet ahead the grey mottled wall of the eighteenth-century tunnel had fallen away to form a shallow cavity, no more than a foot in depth. In the centre was a head, peering out, black and shrouded with dust but unmistakable, the ears pointing high up and the snout jutting out defiantly. He who walked through the shadows and lurked in dark places, guardian of the veil of death . Hiebermeyer stared at the sightless eyes, surrounded by the thick black line of kohl, then shut his own eyes tight and silently mouthed the name. Here, at the threshold of the unknown, at a place of unimaginable terror and death, where those who last lived truly saw the fires of hell. Anubis . He opened his eyes again, and saw three vertical lines of hieroglyphs running down the chest of the statue, the text instantly recognizable. A man remains over after death, and his deeds are placed beside him in heaps. Existence yonder is for eternity, and for him who reaches it without wrongdoing, he shall exist yonder like a god . Hiebermeyer stared past the statue into the empty blackness of the tunnel beyond. For a brief, bizarre moment he pitied all of them, the ancients who placed such store in the world beyond, whose crumbled dreams of the afterlife had become his own kingdom of the dead. Not for the first time he felt he was on a mission, that his true calling as an archaeologist was to bring those in limbo some semblance of the immortality they had so craved.
    ‘Maurice.’ A muffled voice came through from behind.
    ‘Maria.’
    ‘Relax for a moment.’
    There was a massive jolt and he sprang forward, tumbling