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Emerson took out his watch. “What time?”
    “Two o’clock.”
    “Then Ramses and I have plenty of time for a visit to the Valley. We will drive the motorcar.”
    “Not unless it can be driven with only three wheels,” his wife said. “I don’t believe you and Selim ever got round to putting the fourth one back on.”
    “Oh.” Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin. He had bought the motorcar over his wife’s strenuous objections. She had pointed out, correctly, that its use was limited by the lack of good roads, but her chief objection was the way Emerson drove—at full speed, with complete disregard for objects in his way. However, the car spent most of the time in the stable annex, since Emerson and Selim kept taking it apart.
    “We will ride the horses, then,” Emerson said. “You needn’t come, Peabody.”
    “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Emerson.”
     
    R amses hadn’t been in the Valley for months. The firman was held by Lord Carnarvon, whose excavations, under the direction of Howard Carter, had been going on intermittently since 1913. He had found nothing except a few workmen’s huts and a cache of calcite jars. It was generally agreed that Carter was wasting his time. There were no more royal tombs in the Valley.
    As they walked along the dusty path from the donkey park, where they had left their horses, Ramses was conscious of a certain nostalgia. Excavation wasn’t his primary interest, but there was no site on earth more evocative than the burial place of the great pharaohs of the Empire. The family had been allowed to work on the more obscure and uninteresting tombs until 1907, with the grudging consent of the American dilettante Theodore Davis, who then had the sole right to search for new tombs. He’d found a lot of them, too, or rather, his archaeological assistants had. It was Davis’s mishandling of the enigmatic burial in KV55 that had driven Emerson into a particularly outrageous explosion, and M. Maspero, then head of the Service des Antiquités, had been forced by Davis to ban them from the Valley altogether.
    What a season it had been, though! As they passed the entrance to KV55, now blocked and sealed, Ramses felt a remembered thrill. He would never forget his first sight of the pieces of the great golden shrine lying dismantled and abandoned in the entrance corridor, the shattered but magnificent inlaid coffin, the canopic jars with their exquisitely carved heads. The excavation had been badly botched, no question of that, but if Emerson hadn’t insulted Maspero, they might have had a chance of getting the firman when Davis gave it up. Of all the sites in Egypt, it was the one Emerson yearned for most.
    But Emerson passed the entrance to KV55 with only a sidelong glance, pushing through the throngs and muttering anathemas against empty-headed tourists. As they went on, past the side branches that led to the most popular of the royal tombs, the crowds decreased. The sun had risen over the enclosing cliffs. Ramses took his mother’s arm.
    “I’m ready for a rest. How about you?”
    The pith helmet shadowed the upper part of her face, but he saw her tight-set lips relax. She was limping a little that morning, or rather, trying not to limp. He had noticed it once or twice before, but she would never admit fatigue or pain. “If you like, my dear.”
    Emerson came back to ask why they were stopping. His wife, who was wearing her famous belt hung all round with various “useful objects,” unhooked her canteen and offered it to the others. Nefret accepted gratefully, and so did Ramses, after his mother had had her turn. Emerson shook his head. He could go without water as long as a camel, and his son had often wondered why he had never collapsed from dehydration.
    They went on, exploring one side wadi after another, until they reached a cul-de-sac walled in by jagged cliffs. High above them, in a narrow cleft, was a tomb entrance—that of the great warrior pharaoh,