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talking about -- what exactly were Akh-en-Aten’s dates?’
    ‘He reigned, it is thought, around 1350 BC
    ‘Then how could the tradition possibly have been preserved from such a time?’
    ‘Oh, with the greatest ease,’ answered Newberry airily. ‘Arab folk tales are directly descended from the traditions of Ancient Egypt. If you do not believe me, then you need only compare the Westcar Papyrus with the cycle of “The Arabian Nights”.’
    Never then having heard of the Westcar Papyrus, I did not know how to reply to this assertion; but I must still have looked doubtful, for Newberry began impatiently to list the parallels between Akh-en-Aten and the peasants’ folk tale king -- how they had both sought to overthrow an ancient priestcraft, how they had both been the worshippers of a single god . . .
    ‘And his end?’ I interrupted him. ‘What did happen to Akh-en-Aten in the end?’
    ‘We cannot be certain,’ Newberry answered promptly. ‘But his revolution’ -- he shifted in his saddle, to gaze back at the dusty, abandoned plain -- ‘it clearly did not last.’
    ‘And his children?’
    Newberry frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘In the fragment Petrie showed us - the King appeared surrounded by his children. He must have had heirs.’
    ‘Two sons, Petrie thinks.’
    ‘Then what happened to them? Why did they not carry on their father’s work?’
    ‘Again’ -- Newberry shrugged -- ‘we cannot be certain. The first son, it would appear from the evidence of Petrie’s excavations, reigned here no more than two or three years. And then in the second son’s reign - we can be confident of this much at least - El-Amarna was abandoned, and the court restored to Thebes.’
    ‘Why can we be so confident?’
    ‘Because, just as his father had changed his name, so did this King as well. He had first been known as Tut-ankh-Aten -- or in English, “the Living Image of the Sun”. But when he returned to Thebes, and to the influence of the priests of Karnak, such a title was clearly impossible to keep. So you can imagine what new name he chose to adopt.’
    ‘Indeed?’
    ‘Think, Carter, think.’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Why what else could it have been’ - Newberry paused to smile - ‘but Tut-ankh- Amen ? “The Living Image of Amen” -- you see?’ His smile grew wistful. ‘ Tut-ankh-Amen.’
    And so I heard, for the first time, the name of that King who was one day to shadow all my ambitions and hopes, and become in due course the very object of my life. And indeed, almost as though in witness of the moment, even as Newberry pronounced the fateful name so we rounded an outcrop of jagged rock and I saw ahead of us, guarding the entrance to a narrow ravine, a carving hewn out from the wall of the cliff. Newberry gestured to it. ‘You can see here,’ he proclaimed, ‘what on Petrie’s fragment had been incomplete.’ I gazed up at the carving. Although still seated in my saddle, the figures it portrayed rose high beyond my eye-level. I recognised the Pharaoh, Akh-en-Aten, at once: his appearance was, if anything, more grotesque than it had seemed upon the earlier frieze. He was standing with arms outstretched to greet the welcoming rays of the sun. Two girls were behind him, very small, their appearance likewise even more bizarre than before. But there was also a second adult figure, a woman, who wore upon her head the crown of a queen; and she, although just as distorted in her features as the others, did not seem, for all that, grotesque in the least. Far from it - for the strangeness of her appearance lent her a loveliness which was both unsettling and profound, a beauty which seemed almost to be not of this world. I strained to inspect her more closely, puzzled by this mystery; and even as I urged my camel closer to the carving, so the angle of the sunlight changed and all the figures were stained a dark red, and then the beam itself was gone and the carving cast into darkness.
    ‘We must hurry,’