Two Great Mysteries by Elizabeth Peters: The Jackal's Head & the Seventh Sinner by Peters Elizabeth

Author:Peters, Elizabeth [Peters, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781578156153
Amazon: 1578156157
Goodreads: 66531
Publisher: Media Books Audio Publishing
Published: 2004-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

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210 / Elizabeth Peters

Try telling yourself that, though, when you wake with a splitting headache and a bone-dry throat, in absolute darkness, in an ancient Egyptian tomb. People may believe one thing in broad daylight, but it’s not what they believe when they walk through a cemetery at midnight.

For an endless space of time I lay as rigid as the mummified form which, somewhere in the darkness, shared the room with me. I even tried not to breathe loudly. Into my mind, unbidden and unwelcome, came the fear that I might hear something else breathing.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite so bad for me as it would have been for an average tourist with no background in archaeology; but past a certain point, degrees of terror are meaningless. I think the only thing that saved my reason was the flashlight.

It was lying on my chest, like a lily on a corpse. (I didn’t think of that simile at the time, which is just as well.) I felt its cold hard shape as soon as I calmed down enough to feel anything. It gave me a horrid shock for a moment, but as soon as my snatching fingers touched it I knew what it was; and the yellow beam of light was the most exquisite sight my eyes had ever beheld.

I sat up clutching the torch in both hands and admiring the light—just the light, not what it The Jackal’s Head / 211

showed. Then the beam caught a flash of color and a shape; and I was on my feet, moving the flashlight wildly and gasping.

The room was rectangular, perhaps twenty feet long by fifteen feet wide. Walls, floor, and ceiling were of stone—the living rock of the cliffs out of which the tomb had been cut. Most of the rock surface was concealed by a thin coating of plaster almost entirely covered by painted scenes. The ceiling was blue, with a pattern of tidy yellow stars. I turned the light on the wall nearest me; and a sudden sharp surmise stabbed my brain and swept away the last wisps of superstitious terror.

The colors of the paint—green, red-orange, cobalt, white—were as fresh as if they had been applied the previous day. But the scenes were not of the conven-tional rows of mortuary deities weaving a web of ritual protection around the sleeper in the tomb. Instead, an enormous yellow-painted sun orb filled the entire left upper section of the wall. From it stretched down rays of light, ending, rather endearingly, in little divine hands which extended the signs of life and health to the two human forms bathed in the pictured sunlight.

The lower part of the wall was hidden from my sight by a heap of objects—boxes, jars, chests, baskets. The funerary equip

212 / Elizabeth Peters

ment—untouched, undisturbed except by three thousand years of time—of a queen of ancient Egypt.

Queen?

The same strange surmise made me turn my light next toward the object in the center of the room, which filled most of the floor space and concealed the remaining walls from my sight.

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