The Shadow King Read Free Page A

however, on June 25, a third Abd el-Rassul brother, Mohammed, handed himself in to the Pasha. In return for a £500 reward, he promised to reveal the location of the long lost tomb.
    By this time, Maspero was on his way to France for the summer, so Brugsch was sent back to Luxor in his place to meet Mohammed and track down the precious find. On July 6, Brugsch followed Abd el-Rassul and his workmen up the sandy path. He had high hopes that he was about to see a royal tomb complete with at least some of its treasures—though probably just one belonging to an obscure king or queen of the weak Twenty-First Dynasty, as this was the period of the antiquities that the Abd el-Rassuls had been selling.
    Then again … Above Brugsch’s head, up past the top of the cliffs, were the tiny silhouettes of soaring vultures. The Abd el-Rassul family would be desperate to prevent such a valuable source of income falling into the hands of the authorities. Maybe Mohammed’s story was nothing but an elaborate—and deadly—trap.
    TODAY, IT’S EASY ENOUGH to climb onto the cliff top above Deir el-Bahri. From the eastern edge of the Valley of the Kings, you scramble up a stony slope to the top of the ridge, now lined with satellite dishes rather than loitering vultures. Then, walk over the top and hold your breath as the entire sweep of the Nile valley opens out before you. It’s one of the best vantage points around (save for a hot air balloon) to see how this dramatic landscape is laid out.
    In the distance, the blue ribbon of the Nile runs south to north, parallel to the horizon as you look east. It’s bordered on each side by a bright green strip a mile or two wide—fields of wheat, sugar cane, and berseem fed by fertile black silt from the river and tended by the local villagers. Then the green turns abruptly to the amber of the desert sand, which rises to the cliffs on which you’re standing.
    For the ancient Egyptians, this border between green and amber, fields and desert, marked the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Look along this line and you can see the remains of the pharaohs’ memorial temples dotted along it—from the once-glittering* achievement of Amenhotep III, now marked chiefly by two giant statues (known as the Colossi of Memnon) rising tall from the fields, to the ruined columns of the Ramesseum, built by Rameses II. Here the two worlds met—where the people would visit and pay respect to the eternal spirits of their dead kings.
    Back the way you’ve just come, the Valley of the Kings nestles behind the ridge, overlooked by El-Qurn, a naturally pyramid-shaped peak with its sloping shoulders spread protectively over the valley. This is where the pharaohs thought they would be safe for eternity. Beyond it, the desert stretches, harsh and featureless, all the way to the sea.
    The cliffs beneath you are dotted with less grandiose noblemen’s tombs—visible from the plain below as rows of small, dark holes, like windows peeping out of the rock. And down to your right, a collection of square mud-brick houses painted orange, yellow, and blue is perched on the hillside: all that’s now left of the village of Gurna. Thousands of people used to live here, but most of the houses were recently bulldozed by the Egyptian government as part of an effort to turn the entire area into the equivalent of an open-air museum. The residents, who now mostly make their living as taxi drivers and tour guides, were relocated to a new village at the base of the hills.
    As you stand looking over the valley, you can turn left and walk along the top of the ridge for a few minutes, then gradually pick your way down toward the Temple of Hatshepsut, a grand columned structure built right into the base of the cliffs. Or you can turn right and almost immediately scramble down through a cleft in the rock, on a near-vertical cliff path—a treacherous short-cut traditionally used by Gurna’s villagers.† The bottom of the