The Shadow King Read Free Page B

path deposits you very close to the shaft where Mohammed Abd el-Rassul once led the nervous curator and his friends.
    The details of Brugsch’s experiences were recorded in just three places—two academic reports (in French) published by Maspero in 18814 and 1889,5 and an 1887 magazine article in which Brugsch described what happened to the U.S. photographer Edward Wilson.6
    TO FIND OUT what he had to say, I visit the British Library in London, a modern-day treasure-hunters’ delight, where tapping a few computer keys is all it takes to unearth the most obscure, forgotten gems.
    Maspero’s reports are tied up with string, with battered corners and yellowed, brittle pages. They’re also huge, landing with a satisfying thud on my desk. I untie the string and start to read the century-old words, scanning for the key passages—“Le premier objet qui frappa les yeux de M. Émile Brugsch …”*—and the story comes to life once more.
    Brugsch had to admit that the ancient Egyptians chose their hiding place well. They had dug their shaft at the base of a hollow chimney that ran up through the cliff, and was invisible from most lines of sight. One place you can see it from, however, is that steep cliff path.
    Abd el-Rassul’s men had been carrying with them a sturdy palm log. They now tied a rope to it, heaved it across the top of the hole, and used the rope to haul up the most dangerously balanced rocks from its walls and floor. Then, led by Abd el-Rassul, Brugsch lowered himself into the shaft—a neat figure in a dark suit and fez, swaying precariously from side to side as he descended.
    At the bottom was a tiny doorway that led to a low corridor, less than three feet high. Brugsch had to drop to his knees to get through and in the darkness almost bumped into a huge wooden coffin, shaped like a mummy and decorated in yellow paint, that half-filled the corridor just beyond the entrance. It was inscribed with the name of a priest: Nebseny. Behind it were three more coffins. Brugsch crawled past them all with a candle in one hand, gingerly placing his knees and remaining hand on a floor that was scattered with small statuettes, vases, and jars.
    After about twenty feet, the corridor turned sharp right and continued north into the heart of the mountain. A princess’s crumpled funeral tent was carelessly thrown into the corner. This passage was higher so Brugsch could stand, but the floor was still strewn with antiquities that glittered in the candlelight. About seventy feet farther on, he found a side chamber, nearly twenty feet square. Piles of huge coffins were stacked upright against its walls, some of them more than twice his height.
    Brugsch raised his candle over the coffins to read some of the inscriptions inked onto their lids, and was stunned. The looted antiquities that had appeared for sale belonged to the family of high priests who ruled Thebes during the Twenty-First Dynasty. But here, all in one place, were the most famous rulers of the great Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, who ruled when ancient Egypt’s power was at its height, with an empire that stretched north as far as Syria and south into Sudan. Scholars had read about these pharaohs in the hieroglyphs carved in stone all over the country: on statues, temples, palaces, and of course the empty royal tombs.
    There was Ahmose I—first pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who famously founded the New Kingdom when he liberated Egypt from an Asiatic people called the Hyksos. He was joined by Amenhotep I and Thutmose I, II, and III—several of whom had reputations as great warriors—and one of the best-known Egyptian queens, Ahmose-Nefertari. Most impressive of all, here lay Rameses II—in Brugsch’s time (when Tutankhamun was barely heard of) the most famous pharaoh of all. Nicknamed Rameses the Great, he was a mighty conqueror king, often compared with Napoleon, and many scholars then thought he was the biblical ruler responsible for enslaving the