Garza, arriving from his tent with crossbow and bolts, came and stood next to him, silently contemplating the impressive scene. They had already worked out their plans; there was nothing left but to execute them. Imogen soon joined them. Each had a waterskin slung over a shoulder for the night hunt.
Soon the parties were departing in small groups, disappearing into the rugged ravines and ridges that surrounded the great grassy bowl of their encampment.
“Let’s go,” said Garza.
Gideon led the way. They had decided to head out in a different direction than the tomb, so as not to arouse suspicion, and then circle around to what they’d begun calling the Demon Valley. This proved more difficult than first anticipated: most paths they tried ended either in unclimbable rock faces or else abrupt, vertiginous cliffs. At last they found a barely discernible trail that wound its way up a rocky slope to a ridge, then down into a dry wash. Promisingly, the wash led northward, at a slight angle to the trail they’d taken on the earlier day but paralleling it. After a few miles they came to a headland, dropped down into an adjacent canyon, followed that at a different angle for another mile, and then paused to rest.
“All this circling around has wreaked hell with my dead reckoning,” said Gideon. “But I’m pretty sure the trail we want is just one canyon over.”
After a quick rest they climbed the next ridge, which topped out on a knife-edge of rock, sticking into the air like a broken blade. Picking their way through the vertical layers of stone, they at last reached an overlook down into the next canyon. Gideon paused to scan the landscape and check for other hunting parties, but they appeared to be alone. One again, there was no sign of leopards.
“Is that the canyon?” asked Garza.
“Hard to tell. I hope so.”
Another steep descent brought them to the gentle, gravelly bed of the canyon bottom, pale silver in the bright moonlight. Walking more quickly now, they continued down the canyon, which wound its way among dark walls of basalt.
“All these damn canyons look the same,” Garza muttered.
Just when it seemed to Gideon that he’d been mistaken and they must be on the wrong path, the defile widened and they reached the peculiar confluence of three canyons—and there, across a broad sandy wash, he could see the outline of the tomb door, illuminated by moonlight.
Garza stopped to stare. Then, with some difficulty, he swallowed. “Jesus.”
“We’ve no time to waste,” said Gideon. “Let’s go.”
They hurried across the canyon floor and within minutes stood in front of the door. It was about eight feet high and four across, carved of the same dark basalt, and recessed into the cliff face, which itself had been carved into a rectangular shape. Egyptian hieroglyphs decorated the lintels, and the leaden seals Gideon had only seen from a distance were affixed to the door, about head height, stamped with hieroglyphs.
Gideon reached out and touched one of them, pitted and whitened with oxidation. “You’re right,” he told Imogen. “It’s unbroken.”
Imogen scrutinized the seals. “Yes. And also cursed.”
“Naturally,” said Garza. “What’s a tomb without a curse?”
She ran her fingers along the embossed glyphs. “It says, You who enter here…” She paused. “Hmmm. It’s a little obscure. You who enter here, may Aten the One God…set your bowels afire.”
“Ouch,” said Garza.
“Lillaya’s cooking has accomplished that already,” said Gideon.
“It’s written in New Kingdom hieroglyphics of the Eighteenth Dynasty. And this—Aten the One God—means it comes from the reign of Akhenaten.” She took a step back. “More evidence this is Akhenaten’s tomb, and it’s intact…my God.” Then she took a sharp breath, as if thinking of something. “Wait a minute. It’s possible his wife is buried here, too.”
“Nefertiti?” Gideon asked.
Imogen nodded.
“The tomb of Akhenaten and Nefertiti,” Gideon said almost reverently.
“If we don’t get this door open,” said Garza, “we’ll never know who’s inside.” He turned to Imogen. “Got any tricks up your sleeve?”
A silence. “There is no trick,” she said. “No secret button, if that’s what you mean. It’s like I warned you: tomb doors were deliberately made out of massive stone slabs that could only be moved by many men.”
Gideon stared at the door. “It must weigh twenty tons. So how are we going to shift it?”
A long silence ensued as they stared at the ponderous slab before them.
Imogen finally spoke. “I hate to say I told you so, but it looks as if you fellows came thousands of miles only to be stopped by a door.”
Garza stepped forward, then crouched, running his fingers along the bottom edge and up the sides. “We can use leverage.” He pointed at a narrow fissure. “Wedge a lever in this crack, and if it’s long enough it’ll force the door ajar.”
“So where’s the lever?” Gideon asked.
Silence.
“And even if we did find a lever,” Gideon continued, “it wouldn’t be strong enough. It’ll break. Even our bronze spears will bend like putty trying to force open that thing.”
Garza examined the door more closely, this time going over it inch by inch. Minutes passed. Gideon stared up anxiously at the moon. Time was wasting. He racked his brains, but the answer seemed obvious: they were not going to move that stone slab without heavy machinery or explosives—and, as Imogen had pointed out a few nights earlier, they possessed neither.
“What are these parallel drill holes?” Garza pointed to a line of small openings that ran diagonally from one side of the slab to the other.
“You see those on almost any massive blocks moved by the ancient Egyptians,” Imogen told him. “They’d insert bronze pegs and attach ropes, pulled by a hundred slaves.”
Garza grunted as he continued to examine the door. He found a twig and probed inside one of the drilled holes, testing its depth.
“Face it,” said Imogen. “We’re not going to move that door.”
Gideon was growing increasingly frustrated. Here they were, mere feet away from the thing they’d been searching for at such great cost—and they were thwarted by a piece of stone. “You think this is funny,” he said to Imogen.
“It’s hilarious! Look, I’m just as curious as you to see what’s inside—probably more so. But I can’t say I’m sorry you won’t be getting your grubby hands on it.”
“Screw you.”
“Sod off.”
“Hey,” said Garza. “Put a sock in it.” He left off examining the door. Now he started wandering around the floor of the canyon, examining dead thornbushes. Taking out his dagger, he cut a slender branch off one of them. He stripped off the dead bark and began whittling it.
“What the heck is he doing?” Imogen asked.
Gideon, who’d been struggling mightily to push away the mounting feeling of defeat, shook his head. “Beats me.”
Now Garza cut the branch into several pieces, which he carefully whittled into sharpened pegs. He did this with another dead bush, then another, until he had a dozen seven- to eight-inch pegs. He carried them to the door and, hunting around for a rock, placed a peg in one of the drilled holes and used the rock to hammer it in. Six inches of the peg disappeared, leaving an inch of wood exposed. He repeated the process until the entire line of drilled holes was bristling with exposed peg ends.
Gideon, who’d been watching, shifted from one foot to the other. “Manuel, I hate to tell you, but those pegs aren’t going to hold—even if we had ropes to attach to them and those hundred slaves to pull.”
Garza glanced over and then—to Gideon’s vast surprise—flashed a grin. “Just watch.”
He took his headcloth, unwound it, and tore it into short pieces. Then he soaked each piece with the waterskin. Next, taking the sopping pieces of cloth, he wrapped each one around an exposed stub of wood. When this was done, he carefully poured a little water on each rag-bundled stub, soaking it further.