When at long last the night seemed to them to be thick enough, Bronzejaw (so named because he was the eldest) made the first attempt at operating the heaviest lever of the doorway’s mechanism. But the black granite mass did not budge an inch.
“Go on, bitch!” he grunted as he gave another shove.
Unlocking the mechanism and the effort they then had to make to move the door panel drained them to such an extent that when they finally fell into the funeral chamber they barely had enough strength left to stay upright.
Bronzejaw was the first to stand up; then Toudhalia and One-eye followed suit. They knew from experience that torchlight always makes ornaments look more precious than they really are, so they held back from exulting prematurely. Bronzejaw ran his hand over the treasures in turn, saying only, between his teeth: “Whore! You whore!” After surveying all that was around him, he came back to study the sarcophagus. The others stood and watched as he slid his crowbar into a crack.
As they had predicted, the most valuable adornments were indeed inside the coffin. After they had gathered up all the precious objects and stowed them away in leather bags, the coffin and its mummy looked pretty dull and poor.
“Don’t move the light about like that!” shouted Toudhalia to the torchbearer, for he could not bear to see the mummy’s face. As a grave robber, he knew that once tombs have been opened, mummies sometimes ignite and burn to a cinder straight away, but he could not get used to it.
While he and Bronzejaw tapped the walls, hoping to find another door, leading perhaps to the chamber of offerings, One-eye leaned over the open coffin.
“What are you up to in there?” Bronzejaw enquired.
One-eye’s one eye twinkled.
“I want to remove the swaddling to see her cunt,” he said gruffly. “I’ve so often wondered what it was like, for people to make a whole legend out of it!”
“ A whore’s cunt, nothing more, nothing less,” Bronzejaw grunted without turning round. “You’d do better to come and help us find the other door.”
“What are you trying to do?” Toudhalia screamed in horror, believing that One-eye, still leaning over the mummy, was really going to remove the strips of linen.
“Her face is slowly turning black,” One-eye observed. “I didn’t think that happened to royal mummies.”
“For heaven’s sake, leave that mummy alone and get over here!” Toudhalia said.
He kept a close eye on his fellow-robber, fearing he was about to grapple with the corpse at any moment. But One-eye had got hold of a burned-out torch-end and was using it to scrawl obscene words and images on the walls.
“What a nutcase!” Bronzejaw exclaimed as he continued to probe the wall.
When they got to the opposite side of the room, covered with One-eye’s graffiti, they found two lines of hieroglyphs over a crudely stylized representation of male genitalia, half-phallus and half-pyramid.
“What’s he written?” Bronzejaw asked, for he could not read.
Toudhalia moved closer so as to decipher the script.
“Er… Ha-ha! One-eye is a funny devil!”
“Just read it to me, will you? You can giggle later!”
“Hee-hee,” the other robber went on, “It’s just smut. It says that the Pharaoh’s daughter only liked pricks the size of a pyramid.”
“He’s a real nutcase,” Bronzejaw remarked.
“It’s an old quip,” the torchbearer explained. “Do you remember Shabaka, who would dash off a rhyme for a drink? I think he made up that joke.”
“You’re both crazy!” Bronzejaw shouted. “Leave the graffiti and the quips alone, will you? Let’s get on with the job, we’ve been moldering away in here for too long already.”
Since they had turned around, they saw One-eye leaning on the coffin with one hand in the posture of a man about to vomit. He was as pale as a shroud.
“What’s wrong?” Toudhalia asked.
One-eye looked as though he was about to faint.
“I’m not feeling very well.”
“Then move away from there,” Bronzejaw ordered. “You know the smell of mummies makes you want to throw up. It turns my guts too, you know.”
“Let’s get out of here, anyway. We can wait in the gallery.”
“That’s right. Come on, pick up the tools.”
A moment later, they scuttled out. On the threshold, One-eye turned toward the sarcophagus one last time. “You old tart,” he muttered sourly. “You only just got away with it.”
For a long while their steps echoed in the gallery.
Although they swore to themselves that they would never go into a pyramid again, less than two full seasons had passed before they realized that they could think of nothing else, They had acquired a taste for it, like tigers who, once they have had a morsel of human flesh, prefer it to all other meat. Ordinary tombs no longer satisfied them.
This time, apart from sharpening their crowbars and making all their other preparations, they also sewed several pieces of canvas into the shape of masks. They would soak them in vinegar and put them on their faces when the sarcophagus was opened. It was the only way to guard against the terrible sickness that came on when you got close to a mummy.
The profanation of the female pyramid (the strumpet pyramid, as they called it among themselves) had not yet been discovered, which gave them reason to act fast. But perhaps the robbery would never be noticed, since Hentsen’s last lovers, those of her final years, had long since passed on and turned to dust. The sentries had also met the same fate; in fact, they had abandoned their task even during their lifetimes, since the money to support them had run out. But all the same the rape of the pyramid could come to light for some unforeseeable reason, and that would have made any further robbery very perilous indeed.
They had bolstered their confidence on the eve of the act with the thought that no one was interested in Didoufri’s pyramid any more; otherwise it would not have been left unfinished, Their forefathers for several generations had earned their living as they did, as grave robbers, and had never got involved in politics, except by lending an ear now and again to barroom gossip. For instance, they sometimes picked up the information that this Pharaoh was more greatly honored than that one, though both had long been reduced to mere mummies and encased in their respective pyramids. Then soon after they would hear talk of the opposite. The one who had been more greatly honored was now relegated to oblivion, and people began to make wreaths and raise statues in honor of the one previously disregarded. These changes of tide flowed from matters political, so people said, but the robbers thought it all quite absurd and ridiculous — as if two mummies could get up from their graves, grab at each other’s tunics, and scrap like tinkers!
They gathered in the pitch-black night at the foot of the pyramid and wasted no time in levering up a stone that, according to them, concealed the secret entrance. They had a lot of trouble this time, and they had to shift more than a score of stones. It was almost dawn before they finally found the passageway.
That was the hardest part of their job. Thereafter it all went the same as in the other pyramid. Before opening the coffin they covered their faces with the canvas masks they had made, with openings for their eyes. For a minute they larked around, scaring each other with these hoodlike contraptions.
While the others scooped up the funerary trinkets placed in niches in the walls. One-eye, as usual, lingered over the sarcophagus.
Bronzejaw was the first to look at him.
“So what are you up to with the mummy this time?”