Carnarvon went next, with his daughter close on his heels. Burleigh fell in behind her, stepping carefully over the pile of broken brick and rubble, passing through a narrow vestibule and into a chamber that had been hollowed from the living stone.
No one spoke. All remained silent in the grip of the mystery.
The air inside the tomb was dry and held the metallic scent of rock dust and, oddly, spice-as if a once- pungent mingling of pine resin and frankincense had faded away over untold time to a mere ghostly wisp of its former aromatic self. It tantalized, rather than tickled, the nostrils. Burleigh rubbed his nose and moved farther into the tomb.
Slightly larger than the interior of a train car, the room was stacked with dusty articles of furniture-a black lacquered chair, a bedstead, the painted wheels of a chariot… and boxes, caskets, and chests of various sizes. The black chair’s armrests were carved with the heads of lions that had been encased in gold leaf. This, Burleigh decided, was what Howard Carter had seen glinting back at him when he first looked in, for there was no other gold to be seen anywhere.
At opposite ends of the chamber, doors gave way to other rooms. Carter instinctively moved to the door on the right and Carnarvon to the left. Carnarvon was first to break the silence. “Canopic jars,” announced the lord, his voice falling strangely dead in the close air of the tomb. “What have you got?”
“The sarcophagus,” declared Carter. “It’s here-and intact. We’re in luck. There has been no robbery here.”
While the others busied themselves with a cursory examination of the dead royal’s elaborate stone coffin, Burleigh made a quick mental inventory of the items he could sell, estimating what each might bring on the market. Over in one corner, he saw two very fine statues of cats carved of red granite; next to them was a small ebony owl; in amongst the wooden boxes was a large wooden hunting hound with a jewelled collar…
“Who is it? Can you see?” said Carnarvon.
Burleigh joined the others crouched beside the sarcophagus-an oversized buff-coloured stone vault, the top of which was inscribed with hieroglyphs. “It’s here,” Carter was saying. “Yes, here it is. Here is a name…”
“Well?” demanded Carnarvon, impatience making his voice shrill. “What does it say? Who is it?”
Anticipation, Burleigh noticed, was quickly giving way to low-level frustration. And he thought he could guess the reason why.
“It is a male,” Carter intoned, his fingers tracing the glyphs like a blind man reading braille. “His name is Anen.” Glancing up from his examination, he said, “He is-was-a priest with the title of second prophet of Amun. Very high in the temple organization.”
“Not royal then,” observed Lord Carnarvon, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Not a king, at least.” He paused. “Pity.”
“No, not a king,” confirmed the archaeologist. “But still an important find nevertheless.”
“Of course,” agreed Carnarvon, turning away. “Extremely important.”
“Oh, Daddy,” chided Evelyn, “don’t pout-just because there is not a mountain of gold and jewels to be plundered. Look at all the marvellous paintings.”
She held her lantern to the wall, and Burleigh saw what had, to that moment, failed to catch his notice: the walls of the tomb had been plastered white and covered with images. Every square inch of every surface was intensely, vibrantly, vivaciously decorated. One enormous panel showed the tomb’s occupant in a chariot beside the crowned figure of a pharaoh, spear uplifted, dogs racing ahead on the heels of a high-leaping antelope; another showed the priest in his colourful robes leading a ceremony where a number of animals were being sacrificed and that was being overseen by a huge figure of the bronze-skinned god Amun, with his tall plumed crown. A third panel showed the tomb’s occupant on his papyrus punt poling among the tall reeds surrounded by cranes and ducks and egrets, the sky above filled with birds of all kinds, the water below the boat filled with fish and even a crocodile… And more, floor to ceiling-and the ceiling, too, in glowing blue and covered with tiny white stars to simulate the heavens: wonderful, intricate, detailed paintings, with colours as fresh and bright as the day the artists laid down their brushes and retreated to the daylight.
“There’s his wealth,” Burleigh observed, moving to Lady Evelyn’s side and holding his lantern to hers. “The chap spent all his money on art.”
CHAPTER 27
In Which the Emperor Awaits a Mysterious Visitor
Rudolf, King of Bohemia and Hungary, Archduke of Austria, and King of the Romans, tapped his long fingers impatiently on the arms of his favourite throne. He hated waiting. And yet, it seemed that the principal chore of the most powerful ruler of the Holy Roman Empire was not ruling, but waiting. Each day, every day, all day long, the life of an emperor amounted to little more than a series of brief conversations punctuated by lengthy intervals of loitering. He waited for audiences, waited for his edicts to be ratified and executed, waited for ministers to act on his decisions, waited for replies to his manifold messages, waited while the vast wheels of government slowly revolved to bring about a result, any result… and so on and-so far as he could see-forever.
The best that could be hoped for was to organise all this waiting into more productive heaps, overlapping as many delays as possible. Rudolf liked to think it made these idle periods more productive than if strung out individually. Just now, for example, he was waiting for paint to dry, and for his first audience of the day, and for word from Vienna regarding the birth of an infant by his mistress. He was having his portrait rendered, and the artist insisted that he wait until the paint had settled before abandoning his pose, should refinements be required; he was expecting his chief alchemist to attend him with the results of the latest experiments; heavily pregnant Katharina had been sent to Vienna to bear his child, whose arrival was imminent. Later on, he could look forward to waiting for his ministers to present the state of his treasury, waiting for his friend Prince Leopold of Swabia to arrive for his annual visit and hunt, waiting for the coach to take him to the opera for his evening’s entertainment. A full and productive day of waiting stretched before him.
“How much longer?” he asked, meaning the paint-it had become such a familiar phrase on his lips, his courtiers did not feel obliged to respond with any degree of precision.
“Not long, Highness,” replied the artist Arcimboldo, wafting a cloth gently over the surface of the canvas. “Soon. Very soon.”
The Holy Roman Emperor sighed and resumed drumming his fingers. The artist busied himself with mixing colours on his palette. An eternity elapsed, and the emperor was on the point of asking yet again how much longer he must wait before he could get up when a sharp rap came on the door of the chamber and his master of audiences appeared. “Forgive the intrusion, Your Highness,” he announced, “but Herr Doktor Bazalgette craves the pleasure of your attention.”
“And we his,” replied Rudolf. “By all means, bid him enter at once.”
The courtier bowed and stepped backward, ushering into the room Balthazar Bazalgette, the emperor’s chief alchemist: a portly man of middle years, who possessed not only the jowls of a prize swine, but lavish eyebrows the artist might have envied for portrait work. He was also a man of immense erudition, and no small pomposity. If one was prepared to overlook the latter, however, one found beneath the expansive velvet robe a man of great industry and a sincerity of purpose that many religious zealots might have done well to emulate.
“Bazalgette!” cried Rudolf, happy at having this latest round of waiting interrupted at last. “Come here to us!”
The Lord High Alchemist swept into the room in a rush of robes, his tall, fur-trimmed hat slightly askew in his hurry. “Good news, Highness! I bring very encouraging word. We have succeeded in producing the Elixir of the Wise. Our experiments can now continue without delay.”
“That is good news,” Rudolf agreed. He liked anything that promised to minimize the dread delay in any of its insidious forms. “Sit you down.” He indicated the painter’s stool nearby. “Tell us all about it.”
“Gladly, Sire,” said the alchemist, drawing the stool close to the throne. “As you will recall from our last conversation, the prime difficulty of producing red sulphur lies in the inherent instability of the constituent ingredients.”
