panel Taita, the surgeon, bent Over him with the surgical instruments in
his ed barb from deep in his hands, removing the blood-smear flesh.
Now they came to alcoves in which were stacked hundreds of cedarwood
chests. The boxes were painted with the royal cartouche of Mamose, and
with scenes of the king at his toilet: lining his eyes with kohl,
painting his face with white antimony and scarlet rouge, being shaved by
his barbers and dressed by his valets.
'Some of those chests will contain the royal cosmetics,' Royan murmured,
'and some of them will be Pharaoh's wardrobes of clothing. There will be
costumes in them for ack every occasion in his after-life. I long to be
able to unp and examine them.'
all panels showed the mart iage of the The next set of king to the
young virgin, Taita's mistress. The face of Queen LostTis was tendered
with loving detail. The artist gloated on her beauty and exaggerated it,
his brush strokes caressing her naked breasts and lingering on all her
virtues until they epitomized feminine perfection.
'How much Taita loved her,' Royan murmured, and there was envy in her
voice. 'You can see it in every line he drew.'
Nicholas smiled softly and put his arms around her shoulders.
There were hundreds more wooden chests stacked in the next alcoves.
Painted on the lids were miniatures of the king decked in all his
jewellery: his fingers and toes were thick with rings and his chest was
covered with pectoral medallions, while bangles of gold adorned his arms
and bracelets his wrists. In one portrait he wore the double crown of
the two kingdoms of Egypt united, the red crown and the white with the
heads of the vulture and the cobra on his brow. In another he wore the
blue war crown, and on a third the Nemes crown with gold and lapis wings
that covered his ears.
'If each of those chests contains the treasures depicted on its lid-'
Nicholas broke off, unable to continue the thought. The possibility of
such riches was daunting, and the imagination balked at the magnitude of
it.
'Do you remember what Taita wrote in the scrolls? 'I cannot believe that
such a treasure was ever before accumulated in one place at one times'T
Royan asked him. 'It seeffLs that it is all still here, every single gem
and grain of gold. The treasure of Mamose is intact.'
Beyond the treasury there was another alcove lined with shelves on which
stood the ushabti figures: dolls made of green glazed porcelain or
carved from cedarwood. They were an army of tiny figures, men and women
from all the trades and professions. There were priests and scribes and
lawyers and physicians, gardeners and farmers, bakers and brewers,
handmaidens and dancing girls, seamstresses and laundrymaids, soldiers
and barbers, and common labourers.
Each of them carried the tools and accoutrements of his or her trade.
They would accompany the king to the after world and there would work
for Pharaoh, and would go forward in his place if he were ever called
upon to perform a service for the other gods.
At last Nicholas and Royan came to the end of this fabulous arcade, and
found their way closed off by a series of tall, free-standing screens,
tabernacles that had been once fine white linen mesh but were now
