using his belt buckle as an RPD machine gunner's belly, aiming mark, and
fired a tap of three The AKM rode up viciously and the triple detonation
stung his eardrums, but Mek saw his bullets strike, stitching a row up
the man's torso. One hit low in the belly, the second in the diaphragm
and the third at the base of his throat. He spun around, his arms
flinging out and jerking, and then crashed over backwards, out of sight
in the underbrush.
All around Mek his men were firing. He wondered, how many of them Salim
had taken with that first burst, but there was no longer anything to
see. The enemy were all down in cover. A faint haze of gunsmoke blued
the air as they returned fire, and the scrub trembled and shook to the
recoil and the muzzle blast of their weapons.
Then, in the uproar of fire, in the whine and wail of ricochets off the
rocks, one of them began to scream.
'I am hit. In Allah's name, help me.' His cries rang eerily across the
hillside, and the enemy fire slackened perceptibly. Mek clipped a fresh
magazine on to the AKM.
'Sing, little bird. Sing!the muttered grimly.
t required the combined strength of Nicholas, Hansith and eight other
men to lift the lid off the stone sarcophagus. Staggering under its
weight, they laid it carefully against the wall of the tomb. Then Royan
and Nicholas stood on the plinth of the sarcophagus to look down into
the interior.
Fitted neatly into the stone receptacle was an enormous wooden coffin.
Its lid too was in the form of the reclining Pharaoh. He was in the
posture of death with his hands crossed at his breast, clutching the
flail and the crook. The coffin was gilded and encrusted with
semiprecious stones. The expression on the face of the king's effigy was
serene.
They lifted the coffin out of the sarcophagus, and its weight was less
than that of the stone lid, Carefully Nicholas split the golden seals
and the layer of hard dried
01 . Within it they resin that held the lid of the coffin in plac ctly,
and when the found another coffin, fitted perfe as revealed. It was
like a ened that yet another coffin wOP
nest of Russian dolls, one within the other, becoming smaller with each
revelation. coffins, each of them'
In the end there were seven mate and richly decorated than the
progressively more previous one. The seventh coffin was only slightly
larger I than a man, and it was made of gold. The polished metal caught
the light of the lamps like a thousand mirrors and the tomb.
threw bright arrows and darts into every recess coffin they When at
last they opened the golden inner found that it was filled with flowers.
The blooms had dried and faded, so their colour was sepia. Their scent
had long ago evaporated, so that only the musky aroma of great age
wafted up from the coffin. The petals were so dry and apery that they
crumbled at the first touch. Beneath the faded blooms was a layer of
the finest linen; once it must have been snowy white, but now it was
brown with age the flowers. Through the and the stain of the juices from
