Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

In any other tomb, the lack of carving on the door would have sunk my spirits, made me think of turning away from one too obscure to repay the cost of opening. Here, the blankness set off a pounding in my ears, a lightness in my chest, a voice hinting: Here is a secret announcing itself.

— Sah. There is no door.

He was right. Blankness was very well, but this stone seemed a solid mass: we might be at bedrock.

— Could we widen the excavation?

My voice was a hoarse whisper, too loud.

— Sah. There is no door. You should turn back.

He clutched my hand, pulling me up. — Go home, sah. There is no passage for you here.

His hands were plucking at my fingers, at my clothes. I pushed him back.

— I have no home, you filthy—

— Sah!

Silence seeped like bad air down the hole, filling the space between us.

— Sah.

He was breathing heavily. His eyes were pits again. — There is something.

He brushed past me in the narrow way without touching, and I heard rock scrape rock. He passed behind me again.

— There, sah. His eyes did not turn up. — Perhaps that is what you wish.

The beam of my flashlight lit on a hemisphere of polished rock projecting from the blank surface. I fell on it, my hands curved around its cool, smooth surface. In a backward glance I saw the Arab’s eyes grow wide, and then he was gone, the world was black and I was falling, a wind whispering fear in my groin.

I fell long enough to consider these: the hemisphere’s swift motion at my touch; the answering motion of the rock beneath me; a momentary glimpse of the opening chute; that the Arab’s mouth had opened too; that this was absurd.

Then the darkness imploded.

Let the abomination speak not my name in Neter-kert:

For my place is my own, my name and my body are my own, and all things are my own in the Duat.

For I am Khepera, the self-created, the speaker of my name.

For mine are the Words of Power.

I clutched something to my chest, unsure what it was, knowing only that, with nothing else to hold, this must be worth holding. My head ached, and the darkness around me whirled and whistled until I thought the floor had given way again. I lay amid sandy rubble; the object I held was the flashlight, broken or switched off in the first convulsion of my fall. I sat up, and the darkness whirled.

I pressed the switch.

There comes a point in any excavation, if it is a successful one, when you no longer care for the significance of your finds. The articles you uncover, the articles you will write about them, the reception by the profession of your work — all of these cease to matter. What you want — all you want — is to get to the center: to unlock the sarcophagus, remove the outer coffin, and the next, and the next — but even when you have the mummy exposed before you, its amulets and ornaments, its most personal possessions shrinking where they protrude from the yellow linen — even this is not enough. You will not rest until you have stripped the cere-cloths away and stared upon the face of him for whom all this has been done, of whose life these dumb objects struggle to speak.

It is the face, finally, that you desire. And although the nose withers, and the fine leather everywhere draws back, the absent eyes turned inward as if regarding the hollow left by the embalmers, still you search it for some answer.

Something haunts the lips. After centuries of silence, as the process of desiccation stretches the slackness of death, do these lips purse, do they part again, to deliver the secret they have lingered so long on life’s after threshold to tell? This is what we come for: not science, not gold. Only this: the promise of a voice that knows.

Fabulous things. A pandemonium of things. A chaos of things, and everywhere the gleam of gold, the glint of silver, sparks of ruby, amethyst, emerald receding infinitely into darkness. All of this reflected in a single slow sweep of light. So much I had expected. So much I had seen before, and I relaxed, slightly. Only slowly did the significance bear in on me of what the light did not show.

There were no walls.

I struggled to my feet, slashing the beam about. Light fled over inconceivable heaps of footstools, hassocks, chairs, couches, a throne with the gold head of a lion: off dimly in the distance a ship, full-rigged, oars feathered, its sail dark gossamer, motionless. All of these I saw, but no sign of an end: only an endless expanse of dull gold beneath no canopy of utter black. At an impossible height above the floor the darkness seemed to roll, as if black clouds gathered there, but not a breath of wind stirred my hair, although the hairs themselves were stirring.

Had my eyes been damaged by the fall? Was this the time I had been dreading, when the disease would eat into something essential, and all appearance of reality would be torn finally away? I felt my occiput for signs of damage, but no damage could I find: for all I knew I was not hurt, and so this must, for all I knew, be real.

I felt for something solid at my back. The blank, polished wall down which I had fallen sloped steeply up into darkness. For a distance of seven feet above the floor, and as many to the right and left, no sign of a join or crack could I find. The face of the wall was itself peculiar: of a stone polished like obsidian and as dark, it presented to my eyes and fingertips an absolutely smooth and seamless surface, of a temperature indistinguishable from my skin. Touching it, I could barely convince myself that I felt substance. And something more: though polished to a glassy smoothness, and of the most flawless ebony, it gave back no reflection of my light, seeming to swallow up the beam within itself. The light appeared to penetrate the thickness of an inch or so (though a lunatic portion of my mind, which intermittently set the blood to pounding in my ears, insisted that the distance was far greater) before fading, as in dense smoke. Slight security to have it at my back, as the heaps of treasure grimaced and edged closer to me, unless I held them back with the light (and in the light they receded endlessly, which soon unnerved me more than their approach).

It was after this inspection of the wall, when I turned back to face again the vast cavity of dead air, that the helplessness of my situation came near to defeating me, and for a moment I was convinced that the fall had killed me, and that I must start out now on the journey of the dead, seeking the gateway to an afterlife that must, perforce, be the Egyptian one.

But my feet beneath me were unnerved; warmth had deserted me, and my breath seemed sticking in my throat. I could no more move a step into that darkness than I could — I could not think of an alternative. In the jittering beam of my light, the mountains of carved faces — eyes and open mouths — edged closer.

I picked up a rock and hurled it at them; in a shower of glittering sand the darkness swallowed it down.

The soundlessness was terrifying, a vertigo, like the horror one feels at one’s own emptiness while looking over the rim of a high cliff.

If I stood much longer at this wall, I knew, the soundlessness would wash me over in a black flood, press me against — into — the black rock, where behind me dim shapes moved. I turned and saw my face, fading, and turned my light again to frieze a grinning serpent, carnelian-eyed: a ceremonial staff. I knew that if I remained here, in moments terror would strip me of whatever power of conscious action I yet possessed.