Valley of the Kings by Cecelia Holland

responsible—”
    â€œI’ll personally carry every tourist through the dig on my back. Please—”
    â€œI’m sorry, Carter.”
    â€œLet me talk to the curator.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Carter.”
    The sound died out of the receiver; he had hung up his end of the line.
    I put the phone down. My hand was wet. I sat down on the camp stool behind me; I was in the local office of tourism, in the back room. Around me were banks of files and stacks of papers. Putting my head down in my hands, I dragged in a deep breath.
    There were other places to dig. Near the tomb of Amenhotep there was a very likely site for a tomb. I had trenched through it in 1920 and found nothing, but still—I might have turned the wrong way—dug in the wrong direction—not dug deep enough—
    I shut my eyes. In the next room, a door clicked, a bell chimed, a foreign voice called for service.
    For a few moments I could not find the will and the strength to get up. I thought of phoning Cairo again, but I knew those people: having said no once, they considered the word sacred.
    Dig in another place. I raised myself up from the camp stool and left the office building.
    When I reached my house in Luxor, Ahmed was sitting in front of the steps with a clutch of other men: he had gone out and gathered up all those people still living in Luxor who had dug with us the year before. They looked at me with eyes bright as bullets. Ahmed strode forward through their midst.
    â€œI have the job book, Carter. They have all been signed into it. We can begin tomorrow.”
    â€œTomorrow,” I said, surprised.
    â€œOr this afternoon, if you wish.”
    â€œNo, no.” I laughed; his eager efficiency buoyed me, and I felt better. “Tomorrow will be soon enough.”
    â€œShall we meet you there?” he said. “At Rameses VI?”
    The answer came as easily from me as a lie ought. “Yes.” We could start digging. It might be days before the department caught on. Weeks. I wiped my moist palms on my trousers legs. Going up the steps, I went into the security of my house.
    At dawn we all gathered together in the valley. The digging crew had brought their own tools and baskets, and we set to work at once. The ground where we began to dig was loose fill from Rameses’ tomb and all we had to do was shovel it up into baskets and cart it away.
    I laid out the trench on a line running straight away from the tomb. That cut across the tourists’ route, but as long as I was defying the department, I might as well do it with a whole heart. Every time a stone fell on the valley wall, every time a shadow crossed the yellow rock floor, I started with guilt, sure that they had discovered me.
    Just after noon, the front team of diggers began to uncover the walls of an ancient hut. Within an hour they had cleared half a dozen of these structures. They were barren little huts, packed close together; the fill piled on top of them had preserved them from the wind and kept them mostly intact. Some of them were no larger than large baskets. Probably they had been built to shelter the workmen on Rameses’ tomb.
    The tomb itself was large enough to house an entire village; in the end it had sheltered a single splendid carcass.
    Nothing gave me quite as vivid an impression of the way the common Egyptian lived than these huts. Rough as caves, cramped and rude, they were like kennels. I mapped them and made sketches of a number of them, and then my crew dug through them, and after thousands of years of existence they were gone.
    Three feet under the ground level of the huts, we reached the flinty, ungiving bedrock. By then, the evening had come, and we left off work and went home.
    The crew was all staying in Kurna. I dreaded returning to Luxor. The department could find me there at will; if they discovered what I was doing, they had only to wait at my house to arrest me. On an impulse I took Ahmed