The Lost Tomb [antikvár]

PROLOGUE "WE have finished, Doctor. Do you want to go inside?" Mohammed, one of our senior workmen, stood at the top of the deep pit we had exposed at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. He pointed down into a doorway cut through the bedrock on its eastern end, clearly the entrance to a tomb. For several weeks, we had been digging a trench along the base of the hillside here, searching for KV 5, a tomb that had been seen 170 years earlier, then forgotten. "Absolutely! Bruce, do you want to come with us?" I turned to Bruce Ludwig, a longtime benefactor of our project. "Be the first in over 160 years to see what's inside?" A British explorer, James Burton, had seen the entrance to KV 5 in 1825, but there was no evidence that anyone else had crawled inside since then. "No thanks. I'll wait until there's more room to maneuver." Bruce is over six feet tall, and the trench through the doorway was extremely narrow. "But I'm going," said Catharine Roehrig, the assistant director of our Theban Mapping Project since 1980. "I've been in every tomb we've ever mapped on this project—more Theban tombs than anybody else in history, I think—and I don't want to ruin my