“No,” I say. I force myself to set my foot down one more rung. I wait for Wyatt to respond.

“He was one of the epigraphers for U Chicago in the sixties or seventies,” Wyatt says, as if we are chatting over coffee, instead of practically being buried alive. “Actually, I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him. What kind of Griffin are you, anyway?”

Another shaky step. “Phoenix,” I tell him. “Our mascot was the Phoenix.”

“Of course. Anyway, Hall was transcribing an inscription in a temple—Karnak, or maybe Medinet Habu, I can’t remember. Instead of climbing up and down the ladder to move it to the next spot on the wall he needed to read, he’d hold on to the top rungs and hop it horizontally, like a giant pair of stilts.”

Step. And step again. The toe of my boot nudges the stone, and some more limestone powder falls.

“Dawn?”

“Still here,” I say.

“So. Hall didn’t realize the ladder was set up on a column, and at one point when he hopped, the ladder dropped a foot.”

I pause in my climb. “Why the hell would you tell me this right now?”

“Hall broke both heels crashing through the rungs of the ladder,” he says blithely.

I feel like I’m breathing through a reed.

“What’s the punch line?” Wyatt asks.

“I don’t know.”

I take one more step, and feel his hand close over my calf. It is sure and steady and warm, and I let him guide me until I am on solid ground.

Wyatt angles his headlamp so that it doesn’t blind me. “The punch line is: What was he doing wearing his heels in the temple?”

There’s barely enough room for us to both fit. “All right?” he murmurs.

“All right,” I say.

We are pressed up against each other from chest to ankle. Awkwardly we shift until I am behind him, my front to his back. If he crouches down, there is a little more space—this is the bit that had to be reinforced with timbers over the past few days. Beyond that is the burial chamber itself, which is blocked at the end by loosely stacked limestone blocks.

“I need light,” he orders, and I do my best to shine my own headlamp in his direction as he crouches down and curls his fingers around the edge of the limestone. He grunts, and his shirt pulls tight across his shoulders as he struggles to dislodge the block. I watch his spine twist, his back flex with effort. I am just about to suggest we call up for a crowbar when the rock gives an inch. Thousands of years breathe toward us, a hot, dry gasp.

He makes a hole big enough to accommodate his own body, adjusts his headlamp, and begins to crawl through the narrow rock tunnel. I follow at his heels. Stones bite into my palms and my spine scrapes along the top of the channel. It is tight and, blessedly, short. Wyatt stops moving, filling my line of sight. “Can you see anything?” I whisper.

For a long moment, Wyatt is silent. Then he responds, the words a nod to Howard Carter, when he had first peeked into the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, and was asked the same question by Lord Carnarvon. “Yes,” he says. “Wonderful things.”

“Is there a coffin?”

He nods. “And it’s intact.”

He crawls from the tunnel into a slightly larger room of the rock-cut tomb. His headlamp illuminates the wooden box, taking up nearly all the floor space. Its surface is pale with years of lime dust. Three models sit on top of the wooden planks, equally dusty, with bright paint peeking through underneath. There seems to be a line of decorative hieroglyphs on the lid of the exterior coffin beneath the light fall of powder—symbols that justify the fifteen years of Wyatt’s search:

Djehutynakht.

* * *

—

I AM DYING to know what’s in that coffin, as is everyone else, but documenting the architecture of the tomb is the first task. Using classical methods—like the ones done when I was in grad school—would take a significant amount of time. The antiquities director gets a peek inside, and then Alberto and I swap places in the tiny tomb so that he and Wyatt can come up with a basic planimetry. Using a laser distance meter and goniometers, they draw the plan on an iPad. Alberto runs the scans while Wyatt, above, calculates the depth and orientation of the tomb on a map. For several hours, I serve as the runner between Alberto and Wyatt whenever there’s a glitch, and at the end of our work, we have a full three-dimensional reconstruction of the burial chamber. Only then can individual pieces be moved by the Egyptian conservator, Safiya, who logs and packs them to be lifted out of the burial chamber. It’s painstaking, celebratory work.

The ceiling of the burial chamber is only about 1.5 meters high. The space between the coffin and the wall of the chamber is so narrow that I’m the only one who can squeeze to the far end to see it and to brush off the limestone powder.

In addition to a lid, the exterior coffin has five sides—two long, two short, and the floor. The sides are beveled and fastened with dowels and copper ribbons; the top edges are pressed flush in a butt joint but the bottom is notched in a rabbet joint, and secured with more dowels and copper through the battens. There’s a reason it’s lasted four thousand years. The wooden box has one horizontal line of brightly painted hieroglyphs on all four sides, which gives all of Djehutynakht’s titles. The only other paint on the exterior is a pair of udjat eyes facing east, although there may well be more detailed art on the interior walls that we can’t see yet, with the inner coffin nestled tight inside. There isn’t a treasury of gold, but there are offering figures and models stacked on top of the exterior coffin. The canopic chest has fallen off a limestone shelf onto the floor.

I spend hours huddled in the back of the chamber, looking at the models—the wooden carvings of a funeral procession led by a man in a kilt and followed by three slender women carrying wine, grain, and a black-and-cream painted offering box; a large funerary boat carved from a single piece of wood, its rowers attached by pegs and its oars remarkably intact; a kitchen boat that would have sailed with an official up and down the Nile on government business. The coffin is all about Djehutynakht’s death, but these models are life as he knew it—his work and government responsibilities; the family and friends who would grieve him.

I realize with a little shock that this snapshot of Djehutynakht is no different from the clients I have now, who want to make sure they’re ready for what comes next, but also want to remember who they have been.

* * *

—

THREE DAYS AFTER the burial chamber has been opened, the models have been removed and the coffin can be opened. The local workers scamper up and down the rope ladder, setting up extension cords and lights that run from the generator outside the tomb. Its noise is deafening, and I watch Wyatt cover his ears. “My mother used to say if your left ear rings, it means someone you love is talking about you,” I shout. “If it’s your right ear, someone wishes you evil.”

“What if it’s both ears?” Wyatt asks.

I grin. “Then you have a migraine.”

We are standing at the top of the shaft, drowned out by the noise of the generator as Alberto moves around the burial chamber by himself taking photographs of the coffin from multiple angles. Omar, the inspector, trusts him enough to be there alone. His light source is a battery pack that flashes every time he takes a picture, and with each snap, the photograph instantly appears on the iPad that Wyatt holds.

I glare down the dark shaft. There’s another burst of light, and a photo blinks onto the iPad screen. “Why is it taking forever?”

“Do you know how long it took Carter to clear out Tutankhamun’s tomb?” Wyatt says. “Ten years. He numbered everything. Photographed everything. Drew everything.” He smirks. “I’ve been at this for fifteen years. If anyone deserves to be impatient, it’s me.”

The tomb is still crowded—but there’s one person conspicuously missing. “Dailey,” I say, reaching into the corners of my mind for the name Joe once told me. “Why isn’t your money person here?”

I cannot imagine funding an expedition and not wanting to be present when the actual discovery is made. Wyatt’s head snaps up, and his cheeks flush. “From what I’ve been told, because of an airline workers’ strike in Italy.”

“Your benefactor’s Italian?” I ask, but before Wyatt can reply Alberto calls up to us. It is finally time to open the coffin.