Read Online The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child - Free Book Online

“but we’ve still got eight rooms to go.”
    “Right, of course. So sorry.”
    They proceeded to the far end of the chamber. Here, a dark hole revealed a steep staircase plunging into blackness. “This passage would also have been filled with rubble,” Wicherly said. “To hinder robbers.”
    “Be careful,” McCorkle muttered as he led the way.
    Wicherly turned to Nora and held out a well-manicured hand. “May I?”
    “I think I can handle it,” she said, amused at the old-world courtesy. As she watched Wicherly descend with excessive caution, his beautifully polished shoes heavily coated with dust, she decided that he was far more likely to slip and break his neck than she was.
    “Be careful!” Wicherly called out to McCorkle. “If this tomb follows the usual plan, up ahead is the well.”
    “The well?” McCorkle’s voice floated back.
    “A deep pit designed to send unwary tomb robbers to their death. But it was also a way to keep water from flooding the tomb, during those rare periods when the Valley of the Kings flash-flooded.”
    “Even if it remains intact, the well will surely be bridged over,” Menzies said. “Recall that this was once an exhibit.”
    They moved forward cautiously, their beams finally revealing a rickety wooden bridge spanning a pit at least fifteen feet deep. McCorkle, gesturing for them to remain behind, examined the bridge carefully with his light, then advanced out onto it. A sudden crack! caused Nora to jump. McCorkle grabbed desperately for the railing. But it was merely the sound of settling wood, and the bridge held.
    “It’s still safe,” said McCorkle. “Cross one at a time.”
    Nora walked gingerly across the narrow bridge. “I can’t believe this was once part of an exhibit. How did they ever install a well like this in the sub-basement of the museum?”
    “It must have been cut into the Manhattan bedrock,” Menzies said from behind. “We’ll have to bring this up to code.”
    On the far side of the bridge, they passed over another threshold. “Now we’re in the middle tomb,” said Wicherly. “There would have been another sealed door here. What marvelous frescoes! Here’s an image of Senef meeting the gods. And more verses from the Book of the Dead.”
    “Any more curses?” Nora asked, glancing at another Eye of Horus painted prominently above the once-sealed door.
    Wicherly shone his light toward it. “Hmmm. I’ve never seen an inscription like this before. The place which is sealed. That which lieth down in the closed place is reborn by the Ba-soul which is in it; that which walketh in the closed space is dispossessed of the Ba-soul. By the Eye of Horus I am delivered or damned, O great god Osiris .”
    “Sure sounds like another curse to me,” said McCorkle.
    “I would guess it’s merely an obscure quotation from the Book of the Dead. The bloody thing runs to two hundred chapters and nobody’s figured all of it out.”
    The tomb now opened up onto a stupendous hall, with a vaulted roof and six great stone pillars, all densely covered with hieroglyphics and frescoes. It seemed incredible to Nora that this huge, ornate space had been asleep in the bowels of the museum for more than half a century, forgotten by almost all.
    Wicherly turned, playing his light across the extensive paintings. “This is rather extraordinary. The Hall of the Chariots, which the ancients called the Hall of Repelling Enemies. This was where all the war stuff the pharaoh needed in the afterlife would have been stored—his chariot, bows and arrows, horses, swords, knives, war club and staves, helmet, leather armor.”
    His beam paused at a frieze depicting beheaded bodies laid out by the hundreds on the ground, their heads lying in rows nearby. The ground was splattered with blood, and the ancient artist had added such realistic details as lolling tongues.
    They moved through a long series of passageways until they came to a room that was smaller than the others. A