The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page B

show of it. It’s a curse.” He winked slyly at Nora. “To any who cross this threshold, may Ammut swallow his heart.”
    There was a short silence.
    McCorkle issued a high-pitched chuckle. “That’s all?”
    “To the ancient tomb robber,” said Wicherly, “that would be enough—that’s a heck of a curse to an ancient Egyptian.”
    “Who is Ammut?” Nora asked.
    “The Swallower of the Damned.” Wicherly pointed his flashlight on a dim painting on the far wall, depicting a monster with a crocodilian head, the body of a leopard, and the grotesque hindquarters of a hippo, squatting on the sand, mouth open, about to devour a row of human hearts. “Evil words and deeds made the heart heavy, and after death Anubis weighed your heart on a balance scale against the Feather of Maat. If your heart weighed more than the feather, the baboon-headed god, Thoth, tossed it to the monster Ammut to eat. Ammut journeyed into the sands of the west to defecate, and that’s where you’d end up if you didn’t lead a good life—a shite, baking in the heat of the Western Desert.”
    “That’s more than I needed to hear, thank you, Doctor,” said McCorkle.
    “Robbing a pharaoh’s tomb must have been a terrifying experience for an ancient Egyptian. The curses put on any who entered the tomb were very real to them. To cancel the power of the dead pharaoh, they didn’t just rob the tomb, they destroyed it, smashing everything. Only by destroying the objects could they disperse their malevolent power.”
    “Fodder for the exhibit, Nora,” Menzies murmured.
    After the briefest hesitation, McCorkle stepped across the threshold, and the rest followed.
    “The God’s Second Passage,” Wicherly said, shining his light around at the inscriptions. “The walls are covered with inscriptions from the Reunupertemhru , the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”
    “Ah! How interesting!” Menzies said. “Read us a sample, Adrian.”
    In a low voice, Wicherly began to intone:

    The Regent Senef, whose word is truth, saith: Praise and thanksgiving be unto thee, Ra, O thou who rollest on like unto gold, thou Illuminer of the Two Lands on the day of thy birth. Thy mother brought thee forth on her hand, and thou didst light up with splendor the circle which is traveled over by the Disk. O Great Light who rollest across Nu, thou dost raise up the generations of men from the deep source of thy waters…

    “It’s an invocation to Ra, the Sun God, by the deceased, Senef. It’s pretty typical of the Book of the Dead.”
    “I’ve heard about the Book of the Dead,” Nora said, “but I don’t know much about it.”
    “It was basically a group of magical invocations, spells, and incantations. It helped the dead make the dangerous journey through the underworld to the Field of Reeds—the ancient Egyptian idea of heaven. People waited in fear during that long night after the burial of the pharaoh, because if he buggered up somehow down in the underworld and wasn’t reborn, the sun would never rise again. The dead king had to know the spells, the secret names of the serpents, and all kinds of other arcane knowledge to finish the journey. That’s why it’s all written on the walls of his tomb—the Book of the Dead was a set of crib notes to eternal life.”
    Wicherly chuckled, shining his beam over four registers of hieroglyphics painted in red and white. They stepped toward them, raising clouds of deepening gray dust. “There’s the First Gate of the Dead,” he went on. “It shows the pharaoh getting into the solar barque and journeying into the underworld, where he’s greeted by a crowd of the dead… Here in Gate Four they’ve encountered the dreaded Desert of Sokor, and the boat magically becomes a serpent to carry them across the burning sands… And this! This is very dramatic: at midnight, the soul of the Sun God Ra unites with his corpse, represented by the mummified figure—”
    “Pardon my saying so, Doctor,” McCorkle broke in,