CHAPTER 17
LuxorWhen Emma woke in the morning she went straight out onto the balcony and gazed over the calm silver-blue surface of the Nile. In the distance she saw the mountains that had held the tombs of the pharaohs so secretly in their clefts and chasms, until first the robbers, and then the archaeologists, had come to desecrate them. She held her breath. Such beauty! Such an awesome feeling of time having ceased to run forward. Nefertiti and Akhenaten must have gazed at the same scene. Setepenra must have played in her grandmother’s garden over there, beneath the pink mountains where Amenhotep and Tiye had one of their favourite residences. Akhenaten himself would have grown up there. According to the guidebook Bernard had left with them, there was nothing to see of the old palace n
