But Iris was beckoning to her too. At the far end of a long vista of columns and crammed niches a phalanx of cleaning women with buckets and mops were swilling the stone floors.
‘Where are we going?’ Ruby asked.
‘Upstairs.’
Reluctantly she followed them up shallow stone steps to the first-floor gallery, all the time wishing that she could have this treasury to herself without the distraction of Mamdooh and Iris.
There was a crowd of visitors in one room, and past the craning heads she caught one brief glimpse of the serene funerary mask of the boy king.
‘Here?’ she pointed.
Iris shook her head. They came to a side gallery, with rows of polished wooden benches in the ante-room.
‘I will wait here,’ Mamdooh announced.
The room beyond was hushed and dimly lit. The mummified remains of the royal pharaohs lay in sealed glass boxes.
Ruby crept along the line, lingering beside each enclosed mummy. Here were a queen’s dark ringlets and hooked nose, here was a skull showing through skin like dried leather, long yellow teeth bedded in the jawbone, a withered arm circled with a coil of gold. Iris moved in step with her, murmuring the names: Seti I, Ramses II, Tuthmosis IV. Some of them looked as if they were merely asleep, others were withered and collapsed, a bundle of remains more touching than macabre. What struck Ruby most was that these were just people, with wrists and nostrils and fingernails. Outside in the halls were the decorated sarcophagi and tomb ornaments, but here were men and women. They had lived and known glory, and then they were dead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them.
She murmured to herself, the skull beneath the skin. She didn’t know where the line came from, but she had heard or read it somewhere.
She understood why Iris had brought her here. The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obliterated forever, but there was no real difference between this hushed room and the tomb house where Ash’s family lived.
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