The second girl sang nothing and did nothing, but stood motionless. She wore so much gold that she herself was scarcely visible.

Now Khufu himself spoke, and even the jackals were silent as Pharaoh expanded his voice, and his orders filled the City of the Dead.

The singer was lifted into a sort of basket on ropes and lowered gently into the tomb. The girl wrapped in gold was put into the next basket and also lowered. Torches dipped forward, in fascination or reverence. There was a great spill of light and the second girl was no longer shadow under jewels. Strat could see her features and her eyes.

It was Annie.

He had hardly begun rejoicing at the marvelous ways of Time—the miraculous conjunction of souls—the perfect meeting soon to occur in the perfect place— when the next lowering into the shaft occurred.

It was not a priest or a soldier who went down. It was the first rock-hewn slab.

Promptly, the second slab was lowered over the first, and the men began a great and dreadful warbling. They hooted like robed birds gone mad, bowing and nodding to the earth. Then, one by one, man by man, they emptied the baskets down the shaft. Sand and rock and pebble.

Filling it.

ANNIE

Annie and Renifer were in a small room with a large bed. The pile of soft pillows awaited. So did death. It was a parody of a slumber party. But they had not dressed Annie for a party. They had dressed her for eternity.

She did not speak to Renifer and Renifer did not speak to her, because they shared no language and because there was nothing to say.

Annie took off the magnificent necklace, the crown, the thick bracelets, the anklets and amulets. She laid them in a row at the foot of the bed. Gold was beautiful, but you could not, in fact, take it with you. When she slithered out of the netted gown, its bright beads tumbled onto the floor, tangled beyond hope. She slid out of the gold sandals but when her bare feet touched the stone floor, she couldn't stand it. There might be spiders or beetles or rats down here. So she kept the sandals on and fingered the pleats in her stiff white undergown.

Time, you vicious spirit. How could you do this to me? Renifer's torch will burn out. We will sit in the dark while we suffocate.

Annie had contemplated death, of course. All thinking people contemplate death. Her own age was particularly fascinated with it. Whenever they had a poetry assignment, half the kids wrote about death. But none of them ever expected to sit inside their own tomb with lots of time to consider the future of their own dead body.

I am going to become a mummy, she thought.