Feisal was the only other member of the party who was more amused than embarrassed. He had probably run into this sort of thing before. ‘It is not Nefertiti. She appears elsewhere in the same scene. One authority has suggested that this was her tomb, not that of her husband, but that viewpoint is not generally accepted. The unfinished suite of rooms leading off the downward passage may have been intended for her burial. We will visit them later, but first you will want to see the best preserved portion of the tomb, which was designed for one of the royal princesses.’

Ignoring Louisa, he led us out the way we had come.

The others crowded after him. They weren’t any more comfortable in that room than I had been, and I’m not just talking about the temperature and the close air. It was good sized – about thirty feet square, according to Feisal, and the ceiling didn’t brush the top of my head. But somehow I felt as if it did, and the battered stone pillars looked as if they might collapse at any moment.

Whistling softly and irreverently, John stood studying the wall and Mary sidled up to me. ‘Are you as anxious to leave this place as I am?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know. How anxious are you?’ I wiped the perspiration off my forehead.

‘I suppose it’s partly psychological,’ Mary murmured. ‘The reminders of death and decay and darkness . . .’

That was one of the words I didn’t need to hear right then. Without replying I headed for the door.

I was determined to stick it out, though. The chambers we had visited in the mastaba tombs at Sakkara were above ground; the nobles’ tombs at Amarna were cut into the cliff, but we hadn’t gone down under, into the burial chambers, and I had always been able to see daylight in the distance. This was the most difficult place I’d encountered yet, and I felt I was going about conquering my phobia in a very sensible way. The hell with jumping back onto the horse; I’d rather start with a very small pony or a Saint Bernard, and work my way up.

One of Akhenaton’s daughters had died young and had been buried in her father’s tomb, in a suite of rooms located off the main descending corridor. The scene I had found particularly moving, that of the little body lying stiff on the funeral bed, with the grieving parents bending over it, could hardly be made out. Some vandal had tried to hack out a portion of the relief; the deep jagged incision had destroyed the upper part of the princess’s body and other details.

‘That’s an example of why I dread increased accessibility,’ said Larry, who was standing next to me. ‘These reliefs were virtually intact until the thirties.’