“I am capable of protecting Peabody,” Emerson said with a grim look.

I knew he was remembering the note that Sethos had slipped under the door at the hotel. “Yes, you are. We shall see the both of you at teatime, and Nefret as well if the train arrives in a timely fashion.”

In theory there is no reason why two excavators cannot share a single site. In practice it is a recipe for disaster except in rare circumstances. At Giza, for instance, the mastaba fields surrounding the pyramids are so extensive no reasonable man could object to a division at certain times. Often there were several different expeditions working there, more or less amenably.

Amarna was a much smaller site but the archaeological features there were of so diverse a nature that a reasonable man would be willing to share, especially when a particular task was beyond his resources. The nobles’ tombs, wonderfully decorated and inscribed, required skilled copyists. The boundary stelae, inconveniently located high in the cliffs, were badly battered and difficult to reach; Herr Morgenstern had not attempted to access them. The city site itself stretched for several miles, a complex mixture of temples, elegant villas, and smaller dwellings.

The Workmen’s Village, which was of no interest to him, often contained material that shed light on the customs and living conditions of ordinary working Egyptians, a subject that has not been studied as intensively as has the habits of their superiors. But these humble homes did not produce elegant sculptures or troves of jewelry. It was such discoveries that brought journalists to interview the excavators who found them, and I am sorry to say that archaeologists are no more averse to public acclaim than are ordinary men. Emerson is an exception to this general rule. As he once put it, “We have had to curse attention from the press.” He would have liked to blame this on my habit of poking my nose into criminous activities—as he called it—but was forced to admit that his own habits, such as the time he kicked a journalist down the stairs at the Winter Palace in Luxor, had attracted at least as much interest from the press.

But I digress.

The Reader will have noted my emphasis on the words “reasonable man.” I had no reason to suppose that Herr Morgenstern would be reasonable about his site, and to be honest, I doubt many excavators would have been. They are as possessive about their concessions as people are about their homes. One can hardly imagine Mr. X inviting Mr. Y to move into his living room. For Herr Morgenstern to invite Emerson to join him in excavating the city site would have been equally unimaginable.

And for Emerson to confine his activities to the Workmen’s Village was, if not unimaginable, decidedly unlikely. My admonishment that he and Herr Morgenstern needed to come to an agreement had been lost in the breeze.