The wind came from the southwest, howling through the dry waddies of the desert that marked

old courses and floodways of the Nile.

The river had departed this place thousands of years before, leaving behind only sand

where there had once been floodplains, the dusty brown hills rising up over the flat land

below.

The dry hot gusts were both anusense and a relief to the workers' mast and the hundreds

underneath the cliffs that marked the edge of the desert.

Anusense, because it blew the carefully excavated piles of sand back into the holes they'd

dug, and a relief because they briefly cooled the overheated labors.

Stripped to the waist against the heat and the relentless sun, dripping sweat, some

of them mixed mud and straw into molds to form mud bricks, the ubiquitous building material

of ancient Egypt.

When the bricks dried, the workers would carefully stack the bricks to line a series of underground

shimmers, three big openings and then hundreds of smaller ones and neat rows just beyond.

It was a tomb fit for a king and all those who had served him in life.

His high officials and wives would serve him in death as well, human sacrifices to ensure

that the proper order of Egypt continued.

To do otherwise would invite chaos and disorder.

It would violate the tenuous agreements with Egypt's mini-gods, agreements that ensured

the Nile would flood year after year, the harvests would be good, and foreigners would fall

before the invincible armies of the Pharaoh.

Some of the older workers had worked on the last royal tomb, just to the east of this one.

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