The story of the 1881 find is one of the romances of excavation, though the credit of it, if there is any, goes, not to the scientific explorer, but to the native practitioner of the gentle art of tomb-robbery. It was in 1876 that evidence began to accumulate, in the shape of various papyri and other articles of XXIst Dynasty date which appeared mysteriously on the market, that the fellahs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh had somehow or other gained access to some royal tomb of that period. The Service of Antiquities took the matter up, and suspicion fell on the members of a family named Abd-er-Rassoul. In April, 1881, Maspero arrested with his own hand Ahmed, one of the members of the family, and committed him to the tender mercies of Daoud Pasha, the third Mudir of Keneh who has appeared in this chapter, but who, unlike his predecessors, comes in on this occasion on the side of the angels, so to speak. Justice, in the Egypt of the eighties, had ways and means of arriving at its ends which seem strange to mere Occidentals, and Maspero covers a good deal in his simple statement that Daoud Pasha carried on the investigation “with his habitual severity.” The Ramesside inspectors, in 1100 B.C., put things more bluntly--“They were beaten with sticks both on their hands and feet”--but probably the facts were not very different in the modern trial. The only result was to produce a flood of testimony that Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul “never had excavated, and never would excavate, that he was incapable of misappropriating the tiniest antiquity, to say nothing of violating a royal tomb,” and the spotless victim of oppression had to be liberated “provisionally.” “The vigour with which the inquiry had been conducted by Daoud Pasha” had, however, impressed the mind of one of the Abd-er-Rassoul family with the conviction that there are cases where honesty, or the best possible imitation of it, is the best policy. Mohammed Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul came secretly to the Mudir, made a clean breast, or at least a breast as clean as was convenient, to that Rhadamanthus, and on July 5, 1881, Emile Brugsch Bey, representing the Service of Antiquities, at last found the truth about the business, as usual, at the bottom of a well. He was led by the penitent sinner Mohammed to a lonely spot at the foot of the Libyan cliffs, not far from Hatshepsut’s famous temple at Der el-Bahri. There, after a long climb up the hillside, and the scaling of a high cliff, he found behind a great rock the mouth of a black shaft about 6 feet square, the well of the unfinished tomb of Queen Astemkheb of the XXIst Dynasty; and the story of his experiences may best be told by himself.