January 23, 1922

The day before Mace left he and I took a long walk around the southern valleys of the Goom as he said he wanted to see the Tomb of Hatshepsut. As a matter of fact we went a good deal beyond that wandering up all of the valleys to their heads. We took along some lunch, a kodak and an article by Carter which he had written for the Journal two or three years ago. We came into one valley which was perfectly magnificent with enormous cliffs rising sheer up from the bottom. At the head of it there was a tremendous door-like place of which I took a couple of snapshots as we drew near it. At last, after we had struggled over the rocks and the valley bottom we came to a point where we could see that the valley ended in a great fissue about 50 meters deep with its bottom some 10 meters above the valley floor. Dangling from the bottom of the crack against the rock there were a couple of strands of Arab saggia rope. The end of the rope was just out of reach but Mace and I climbed on a pile of rocks and then tried to swarm up the rope but without any luck because we twirUed around and around and could get no foothold anywhere.

I am going back someday soon with a ladder to try to get up into the crack because it is just at the point where Carter describes the Tomb of some Princesses which it is rumored was plundered by Arabs in 1916. In fact we have an old man on our work named Mohammed Hamad who claims to have been one of the men who found the tomb in the crack and got out of it what he describes as an untold quantity of gold which they say was sold to Moh. Mohassib.