Marianne Brocklehurst and Mary Booth had to be very quiet. Their rooms on their rented houseboat, or dahabeah, were small, and the coffin they were trying to move took up most of the space. They hoped to unwrap the mummified remains within the small (only about five feet long) but “very prettily painted case” they had purchased from a dealer near Thebes, in southern Egypt.
They were excited—they’d finally gotten their hands on the mummified human remains they’d spent weeks hunting down—but also nervous, because if their Egyptian crew knew what they had acquired, how they had acquired it, and what they were about to do with it, there was a real risk the women would be stranded on the Nile.
