GREAT ACCLAIM FOR ELIZABETH PETERS
AND CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK

“No one is better at juggling torches while dancing on a high wire than Elizabeth Peters.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Peters’s mystery series is such delicious fun.”

—Winston-Salem Journal

“Amelia Peabody Emerson, archeologist extraordinaire, and arguably the most potent female force to hit Egypt since Cleopatra, is digging in again!”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Plenty of interesting Egyptian and archeological lore, lots of danger.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Amelia is rather like Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Miss Marple all rolled into one.”

—Washington Post Book World

“Elizabeth Peters is wickedly clever.… [Her] women are smart, strong, bold, cunning, and highly educated, just like herself.”

—San Diego Reader

“What’s more fun than an Elizabeth Peters book? Not much that’s legal!”

—Salisbury Post(NC)

“It’s always fun to go on safari with this crew.”

—Anniston Star(AL)

BOOKS BY ELIZABETH PETERS

Crocodile on the Sandbank

The Curse of the Pharaohs

The Hippopotamus Pool

The Last Camel Died at Noon

The Mummy Case

The Murders of Richard III

Naked Once More

Night Train to Memphis

Seeing a Large Cat

The Seventh Sinner

Silhouette in Scarlet

The Snake, The Crocodile and the Dog

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 1975 by Elizabeth Peters

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This edition is published in arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

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First eBook Edition: February 2010

ISBN: 978-0-446-57321-4

E2-20220517-JV-PC-AMZ

To my son Peter

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The love of my beloved is on yonder side

A width of water is between us

And a crocodile waiteth on the sandbank.

—Ancient Egyptian Love Poem

Author’s Note

ALTHOUGH my major characters are wholly fictitious, certain historic personages make brief appearances in these pages. Maspero, Brugsch and Grebaut were associated with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in the 1880’s, and William Flinders Petrie was then beginning his great career in Egyptology. Petrie was the first professional archaeologist to excavate at Tell el Amarna and I have taken the liberty of attributing some of his discoveries—and his “advanced” ideas about methodology—to my fictitious archaeologists. The painted pavement found by Petrie was given the treatment I have described by Petrie himself. Except for discrepancies of this nature I have attempted to depict the Egypt of that era, and the state of archaeological research in the late nineteenth century, as accurately as possible, relying on contemporary travel books for details. In order to add verisimilitude to the narrative, I have used the contemporary spelling of names of places and pharaohs, as well as certain words like “dahabeeyah.” For example, the name of the heretic pharaoh was formerly read as “Khuenaten.” Modern scholars prefer the reading “Akhenaten.” Similarly, “Usertsen” is the modern “Semiseri.”