The Maahes who started the night watch. Khnum-Shepses took the mantle in the years when the greatest king of the age began his great tomb on the plateau at Giza, and he saw a city of workers rise beside it: thousands of people in barracks and bakeries, working shifts through the day and sleeping in the dark.
It was a rich place for a brood to hide. Workers were many, tired and little noticed, and the gangs came and went on the quarry roads. Khnum-Shepses founded the Giza Watch, the Pride's first organised nightly patrol: a rota of trained watchers who walked the workers' town and the quarry roads every night, in pairs, with a rule that no one walked alone.
The Giza Watch was the model for every Pride watch that followed. He held the mantle for 50 years on a Partial supply of resin, and trained the men and women who staffed it himself. The tombs, stones and kings of Giza were never the Pride's concern. The workers were.
What he left behind: the Giza Watch, and the rule that no one walks alone.
