“I AM PLEASURE TO be here,” Iskander said, pumping Pierce’s hand. “I wish you always.”
“Thank you,” Pierce said, trying to withdraw his fingers.
“Whatever you will wish, you will ask.”
“Thank you.”
“I can do whatever.”
With that, he dropped Pierce’s hand and stepped back. “Cigarette?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Iskander shook a pack from his robes and gave one to Pierce, who lit it and inhaled while the Egyptian watched carefully. It tasted strong and sour. “Good.”
“Yes. Good. Egyptian.” He held up the pack so Pierce could see. Then he frowned: “Are you Holland?”
It was a moment before Pierce understood. “No, American.”
“American. My congratulations. I hope you will be very happy.” Abruptly, he grabbed Pierce’s hand and began shaking it again. He was a nervous, fluttery little man, constantly in motion. Even when standing still, he shifted from one leg to the other, swaying slightly.
“Thank you.”
The handshake seemed to go on forever.
Barnaby watched it all with a sad expression on his face. Poor bastard, thought Pierce, he’s had to put up with this all the way from Luxor.
“This women,” Iskander said, turning to Lisa. “We will not introduce you.”
Silence.
Barnaby nudged Pierce.
“Oh. I’m sorry. Mr. Iskander, Miss Barrett. Miss Barrett is Lord Grover’s secretary.”
With a bow, the Arab grabbed her hand and delivered a long, fervent kiss. “I am charming.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Lisa said.
Iskander straightened, stepped back, and looked at her critically. “Very beautiful,” he said, and made a loud clucking noise. “She is…” he broke off and pointed toward Pierce, then back to Lisa.
Lisa reddened.
“No, no. She is Lord Grover’s secretary.”
“Yes? I know.” He smiled, showing several brilliantly gold teeth. “Very.”
“I hope,” said Barnaby, clearing his throat, “that you will enjoy your stay with us, Mr. Iskander. Would you like to see the rest of the camp?”
“I have with me my tent.”
“Yes, but I thought perhaps you would like to see our arrangements.”
“Yes?” He seemed very surprised.
“Yes, I think so.”
“I think so,” he repeated doubtfully.
“Well then. If you will follow me—”
Abruptly, the Arab whirled and faced Lisa. “Are you Holland?”
“No.”
“Oh. Yes I see.”
And with that, he followed Barnaby through the camp.
They stood in the supply tent, leaning on crates, talking. Everyone was tired; the barrage of new impressions, the heat, and the attempt to adjust had exhausted them. Grover’s two girls were asleep in their tent. Iskander had pitched his own tent a respectful distance from the camp and had retired early.
Outside, it was dark—dark as only a desert can be, the sky clear and starry, untinted by the lights of the city. It was also cold. The temperature dropped sixty degrees when the sun went down, and everyone wore sweaters.
Barnaby was talking.
“We begin tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll start with the Tombs of the Nobles in the hills all around us. You may have noticed them—they’re just little holes in the rock, high up.”
A few of them nodded. Barnaby went on, “The Tombs of the Nobles aren’t really tombs. They’re memorial chapels built in honor of various court officials—the vizier, the royal gardener, the vintner, the gamekeeper. Nobody was actually buried in them, and they’re small places, usually just a single room. We’ll photograph the paintings and mind our own business. Mr. Mander is a pleasant fellow, but he has a young lady in Luxor to whom he is very much attached. I don’t think he’ll stay with us long.”
He took out a map of Luxor, printed on fine cloth, very detailed. On it he had drawn several fine lines.
“The location of the tomb,” he said, “is here, according to the hieroglyphics. It says, halfway down the path of the woman-king’s place—meaning Hatshepsut’s temple. There used to be a straight road leading all the way from the temple to the Nile, though the river in those days was much wider. I’ve put the approximate halfway point on the road here. Then the directions state, roughly 1,300 yards south from that point, or to here—” he pointed to the map. “This area is now sugarcane fields. From here, east 2,200 yards, to this point, in the foothills. Then 1,100 yards north, into the cliffs. And there’s where our tomb will be.”
Conway bent over the map. “Five hundred feet up,” he said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“How accurate are the directions?”
“Fairly accurate. Allowing for conversion factors from the Egyptian units and shifts in terrain, I wouldn’t think it’s off by more than one hundred feet in any direction.”
“That gives us a cliff surface of one thousand square feet,” Conway said. “Can’t you do better than that?”
Barnaby shook his head.
Nikos shrugged. “Then we search a thousand square feet.”
“When the watchdog leaves,” Pierce reminded them.
“Drink, anyone?” Lord Grover asked.
Conway walked over and looked Grover up and down. “Are you Holland?” he said.
The camp fell into a routine quickly. Breakfast at five—about which nobody complained, because it was cool—followed by work until ten, when lunch was served. Then, sleep until four, and another work session until seven, and dinner. For the first three days, everyone was too tired to stay up later; soon afterwards, the parties began. Hamid Iskander was carefully uninvited.
Their work consisted of minute examination of the Tombs of the Nobles and photographing of the hieroglyphics and friezes. Pierce marveled at the freshness of the paint, the vividness of the colors—they might have been painted last week, instead of three thousand years ago.
“Desert heat,” Barnaby explained. “Best preservative in the world. At Karnak, there are beams and pillars that have been exposed to the elements, and still the paint remains.”
The scenes they photographed were stylized but depicted everyday moments in the lives of the people—the rich people, a sort of three thousand-year-old Vogue, as Lisa put it.
Scenes of banquets, dancing girls, musicians; hunting expeditions, boating trips along the Nile; overseers directing the sowing and harvesting of the grain, the slaughtering of bulls for a feast, the crushing of grapes, and the tending of gardens. Soon, Pierce began to ignore the stiffness of the figures, the profiles and endless processions. The people came alive for him, a culture complete, vibrant, wealthy, and powerful.
Each night, he returned to his tent tired but thoughtful, turning over in his mind the things he had seen.
A week after they arrived, Pierce walked into Conway’s tent and found him cleaning a gun. He stopped and stared.
Conway looked up mildly. “Something wrong?”
“Yes. Where did you get that?”
“I brought it with me.”
“Why? Do you know what Iskander would do if—”
“He would congratulate me on my good sense.”
Pierce frowned.
“You are confused. I can see by your face that you are confused. My good man, this—” he waved the gun “—this is a cobra pistol.”
“Watch where you point it.”
“Not loaded.” He pointed the barrel at his skull and squeezed the trigger six times.
“Why?” Pierce said.
“Death wish.”
“No. Why did you bring it?”
“For cobras, man.”
“There are no cobras around here.”
“Well, uh, you keep thinking that when the cobra bites you. It’s good for your morale in the last twenty minutes of your life.”
“Nobody said anything to me about cobras,” Pierce growled, and left the tent
“I didn’t want to frighten you,” Barnaby said, “but it’s all true. There are cobras around here, and whole expeditions have been canceled because of them. Carter and Carnarvon were digging at Sakha before the First World War, and work had to stop for a season because of an invasion of cobras.”
Pierce reached for a cigarette and sat down on Barnaby’s cot.
“The Egyptians used to worship them,” Barnaby continued. “The goddess Wadjet, an ancient deity. The cobra was a royal creature and a symbol of royalty since the 1st Dynasty. Cleopatra probably killed herself with a cobra. In this region, around Thebes, there was a local snake goddess, and there is a cave on the road to the Valley of Queens which was the local center of worship. So you see, it’s quite a real thing.”
“Nice of you to tell me.”
“I would have,” Barnaby said, “eventually.”
At the end of the first week, Pierce had a backlog of exposed color film, which he gave to Hamid Iskander to forward to Cairo. He developed the black-and-white film at night, and it kept him busy. Sometimes, when he had a lot to do, Lisa helped him, working in the reddish glow of the safelight. He was increasingly amazed at her—she knew a lot about photography, she was a good cook, and she never complained about the hardship of camp living.
In contrast, the other girls complained continually and spent most of their time drinking in their tent. Pierce did not think they would last long; Lord Grover himself seemed restless.
Pierce and Lisa did not talk much in the darkroom. When they did it was about the tombs, or the developing time, or the temperature of the stop bath. Often, he wanted to shift the conversation to something else, but he was not sure how to do it. She could make him feel extraordinarily clumsy and inept when she wanted to. He decided to let her make the first move.
The following Friday, they took the day off and visited the Valley of the Kings, Biban el-Moluk. Barnaby conducted them through the tombs, which were often quite simple, just a long corridor cut through the rock, opening into a central room where the sarcophagus had lain.
But the walls were covered with hieroglyphics, scenes of the pharaoh’s great deeds, and pictures of deities. Though the air in the tombs was stale and dusty, coating the tongue, Pierce did not notice it.
Other tombs, from a later period, were more elaborate. False passages and empty chambers had been cut to confuse graverobbers, and the tombs were frequently buried deep in the rock. The work which had gone into them must have been monumental.
“I don’t like it,” Lisa said. “It’s eerie—all this fixation on the dead.”
Pierce knew what she meant. Thebes had been a necropolis, a city of the dead. It had been called “The Horizon,” the interface between the worlds of the living and the departed. It was strange to see such efforts lavished upon a cemetery.
“You mustn’t get the wrong idea,” Barnaby said. “The Egyptians were happy and fun-loving and not preoccupied with death. Actually, they led lives much like the Greeks or Romans, who also had societies built on slave labor. Their parties were lavish, and everyone got drunk and ate too much; their lives were pleasant, and they enjoyed themselves.
“The emphasis on tombs and religions comes only from the religion, which centered on the journey into the underworld and the need for a safe resting-place for the deceased to ensure the afterlife. The pharaoh had to be equipped with everything he might need in the hereafter, and so he was buried in splendor. It’s not such an uncommon idea, culturally. Catholics need their last rites; the Norsemen wanted to die holding a sword; the Greeks needed to be buried with a coin in their mouths to pay Charon, the boatman on the river Styx.”
“Blasphemy,” Conway said.
“For an Egyptian, going on to the afterlife was a difficult thing, with lots of pitfalls—but it wasn’t unhappy, and I don’t think people regretted dying as much as they do now in an agnostic world.”
“Is that an editorial?” Lisa asked.
Barnaby smiled. “I guess so. Shall we look at the other tombs?”
As they left the valley, Conway said, “Every time I see all those gods, I get confused. I’d never make a good Egyptian—I’d always mix them up. I’d get down and start praying to Horus or Hathor, and I’d really want Anubis, you see. It’s like asking for something when you have the wrong guy on the telephone. You never get anywhere.”
“All religions are confusing,” Nikos said. “That’s how the priests stay in business.”
The days merged into weeks, and soon they found they were not counting anymore. Each day was the same—the weather unchanging, cloudless, hot—and it did not matter whether it was Tuesday or Thursday, October or January. Once in awhile, Pierce would take out a calendar to keep track.
They grew hardened to life in the camp. They learned to go without a bath for a week, then ten days. They learned to accept each other’s idiosyncrasies, to ignore them. Most of all, they learned to live with the sand.
Sand in your boots, in your underwear, in your collar; sand in your cameras, in your batteries, in your food; sand in your water, in your drinks, in your bed; sand in your eyes, your ears, your hair, your mouth.
Sand mixed with sweat, making clothes gritty, abrasive. Sweat stinging your eyes, and sand in your handkerchief when you wiped it away. Drinking liquids almost continuously. Salt tablets. Antibiotics for dysentery. Days when the supplies did not come from Luxor. Three days when the refrigerator went on the blink, and there was no ice and great fear that the film would spoil. One agonizing six-hour period spent repairing the Land Rover, which had gotten sand in the carburetor.
And the flies.
Every morning, Conway would get up, yawn, and smile: “Isn’t it great? Life in the country.”
Hamid was with them constantly. Often, he would burst in upon their work, asking where one member of the expedition was; he kept track of everybody during the hours of daylight. At night, Pierce suspected, he was also alert, sitting in his tent listening.
If so, all he would hear was the sound of a party. Every night, they had some sort of party The tensions of the work, the close living conditions of camp life, which robbed them all of privacy, were relieved by periodic drunks that went long into the night. At these times, Grover’s two girls would revive, wandering gaily among the group, laughing and kissing everyone. Nikos became quite attached to the Malaysian, but Grover did not seem to mind. He presided over the parties like a huge, drunken Buddha, dispensing drinks, advice, and dirty jokes with tremendous energy and gusto. One of the girls had brought a portable phonograph and a stack of records, so they had music. Occasionally, someone would try to dance, though the sand made it difficult. But with rock-and-roll blaring, and a whiskey in your hand, it was almost possible to forget where you were—and that was the object of it all.
Hamid left them after six weeks. He came up to Pierce one morning and asked if he had films to be taken to Cairo. Pierce said he did. Hamid replied gravely that he must return to Luxor for “business and governments”; he would be gone some time, though he would come back periodically to see how work was progressing.
Pierce said they were grateful for his help getting started. Hamid said if they needed anything, just let him know. Pierce promised they would.
The following day, the search began.