Dead Men's Hearts (11 page)

She shook her head.

“Have you ever heard of the Deir el-Bahri cache?”

She sighed. “Gideon, dear, have I ever pointed out to you that you have a slightly annoying habit of starting your stories by asking me if I’ve heard of something that hardly anybody has ever heard of? The Deir el-Bahri cache, the
Menshiya,
the Neiman-Marcus fragment—”

“Many times,” he said, flopping into one of the beige armchairs, putting his feet up on the ottoman, and stretching comfortably out on his lower spine. “It’s just a pedagogical stratagem, well known to ensure listener participation in the communication process.”

“Well, sometimes it just ensures listener teeth-gnashing. What’s the Deir el-Bahri cache? Just tell me, don’t worry about my participation in the communication process.”

Deir el-Bahri, he explained, was the name of one of the rocky burial canyons near the Valley of the Kings. In it, at the beginning of the Twenty-first Dynasty in about 1000 B.C., the authorities took action to protect the great pharaohs’ mummies from the profanations of the thief-families that had been robbing the nearby royal tombs for five hundred years. They had gathered up the desecrated mummies from their plundered tombs and put them all in a single place—the tomb of Queen Inhapy, behind the more famous, more showy temple of Hatshepsut, and there, stripped long ago of anything worth stealing, they were to lie undisturbed and eventually be forgotten.

Centuries passed. Millennia passed. Then, in 1891, a thief named Ahmed er-Rassul, a member of one of the local families that still made their living by systematically looting the same tombs—a piece here, a piece there, so that the market was never flooded—had a falling-out with his brothers. Out of spite he led officials into the unremembered mass tomb, which only the er-Rassul family knew about. There the officials were stunned to see, stacked on top of one another like so many logs, something that scholars thought no longer existed: the actual, preserved bodies of most of the legendary pharaohs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties: Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramses II—“

“And where does the
Menshiya
come into it?” Julie said, finishing her drink and stretching. “I don’t mean to rush you, but we have to be up early tomorrow morning.”

“They couldn’t leave the bodies where they were,” Gideon said, “so they shipped them to Cairo for safekeeping. The boat that took them was called the
Menshiya.
Can you imagine? The ancient kings of Thebes on their last journey after three thousand years. The news got out and people lined the shore all the way from Luxor to Cairo. Women tearing their hair, men firing guns into the air…”

“Can I ask you something? Did you actually know all this before, or did you learn it from boning up these last few weeks?”

“Don’t ask rude questions. Anyway, there’s more. I haven’t gotten to the best part. When they arrived, these old mummies had to be assessed for duties, like anything else coming into Cairo. The problem was, there wasn’t any classification they fit into. They weren’t stone, they weren’t cloth, they weren’t wood. So the tax collector and the officials got their heads together, came up with a compromise solution… and the greatest rulers of the ancient world made their triumphal entry into modern Cairo classified as dried fish.”

Julie spluttered with laughter. “Not that far off, when you think about it. You know, there’s got to be a moral there somewhere.”

“There sure does. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what it is.”

The morning began on a happy note. The baggage had arrived at el-Minya at 12:30 a.m., and Phil had somehow gotten it delivered to the ship in (and on) two rickety taxis. So as individuals began emerging from their staterooms a little before 7 a.m., they found their luggage stacked neatly in the corridor beside their doors. There were yips of joy as people were reunited with their underwear and toiletries. Even Haddon went out of his way to shake Phil’s hand.

It was all mildly amazing and a bit amusing to Gideon. At home Phil’s life was an exercise in planned disorganization. Constantly behind in his schedule, constantly overlooking things like bills and appointments, perpetually late (“Sorry, I remembered I had to do the laundry.”

“Sorry, the rubber plant needed repotting.”), he bumbled along from one day to another, happily enough, to be sure, but always seemingly on the edge of chaos. Here, in his professional capacity, he was a man of infinite capacity, his fingers on the strings of every available resource.

During breakfast, a bright buffet of melons, figs, dates, tangerines, and warm loaves of sweet bread, Forrest went over the shooting schedule. All of the morning’s interviews would take place in or around the Tel el-Amarna Museum not far from the ship. At 8:00, Haddon would talk about his early experiences there. At 9:30, it would be Gideon’s turn; he would discuss Pharaoh Akhenaten and his times. And Arlo would display and discuss some of the old finds from Lambert’s day at 11:00. TJ had an off-day.

“But which finds?” Arlo asked. “What do you want me to talk about?”

“Anything,” Forrest said. “Talk about jewelry.”

“Well… there
a
some jewelry here that I’m quite interested in myself, but I don’t know—”

“Fine, perfect.”

In his own way, Arlo looked pleased.

“So long as it’s visual,” Forrest said.

“Well, of course it’s visual.”

“Fine, perfect.”

As Forrest went on, Arlo leaned worriedly toward Gideon. “What does he mean by visual?”

“You’ve got me, Arlo.”

“Isn’t jewelry visual? I mean, by definition?”

“You’d sure think so.”

“I’m really not very good at this sort of thing,” Arlo said.

“Okay,” Forrest said, “anybody who’s not involved in the shooting, you’re free to spend the morning wherever you want. But remember, the boat has to leave at one o’clock sharp, so
please
—give my ulcer a break and be back in plenty of time. We’re on a tight schedule and I wouldn’t even want to
try
to extend our time in Egypt.”

And miss even a single, splendid day of Anatolian boar-hunting, Gideon thought.

Chapter Ten

The Tel el-Amarna Museum stood at the desert’s edge a few hundred yards from the river, a little more than a mile south of the huddled brown village of el-Till and hard against the scant remains of what had once been the King’s Street in the great city of Akhetaten. No more than a utilitarian structure when constructed in 1913 as headquarters for Lambert’s first excavation, the plain, one-story stucco building had been going downhill ever since. For twenty years after 1913 it had gone unused. In the 1930s, the University of Bern had taken it over for two decades. Then, in the 1950s, it had been turned over to the Egyptian government for use as a museum, but the money had never come through to properly maintain or staff it, and its finer pieces had gone one by one to more prestigious institutions. Now its undistinguished and slowly deteriorating collection was open to the public only a few afternoons a week, and irregularly at that.

It was nobody’s fault, Gideon knew. Egypt, possessor of the greatest accumulation of archaeological material in the world, also happened to be one of its poorest countries. If there wasn’t enough money to shore up the Great Sphinx against the groundwater that was eating it away, or to safeguard Luxor Temple against the corrosive salts in its soil, what chance was there to turn the dowdy Tel el-Amarna Museum into anything special? And if they did, how many people would come to visit it? Why would anyone, given the mind-numbing wealth available in the rest of the country?

Those members of the Horizon expedition who had the choice went elsewhere this morning. TJ took Julie on a tour of the ruined estates and houses that had made up the northern “suburbs” of Akhetaten, Bruno and Jerry trudged up the long incline to the famous painted cliff tombs on the ridge behind the city, Phil wandered around the village of el-Till making new friends, and Bea got a book and a pitcher of tea and went up to the
Menshiya’s
sun deck.

Gideon, Arlo, Haddon, and the film crew had the museum to themselves except for Dr. Afifi, the cadaverous, understandably hangdog museum director, who hovered, apologetic and solicitous, in the background.

Shooting began in the workroom, formerly a classroom in which a bright and single-minded twenty-year-old named Clifford Henry Haddon had been among those who had succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of hieroglyphic symbols at the feet of the celebrated Professor Heinrich Wiedermeister of the University of Bern.

But this morning’s interview, with Gideon watching from the back of the room, got off to a poor start. Haddon, standing in front of some racks of inscribed stone fragments and looking slightly ridiculous in an oversized bush jacket with enough shotgun-cartridge loops to satisfy the most bloodthirsty White Hunter, was stiff and fussy, squinting under the hot pole-lights. Patsy, cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth, was sweating grouchily over a tangle of wires while Cy, looking as if he might topple over asleep at any second, manned a videocamera set up on a tripod. Forrest, who had the ability to look bored and desperate at the same time, was alongside the camera, keeping his eyes mostly on a monitor a few feet away and prompting Haddon with edgy questions.

“And so after you got your master’s degree at Yale, you came directly here to work on the dig and study with Wiedermeister, is that right?” He was maintaining the singsong, doggedly cheerful tone employed by the edgy young when dealing with the recalcitrant elderly.

“Well—”

“Cut,” Forrest said. “Please, Dr. Haddon, look, I don’t mean to keep interrupting, but would you try not to start every sentence with ‘well’?” It was only 8:10 in the morning and already his smile was tight and glassy. “Okay? All right?”

Haddon compressed his lips and nodded. His beard stuck out straighter.

“All right, do you want to start again? Try to make it sound interesting now.”

“I will try,” Haddon said, “difficult as it may prove.”

Things, Gideon thought, were not improving.

Haddon waited for the signal to begin again, and peered frankly into the lens. “In the fall of 1944, with my master’s degree in hand, I leaped at the chance to come—”

“Cut,” Forrest said. He smiled harder. “This is just great, really great, but it would be even better if you didn’t look into the camera. It makes it a little severe. You know, like Uncle Sam saying ‘I want you’? We can’t have that, can we?”

He laughed. Haddon glowered.

Forrest’s massive face arranged itself into a merry smile. “So. Just speak right to me, not to the camera. ”Okay? All right?“

Haddon gritted his teeth, nodded, and started when Forrest dropped his chin. “Well—”

“Please.”
Forrest’s voice was a little strangled. “No ‘well’s’. Okay? All—”

“Young man, I will make a bargain with you,” Haddon said. “If you stop saying ‘Okay? All right?”, I’ll stop saying ’well.“ How does that suit you?”

Gideon winced. Tempers were already simmering, and it was just the first hour of the first morning of taping. Making a movie, a retired Port Angeles neighbor who had worked in Hollywood had once told him, was like making sausage. The finished product might be terrific, but you didn’t necessarily want to watch the process.

He made an unobtrusive exit and wandered for twenty minutes or so through the ill-lit, poorly labeled museum, but there wasn’t much to hold his attention: broken stelae, fragmentary statues, a few shabby, anonymous mummies and mummy cases. All in all, watching the rest of Haddon’s interview promised to be more uplifting.

On the way back he passed a small library in which Arlo and Dr. Afifi stood at a table, arranging five or six shoebox-sized containers. When Gideon entered, Dr. Afifi excused himself and humbly backed out, leaving the room to the two Americans as if he had been the intruder.

“Oh. Thank you, Doctor,” Arlo called absently after him, staring dejectedly into the boxes. “Just look at this,” he said to Gideon. “Nobody but an anthropologist would know this was anything but a pile of junk.”

“Mm,” said Gideon. He was an anthropologist, and it looked like a pile of junk to him.

In the boxes, arranged without apparent design, were blackened, kinked strands of metal—probably low-quality gold—squashed into shapeless clumps; dull pebbles that on closer examination were drilled beads of faience, carnelian, and jasper, the remains of necklaces or collars that had fallen apart millennia before; flattened, crumpled, copper armlets and anklets; bent, broken amulets in the forms of fish and flowers; various gewgaws of faience, the ubiquitous glass paste of ancient Egypt. There were gobs of unrecognizable stuff with tags attached to them by red string—like toe tags in a mortuary, Gideon thought, and there was something appropriate in the parallel.

It was material that had been in storage for fifty years, Arlo told him, ever since Lambert had excavated it; never written up in the literature, never even properly catalogued. Apparently it had been dug up out of the ground, brushed off, stuck in its boxes, and then utterly forgotten. If there had been any attempt at repair or restoration, there was no sign of it.

It was Egyptian archaeology’s old, familiar story, Gideon thought. There was simply too much, that was the problem. Too much material, too many eager excavators over too many decades, and not enough patient, expert people to make something of what came out of the ground. Even the great CairoMuseum was reputed to have an attic and two basements full of crates from the 1890s that they hadn’t yet gotten around to opening.

“They’re no help to you in your book?” Gideon asked.

Arlo uttered a rueful laugh. “Not in this condition. And half these things aren’t jewelry anyway, despite the labels.”

He fingered a clump of dull metal strands in one of the boxes. Bits of black flecked off to join the layer of similar debris in the bottom. He picked up a small almond-shaped eye of black and white faience, rimmed with metal, and turned it disgustedly over. “The eye shows up frequently enough as an amulet motif in the Amarna Period,” he said in a dusty, disheartened voice, “but never in its naturalistic form. Only as the Eye of Horus.”