In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (16 page)

I looked around me, and there was nothing more to do: no family for farewells, no friends; my equipment I carried in my own hands. My office I simply locked, and in my empty house I locked my keys. Let the newspapers gather, the mail spill out of its box. I wished for the days of milk delivery, that one more mourner might leave offerings at my tomb. No matter: I would be gone—escaped—into darkness or into light.

I awoke once, en route, in the never-never-time of the Atlantic: over the wing the sun was rising, spreading purple shadows miles across the clouds. The cabin was quiet but for the vibration of the engines, the rushing of wind, the intermittent snore of my two-hundred-some companions. I thought I saw a small beetle, gold and iridescent blue, emerge from the carpeting at my feet. It raised its wingcovers, and flew a yard or two down the aisle before disappearing into the center of my vision.

A voice rose and subsided, murmured, surged and submerged again, out of and into the eastward urging of the engines:
unun neb-t shet-t unun maa-t; unun neb-t shet-t; unun neb-t upsh; neh-ti neheh; unun neb-t upsh, upsh, upshhhhhhh.

The long duration of an afternoon that should have been night I kept to my room, the curtains drawn against the glare. My window faced west, and as the afternoon wore thin and finally unraveled, the curtains caught cold fire; the window was a blaze of gauzy orange, reddening. In the midst of the glow, a black circle pulsing. Outside, in the heat and light, cars gathered, bleating. I lay and watched the pulsating void, listened to the thread of beeps and baas, and in the distance, on a wire stretched somewhere in the recesses of my skull, a thin voice was chanting.

The room was red and dim around me, and the voice had somehow escaped into the evening, where it ululated across the domed and minareted roof of Cairo: evening prayer. I stumbled from the bed and threw the curtains open. Beyond the new city the Nile shimmered around Rawdah. Beyond lay Al Jizah, where I told myself I could see the buildings of the University, where Professor——and I had stayed the first evening of my first trip into Egypt. And beyond Al Jizah, black against the blue-green-gold of the horizon, the Pyramids.

I could not see the Sphinx, but I knew where it lay, could conjure up the blind face of Khafre staring back at me. Blind, and crumbling, and slumping back into the sand.

I drew the curtain across the glass: for a moment my face, pale, gleamed back at me, one arm reaching out from the darkness.

The riddle of the Sphinx—the real riddle, the real Sphinx—is that we do not know the question.

I rented a Rover through the auspices of the Egyptian Auto Club, located conveniently around the corner from the Museum where the relics of Nur-Mar rest. I did not pay the visit. In my two days remaining in Cairo, I made three stops. One to the Etymological Society, up the broad contorted snake of Ramesses Street. I brought with me some copies I had sketched of some of the later marks from Nur-Mar’s papyrus which still perplexed me. I hoped they would perplex them as well.

My credentials were enough to grant me entry to the Director, a fellow who, behind two solar discs of eyeglasses, looked a bit like Gandhi. He peered with his magnifiers at my sketches, and then looked up at me with the same abstracted stare.

—Where did you get these?

I told him something like the truth. He remembered the excavation, of course; the glyphs had been printed on the seals of certain jars, I said. It is easy to lie, to lie gracefully I find, when the face of your listener is hidden in a pool of black. I heard a slow exhalation, a dusty sigh, and when I looked sidelong he had removed his glasses to rub his eyes.

—We see so many of these, he said.

My heart almost stopped. The darkness in my eyes went gray.

—And it’s always the same. The man sighed again over my sketches, and replaced the glasses; his eyes flashed large, as if he had seen something important. A momentary distortion.

For a long minute he gazed up at the ceiling, where the fan was slowly threshing flies.—They never stopped, you see. You must know something of that yourself. They never stopped adding in. Any time they thought of something new, they simply reached into air and added on another glyph. It’s worse than chaos, he sighed.—It’s infinity. It comes to the same thing in the end, doesn’t it?

He slumped, if this were possible, deeper in the dim brown heat, the rumples on his suit creasing through his face.—Did you know? I was trained as a chemist. For one year at University, before Nasser. Then the revolution came, and my family left, and I could study anything I wanted. We were all nationalists then, you know—very much so. And I decided that our heritage, our glorious gift to the human race, would be the more fitting study. But today—He pushed the scrap of paper back toward me.—Today I feel nostalgic for the benzene ring. You know the ring? A snake that bites its tail. That is perfection—none of this ringing in of signs from here and there and tomorrow: just carbon and hydrogen making geometry together.

—No. I am sorry, Doctor———: I cannot help you. I hope it was not important.

My second visit was to the Egyptian Library, and my work there was all in solitude, and all deliciously null.

And finally to the tourism board, where nothing consequential happened.

I am convinced more and more each day that I am dying. I left Cairo over the El Giza bridge, the bright Nile counterfeiting the morning sun. As I waited in the traffic in the Shari Al-Haram to make the left turn that would take me down to Route ø2, around me roared an endless procession of tourist buses, their windows black to opacity. What convinces me of my own hastening end is not the omnipresence of death around me—as I waited, a dog wandered into the traffic, rolled once as it was hit, righted itself, then went down again and was still—what convinces me is the persistence of my memory, as it replays before me isolated fragments of my life.