In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (17 page)

The struggle of the dog to right itself I had seen before, from behind the wheel of a ’58 Chevrolet on the boulevard that circled the city where I grew up. It was my car that struck the dog the second time—I could feel the thump of something solid beneath my feet, a brief rumbling roll, and then the motionless shape receding in the rearview mirror. I had refused to drive for a week after that, and my foster parents, angry—self-doubt they could never tolerate, I think because it confirmed their own uncertainty about me—threatened to revoke my driving privileges. And that dog—those dogs, the one warm beneath the Egyptian sun, the other still receding in the mirror—those dogs coalesce into a third, the one another set of parents had given me the week of my arrival in their home. I was twelve, I think, and alone in the house when a strange car stopped at the door, a woman handed me the collar with an aggrieved,—She ran out so fast.

The problem of digging a hole: twice I laid her in it, and twice I had to lift her out again and dig it deeper.

Within a year I was watching the since-familiar backhoe perform its obsequies over an equally parching soil, the thin blue of its exhaust the smoke of some small incineration as it backed the dust over that set of foster parents. Their car had been pinned beneath a bus. And in every case—I am omitting others—what struck me most was an emptiness in the visible world, a quality of light like the echo in an empty house, in every scene once inhabited by the—

What convinces me that I am dying is the way I maunder on, about dead pets, and foster parents, and myself. It is as if I have grown old—and I am not yet fifty. But these memories will not abate—they quicken, as if some part of myself hastens to become empty.

I have called it a tomb. More and more I doubt that is the proper term for the structure I seek. But I am yet baffled by what to call it: his retreat? his sanctuary? his redoubt? My horizon, the Nur-Mar Papyrus calls it, as it tallies the expense, the laborers and their rations, the sleds of undressed stone removed, the blocks brought in. My horizon: so all the kings, from the Third Dynasty on, referred to the tombs they prepared; here was the gate through which they would pass, like the sun at evening, into the land of the night. And like the sun, the term implied, the king would rise again.

Aahku-t
———, the papyrus calls it: the horizon of the nameless one;
Aakhu-t heh
, the eternal horizon, the tomb:
Aakhu-t sheta-t, shet-t metcha
: the secret horizon where the writing is read, as near as I can translate it: a word has been struck from the end of the phrase, and the last word could also be the word for a cutting tool, the verb “to destroy,” the name of a god, or an edict, decree, liturgy, book, writing, letter. And late in the papyrus, a new sign inserts itself into the sequence: “navel-of-the world” might be one reading: “bottomless pit” another; but an alternative reading, not entirely to be dismissed, is “noisome and trackless swamp.” In the last occurrence, the phrase seems to have become nonsense: I cannot interpret the glyphs, read them frontward or backward as I might.

Whatever he called it, for whatever purpose, it is clear that he intended to enter it, and I find no indication that he was going to wait to die before he did. His redoubt, I have come to call it, for it seemed that, in the final period of his reign, he felt pressed: the size of the work crew doubles, then doubles again. In the last year of its construction, perhaps forty thousand labored on the site; all, it seems, slaves from a country I have never heard of, and perhaps never existed: the name given in the papyrus is the word for “mute,” a class of servant employed in sensitive tasks, for which they qualified by having undergone glossectomy. In these passages, the handwriting hastens, slurs to hieratic, and the tale of construction stresses the speed urged on the crews. The work goes on—indeed its pace quickens, and the quantities of stone shifted, the provisions and furnishings crafted and stored, assume such magnitude that one cannot but doubt that the hyperbole typical of such accounts is at work: if the blocks involved are even a tenth the size of those from which the Pyramids were built, the manuscript describes a quarry large enough to produce a mountain range of Pyramids.

Then—curiously—the work of the construction, the physical details of it, disappear from the text, as if the decree of silence has caused the laborers to vanish. Perhaps the work was finished. There is no telling. The narrative breaks off with the phrase, “And then I caused—” I caused:
ta un
; or the phrase may be
ta hep
, to hide, or
ta hems
, to dwell, to make inhabited. I caused, I had, I made habitable my horizon, my secret horizon of the cutting tool; I sank into the noisome and trackless swamp. A rebus that re-forms itself upon each reading; it is a translator’s nightmare.

With Budge’s device mounted beside me in the Rover I drove out into the desert, the screen flickering, distracting me from my road with glimpses of shapes moving beneath the ground—large, vague masses of rock sliding beneath rock. I don’t know to what use he intended to put his creation, but for me it was an answer out of a dream, removing every obstacle between me and my goal. And as I left populated roads, then roads entirely behind me, I knew that I had entered into a new epoch in Egyptology.

Three days I drove the upper reaches of the Valley and beyond, three days of wild shocks that I still feel echoing in my bones, of sun that blinded me, and sand that filled my mouth with the arid taste of my youth, the taste of Egypt, and I drove on. The whisper in my ear was urgent behind me; I drove on into the darkness that formed always ahead and always out of reach. On the second day, I bit my tongue clear through, spit the tip of it into the wind and drove on, mouth filling with salt and the sharp taste of pain.

A dozen, two dozen, half a hundred undiscovered tombs flickered on the screen as I rode over them with my wheels: small tombs, large tombs, tombs plain and elaborate of form, but nothing answered the size, the majesty, the ineffable difference that I would know in the one I sought.

On the evening of the third day, after the shadow of the Horn had climbed the eastern sky, half-maddened by three days’ search, I found it.

The image was vague, as if lying at a great depth, or in a stratum of rock less lucid than the rest. But it could be nothing other than the tomb of him I sought: Vast, it seemed a map of a world unrolled beneath me, bafflingly intricate, tantalizingly obscure.

So much I saw on first glance, and came near to flipping the Rover as I applied the brakes: I turned a full circle in the sand before stopping, one wheel slightly bent by a boulder. I restarted, moving slowly by headlight up and down the slope, from the base of the jagged cliff behind me to the rim where the plain fell steeply toward the Nile, trying to assemble a clearer map of the subsurface.

No clearer, except at

—I am a shepherd, sah.

—But you have no sheep.

My tongue, thick and bleeding, would barely form the words.

—This is true, sah. They are in the hills.

He waved a robed arm off to the darkened west, where I had thought only the Libyan desert lay.—With my son. I have come into the Valley for work.

I nodded and said nothing. At the word “work,” he had tried to catch my eyes: his were black pits, unfathomable beneath a ragged burnoose. In the white glare of the lantern, his face was half extinguished. The silence between us stretched, until I made an unnecessary adjustment to the lantern, which gave a popping noise and went out.

—That is better, sah.

The bedouin leaned back, and sighed as if he had made himself more comfortable against the rock. Again the silence returned, and with it my fear. Watching him settle, I realized I had held the same half-crouch since his arrival; my pen still poised over my notebook where I had been jotting—creature of habit—notes about the site. I folded the notebook, and snapped it in my shirt-pocket. I don’t know what became of the pen.