In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (18 page)

The man’s eyes followed my every move, two gleams shifting in two black pits. I wanted to keep him talking. Why, I didn’t know, only that it calmed me to hear him speak, and everything I learned about him helped me to believe he meant no harm. Under the sun, with the tourist buses winding through the gullies below, he would have seemed nothing more than an Arab shepherd. Now the boundaries of the known had shrunk to the sphere of a Coleman lantern’s light—and now even that had collapsed upon itself, leaving me outside. In the dark he became by turns a thief, a brigand, a ghost, a djinn, and then things for which I had no name.

—How long have you been a shepherd then?

The question sounded foolish to me—incongruous with the time and place. Of course he had been a shepherd as long as he could remember, and his father before him, and so on. But to my surprise he answered eagerly.

—Ah. You see very well. I was not always a shepherd. I was son of a—how is it?—holy man, yes? A mullah, you understand? Not one of these ignorant dervishes that come from the east, no, or a bedouin madman with visions of the Prophet, none of these. He was an educated man. Was his mistake.

The robed arm swept off to the north, the sleeve breathing a dry odor of sheep.—We lived in a modern house in the city. Electric lights. Plumbing. There was a clock to tell the time for prayers: it knew the phases of the moon. The muezzin had a microphone. All of these things, and my family as well. My brothers and sisters. One mother.

He picked up a handful of sand, and let it slip between his fingers. The night breeze drew it out in a curtain, gauzy under the light of the stars.—My brothers, I do not know what became of them. My sisters and myself they put into the street. My mother—A long sigh escaped him, as if his robes were leaking, and I realized suddenly this was sadness I was hearing.

—They called her whore, you see. My father himself he cut off her head in the street. They took him away: it was not the modern thing to do. It did not matter. No man of our congregation would help us. And the women…

The face was a black shape behind the burnoose, a veiled motion, sweeping back and forth, back and forth. The day had been long: the voice and the swaying motion drew me down to sleep. I roused myself.

—What did you do?

—Do? The face turned up, and in the light from the sky the eyes glittered darkly: black pits, filmed with light.—Do? I did nothing. When a shepherd came into the city he took me back with him.

A loud spitting, a rasp of foot on shale.

—I became a shepherd. I learned a new life. I learned many things in the hills. Where the springs are. How to find the oases. And the quicksands. The season of the ewe, and the time of her bearing. I took a wife. She is a good woman. But now—

The figure leaned over, the eyes plain now in the dark face, a yard from my own. In my ear a voice was wailing.

—Now the lambs have come, and there is nothing to do. I come down to the Valley to find work. And I find you.

—What work do you do?

—I dig.

—Dig?

—Yes, dig, dig! Shovel and pick, or little brushes. Trenches this way and that. I have been a digger before. I have found many things. Valuable things. And nothing have I stolen. I have helped many digs to find.

—To find?

I was leaning forward, almost within the shadow of his robes.

He drew back, turned toward the gray band of the horizon, and shrugged.

—What they find.

The figure withdrew into his robes and a silence that enveloped us both in a circle cut off from the world. I looked up to reassure myself that the sky was still there: the roof of the world was hung with lamps shivering in the cooling night.

—What makes you think I’m here to find anything?

He spat again, but did not move.

—What do you think I’m here to find?

The figure leaned forward.

—I know you. I know your name.

I drew back as if from a snake.

—Your name is———, you come from———in United States. You are a professor-doctor. I worked for you, two years ago, down there.

The arm pointed now, a short straight thrust into the Valley of the Kings, where dim slopes slanted over deeper shadows.—You found a tomb. There was a man in it. I was there when you—

—When I what?

The face was inches from mine.

—When you took the bottle. You put it there.

The finger jabbed at my breastbone.

—You put it there, and went away, exactly like a thief. And now you are here.

—Here? My voice was weak.

His voice was low, murmuring, a thick haze.—Was it a map?

Murmuring deep in my skull, a pulsing darkness speaking:—Yes.

—Of this place?

—Yes.

He mumbled something I could not catch.

—What? What about this place?

Teeth flashed, a finger held over them.—Shh. Shh. Shhhhhh.

—Sah. Breakfast is ready.

He had taken my powdered eggs, my Primus stove, and fixed for us a yellow mess that steamed, smelling of curry, from the plate he held under my nose.

—Sah. Come eat. We must work now before the sun.

I sat up tangled in my sleeping bag, trying to break free from it. Something else clung to me—a dream, a voice that murmured from the earth. Soft touches lingered about my skin.

There was light low in the east, hardening the Nile out of night. Beyond the river a suggestion of low, rugged hills.

Before the sun, he had said. Surely he could not think we would knock off work at noon? I had before me, with or without his help, weeks of bitter labor, and I would have put it off if I could. But having started I would finish it as quickly as strength would allow. I could not imagine an afternoon idling beside a pit half-dug and leading so suggestively down.

The rumbling of his voice rose behind me, a low drone like the one that had zoomed through my sleep in the night. What had I dreamed? I turned and saw him prostrate and cowled, his sandals beside him where he knelt face-down on a rug, the soles of his feet pink in the dawn, his arms stretched out to the east.

Orange light flooded the sand and rocks, brightening to white, and when I turned to the east the ragged hills were lost in glare. Halfway down the slope, a pool of shadow in a natural hollow in the scree, a pit opened. Beside it rubble was strewn down the slope, hurled as if a monstrous dog had dug there, dug all night in the frenzy of a scent, a scent that I too smelled now, on the hot breaths of dawn: dust, spice, bitumen and natron, the mummy of a god.

I shook my head. Foolishness, put there by this man’s chanting.

But this hole: what was I to make of this hole? For it was a hole, not a pit or trench or any of the ordinary excavations. It was a passageway, leading down. Too big, too wide, too deep for any one man’s one night’s work. The shepherd’s voice droned through my thoughts, distracting. Had he hypnotized me then? Had I slept weeks away? Surely I must be suggestible to anything by now.

I looked to the shepherd, who had risen from his rug, rolled it, and was now absorbed in picking pieces of egg from his beard. Haunted by the feeling of a void hovering somewhere in my memory—days taken out of my life—I walked with him to inspect his work.

The interior was dark, a meter high, perhaps—high enough to crouch in, if one bent almost double; it slanted down some fifteen meters or more, seeming to end in a flat, featureless mass.

How had he done it?

I ached to ask, but caution kept me still: if I asked, he might disappear, this fabulous passage might close, and I would awake on a barren hillside, weeks of heartbreaking labor still before me. The man crouched at my shoulder, his breath audible in my ear.

—Have you a torch, sah?

I had indeed: a six-cell indestructible pharos, bought expressly to illuminate the endless corridors of the King. By its light, the shepherd let me lead him down.

Scree tumbled beneath my feet, a cascade of stones preceding me down the tunnel. I heard them strike and lie still. In the passage, sound was magnified, my breath coming fast, panting thickly. Behind me, the shepherd padded noiselessly down, dislodging not a pebble. The light showed us the tunnel’s end, a smooth, seamless face of stone.

In any other tomb, the lack of carving on the door would have sunk my spirits, made me think of turning away from one too obscure to repay the cost of opening. Here, the blankness set off a pounding in my ears, a lightness in my chest, a voice hinting: Here is a secret announcing itself.

—Sah. There is no door.

He was right. Blankness was very well, but this stone seemed a solid mass: we might be at bedrock.

—Could we widen the excavation?

My voice was a hoarse whisper, too loud.

—Sah. There is no door. You should turn back.

He clutched my hand, pulling me up.—Go home, sah. There is no passage for you here.

His hands were plucking at my fingers, at my clothes. I pushed him back.

—I have no home, you filthy—

—
Sah!

Silence seeped like bad air down the hole, filling the space between us.

—Sah.

He was breathing heavily. His eyes were pits again.—There is something.

He brushed past me in the narrow way without touching, and I heard rock scrape rock. He passed behind me again.

—There, sah. His eyes did not turn up.—Perhaps that is what you wish.

The beam of my flashlight lit on a hemisphere of polished rock projecting from the blank surface. I fell on it, my hands curved around its cool, smooth surface. In a backward glance I saw the Arab’s eyes grow wide, and then he was gone, the world was black and I was falling, a wind whispering fear in my groin.

I fell long enough to consider these: the hemisphere’s swift motion at my touch; the answering motion of the rock beneath me; a momentary glimpse of the opening chute; that the Arab’s mouth had opened too; that this was absurd.

Then the darkness imploded.

I clutched something to my chest, unsure what it was, knowing only that, with nothing else to hold, this must be worth holding. My head ached, and the darkness around me whirled and whistled until I thought the floor had given way again. I lay amid sandy rubble; the object I held was the flashlight, broken or switched off in the first convulsion of my fall. I sat up, and the darkness whirled.

I pressed the switch.