Sleeping Beauty (50 page)

Josh loved Luxor. It was an ancient village trying to be a modern city; it was dirty, shabby, and poor, but it was wonderfully full of life. And it sat astride the ancient capital of Thebes like a gateway to the wonders of another age, a town where Josh felt at home with pharaohs and courtiers dead four thousand years, and with modern friends who invited him to their homes for dinner. Luxor, and all of Egypt, and his work, were clear-cut to Josh; they had none of the sloppiness that had embarrassed him in his relationship with Dora, none of the fuzziness that seemed to define his relationships with women so that he never found one that would last. Absorbed in his work, walking the streets of Luxor, he had a focus and a purpose and the rigor of a scientist. It seemed to be the only permanence in his life. And now, in Luxor, he hoped to make the greatest coup in exploration since the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922.

“The most wonderful thing in the world,” said Carol Marston as she and Josh sat at dinner his first night in Luxor. Tall and dark haired, with a lively face and almond-shaped brown eyes that darted everywhere so she would miss nothing that went on around her, she was the newest and youngest member of the board of the Museum of the Ancient World. “The most wonderful in the world, and for
me, too,” she said as she finished her dessert and sat back with a deep sigh. “I have to tell you, Josh, I'm having more fun than I've had since Whit died. It's the first time I've been anywhere that people aren't feeling sorry for me, and I like that; I like not being surrounded by people who're making sure I'm not alone. That sounds ungenerous, and I don't mean to be, but it's nice to be part of something huge and historically magnificent for a change. I have to thank you for that, for letting me come along.”

“I'm glad you're here,” Josh said, liking her. “But this may not be a historically magnificent week. We've been working on this project for six years, and we've dug in a dozen places without finding anything.”

“You'll find it; I'm betting on it. You have a very confident look. Tell me what we're going to do tomorrow.”

“Check out a possible site for Tenkaure's tomb. You know about him.”

“Only what you told the board; you think he was a real pharaoh but you're not sure.”

“Sure enough to keep looking for six years. There are enough references in the histories of the pharaohs who came after him to make it look like a good bet. There seems to have been a family split, and an attempted coup, and then it looks like his successors conspired to make him a nonperson after he died. And they almost succeeded. But if I'm right, he's got a tomb somewhere, and that's what we're looking for.”

Carol sighed. “I like the way your voice sounds when you talk about it. I wish all of us had some kind of project tucked away in a closet or a drawer, something we really, really care about, so when we're left alone, we can pull it out and get so involved that's all we think about. And when we talk about it, we'd sound like you, excited and wound up in something a lot bigger than us and our problems. That's what I meant. Historically magnificent.”

“You still miss Whit so much,” Josh said.

“I do. That's surprising, isn't it? I thought four years would make everything more tolerable, but I still want him back all the time, and I'm still furious at him for dying and
leaving me. And I still talk to him when I'm alone, especially at night. I guess, in a way, I'm still holding on to him because it's unbearable to think of letting him go completely.”

I've never known anything like that, Josh thought, or a woman who would inspire that kind of mourning and clinging if she should suddenly be gone. And then, thinking that, he thought of Anne.

He had been thinking about her since the beginning of his trip, when they were flying over Europe and he glanced out the window at the long expanse of Lake Geneva nestled in a landscape of farms and towns so neat they looked chiseled. There had been a storm; now the clouds were dissolving, casting shadows on the surface of the lake. Between the shadows, the sun glinted in thousands of sparkling lights.
Anne would like this.
The thought came to him without warning, and once it lodged with him, it did not leave.

And then, in Luxor, he discovered that he was seeing the town, and the dig, as if for the first time, through Anne's eyes. It was as if she walked with him up and down the narrow streets, and stood with him when he and Carol took the ferry across the Nile early the next morning. Standing with commuting workers, he looked at the western bank of the river, where a solid line of hills six hundred feet high hid the Valley of the Kings. The hills looked like hammered gold in the low morning sun, and the clear, dry air that made every object stand out, sharp and distinct. “My God, it's gorgeous,” said Carol. “I had no idea it would look like this.”

“The desert sun,” Josh said. “It's magic. These hills turn purple and bronze at sunset; wait and see.”

But it was not only Carol to whom he spoke; it was also Anne. He was storing up things to tell her; he was memorizing the landscape. For the first time in twenty years he thought of using his camera not to document the area where they would dig, but as if he were a tourist, to bring back images of that ancient place. He looked beyond the golden cliffs ahead. Later, as the sun moved higher, ripples of heat rising from the desert would make the sand dunes and distant hills shimmer and almost disappear into the softly
blurred sky. It was an effect no camera could truly catch. She'll have to see it for herself, he thought.

He could not remember a woman who had engaged his curiosity as Anne had done—even more, it seemed, since he had left America. Being more distant by several thousand miles, she seemed elusive in yet another way.

He wondered if it was her elusiveness that so interested him. That was part of it. But there was also her beauty and her sharp mind, and the mysteries about her, and also, perhaps most intriguing of all, that air about her, as if part of her had yet to be awakened. To Josh, the scientist who had never been able to pass up a puzzle or a riddle, Anne had everything that would stop him in his tracks. What else would have made him put aside his determination to be alone for a while and figure out where he was, and how he'd managed to be such an ass about Dora?

He'd decided he needed six months alone, maybe even a year. But since he'd met Anne at the City Hall in Tamarack, he hadn't been able to get her out of his thoughts.

He and Carol stepped off the ferry with his crew of diggers, and walked to the cars waiting for them, and drove into the Valley of the Kings. In an instant, they had left the Nile and its boats and Luxor behind, and were dwarfed by limestone cliffs, towering dunes of sand, and rock etched with deep gulleys. In that moment, it seemed that four thousand years dropped away, and once again ancient Egypt was alive.

They drove deeper into the isolation, leaving the main road and jouncing along the gravel bed of a long gully that started high above them in the hills. “Here we are,” Josh said at last, and they came to a stop. The two cars looked as tiny as a child's toys at the base of hills of sand and rock that rose steeply to rough-edged ridges starkly etched against the cloudless sky. Not a single plant could be seen in any direction, nor an animal, nor another person. The sun's heat radiated in the bowl-shaped valley as if it were trapped in an oven. “Not too bad,” said Josh, rolling up his shirtsleeves. “It's about thirty or forty degrees cooler than in July.” He
glanced at his watch. “Hosni ought to be here in a few minutes. We'll wait up above.”

The workers had moved up the gulley and disappeared behind a hill. When Josh and Carol reached them, they were sitting on the ground, knees to their chins, their pickaxes beside them. Nearby was a deep hole, and piles of gravel. The two guards who had been there all night spoke to Josh in Arabic, then left.

Carol looked at him, eyebrows raised in question. “Everything's fine,” Josh said. “Nobody tried to grab our hole in the ground. The government pays these guys; we don't work without official support. It's not like a hundred years ago when archaeologists and hobbyists dug up the valley on their own and hired guards to fight off everybody else—the government, other diggers, tomb robbers, whoever was around. It's hard to imagine how crowded this place was in those days. There were diggers everywhere, looking for the shafts that led to the tombs, and then there were hundreds of workers hauling treasures out and taking them to boats on the Nile.”

“Why did you pick this place?” Carol asked. “There's nothing special about it.”

“Not on the surface. But a friend in Washington sent me satellite photographs that show disturbances in the contours of the land, and some of my graduate students made three-dimensional surveys with them on the computer. It's a tool we never had before, and it's not infallible, but it's better than poking around blindly. We've had six failures without it, so I've put a lot of faith in this one.” He looked up as a short, dark man in white pants and yellow shirt joined them. “This is Hosni.”

The two men shook hands and Josh introduced Carol. “Hosni is an archaeologist from the University of Cairo; he's in charge of this dig. When we find our tomb, he and I are going to tour on television together. We're working on our act. So what do we have?” he asked Hosni.

“Look here.” Hosni knelt at the edge of the hole behind the workers, and Josh knelt beside him. There was a
depression along one side of the hole, as if the stones and gravel had sunk in. Josh leaned forward to study it, and for the first time since he had begun his trip, he forgot everything else.

“Irregularities underneath,” he murmured.

Hosni nodded. “We got to this part yesterday afternoon. I decided to wait for you.”

Josh stood up. “Let's see what happens.” His voice was calm, but excitement was stirring inside him. He tried to ignore it. Six failures before this, he reminded himself. He moved away from the workers and sat on his heels. Carol joined him, sitting cross-legged on the sand. They put on hats, and they waited.

Hosni spoke to the workers, who began digging at the side of the hole with the depression. The sound of their shovels crunching into gravel was loud in the silence. When they pried up rocks and broke them apart with pickaxes, the clanging sound of iron on stone rang through the silent valley, echoing off nearby hills like receding church bells. Josh watched, as if mesmerized. All his research in libraries and museums, the books he read, the articles he scanned, the satellite photographs, his calculations late into the night—in the end, it all came down to this: a group of men in the heat of the desert, digging with shovels, and lifting pickaxes high above their heads and bringing them down onto rock.

An hour went by, and then two. Josh photographed the hole as it deepened and widened, and the surrounding hills and gullies. He and Carol drank from water bottles. The sun blazed, making the sand glare until it, too, seemed to be a sun, burning upward, into the sky. There was no breeze. Carol took a large parasol from her canvas bag and opened it and held it over her and Josh. The workers hummed and grunted, their bodies and hair gray with powdery dust that was streaked with perspiration, while Hosni stood with them, directing where he wanted them to dig, occasionally grabbing a shovel himself. Miraculously, his white pants stayed clean. “Did we bring anything to eat?” Carol asked.

Josh looked at her as if she had disturbed a dream. They
had been digging for three hours, and he had barely moved except to photograph the site. “Food,” he said. “I'm sorry; I never think of it until someone reminds me.” He pulled two apples from his canvas bag, and boxes of crackers. “A feast. We'll go back to Luxor for lunch. It's too early now; it's only ten o'clock.”

“Oh, no, it must be noon.” She looked at her watch. “I can't believe it; it feels like afternoon. But then we started at the crack of dawn, didn't we? Four-thirty in the morning . . .”

“We'll stop about one and come back at three. I did warn you.”

“You did. I didn't think you were serious about four-thirty.”

“Josh.” Hosni's voice was high with excitement. In an instant, Josh was beside him, Carol right behind. They looked into the hole, following Hosni's pointing finger.

A corner of a rough stairway was sticking out of the rubble.

Josh slid to the bottom of the hole and dropped to his knees. He touched the top step with his fingertips. He ran his hand over it, pushing away gravel and rocks. Elation filled him like a burst of light. He imagined the stairway descending into the earth, becoming a rough-floored passage pushing its way at a steep angle deeper and deeper into blackness, the air becoming hot and close, until it ended at a stone door. . . .

Carol had followed him; now her fingers brushed his as she, too, touched the steps. Josh barely noticed her. He had never had a moment like this. Most archaeologists never had a moment like this. He had prepared for it, dreamed of it, planned and schemed to raise the money for it, but there was no way to be fully ready for this moment, when his fingers touched a stairway that had been built and buried and forgotten thirty-five hundred years ago. He imagined the workers hacking the steps from solid rock, and then the corridor and then the many chambers, the wall paintings, the riches— “Of course we don't know if we're the first,” Hosni said.

Slowly, Josh stood up. The spell was broken. “But we are,” Carol protested. “They just dug it out. Nobody got here before us.”

“They might have, three thousand years ago,” said Josh. “Robbers found a lot of tombs soon after they were hidden, sometimes within a few years. There's a village near here where all the houses are built over tomb shafts. The robbers built them there so they wouldn't have to commute to clean out the treasures, and their descendants still live in them, very proud of their heritage. There was no way to guard the whole valley, of course, and too many people worked on the tombs for them to be kept secret. Anyway, it was part of the culture that pharaohs were buried with enough possessions and wealth and even food to get them through the next life. And it was part of the robbers' culture that they'd go after it.”