Sleeping Beauty (84 page)

“More coffee?” Josh asked casually. His heart was pounding. He felt everything he cared for and wanted was in this crowded, vibrant town, and everything he had ever longed for was coming together in a way he could not have dreamed only a short time ago. Seven months, he thought. From August, when I first sat in Anne's office, to this night, when we sit here, in a magic circle.

“Yes, please,” Anne said. She sat very still, as if afraid to break a spell.

He brought two more cups to the table and sat beside her, his arm just touching hers. “Have we finished with the news, or did anything else happen?”

“Keith is gone,” Anne replied. “He left a note on Leo's desk about two weeks ago, saying he wanted to see more of the world, and he thought Leo had lost faith in him. I don't believe a word of it; I'd guess he's gone to Vince, to ask for a job in Washington, and I'll bet he gets it; they probably have something on each other. Leo is glad he's gone, though he felt guilty when he told Marian; she liked the idea of his working there.”

“Marian sees Keith about as clearly as she sees Fred,” Josh mused. “It seems she's come to terms with both of them, and with staying where she is. It's like William with his letter writing that never gets results, and Nina with her various husbands; people make patterns for themselves and get comfortable in them, and it takes a lot to make them move. Charles was the one who changed course; from what you told me, I've never heard of anyone breaking free of a way of life the way he did, with Vince.”

Anne was silent. She felt Josh's arm against hers. My father and I, she thought, breaking free of a way of life. But she knew she would not really be free until she told Josh about her past. If she had ever seriously thought she could avoid it and still discover what they might be together, she knew now that she could not. I have to let him share it with me, she thought, the same way he wants me to share his work. To share it all. The bad and the good. But immediately a wave of sleepiness swept over her, and she felt her eyes closing.
Tomorrow. Or the next day. There's plenty of time.

“That's enough; you've got to get some sleep,” said Josh decisively. “We can put off the tomb for a day if you don't want to get up early.”

“No, I want to do it tomorrow. Starting with breakfast at six-thirty. I've enjoyed this, Josh. What a good way to feel like part of a strange town, sitting in a café and drinking coffee with the locals.”

“And their music,” Josh said. And they laughed as a clash of cymbals split the air around them.

That was what Anne was thinking about when she slipped into bed in her hotel room: their shared laughter. Good night, Josh, she said silently, as she had said to him in the elevator.
Sleep well,
said his voice in her thoughts, as he had said as she went to her room.
We'll have a wonderful day tomorrow.

I had a wonderful day tonight, she thought, and smiled.

*   *   *

Around the tomb, it seemed as if a small town had sprung to life. The barren valley, stretching narrowly between brown hills, was crowded with trucks and cars, folding tables and chairs, packing crates, piles of tools, flashlights and high-powered torches, sections of scaffolding, boxes of food and bottled water, armed Egyptian soldiers, workers, journalists and photographers, archaeologists, apprentices, government officials, and a small group of privileged visitors. They all moved about in a haze of dust beneath a blinding sun. Anne remembered the slides Josh had shown her of the valley, silent and still, as desolate as if it were at the end of the world, and she could not believe it was the same place.

“I would have liked you to see it when we first came here,” Josh said, watching her take in the crowded scene. “But to tell you the truth, I have a feeling this is how the place looked when the pharaohs lived and died. There were always workers digging new tombs, and artists painting and chiseling them, and other workers loading them with the treasures and everyday things the pharaoh would need in the afterlife. And they worked two or three shifts, so there were always people coming and going. I don't know if the valley ever was empty for more than short periods of time until the pharaohs were gone. And by then, even before that, in fact, the tomb robbers were at work. Shall we go inside?”

They began the long descent down the rough stone steps. Workers had built a crude handrail along one side, but Anne wanted to go into the tomb as Josh had the first time and she did not use it. Lights had been strung above, casting blunt shadows on the stone, making it look to Anne as if she were burrowing into the center of the earth. So, when Josh stood
aside at the entrance to the first room and she went in before him, she stopped abruptly in pure astonishment.

The room was a blaze of color: huge lights illuminating brilliant, pristine colors that had been preserved by dry air and total darkness. Surrounded by that riot of color and design, Anne no longer heard the chatter of people in the other rooms. It was as if she and Josh were alone, and suspended in time. Rolling up their shirtsleeves in the oppressive heat, drinking the bottled water Josh had brought, they walked slowly along the walls and into adjoining rooms, their heads tipped back, gazing at the life-size and miniature figures. As they strolled and stopped and strolled again, Josh told Anne the stories behind the scenes, and the stories of the treasures stacked along the walls and others still tumbled about as they had been found. His was the only voice she heard; the grandeur of the tomb seemed to belong to him. He had found it and opened it to the world, and he talked about it as if it were a book of family photographs.

“We photograph each item,” Josh said, “write a description of it, give it a catalog number, wrap it and put it in a packing crate, and then haul it out of here and truck it to boats on the Nile that take it to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Each one of them is priceless, of course, which is why you see part of the Egyptian army patrolling the valley.”

“Have you any idea how many objects there are?” Anne asked.

“Not yet. At a guess, close to ten thousand.”

Anne tried to imagine documenting and moving out that many objects, from tiny carved figures to full-size thrones heavy with jewels and gold leaf. Josh had said it would take months, perhaps a year. She wondered how much of that time he would be in Egypt.

They came to the last room, with the enormous stone sarcophagus in the center still awaiting the scaffolding and hoist that were necessary to lift its stone lid so workers could remove the pharaoh's mummy. Suddenly, Anne felt dizzy from the heat. “Just a minute,” she said, and leaned against the wall, her eyes closed.

“My God, I'm sorry,” Josh said contritely. He took her arm and led her to a stone ledge along one wall. “Sit here; drink a lot more water. We'll leave as soon as you're ready. I am sorry; I get carried away and I forget that other people aren't used to this.” He was angry with himself, and Anne heard it in his voice.

“I could have asked you to slow down,” she said, smiling at him. “But I didn't want to. I've never seen anything so magnificent.”

Josh sat beside her. “There really is nothing like it, anywhere. But we could have divided it up into two or three days.”

“No, this was the best way.” Anne looked about the square room. There were fewer pictures here; the ceiling was filled with gold stars on a blue background, and the walls were covered with hieroglyphics: column after column of prayers from
The Book of the Dead.
“I wanted to feel swallowed up by it,” she said. “I wanted to be lost in it.”

“Why?” Josh asked.

It was the first time he had asked her directly about her feelings, and instinctively Anne drew back. She met his eyes and she was the one who looked away, because she was ashamed. “To be part of it,” she said after a moment, “so I could feel the way you feel about it. I think you let it consume you the way I let the law consume me, and I thought if I could be as completely swept up by this as you are, I could understand that part of you, and I'd know that you understood that part of me. Also,” she added hastily, giving Josh no time to comment on what she had said, far more revealing than anything she had said to him, or anyone else, “when I travel I like to become part of the country, and in Egypt that means the chaos of Cairo's streets or a Luxor café or the incredible splendor of a tomb. And today was the tomb.”

Josh nodded. “And you're feeling better now.”

“Much, thank you. Sitting helped. I'd like to hear about this room.”

He walked along the walls, translating some of the hieroglyphics, and then he knelt beside the sarcophagus, running
his fingers along the carvings of Isis and the paintings of sacred animals while narrating their legends. Anne felt like a child hearing a bedtime fairy tale: as warm and protected as if she were wrapped in blankets, and soothed by his voice re-creating an ancient, wondrous world.

“Lunch,” Josh said abruptly. Anne started, as if she were waking up. “We'll go back to Luxor.” He looked at her searchingly as she stood with him. “We can come back this afternoon, if you'd like, or tomorrow and every day after that; there are dozens of other tombs, some quite different from this one, and temples and monuments, depending on what you want to see.”

“Or?” Anne asked.

“Or we could get out,” he said bluntly. “No matter where else we go around here we'll have hordes of tourists; the Valley of the Kings is not the place for privacy. Neither is Luxor.”

Anne nodded. “Where would you like to go?”

“On the river. A friend offered me his boat while he's out of town. We could see a part of Egypt you can't see any other way.”

“And be more private?” Anne asked with a smile. “With two hundred other boats?”

He grinned. “They keep their distance and we don't allow boarding parties.”

There was only the briefest pause. “I'd like that very much,” Anne said.

“Good.” Josh led the way back to the rough stairway and into the blazing, relentless sun. “Lunch on the boat, then. As soon as you pack, we'll be ready to leave.”

*   *   *

The boat was named the
Hapy,
for the god of the Nile. It was a small yacht gleaming white and green in the sunlight, with a lounge and two staterooms above, and quarters below for a crew of three. Josh stowed Anne's bags in one of the staterooms, and they went to the polished deck and stood beneath a broad green-and-white-striped awning, watching the town of Luxor recede as the boat moved almost sideways to the middle of the river.

The Nile was brown along its banks and blue-green up the middle where the
Hapy
sailed, heading south. The steward served a cold vegetable salad and white wine at a table beside the railing covered with a green linen cloth and set with white china and heavy antique silver. From the shore, young boys shouted and waved, and music drifted to them from small villages, but otherwise there was no sound but the hum of the
Hapy's
engines and occasionally, the horn of a passing tourist boat. The afternoon slipped by as softly and quietly as the ripples on the Nile. Josh and Anne sat in wicker armchairs deeply cushioned in bright cotton, gazing past the railing at the life on the river and its banks. A table stood between them with glasses of iced tea beaded with moisture, and replenished at intervals by the steward. A cool breeze whispered past them as the boat picked up speed. They talked or were silent, lulled by the rhythm of the river. On the banks, women in black washed clothes, pounding them on large flat stones, gossiping together, stopping now and then to call to naked toddlers who were exploring too close to the water. Older children swam nearby, shouting exuberantly to each other. Farther off shore, young men stood in tiny fishing boats, flailing the water with long sticks to frighten the fish into fleeing, so the older man at the other end of the boat could sweep them into his net. Wiry young boys skimmed the surface of the water in small feluccas that were identical to the boats used in the times of the pharaohs, their white sails billowing like a dancer's body curved in flight. On green terraced fields stepping up from the river, one farmer tilled the soil with his hand plow as he walked behind a plodding ox; another rode a bright red tractor. And just beyond the fields, and the ancient cities with minarets, and the small clusters of factories whose chimneys sent streams of black smoke into the sky, was the desert, stretching empty and unbroken all the way to neighboring countries.

Except for the red tractor and the few factories, it was as if they had gone back thousands of years, and Anne watched it all in a fascinated reverie. She sat on the cool deck of a modern yacht on the Nile, watching men, women, and
children move in timeless patterns that seemed to make them part of the earth and its rhythms, and were as far from modern Los Angeles and a hushed white apartment as if they were on different planets.

“I couldn't imagine living that way,” she murmured, watching a woman gather her laundry from the stones where she had spread it to dry, “but it would be nice to bring some of it to today.”

Josh nodded. “Enough to slow down and think about how much we're still part of our past, or ought to be. I think about that a lot when I'm here. Of course the Egyptians have their own problems, trying to be a modern country, but this is a good place to be reminded that we should come to terms with our past and make it part of our present.”

The sun slid below the crest of a bank of high sand dunes. It reappeared through a deep notch, and was reflected in a blazing swath of burnt orange across the Nile. In another minute, it was gone for good. The river turned dark blue, then black. The air grew cool. There was no long, slow twilight here; there was only sunlight, and soon after, a blackness that swallowed up the land, leaving only scattered lights on shore to mark the boundaries of the Nile.