In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Read online

  —What if this king had set out to learn the Word of Power, the word Thoth whispered in the ear of Ptah when between the two of them they made the world? I am convinced it happened, inevitably in a land so obsessed with the supernatural: one rose up among them who personified their dream. And though of course—

  My voice cracked. I knew what I must say here, but even then something in me rebelled.

  —Of course there could be no such word, no power to create a world, not really. So there must have been something else, some physical sign for such a word, a substitute. By that material logic they always used to deal with the abstract, he must have built that world himself, a tomb-burial to beggar all the tombs since Menes founded the First Dynasty. That must have been it, you see: it would follow from all the Egyptian practices we know, only raised to such an extreme—an inevitable extreme, you see—that he had to ransack the kingdom to supply it. We can imagine the rationale. The Word of Power needs its own perfect seat, the proper circumstances, a temple within which its own prophet-priest the King would guard the Word, and finally at the appointed time utter it, and then the world would change, all Egypt would be transported bodily into the afterlife and death’s dominion would become the King’s.

  —Imagine what power such a fantasy would give him over his people. How great an effort he could have extracted by the mere promise alone: if the nation had bent all its efforts toward the construction of a mere pyramid, not once but repeatedly in the preceding dynasty, how would they devote themselves to a sovereign who promised to bring them all within his horizon, and make the gates of death turn back upon themselves? How hard they must have worked!

  —And how violently, in the end, they rebelled. The labor was too great, even for the promised end. Or perhaps they revenged themselves upon him only after he died, and they realized that he had failed? Maybe that explains the revulsion: among a people for whom belief in magic was essential to life, what if one of them set out to put that magic to some ultimate test? How savagely would they have turned to tear him when he fell?

  —I have only to look, and I know I can find it, the one thing absolutely necessary. The tomb. The greatest tomb in the history of Egypt: the greatest find in the history of Egyptology. For it must be there. I am convinced it was not rifled. That’s the beauty of it, you see: if the tomb had been found, if such a quantity of goods and artifacts as it must have contained had been released, the world would be littered with evidence of his reign—and we have none! And even had there been some attempt to destroy them, the signs would still be there: records of Radedef survived the destruction of his monuments, and he was nothing to this one. I am certain of it: the King was sealed in his horizon, and they threw away the key. Perhaps they even imprisoned him in it still living. Who knows—

  I stopped, finding myself teetering again on the verge of something disastrous, recognizing something in myself trying to make itself heard. I had wanted to go on, to explain where I thought this tomb might be, how best to start the search. But in the midst of that explanation I sensed a desire I had theretofore not known: a desire, almost a conviction, that in his tomb I should find the King himself, still living, and from his lips would hear—everything. The truth about everything Egyptian, about a world lost long before I was born, the truth about—even then I did not know just what I hoped to hear.

  I held my tongue. Silence, like a thickening of dust. Professor——was still, his hands carefully motionless, his expression inscrutable: I felt myself teetering, a scale waiting to tip with the next weight placed upon the pan.—Imagine evidence, I cried.—Texts, artifacts, everything perfectly preserved, from a crisis early on, at the very heart of the Egyptian social, political, and religious complex. At the origins of our own—

  I was shouting, I realized, a foot from the old man’s face, as if volume could give substance to my words; shouting into a face that seemed, more and more as I peered into it, too uniformly relaxed.

  —He’s dead, I whispered, and my voice fell hoarse among the echoes fading in the quiet room. I reached out and laid a hand upon his shoulder. His head lolled, his jaw opened, and a rattling snore escaped.

  He recovered, one half of his face blinking and rewrinkling as he tried to lift both hands to rub his eyes.—xcuse me. He muttered at last.—m sorry. Sleep again. No reflection, please blieve me.

  He settled his glasses on his nose and his living hand upon his paunch.—Would you mind terribly much repeating?

  I put the cassette in the slot, and clunked its hatch down:

  Budge’s voice emerged, attenuated, as if it really were a spirit’s voice.

  —Sorry to leave this to last minutes,———, but I’m all at sixes and sevenses with this and that. I’m packing books with both hands while I talk. I don’t know, Lester, ask your mother. Now. Assuming the beastly custodials haven’t changed the locks overnight, you should find the thing on the shelves to the right of the door as you face it. From inside, that is. It’s about the size of a carry-on bag. Black leatherette. Do you have it? Careful when you lift it down: it’s not terribly fragile but it is heavy, and I don’t want you to break your foot. Now.

  Now. Budge’s voice went on, brightly and (I could tell) well pleased with himself—with his packing, his ingenuity, his casual belief that somewhere he was still alive. In his empty office, the familiar clutter had been reduced to stripped shelves, a few mounds of equipment catalogs and boxes of bright electronic shards. His voice was almost unbearably real to me, bouncing sharply from the bare walls as I acted out his instructions, levered down the heavy case and thumbed up its hasps, muttering to myself the instructions from the tape. My hands were trembling too much to attach the power lines to the battery, and I had to stop, shutting off the tape-player with more effort than necessary.

  Sitting at the bare table beside the open case, for a long time I could not catch my breath. I was near to crying. Not for Budge: do not mistake me, it was none of that. A wordless despair had seized me, and was long minutes vanishing back into whatever pit it had crept out of.

  I had started to believe in Budge’s absurd promise.

  When I could take a breath without its catching, I eased down the button on the recorder, and turned again to my inheritance. At his direction I flipped three switches, waited for the screen to light and settle, a flickering void, then set two dials at his instructions.

  The screen shuddered.

  I was looking at a luminous floor plan of the lobby, six stories below my feet: there was the ugly aluminum sculpture, there the three broad granite steps up from the entrance, the inscribed marble benches, the men’s and ladies’ with their pipes and porcelain off on either side. At my ear, Budge was explaining how it worked, but I couldn’t hear: my eyes were full, and my heart was beating loudly. At the center of the screen, a darkness beat as well.

  There were small rites to perform. I carried my files—on the King, on myself—out into the backyard. There was a barbecue pit there, relic of an earlier tenant.

  I had thought so much tinder would flare in an instant, flash and vanish, but the burning was slow: one page at a time caught at the corners, the blue flame flickering as it read over, consumed, and curled each up to reveal the next: I saw a story roll up like the sky at Judgment Day, blacken to ashes before my eyes. This was on Wednesday.

  On Thursday I drove to the school where I had taken my doctor’s degree. My thesis was shelved among a thousand like it in the doctoral papyrus dump. As I pulled it from the shelf and felt again its ungainly mass, like no other book in the world, in the solitude of the library I felt as if my adult life had been a dream: here I was carrying my new dissertation into the library, about to walk to Professor——’s.

  The circulation clerk took my name and address, and accepted my alien faculty ID. I hoped urgently she would not notice the names on the card and the book were the same. As she opened my thesis to stamp the date due, she spoke.

  —You’re the first one to check this out in…thirty yea
rs.

  —Someone else checked it out?

  —Sure. See? She showed me the dim, purple date, two weeks after I had received my degree.

  —Who?

  A laugh.—Thirty years ago? I wasn’t even born.

  I stood facing the house that had been Professor———’s.

  The housekeeper-nurse had inherited, I remembered. I had never learned her name. Was she still there? In the bowels of the house, a bell rang; footsteps approached; the door swung back. An ordinary woman, far too young, holding a wide-eyed infant.

  AND ONE OTHER thing: as I drove out of town, over the bridge where the breath of the sea blew in through the window, over the rail I heaved the black flapping shape of my thesis. It dropped from sight, and I could only imagine the splash.

  This vignette represents the deceased on his knees, embracing his soul.

  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.

  of the ashes is the soul reborn in the twelfth hour of the Duat. He enters the tail of the mighty serpent, which is named Divine Life, and issues from its mouth in the form of the scarab Khepera, who rolls his own egg of spittle and mud. But the last door of all is guarded by Isis, she who nurses the throne, and by Nephthys, the barren one who wails, and they also are in the form of serpents; their mouthsare open, their tails twine together, their fangs drip venom as the soul of the deceased approaches.

  Now Urnes, the river of Duat, flows into the primeval

  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.

  At Cairo airport, I had nothing to declare.

  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.

  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.

  Come then, Thoth, provided with charm, quicker than greyhounds, fleeter than light. I am Khepera who produced himself upon the let of his mother. Untie the bandages, twice, which fetter my mouth. Behold, I collect the charm from the one with whom it abides, creating the gods from silence, giving the mother-heat to the gods, making forms of existence from the thigh of thy mother. Behold, this charm is given me from where it is, quicker than greyhounds, fleeter than light, more solid than shadow.

  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.