In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Read online

  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 have made my way.

  I know thee and I know thy name.

  Thy name is———, the unsounded,

  Yea, who spake thy own name.

  No things are unseen to the one who is unseen;

  No names are unknown to the one whose name is nought.

  I know thee and I know thy name.

  Thy name is———.

  Thy name is Ami-seshet;

  Thanassa-Thanassa is thy name.

  Thy name is Arethikasathaka;

  Npthysysiseremhesihrahaputchetef is thy

  —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.

  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 thi
ng 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 mo
mentary glimpse of the opening chute; that the Arab’s mouth had opened too; that this was absurd.

  Then the darkness imploded.

  Let the abomination speak not my name in Neter-kert:

  For my place is my own, my name and my body are my own, and all things are my own in the Duat.

  For I am Khepera, the self-created, the speaker of my name.

  For mine are the Words of Power.

  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.

  There comes a point in any excavation, if it is a successful one, when you no longer care for the significance of your finds. The articles you uncover, the articles you will write about them, the reception by the profession of your work—all of these cease to matter. What you want—all you want—is to get to the center: to unlock the sarcophagus, remove the outer coffin, and the next, and the next—but even when you have the mummy exposed before you, its amulets and ornaments, its most personal possessions shrinking where they protrude from the yellow linen—even this is not enough. You will not rest until you have stripped the cere-cloths away and stared upon the face of him for whom all this has been done, of whose life these dumb objects struggle to speak.

  It is the face, finally, that you desire. And although the nose withers, and the fine leather everywhere draws back, the absent eyes turned inward as if regarding the hollow left by the embalmers, still you search it for some answer.