The Sacred River (22 page)

Nothing Yael could not have seen with her own eyes, without benefit of language.

“What is her name?”

“Um Fatima,” said Suraya. “Husband prison.”

Yael looked up at the woman. She had a duty to help but she wouldn’t give her money. She did not dare.

“Codswallop!” she announced with a smile, banging the side of her hand on the table for emphasis, as she had seen Mr. Dickens do during a reading of his works. “Tripe! God save the Queen. Give her the eggs, Suraya, and the herbs. Tell her I will get some rations for her. Next time. Give her the flowers as well.”

The baby sent up a thin cry that sounded like the mewing of a kitten. Getting to her feet, collecting the umbrella, Yael thought of the Europeans on their knees under the scented cedar rafters, praying to a God of love. Saw in her mind the blue velvet collection pouch being passed from hand to hand and resolved to return to St. Mark’s on Sunday. She would see Reverend Griffinshawe and plead with him again to support the clinic. The sheikh was right. What use was soap without food.

Yael felt a sudden longing to be out of the small room and back at home. By which she meant, she understood with some surprise, not a wallpapered, picture-adorned, fire-warmed house in St. John’s Wood but a sparsely furnished villa in the Frank quarter of a North African port.

THIRTY-FIVE

The man rode ahead on a bay horse, trotting around a thicket of acacia trees. Sitting sidesaddle, her head wrapped in a new orange scarf she’d acquired on the voyage down the Nile, from a woman with twins at her breasts, Harriet followed on a donkey. Sweat was streaming into her eyes; her lips stung from the dry heat. The donkey boy walked behind, cudgeling the creature every few moments, and behind him a small girl with a full, squelching water skin on her back ran after them in her bare feet.

They were going west, away from the river, the sun at their backs as they traveled along the edges of lush fields of heavy-headed maize plants, around forests of sugarcane that came up to the haunches of the donkey. The farmland ended and the horse turned north, leading the way up a stony track into a white mountain valley. Harriet held onto a tuft of its mane as her donkey began to scramble up the path.

Dr. Eberhardt Woolfe had pulled up his horse.

“How do you fare with the donkey, Miss Heron?” he called as she approached.

“Not bad. I used to ride them on the beach, when I was a girl.”

“We shall arrive in ten or fifteen minutes.”

A smaller track led off from the main one and the horse took it, its hindquarters swaying, tail swishing against the flies. Harriet’s donkey followed, its hooves sending showers of small stones back down the slope, Harriet feeling as though she might slide off the back of it.

Louisa had refused the invitation to come to the tomb but at the encouragement of Monsieur Andreas—who assured her that everyone in Luxor knew Dr. Eberhardt Woolfe, and that everyone who knew him respected him—she’d acquiesced to the expedition, on the condition that Fouad accompany Harriet.

Fouad had made clear his opposition to the outing. Despite his claim to be an Alexandrian, and therefore superior in all ways to his fellow Egyptians, Fouad was full of superstitions. He swore that there were men who could with a breath turn silver coins into gold ones and salt into sugar; he believed that the evil eye caused troubles ranging from death or sickness to the failure of crops, and wore a small leather pouch around his neck that contained a prayer from the Qur’an, to counter it.

He’d muttered, as they crossed the river in a small felucca, about evil spirits, ill fortune, the unfailing superiority of the city to the village. Now, as they climbed the path through barren hills, Fouad was silent. Having refused Dr. Woolfe’s offer of a donkey for himself, he trudged at the head of Harriet’s, his heels rising out of the laced shoes with every step.

A breeze got up and fanned Harriet’s face, lifting the hair around her forehead. The donkey quickened its pace, pricked its ears; the sound of its hooves altered on the shale. They rounded a bend in the track and entered a narrow ravine of white rock, the lower part of it in shade, the tops of the slopes on each side blinding to look at. Dr. Woolfe dismounted.

“We have arrived.” He gestured toward a dark opening that looked like the entrance to a cave, farther along the valley and up a slope, in the white cliff of rock. “Are you ready, Miss Heron?”

Sliding down from the donkey, assisted by Fouad, Harriet discovered that she felt unready. All through the winter in London, struggling breath by breath through the lonely nights, she had resisted death. With the fortitude that she could summon in her mind if not in her enfeebled body, she’d told herself that she refused to die—until she reached the city of the dead.

Now that she was here, she felt differently. Harriet wanted to live. She wanted it fiercely. She hadn’t known that the world could be so expansively beautiful, so full of possibility. From the day when she had landed in Alexandria, she had changed her mind about life. She could hardly explain that to Dr. Woolfe.

She took another sip of water from the tin flask that Louisa had insisted on, replaced the cork, and slid it back into her pocket next to her journal. Blotting her forehead with her scarf, she cleared her throat.

“Yes, Dr. Woolfe. I am ready.”

“Come.”

He set off along the valley floor and Harriet followed, first walking along the bottom of the narrow gorge, then scrambling behind him up the path to the entrance of the tomb, stepping into a passageway hewn from the rock. It was just tall enough to stand in and inside the entrance was a wooden table, on which stood several small, old-fashioned lamps, matches, and a stack of wooden boxes.

Dr. Woolfe lit two lamps, the smell of the smoking wick reminding her oddly of London. He handed one to Harriet.

“This way, Fräulein. Watch your step.”

She followed behind him into the downward-sloping passageway. The walls and ceiling were undecorated and the ground scattered with rocks and chips of stone. A sweet, unpleasant smell hung in the air. She remembered Fouad and turned to see him still standing at the entrance, with Dash cowering by his ankles.

“Come, Fouad,” Harriet called over her shoulder. “Hurry.”

“I cannot.”

“Why not?”

“
Afrit
, Miss Harry. Spirits. This bad place.”

His face was ashen. She’d promised Louisa that she would not allow Fouad to leave her side, but he looked as if he might faint.

“All right,” she called. “Wait for me there. Don’t go anywhere.” The dog’s mournful yelps echoed into the tunnel behind her as Harriet walked on into the passage to where Dr. Woolfe was waiting. In the lamplight, his suit was the color of the rock. It occurred to her that he looked at home in the tomb, as if he were at ease, more so than he had been on the steamer or even by the river. She smiled at him.

“My dragoman is afraid.”

“
Ach
, I thought you had changed your mind.”

Dr. Woolfe began talking about his excavation. Sand and rock and rubble, debris from the occasional flash floods that could fill the ravine, had over the centuries been washed into the tunnel and silted up the entrance to the tomb. Artifacts he had already found suggested that the tomb had been robbed in antiquity, the entrance blocked originally by departing thieves. He explained his resolve to cause no further damage to the tomb, either in the excavation or once they gained entry, but only to preserve what was there and record it for posterity, with the help of the Egyptian workers.

“Where are the workers?” she asked.

“It is Friday, Miss Heron. The men are at the mosque. They are faithful fellows.”

The air in the tunnel was warmer than outside, almost suffocating. The darkness was so dense it seemed to Harriet as if it were something solid, not merely an absence of light. She made herself keep walking, taking small steps behind Dr. Woolfe, breathing slowly and steadily, fighting the gut instinct to turn and run back toward the entrance, to sunlight and air.

Dr. Woolfe gestured at something on the wall. He held up his lamp to it and Harriet found herself looking at a picture. It was blackened and sooty, as if fires had been lit underneath it, and the plaster on which it was painted was flaking, in some places had been gouged away. Despite the damage, she could make out an elegant seated woman, dressed in a white robe and with an elaborate headdress on her black hair. Her face—calm and contemplative—was in profile, the nose missing. The woman was sitting at a table, playing a board game.

Above, painted on the wall, were hieroglyphs. Harriet saw a cartouche, the circle that enclosed the name of a royal, containing the symbol of a windpipe, with lungs attached. The half-effaced signs seemed to speak directly to her, and despite the heat, Harriet shivered.

“Once, all of this section would have been decorated. This is all that remains. Come. I will show you where I am working, Miss Heron.”

Dr. Woolfe continued round a bend in the passage, the light from his lamp vanishing. Harriet’s dress was clinging to her skin, her palms damp. The ground here was soft, carpeted with feathers and embers, desiccated animal droppings. She felt as if she were standing inside the nest of a bird. She leaned against the wall of rock, afraid she was going to be sick from the stench.

She stood up as straight and tall as she could and felt for her journal in her pocket. It was for this that she had come to Thebes. Written her spells. Now that she was here, she must explore whatever she could, experience it as it was. Wrapping her scarf over her mouth, wiping sweat from her eyes, she continued along the passage.

Dr. Woolfe was standing by a wall of rocks and debris that made a dead end. He held up the lamp again.

“This is the site of my work, Miss Heron. Not very exciting, as I warned you, but you can see from the lintel above”—he directed the lamp at a white stone beam running across the highest point of the passage, above the rubble—“that there is a tomb behind.”

“Whose tomb is it?”

“I think that it belongs to a royal female.”

“A queen?”

“Yes. The one you have seen, on the plaster panel. The lady in white.”

Harriet thrilled to the thought that the woman depicted in the wall painting might lie on the other side of the rubble, her body preserved, her spells, written on papyri, kept close by her. The sweet smell assailed her again and she put her hand to her mouth.

“The smell, Dr. Woolfe. Is it from . . . mummies?”

He laughed and held up his lamp to the ceiling of the passageway, illuminating a line of black clustered shapes hanging motionless over their heads. One came to life and took off, darted past them. Harriet gasped as its wing brushed her face, soft as cobweb.

“Bats. Don’t be afraid. The worst they will do is to blow out your lamp as they pass.”

Harriet pulled her scarf from her shoulders up over her head, wrapped it around her face, and tied the ends behind her neck.

“How can you tolerate being down here?” she said.

“
Ach
, one grows accustomed to it. Lepsius, the great German Egyptologist, even lived in a tomb.” Dr. Woolfe put out his hand to the blocked doorway and pulled a pebble from the mass of rubble. A trickling sound, like water, filled the air as a shower of sand and chips of stone ran down to the ground. He held out the round stone to her. “I am called by this work, Miss Heron. I have a sense of connection to those who planned for the eternal life with as much faith as Christians do now. Sometimes, I feel they might be my own ancestors.”

Harriet pulled the scarf away from her mouth.

“That’s how I felt when I first saw the hieroglyphs and learned about the Book of the Dead. The people were so real, they seemed closer to me than my own relations.”

The stone in her palm was soft and cool. She slipped it into her pocket as another bat swooped past their heads in a strange, flitting movement, and the nausea returned. Dr. Woolfe bowed his head toward her.

“Are you finding it too hot? Would you like to get back into the daylight? Come, follow me.”

He began to walk back in the direction they’d come. Harriet followed, stepping carefully. She felt something sharp under the leather sole of her boot and couldn’t contain a cry of revulsion; she’d read about tombs littered with shards of bones, with skulls smashed like teacups, ribs scattered around like kindling. She might be walking on the remains of the queen.

Reaching the place in the passageway where the painted panel was, she stopped and held up her lamp. The light fell on the last column of the hieroglyphs. At the top was a painted oval, symbol of the protective eye of Horus. Peering at the wall, she made out below it the shape of the seated figure that denoted a woman, facing to the right, which indicated that these hieroglyphs were to be read from right to left. Hieroglyphs were always read toward the faces of the living beings in them.

Looking again, she saw the sign for
neb
, and the feminine indicator underneath it, followed by the two lines that represented Lower and Upper Egypt.
Lady of the Two Lands
, she murmured to herself. It meant
Lady of the Two Lands
.