Easy Go

by Michael Crichton

  “That’s a chariot,” Nikos said.

  “For the use of the soul in the afterlife,” Barnaby said. He was busy deciphering an inscription on a small wooden chest. Inside the chest was clothing, carefully packed in linen—sandals, necklaces, robes. The cloth had rotted in places, but it was still easily identifiable.

  “Thought of everything, didn’t they?” Grover said.

  “Don’t touch!”

  “God Almighty,” Grover said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “The man’s gone berserk.”

  Later, Grover spoke to Pierce alone. “What’s the matter with Barnaby? He wasn’t like this before.”

  “It’s the tomb,” Pierce said. “He’s been officious ever since we found it. Believe it or not, in the last few days, he’s improved considerably.”

  “I should never have suspected.”

  “Well,” Pierce said, “in a way, I can see his point.”

  Grover’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that, considering what’s in there—what it’s like and what it must have been like—we can’t really barge through and plunder it, can we?”

  Lord Grover thought to himself, I am a good judge of character after all. He said, “No, I suppose not.”

  “You’re new here,” Pierce said. “Barnaby will relax in a day or so, and I’ll show you some of the things we’ve found. They’re really quite interesting.”

  Pierce showed him everything.

  A clasp, tooled in red gold, depicting the pharaoh in his chariot, returning with prisoners from a triumphal war.

  A scabbard of gold, ornamented with prancing horses, which held a gold knife and a jeweled hilt.

  A fly whisk made of thin pounded gold, fan-shaped. It showed the king hunting ostriches on one side, waterfowl on the other.

  An unguent box shaped like an oval cartouche and inlaid with lapis lazuli. It was empty; Barnaby thought it was probably used for rituals only.

  A footrest of blue glass and another of wood, on which was carved the images of the pharaoh’s enemies—Assyrians and Nubians, Libyans and Sudanese. A small box with a secret catch, containing a piece of soft wood and a hand drill for starting fires.

  Gloves of soft skin.

  Boomerangs, constructed in all shapes and sizes, for killing the wild birds that lived in the marshes along the riverbanks.

  Small jeweled statues of the cobra and vulture, royal symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt.

  A square box inlaid with ivory; inside was a round wooden knob at the end of a stick. Barnaby thought it was a box for storing the king’s wigs.

  A remarkable collapsing bed that unfolded to three times its stored length. Probably for the pharaoh’s use on the battlefield.

  Dried food: meat and grains, as well as various kinds of seeds. Large jars of wine.

  Alabaster lamps elaborately carved in decorative motifs—the lotus and papyrus and other flowers. One lamp was carved in the shape of a crocodile.

  Lord Grover watched Pierce carefully as the objects in the room were shown to him. He found Pierce’s own attitude toward the objects unusual. There was pride in his voice as he explained them, but it was not simply pride in the quality of the work or pride in his own discovery of the tomb. It was neither, or both. Grover could not be sure.

  At the end of the evening, Conway came up and said to Grover, “How do you like it?”

  “Fabulous,” Grover said.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking. This was a rich fella, all right, but he had a few extra things going for him.”

  “Like what?”

  “No income tax,” Conway said, and laughed.

  Several days later, they broke down the plaster door. First, they cut open a small hole, a foot in diameter, and shined a flashlight through. Barnaby peered in.

  “What do you see?”

  “Gold.” He sucked in his breath. “A solid wall of gold.”

  They continued work, widening the hole. It was soon clear that the room was almost entirely filled by a huge gold box, intricately chiseled. There was barely room for a man to slip around it, so completely did it fill the room. When the door was cleared away, Barnaby entered the next chamber and examined the carvings and inscriptions and tapped the box.

  “Gilded wood,” he said. “A gilded wood shrine.” He looked at it, estimating the dimensions. “Say ten feet by sixteen. It must contain the sarcophagus.”

  He edged his way around the box. The others followed.

  “Careful,” he said. “There are things on the floor.” He stooped to pick up a necklace of semiprecious stones.

  “This room is oriented on a north-south axis,” he said. “The door should be over…ah, yes. Here it is.”

  “Door?” Lord Grover said. “Wait a bit. I must see this.” He was having difficulty squeezing his bulk through the narrow space between the shrine and the walls.

  At one end was a set of hinged doors.

  “I thought it opened upward,” Grover said.

  “No. This is just the shrine. The sarcophagus itself will open upward.”

  Grover nodded. The others clustered around.

  “Well, go ahead man, go ahead.”

  Carefully, Barnaby freed the latch and swung the doors open.

  Another shrine sat inside, covered with a yellow veil and sprinkled with tiny daisies of solid gold. The veil was held in place by a wooden frame. Barnaby pushed it aside and opened the next set of doors.

  Still another shrine was revealed.

  “My God,” Grover said. Outside the shrine were stacks of weapons and linen bandages neatly rolled in small bundles.

  Barnaby broke the seals on the third shrine and found a fourth. Like nesting boxes, each fitted with close precision inside the next larger.

  “Bring the light closer,” Barnaby said. His voice was tense; a rivulet of sweat ran down his forehead to his neck. “This one is different.” He examined the door, which showed Isis, arms raised, protecting the contents of the shrine.

  “I think this may be the last one.”

  He broke the seals. The doors creaked open, with the dust of centuries fluttering down from the hinges.

  A glimpse of red stone. The doors opened wider. The sarcophagus.

  There was still room within the fourth shrine for a man to walk inside. Barnaby stepped in and circled around the sarcophagus, which was square and smoothly finished.

  “Red sandstone,” he said, “A very nice job.”

  “The mummy’s in there?” Grover said.

  “Yes. There will be several nesting coffins, just as there are several shrines. The first coffin is probably gilt wood. The second may be an alloy. The final coffin may be solid gold.”

  “Hey,” Nikos called from another part of the room. “Look at this.”

  The others came around the shrine to where he was standing.

  A low opening led from the burial chamber to another room. The entrance was guarded by an immense statue of a black crouching dog, ears pointed, nostrils flaring.

  “Anubis,” Barnaby said. “The black jackal. He opens the roads to the other world for the dead and supervises embalmings. They called him the usher of Osiris.”

  The statue glared fiercely at them.

  “Wouldn’t like to tangle with that,” Conway said. He patted the forepaw. “Nice doggie.”

  “Let’s see what’s in the room he’s guarding,” Barnaby said, ducking through the opening. “You see, Anubis was responsible for seeing that the gifts given to the deceased by mourners actually—”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Come inside and look.”

  Nikos entered and whistled softly.

  “Yes,” Barnaby said, “I was right. This is the treasury.” Gently, he lifted one of the many chests and boxes stacked around the room.

  It was filled with jewels.

  “Merry Christmas,” Conway said. He opened another chest and found stacks of gold weapons and canes. Solid gold.

  Grover went ov
er to a small gilded box, inside which rested an urn draped in linen. He plucked away the linen, and started to lift the lid. “What do you suppose is in here?” Urns in the antechamber had contained rare spices and oils, frankincense, and myrrh.

  “Probably,” Barnaby said, “the guts of the king.”

  “Oh.” He stepped away from the urn without opening it.

  “How do you know?” Pierce said.

  “I don’t. But you’ll notice there are three other urns, set around the room in a rough square. Probably all four are canopic jars containing the pharaoh’s viscera, which were removed at the time of embalmment.” He went to one urn, picked it up and pointed to the figure painted onto it.

  “Hapy, the dog-headed ape, guardian of the lungs.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Grover said. “Show me some of those jewels.”

  The next chest they opened was a beautifully inlaid piece containing a scribe’s complete equipment—an ivory pallet, a small alabaster bowl, three cakes of ink, and a reed pen.

  Behind the chests were stacks of furniture, carelessly jumbled, for the king’s use in the afterlife. Then several ankhs, the staff of life, in gilded wood and numerous small statues.

  Finally, they came upon a miniature coffin shaped like a human body but only six inches long. It was made of copper inlaid with colored glass. Conway opened it and handed the lid to Barnaby.

  “A royal cartouche,” he said, puzzling over the inscription. “But a woman’s name. Probably the queen.”

  Conway found only a small object wrapped in linen. It turned out to be another sarcophagus. Within this, wrapped in more linen, was a curl of auburn hair.

  “What do you know,” he said.

  “The soul of a romantic,” Grover said.

  “It was probably his mistress,” Nikos said.

  Pierce had wandered back to the shrine and the sarcophagus. He was curious to know how heavy it was and whether they could remove the lid. A few moments of inspection convinced him that it would be quite difficult; the lid was a single slab of stone, six feet by three and nearly a foot thick.

  Nikos came back, and together they examined the problem. They decided it would be necessary to dismantle the four shrines and then to jack up the lid. That would take several days.

  “Of course,” Nikos said, “we already have enough without breaking into the sarcophagus. It’s not necessary.”

  “Yes,” Pierce said. “It is necessary.”

  “Barnaby says that there are probably several more interlocking coffins inside, but not much easily transportable—”

  “We have to do it,” Pierce insisted.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to have a look at him.”

  A week later, grunting and straining, they removed the lid. Lying inside the stone sarcophagus was a coffin of gilt wood. The Pharaoh lay on his back, arms folded across his chest, each hand gripping a scepter. He wore the headdress of the vulture and cobra, twin symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt, and his beard was carefully braided. His lips were set in a firm line, and his eyes stared upward at the ceiling.

  The expression was peaceful but expectant, as if the king were awaiting the gods who would carry him through the twelve chambers of the underworld, down the eternal Nile in the sky.

  Pierce looked at the face and said nothing for a long time.

  “Meketenre,” he said at last. “He’s lucky. If we didn’t discover him, nobody would ever remember him. But he’s going to be famous. We’re doing him a favor.”

  “You’ll have to pardon him,” Conway said, “if the man doesn’t say thank you.”

  The next day, Nikos left for Aswan.

  9. Aswan

  THE TOURIST TRAIN, A special air-conditioned express that made the trip to Aswan once daily, covered the distance in four hours. But the tourist train did not carry natives; Nikos rode the afternoon train along with the other fellahin. The windows were thrown wide, admitting dust and hot air. The seats were rude wooden slats, worn smooth by thousands of sitters. It was packed with men in galabas and women in black malaayas, veiled. Some wore ornaments of gold through their noses, and one or two young girls of marriageable age had bright red shawls.

  Nikos sat at the far end of one car, leaning over and looking out the window. He was unshaven; his face was smeared with dirt and grime. At his feet was a crate of clucking chickens. If anyone asked him, he would have explained that he owed them to his brother in Darawa, outside Aswan.

  But nobody asked him. He was allowed to sit in peace, staring out at the monotonous countryside. The train passed down the east bank of the Nile, stopping at each small village along the way. The villages were all the same—mud huts, dusty streets, and date-palm trees, stately camels and barking, hungry dogs. The people were animated and talkative; riding the train was obviously an event in their lives.

  Abdul Badia, born in Alexandria, 1919. Lived in Luxor since 1938, fought with the British during the war. Occupation: shipbuilder. Not a very profitable occupation these days, since wood was so scarce.

  He repeated these facts over to himself, again and again. For the next two weeks, he was Abdul Badia. The man at the Luxor train station had not blinked when he had purchased a ticket to Aswan, but sooner or later he was bound to be stopped. When that happened, he would need this information at his fingertips.

  Abdul Badia.

  Nikos had made up the biography himself; it had the virtue of being partially true. He had been born in Alexandria in 1919, the son of a Greek merchant sailor and an Egyptian whore. His father had apparently been quite taken with the woman; he spent eight years in Alexandria with her, until she died of influenza. Then, he returned to his home in Patras, taking young Nikos with him.

  Giorgio Karagannis was the acknowledged black sheep of his family and was never quite accepted on his return to Greece. Nikos, the illegitimate son by a foreign woman his father never married, was not accepted at all. In fact, he was totally disregarded. His father returned to the sea, leaving him in the hands of unwilling relatives for months at a time. For nearly a year, at the age of eight, he spoke little Greek. It was a difficult time. Finally, when he was twelve, he ran away from Patras. He had never returned.

  Like his father, he became a sailor, and he soon learned to supplement his meager pay by smuggling goods from the ship to sell ashore. He became familiar with all the countries of the Middle East and learned all the languages. When the war broke out, he was nineteen and in Alexandria. The British Army badly needed interpreters, and he was hired immediately. For reasons which he dimly understood, he never fought, never held a rifle in his hands. The last thing he did before leaving Egypt in 1948 was visit the cemetery at El Alamein, where the tombstones stretched for acres across the desert.

  Madness.

  He sighed and watched as the train pulled into the next town. He was bored, that was why he was thinking this way. Before he had left Luxor, he had picked up a book, intending to read it on the way up. Pierce had, fortunately, stopped him.

  The fellahin did not read. He would have stood out like a sore thumb on this train.

  He looked at his fellow passengers. A woman feeding her baby, staring off into space; two men engaged in animated conversation, laughing; an old man, his face a wrinkled prune, his ankles spindly beneath his robes, looking disconsolately at the floor. A young boy with eye disease, turning one eye milky white and outward. (The gift of the Nile—what did they call it? Trachoma.) An infant, sitting quietly in its mother’s lap, while the flies crawled around its nose and mouth.

  It was hot on the train. He pressed his legs firmly against the chickens so that no one would steal them. And through his robes, he felt the slight bulge of the scarab. It was a small thing he had picked up from the floor of the tomb, a personal memento of no consequence. It was a habit of his: he always kept a souvenir from each of his jobs. He still had a hubcap from the Aga Khan’s car.

  And the scarab, though pretty, was a minor thing. It was cut from
pale amethyst and nicely done, but there were thousands of scarab beetles in Egypt, and tens of thousands of fakes.

  A small thing.

  Still, one never knew…

  He touched the bulge absently and drifted off to sleep.

  Aswan.

  Once, it had been the limit of the Lower Kingdom, the farthest outpost of civilization, the frontier town. From Aswan, the endless desert began, and only a few daring caravans set out across it, into Nubia, the “Land of Gold.” Savages lived to the south, the wild tribes of Wawat, Arthet, and Iam, often attacking Egypt in hope of conquest, never succeeding.

  In those days, it had been two towns, like Luxor: one for the living and one for the dead. Souanou, on the east bank, was the marketplace of the twin city; Elephantine, an island, had been the spiritual center.

  In more recent history, Aswan had been a minor town en route to Khartoum, which was then the center of commerce, exploration, and slave trade. Aswan never lost importance, however, for the First Cataract of the Nile was here, marking the first major obstacle to navigation for a boat traveling south.

  The Nile at this point was broad but shallow, with bare rock outcroppings and two large islands in midstream, Elephantine Island and Kitchener’s Island. The first was massive, formed from black granite in odd, smooth shapes that, seen from a distance, resembled a herd of elephants in the water. Kitchener’s Island contained the home and tropical gardens of Lord Kitchener, the English general who conquered and rebuilt Khartoum after the Mahdi’s whirling dervishes had destroyed it in 1885.

  Aswan was situated in an area of excellent granite, and the Egyptians cut Aswan granite for all their important monuments and buildings. The stones were floated downstream for use in the major temples; one large obelisk could still be seen in the quarries outside town. Had it been fully removed, it would have been the largest single block of stone ever used by the Egyptians; it was estimated to weigh one thousand tons. Three sides of the column had been cut free before a flaw was discovered in the granite, rendering it useless.

  Nikos had not visited Aswan since the war, and he was astonished to see the changes now. White and shining, the New Cataract Hotel stood out on Elephantine; other modern hotels stood on the east bank. The town had a new, prosperous look. From conversations he heard in the street, he learned that two new universities were located there.