by Jerry Dubs
Akila looked from his sincere face to the pile of gems and jewels and money. Men would do anything for such a treasure. They would lie, they would endure torture. They would take advantage of their friends. They would abandon their wives and children.
Watching her, Tim thought how open she was. He saw her concern for Bakr, her worry about his health, her confusion about him, and suddenly he knew how he could help her.
“Take everything,” he said. He nodded to the jewels and the money. “Put it someplace safe so that Bakr isn’t in danger. Hide it, put it in a bank, dig a hole and bury it, I don’t care. Leave me enough to pay Bakr, or better yet, give it to him, whatever he needs, whatever you think is right.”
Seeing the question in her eyes, he continued, “I need someone I can trust. I’m not trying to buy your trust. I’m putting everything in your hands. I’m putting myself in your hands.”
As Akila studied Tim, laughter entered the room from the small arched window over Tim’s bed. She went to the head of the bed and leaned over it to peer outside.
Zahrah, a fifteen-year-old girl who lived on the outskirts of Helwan, and her mother, Ulfah, were sitting on wooden benches and kneading bread dough for the stone ovens. Ahmes was sitting with them, his sketchbook and box of crayons on the sandy ground beside them.
While the women worked, Ahmes pointed to trees, rocks, birds, the benches, the ovens. As the women told him the Arabic words for them, he repeated them. His accent was harsh and Zahrah kept teasingly mimicking him.
Her mother, seeing the flirtation, kept shaking her head to discourage her daughter, but Ahmes' good humor was too infectious and the three of them kept dissolving into laughter.
Akila smiled as she watched them. She knew Ulfah and her daughter. They were simple women – uneducated, honest, and accepting. The two of them – and millions of others like them in Egypt and throughout the world – nursed babies and raised children, cooked meals, sewed clothes and kept them clean. They were the bedrock of families in every society, throughout all time, yet they were seldom praised and too often abused.
Watching Ahmes she saw that there was something elemental and solid in the way he sat and the way he moved; the idea of multitasking would be alien to him. His laughter was spontaneous and real, a match for the smiles on Ulfah’s and Zahrah’s faces. His eyes, full of intelligence and honesty, hid no ulterior motive. His inquisitiveness and eagerness were obvious, and he glowed with energy – excited and enthralled by each moment that passed. She had seen his talent and his devotion to Tim.
Akila couldn’t help but smile at Ahmes; he was the son every mother wanted. He was the man every mother would want for her daughter. Keeping her face turned toward the window, she wondered about Tim.
He was clearly hiding something. And just as clearly he had suffered much. The saline solution was dripping life into his body, but there was a weariness in him, a broken sadness in his spirit that she wasn’t sure anyone could heal.
Unbidden and unwanted, her thoughts turned to her husband, his imprisonment and torture and his final sacrifice to spare her. She wished that she could have been with him to help him hold onto hope or to find peace when hope was gone. But she knew he had been alone, with only his own strength and, she hoped, the assurance of her love for him to give him strength.
Hearing Tim’s faint, uneven breathing behind her, she suddenly wondered if his fasting and imprisonment had been a sacrifice he had endured for someone he loved.
It would explain Ahmes’ devotion, she thought.
Laughter came from the courtyard again and looking outside through tear-filled eyes, Akila saw Ahmes and the women as if in a soft watercolor painting. Light surrounded them, softening the edges that separated them, bringing them close together, too close to allow anything unhappy to intrude.
She saw Ahmes reach to Ulfah and touch the older woman’s arm as he pointed with his other a hand at unground grains of wheat. She saw his earnest look as he tried to copy her speech and his happy grin when Zahrah mimicked his speech.
She decided that she would trust Ahmes.
If he had decided that Tim’s life was worth saving, then she, too, would give this strange, weary man a chance.
Hope in Saqqara
Leaning on his cane as he looked at the time-worn, yet still majestic Step Pyramid and the sprawling funeral complex that he had designed for King Djoser five thousand years earlier, Tim Hope felt a mixture of pride and longing.
It was late morning, a month after he had arrived in the modern world. Akila’s medical skills, Bakr’s attentive hospitality, and Ahmes' unending compassion had combined to keep Tim alive. And now, limping from a stubbornly fragile right knee, he was spending a day away from the guesthouse, hoping to begin rebuilding his endurance.
He had asked Akila to take him to Saqqara, a short drive from the guesthouse. She had parked her car and they had walked onto the plateau that was home to the ancient dead and to Tim’s own past.
“I never tire of seeing this,” Akila said happily as she took Tim’s free arm. The gesture was one of support, one concerned friend helping another.
Feeling rejuvenated and at home amid the monuments, Tim raised his cane, a walnut staff with a simple curved handle, and waved it at the remains of Djoser’s forest of stone pillars, the staggered wall that Paneb had built and the crumbling, worn exterior of his own creation – the Step Pyramid. Each stone, each swell of sand, each faded column evoked a memory.
Pointing at the southeastern wall he said, “Look over there. Imagine six lines of men pulling wooden sledges across the sand. Each sledge is stacked with brick-sized blocks of limestone. They entered over there,” he pointed his cane at the empty space where one of the gateways to the complex once stood. “It is the entrance that is closest to the canal dug from the river to float barges of stone here from the quarries,” he explained.
“The men, some of them are boys just entering manhood, start work at dawn after a breakfast of bread and cold meat, usually fish, sometimes goose. On days following a festival, they might get onions and red meat from goats or bulls.
“By midmorning they will have hauled thousands of blocks across the sand, unloaded them onto stacks over there, by the eastern side of the pyramid.
“The heat is oppressive. The sand gives way beneath their feet making every step a struggle. Still the men work steadily. Their legs and shoulders ache. But they don’t stop,” he said with pride.
Turning to Akila, he added, “There aren’t any overseers with whips like you see in the movies, these are citizens, not slaves. If the men wanted, they could simply walk away from the hot, exhausting work.
“But they don’t because they are proud of what we are doing. The teams of men are grouped by village. So men from Iunu are competing against men from Waset or Ineb-Hedj or any of the other villages up and down the river. They each want to prove how strong men from their village are.”
Tim paused and smiled at the memory of the men, a small city of workers coming together to build the monuments.
There had been occasional fights, a man thought another had stolen his mallet, two men from the same town who were nursing a grudge over a woman found an excuse to come to blows. There had been injuries, serious ones, and sometimes a death, not unlike the modern building of tunnels and skyscrapers.
But there had been celebrations, too.
Visiting priests, eager to show their devotion to King Djoser, would arrive with a line of servants carrying beer and bread and leading oxen to be slain for a feast. Families filled the plateau on festival days and Tim remembered shuddering in worry as he watched children swarm over the stones, climbing and shouting as they played.
He remembered the air filled with smoke from cook fires and the aroma of roasting meat. He could almost hear the shouts as men organized impromptu contests: racing, slinging rocks at targets, and wrestling. The plateau had been alive with energy and excitement.
“We believed that we were serving not just a ki
ng, but a living god,” he said.
Then, realizing that he had included himself in the memory, he turned to Akila and said, “When they go home to their wives and children or to their parents and their girlfriends, they will brag that they helped build King Djoser’s eternal home and that they are helping to maintain ma’at. They’ll tell them that Re and Horus watched over them, that Ptah himself felt the earth groan from their efforts, and that Osiris and Isis guided their labor.”
Looking at the ancient ruins, Tim reconstructed the scene in his mind’s eye. He saw gleaming, painted pillars, he heard the shouts of men good-naturedly taunting their neighbors to work faster, he saw Paneb conferring with his foremen, explaining where cylindrical blocks of stone should be stored, deciding how many men would be drawn from hauling stone to work on the walls. He felt the heat of the sun and smelled the sweat of the laborers, the tang of paint and the dark, secret smell from beneath the desert as the miners dug the subterranean tunnels.
Akila tugged on his arm, bringing him back from his reverie. Smiling at him, she said, “I stayed up last night reading up on Saqqara so I could be your guide. I think I wasted my time.” She almost called him Imhotep, but held her tongue.
After she had made the decision to help him, Akila had focused on healing his battered body. She knew that he was concealing a secret. His physical condition, the touching devotion of Ahmes, the strange language the men shared, and the cache of gems and gold and money made it obvious that they were hiding something.
But he never seemed threatening or dangerous and there were no rumors of an escape from the secret police, no night raids on homes, no strangers asking questions. Then as his strength had returned, she had watched him absorb his initial sadness – she had often found him in tears – and bury it beneath a resolute exterior. He had decided to accept his past and to build a future, she thought.
She noticed, too, that Ahmes had ceased calling him Imhotep. And so Akila decided to let ‘Imhotep’ rest until Tim was ready to reveal him.
“Let’s go over this way a little,” Tim said, leading Akila past the south tomb.
“When I was a little boy, my grandfather lived in a small trailer at the edge of a cemetery.” He looked at her and smiled. “It wasn’t creepy, just a flat, green field dotted with tombstones and a few trees. My grandfather didn’t have a yard so I played in the cemetery when we visited him. I remember him telling me not to tramp on the dead people.”
Shrugging, he looked at the reconstructed hall of columns and beyond it to the remains of the high wall, then north toward the pyramid, orienting himself and gauging his position.
“I think we’re OK here,” he said, coming to a stop.
“See, the desert under us is full of tunnels. The south tomb behind us? There is a shaft that goes down about a hundred feet. Six tunnels come off that central shaft. No one is buried there, it is a home for King Djoser’s ka.
“The original mastaba capped all of the subterranean area so no one would have walked over the ka’s eternal home.” Taking his bearings once more, he nodded and said, “I think we’re beyond the area here.”
Tim looked down at his feet, raised his right leg and flexed his knee and then looked at Akila who was studying him. She smiled in embarrassment at being caught and looked away.
Her movement placed her face in profile to Tim. She was looking northward and the sun highlighted the side of her face, pouring light over her dark cheek, burnishing her prominent cheekbone and her elegant jaw, falling into the gentle curve of skin turning inward at her eye, giving texture to her full lips.
Closing his eyes, Tim remembered a lamp-lit evening in ancient Egypt when he had sat across the room from Meryt who was sleeping. Her bare back had been turned to him, a thin linen sheet pulled part way over her naked hip. Without effort he recalled the slope of her waist, the gentle undulation of her spine curving up her narrow back, the play of flickering light across her smooth, tawny skin.
By then he had already fallen in love with Meryt’s humor and her playfulness, her generosity and her innocence. That night he had fallen in love with the woman.
Opening his eyes he saw that Akila had turned her back to him, giving him time to compose himself and dry the tears that he found so frequently in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, giving her permission to acknowledge his vulnerability.
Turning to him, she nodded. “It’s OK. You’ll tell me when you are ready.”
***
They explored the funeral complex, Tim effortlessly explaining the original layout of each chapel, describing the original colors of the colonnades and the purpose and importance of the ceremonies held in each temple. He told her about the exterior wall, tempted to explain that it was Ahmes’ idea to give the doorways an irregular, natural spacing.
They stopped on the steps of the Heb-sed court to give Tim’s leg a rest and to snack on a picnic lunch that Bakr had prepared for them.
“How do you know so much about this?” Akila asked.
“It was my life for fifteen years,” Tim answered.
“You worked here? For the department of antiquities? As an archaeologist?”
“I was here, but I wouldn’t call it work,” he said, digging through the knapsack of food.
They ate in silence for a minute and then she said, “I Googled you.”
When he took another bite of an apple instead of answering, she continued. “There are lots of Tim Hopes. But there was one who disappeared while visiting Egypt seventeen years ago. The United States embassy issued a missing persons alert with a passport picture.” She squinted at him, smiling as she did. “It looks like you, only with hair and fatter cheeks.”
When he focused on his apple and didn’t look up at her, she continued, “But since our government doesn’t place its records online, I don’t know how much of a search was conducted or if this Tim Hope was ever found.”
She looked over her shoulder toward the barbed-wire-topped enclosure that surrounded the Tomb of Ipy. “You’ve heard of the Tomb of the Time Traveler, haven’t you?”
Tim remembered the shock he felt when he had read about the discovery of a mummy that seemed to be of a modern man. He knew it was Brian Aldwin. Brian had saved Tim’s life. He had saved King Djoser’s life, too, and then had been rewarded with a new name – the protective god Ipy – and buried in a tomb intended for Kanakht, the king’s traitorous vizier.
“The Tomb of Ipy, over there,” he said, tilting his head toward the tomb and trying to keep his emotions at bay.
“Yes,” Akila said. “Well, some of the websites I found list dozens of people who disappeared while visiting this area. Americans, Germans, Brits, Greeks, Japanese, all sorts of people, even a Russian mobster. The theory is that these people are trying to escape something, ex-husbands, creditors, angry loan sharks, government spies, you name it.
“They find a secret contact here in Saqqara and arrange to leave this time, this era. Then they enter the Tomb of the Time Traveler and are transported into ancient Egypt, or perhaps future Egypt. Tim Hope is on some of those lists.”
Tim took another bite of apple. He had come here to tell her the truth and so he nodded. “I’m that Tim Hope. I wasn’t running away from spies or mobsters, just myself.” He finished the apple and wrapped the core in a piece of newspaper.
Then he pulled a damp washcloth from the picnic basket and cleaned his hands. “You know, I never understood the attraction of going to the beach and lying in the sand. I love this place, but I will never, ever get used to sand.”
Pushing himself to his feet he turned to Akila and said, “Come on, I want to take a look at the Serdab Court.”
***
Lost in thought, Tim looked at the desert sand as he led Akila around to the north side of the pyramid. She walked silently beside him, her hand covertly, hesitantly reaching out toward his side when he seemed to lean suddenly on his cane.
They walked past the broken statues along the eastern wall a
nd past the stone papyrus stalks standing on the remaining wall of the House of the North. As they approached the Serdab, a small group of tourists walked past, led by a heavy-set guide who was wearing a tall, red fez. The collection of colorful shorts, Panama hats, and clutched smart phones passed and the small stone house of King Djoser’s watchful statue was revealed.
Reverently Tim approached it, unaware that he was holding his breath.
Stepping between the two extending walls, he stopped before the two spy holes intended to give the king’s ka a view of the funeral celebration. Hesitantly he reached up and let his hand rest on the warm stone.
He knew that the statue within the enclosure was a reproduction. The original had been moved to the museum in Cairo, but he didn’t need to see the statue. He knew King Djoser’s face better than he knew his own.
He knew everything about King Djoser.
He knew his perfumed presence at state gatherings; his musky, sweaty smell when he emerged from his chambers with Inetkawes’ laughing, lust-filled voice calling farewell; his sour stink when he returned from a weeklong hunting trip in the desert.
He knew Djoser’s warm baritone voice as he chanted a hymn welcoming the flood; as he proclaimed his divinity before an audience, the words full and true; as he laughed at a joke or shouted in delight at a new discovery or as he unabashedly groaned, the sound echoing down the stone corridors from his bedchamber.
He knew the texture and color of the king’s skin; the languid, sensual fullness of his lips, his broad, imposing forehead, and the piercing intelligence of his eyes.
He always seemed to know my thoughts and my fears, Tim thought. And he always accepted them, embraced them, fulfilled them, answered them.
Leaning forward he rested his forehead against the stone, taking comfort in the eternal strength of the rock, knowing that it felt the same at this moment as it had when it had been lifted into place five thousand years earlier.
