Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  “I told you it wasn’t the Waldorf,” Susan muttered.

  “Before you scatter,” Lanier said, “there’s something else I want to make you aware of.” He stood beside a table near the door to the east wing. On the table were two bowls. “My work here consists of trying to replicate the unguents, remedies, household preparations, cosmetics, and perfumes of the ancient Egyptians. I use recipes that have been left to us on the walls of the temples hereabouts, by ancient Greeks, such as Dioscorides, and in several papyri that have miraculously been rescued and saved. The hardest part, I’ve found, is identifying the plant species they refer to, since one plant may be called by a dozen different names. If a recipe calls for antiu, what the hell is antiu? You see the problem?

  “What I like to do is, I like to put out the things I make and let whoever wants to, try them. I don’t put anything out until I’m pretty sure I’ve got the ancient recipe right.” Horace Lanier spoke rapidly in a grandfatherly voice. “And I leave a card with it to tell you what it’s supposed to be used for. Some of these old concoctions seem to have been used for several different things.” He stuck a fat finger in one of the bowls, then rubbed whatever it was on his arm. In the nasal tone of a snake-oil salesman he added, “Good for upset stomach, gets rid of fleas, and you can spread it on toast.”

  As soon as they realized he was joking, they all laughed.

  “In this first bowl I have some kyphi. It’s a well known fragrance used in temple ceremonies from earliest times, but also supposed to be good for asthma. You can burn it, you can eat it, whatever. Use your imagination. I’ve made this particular batch from a recipe in the famous papyrus Ebers which dates approximately from the time of Amenhotep the First. Now that I’ve definitely identified one mysterious ingredient as chervil, I’m pretty sure this is exactly like they used to make it.

  “This other bowl has a cleansing scrub that’s supposed to erase wrinkles and make your skin soft.” He rubbed his arm again. “Like I said, try anything you find here if you want, but it’s purely voluntary. And don’t sue me if you get a rash.”

  Roxanne led them through the dining room and into the west wing. Four doors, two on each side of the hall led to as many rooms, but one was used as a library and two others were already taken by herself and a woman they had not yet met. She opened the door of the one vacant room. It was a tiny cell with a miniscule window, a cot, a dresser, a washstand, and a night table with an electric lamp.

  The east wing stretched immediately beyond the arched doorway on the other side. On this end there were six rooms, three on each side, and another door at the far end that Roxanne told them led to Lanier’s quarters. She swung all six doors open and let them check out each room. One was already occupied, they could see, by the hiking boots, work shirts and men’s toiletries scattered about. Picks, ropes and surveying equipment were piled against one wall. A thin striped spread was pulled up and over the pillow on the narrow bed in the far corner. “This is Paul Hannah’s room,” she said. “He should be back before dinner.” Two of the remaining rooms were a bit larger than the others, but they all seemed to have the same amenities.

  “Awfully sorry, but I’m afraid the architects didn’t have married couples in mind when they drew up the plans. All our rooms are singles and, as you can see, the beds are quite narrow.”

  Shelley’s pale face reddened. She shot her husband an anxious look.

  Graham glanced at her, then quickly away. “Well, hey. We’re not here for that kind of stuff anyway. We’re all colleagues. One big happy family. Right?” He spread his arms wide and smiled.

  Shelley’s gaze darted from Lacy to Graham to Susan.

  Friedman chose the first room on the south side and Susan took the slightly larger room immediately beside it. Shelley, suggesting the north-facing rooms might be cooler, asked if she and Graham could have the two remaining rooms on that side. Lacy took the last room available, on the far end and on the south side of the hall.

  “It doesn’t matter, Shelley,” Lacy said. “These walls are so thick and the windows are so small, the sun won’t have that much effect.” She was heading to the antika room for her luggage when Bay burst through from the other direction.

  “Dr. Breen! Selim brought me no aubergines and no sultanas!”

  “Do you need them for tonight?”

  “I need them for tomorrow night’s dinner.”

  “We’ll send him out for them tomorrow.”

  “I need to start the preparation tonight! I can’t wait ‘til tomorrow.”

  “You’ll have to. Now go on with your cooking. Shoo!”

  Lacy watched, somewhat uncomfortably, as Roxanne pushed Bay through the doors at the end of the hall and turned back to the new arrivals. She apologized for the scene and added in a low voice, “You have to understand poor Bay. She believes she’s the reincarnation of Hatshepsut’s daughter. She moved here almost forty years ago from Chicago—to be close to her mum’s temple.” As she backed through the doors, she added, “But she’s a brilliant cook!”

  * * *

  They gathered in the dining room for dinner. A large, round table, sufficient to seat at least twelve, sat directly under a round dome in the ceiling. Openings for air and light ringed the lower part of the dome. The table was set, and a tray with nine glasses, already filled with white wine, sat poised on a long sideboard.

  They had been joined by two more people recently returned from their day’s work. Lacy studied the man, Dr. Paul Hannah, from across the room. He was about forty and well-built. About five-nine, she guessed, with brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. With his khaki shirt and cargo pants, his tanned face and arms, he reminded Lacy of a piece of toast. It was a bad habit she had—labeling people.

  The other new person was probably in her fifties and she looked like an ostrich, with unruly grey hair and a long wrinkled neck.

  Lanier proposed a toast to the success of the project. “I’d like to say that Susan Donohue and Graham Clark have put together a world-class team to study Kheti’s tomb. Joel Friedman will identify the species of plant material and there’s a lot of it—in funeral bouquets and garlands as well as in unguent jars. The material remaining in those unguent jars will be analyzed by Dr. Clark.” Lanier paused and pointed with his glass to Graham. “His lovely wife, Shelley, will help us with the linen and the matting.” He paused again. “Perhaps the biggest question we have about this tomb regards the relationship of our man, Kheti, to the seat of government at Amarna, because Kheti’s life and death spanned the period of Akhenaten’s reign when the government was moved down river for a few years, but Kheti lived here in Thebes. The origin of the tomb’s paint pigments and dyes may be our best bet for clarifying this relationship. For that we have Lacy Glass who, Joel Friedman assures me, is the world’s foremost authority on plant pigments.”

  All heads turned to Lacy.

  “Here’s hoping they used seaweed.” Lacy raised her glass and the others followed suit, some with a laugh, others with a look of incomprehension.

  * * *

  Bay brought out a bowl of steaming sweet potatoes and set it on the table already laden with fried chicken, beans, mashed potatoes, and gravy. She apologized for the beans not being the sort of string beans Americans are used to. “But at least they’re beans,” she said.

  Lacy, helping herself to the chicken, said, “I have a question. Why is this house called Whiz Bang?”

  Susan grabbed her napkin and spluttered into it.

  Shelley said, “Yes, why?”

  “Isn’t that some sort of weapon they used in World War One?” Graham asked. He had shaved, changed clothes and now looked decidedly cleaner than his travel companions.

  Roxanne and Susan glanced at each other. Roxanne nodded, indicating that Susan should do the explaining.

  “Well!” Susan began, setting down the salt shaker. “I was brought here last year by a member of the Supreme Council who speaks English with a very thick Egyptian accent and he kept talking to
me about ‘Whiz Bang.’ He’d say, ‘We go to Whiz Bang tomorrow,’ or, ‘Much work to do at Whiz Bang.’ When he finally brought me here, I asked Roxanne, I said, ‘What the hell is Whiz Bang?’ She told me, ‘He’s trying to say West Bank, dear. This is the west bank of Thebes.’ But the sign at the foot of the hill is new. I hadn’t seen that until today.”

  “It seems to me this is almost an extension of Luxor,” Shelley said. “I can see Luxor from here. I must say it doesn’t measure up to the Luxor in Las Vegas.”

  “Luxor and Thebes are one and the same,” Lanier said. “It was Thebes in the days of the pharaohs, now it’s called Luxor.”

  Lacy was glad Shelley had shown her ignorance first because she’d been wondering the same thing herself.

  “It’s time you met Paul and Kathleen,” Roxanne said. “They were working in the tomb when you arrived.” She turned to the man. “Paul?”

  “Paul Hannah,” he said, his knife and fork poised in either hand. “I’m from California originally, but my last ten years have been spent in the Middle East, mostly in Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel. I’m interested in the origins of the very earliest civilizations, which seem to have popped up in several widely-spaced places about the same time, and without any known communication between them. Why? After thirty thousand years of being Homo sapiens, but inventing nothing more sophisticated than an arrowhead, do they all of a sudden start growing crops, building cities, and writing down who sold sheep to whom?”

  Lacy noticed his fingernails were jagged and grubby.

  Paul pushed his wire-framed glasses up with his middle finger. “Of course, Thebes isn’t the best place to find clues to this so-called Neolithic explosion, but I’ve temporarily gotten sidetracked with trying to find out who the Hyksos were. Mysterious people who seem to have taken over Egypt in about the fifteenth century B.C.”

  “And we’re hoping he won’t find out any time soon, “Roxanne took a sip from her wine glass, “because we don’t want him to leave us.” She turned to the ostrich-necked woman, and nodded.

  “I am Kathleen Hassan and I am the conservator for Kheti’s tomb.” She perched, stiff-backed, on the edge of her chair, her hands laced together in her lap. “I am responsible for protecting and preserving the contents including the cloth, the coffin, the bouquets, funeral cones, pottery, paintings—all the contents—you understand.” She paused and looked around the table, making deliberate eye contact with each diner as if engraving those last two words in each mind. “It is of the utmost …”

  “Thank you, Kathleen.” Roxanne cut her off.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Drs. Lanier and Breen asked the new arrivals to grab a drink or a cup of coffee and meet them on the porch for a bit of orientation. They dragged the porch’s wood chairs into a conversation circle.

  “So! We’re all here, are we?” Roxanne said. “Paul and Kathleen are washing the dishes, but they already know everything so they don’t need to be here. Bay, incidentally, cooks breakfast and dinner for us and prepares a cold lunch that we usually take with us to the tomb. But she lives in a small flat nearby and after dinner she leaves us and goes to the temple for whatever sort of evening rites she deems necessary to honor her mother’s memory.” Roxanne injected a heavy note of sarcasm into “evening rites” and “mother’s.”

  “The rest of us take turns doing the dinner dishes,” said Lanier. “You’ve all got the evening off because you’re new, but don’t worry. You’ll get your turn.”

  “The temple. You mean Hatshepsut’s Temple?” Shelley asked.

  “Right. You can see it just over there.” Lanier pointed northward. The Temple of Hatshepsut, one of the most photographed sites in Egypt, resembled a three-tiered wedding cake set into a steep escarpment. Long-term excavation and restoration work still continued with many years to go. The top tier glowed warmly in the floodlights, the lower tiers hidden from their view by small intervening hills.

  Roxanne began. “We’re working in the tomb of Kheti, an important man in Thebes during the Eighteenth Dynasty, about thirteen-fifty B.C. or thereabouts. Kheti was Supervisor of Gardens and overseer of the granary. He apparently also had responsibility for the dyeing of textiles, and he may have been Mayor of Thebes for a time. We’re still not sure about that. It’s odd, we think, that such an important man was involved in the dyeing of linen, because dyers were the lowest of the low on the social scale. Their hands were always stained and the dyes they worked with smelled bad.”

  “Soap hadn’t been invented yet and some of their dyes were derived from sea creatures,” Lanier interjected. “Explain to them about the Eighteenth Dynasty, Roxanne.”

  “I was getting ready to do that, but you interrupted,” she told him in a tone more playful than scolding.

  “Actually, the less we know the better,” Graham said. “The whole idea is for us to bring a fresh perspective to the tomb.”

  “Perhaps so, perhaps not.” Roxanne said, and then went on as if the suggestion to let them remain in ignorance wasn’t worth considering. “Toward the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten ascended the throne and threw all of Egypt into turmoil. He tossed out all the old gods and declared that there was only one god, the Aten, or sun god. He moved the capital from Thebes to a site north of here that we call Amarna. So this time is called the Amarna Period. It was a time when Thebes had been ‘kicked to the curb,’ as they say, as a cultural and religious center.

  “Now I wonder. Did any of you notice the posters in the antika room earlier? One is of Akhenaten and the other is of his wife, Nefertiti.”

  “The skinny-headed guy with the huge hips?” Lacy asked, her tone incredulous. She had noticed the poster earlier and done a double-take. “That can’t be what he really looked like. A head that thin wouldn’t work! There wouldn’t be enough room for his brain.”

  “There’s been much debate, for decades, about the extent to which he may have looked like that and the extent to which they used artistic license. It seems to have been the style of painting during the Amarna Period because his wife and daughters are often portrayed as looking the same way. Elongated heads, large hips and thighs, spindly calves bent backward at the knees, and long, thin fingers.”

  “Some people have suggested that Akhenaten was a victim of Marfan’s syndrome or Froelich’s syndrome,” Susan said.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Roxanne barked. “Certainly the whole family wouldn’t have been victims of Marfan’s syndrome. It was a style of drawing. And if he’d had Froelich’s, he’d have been sterile, which he obviously wasn’t because he had six daughters with Nefertiti, not to mention Tutankhamen, who was his son by another one of his wives!”

  It appeared to Lacy that Susan and Roxanne were in stark disagreement on the matter of Akhenaten’s personal life. What evidence did each of them have, on which to base her opinion? She recalled the poster of the famous bust of Nefertiti she’d seen hanging in the big room beside the one of Akhenaten. Even Lacy recognized the painted sculpture of the beautiful queen in the flat-topped hat, quite possibly the most famous bust in the world.

  Graham said, “Are you telling me that beautiful woman was married to that freak? I don’t believe it.”

  “Being pharaoh sort of trumps physical appearance,” Roxanne said. “At any rate, it was a time of turmoil. Priests of the Karnak Temple found themselves out of a job. Some say they were shipped off to work in the quarries. All references to the old gods on temple walls, on statues, even the hieroglyphs on little amulets were hacked off. Scratched out. You can imagine the suppressed fury of the Egyptian people who were given no choice at all regarding whom they could worship. It took Akhenaten’s son, King Tut, to restore the old order and begin the healing.”

  “But he was just a child, wasn’t he?” Graham asked. “How old was King Tut when his father died and he took the throne?”

  “Actually, Tutankhamen didn’t immediately follow Akhenaten as pharaoh. Another one, Smenkhkare, took over for a short
time, perhaps ruling as a co-regent. It’s unclear exactly when Akhenaten died. Smenkhkare may have been a half-brother or perhaps his son-in-law.”

  Susan butted in, her dark eyes bulging. “Smenkhkare wasn’t a he. Smenkhkare was nothing less than Nefertiti herself, acting as pharaoh. There’s plenty of evidence for this.”

  Roxanne said nothing for a long moment, as if she was silently counting to ten. “There are fads in Egyptology, as there are in all disciplines. The current fad in our field seems to be finding female pharaohs under every rock.”

  For a second, Lacy feared Susan was going to jump up and attack Roxanne. Her hands clamped on the arms of her chair and her shoulders heaved forward.

  Horace Lanier rescued the situation. “Tell them about the secret room, Roxanne.”

  “Ah, yes. Do you know what a canopic jar is?” No one answered and she went on. “When a body was mummified, they put the internal organs in tall jars and sealed them. There were usually four jars and they were interred in the tomb with the mummy.

  “A couple of weeks ago, I was examining a section of wall in the tomb and I found a chink which proved to have empty space behind it. At first we thought it was where a modern-day resident, hacking around perhaps from a back room of his own dwelling, had hacked right into our tomb. This happens sometimes and when it does you can bet the contents of your tomb will soon disappear. But as we dug farther, we found a whole new room!” Roxanne clamped her hands together. “This room has been filled with debris from rock falls and sediment brought in by flash floods, but we’ve found two canopic jars, a few shabti figures, and some papyri. One of the canopic jars has the cartouche, that is, the name, of Nefertiti. We’re trying to make sense of all this, but we’re severely hampered by the fact that the ceiling is unstable. It could collapse at any time.”

  “Why wasn’t I told about this?” Susan’s voice sounded threatening.

  “You’re being told about it now, dear,” Roxanne said. “It was only a couple of weeks ago, and since we knew you’d be here today, we saw no reason to mention it earlier. What a lovely surprise for you, right?”