by Jerry Dubs
Tim almost smiled at the guide’s English, but he saw that beneath his bluster the man was worried; he hated to see tourists and their American dollars disappear.
He held up his hand. “Honest. I did not see them come up. And anyhow, where would they have gone? The bus is still here.” He pointed to the parking lot. He saw that a taxi cab was sitting beside the bus. He hadn’t noticed it before, but his back had been to the lot.
“Yes, where,” the guide said. Then he suddenly whirled in a circle, as if expecting the couple to be sneaking up behind him. “Always the funny. Here… not here.”
“Maybe they are in the taxi?”
The guide shook his head. “My taxi.” He pulled keys from the pocket of his robe and dangled them in front of Tim. The guide bounced from one foot to the other, thinking. Then he said, “You tell them Hamzah gone without them. They walk to Mena House. Very funny. Yes.”
The guide walked to his cab, his head turning to look around the complex, expecting the Americans to suddenly re-appear. Tim looked over at the Tomb of Kanakht. The guard was watching him.
Tim shifted the weight of the backpack, looked back up at the guard, who continued to watch him, and made a decision.
“I didn’t see them come up either,” he said as he approached the guard.
“No English.”
Earlier he and the guard had talked in English for fifteen minutes. Tim wondered if he laughed now and made a joke of the guard’s stiff response, perhaps the guard would relax and laugh with him. But the man’s face was pinched and angry.
“Right,” Tim said under his breath as he tried to compose his thoughts in Arabic.
“No English,” the guard repeated.
Tim switched to Arabic: “I didn’t see them go.”
“Closed to public,” the guard answered in English.
Tim stayed with Arabic. “The man and woman didn’t come out. Are they there?” he pointed to the tomb entrance. “Should we see?”
“No one there. Closed to public.”
Tim shook his head. “They went in. Not come out.” He felt like he was negotiating the price of a counterfeit tomb relic.
“No one there. Closed to public.” The guard’s hand played with the billy club. He blinked and his right leg started to bounce.
“We should see.”
The guard shook his head. “No one there.”
“Can we see?”
“No one there. Closed to public.”
Off to his right, Tim heard voices as the group of tourists, finished staring at Djoser’s statue, emerged from behind the Step Pyramid and began walking toward him headed for the Pyramid of Unis. He watched them high step carefully through the sand. Then he looked down at the sand by the entrance to the Tomb of Kanakht. It was filled with footprints leading into the tomb.
The guard followed Tim’s gaze and saw the footsteps. He scuffed at the sand, wiping out the prints, and then he stood in front of the gate, his arms folded across his chest.
“Closed to public.”
Tim and the guard stared at each other for a moment, and then Tim shook his head and walked out to the parking lot.
Hamzah and the taxi were gone.
It was possible, Tim thought, that the couple had come out of the tomb while the guard had been around back, while he had his head down writing in his journal or studying the map. It was possible that they had been hiding in the back of the cab and were now reunited with Hamzah. He remembered the playful smile on the American’s face. Perhaps he had planned to play a joke. Or perhaps the girl had felt ill and they had gone to the taxi for her to rest.
Or they could have crossed over to the colonnade, walked back to the Step Pyramid and could be wandering around the northern courtyard.
And it was possible that they were still in the Tomb of Kanahkt. Although there didn’t seem to be a reason for it, Hamzah had seemed genuinely confused. Tim didn't think the Americans were hurt, he couldn't imagine the little guide being able to overpower the big American. Still.
He looked around for another official, but didn’t expect to see one. The antiquities department was understaffed and the idea of guarding a huge mound of stones that had been around for thousands of years was a low priority.
Back home Tim would use a cell phone, call 9-1-1 and let the police sort it out. He hadn’t bothered to bring his cell phone on the trip. Even if he had it, he had no idea who he would call, perhaps the embassy. And tell them what?
Following the ruins of the colonnade that ran along the eastern edge of the complex, Tim walked away from the Tomb of Kanakht and the angry guard. He reached the northern end of the pathway and scanned the area for the Americans.
The Step Pyramid now lay between him and the angry guard. He walked across the courtyard toward the pyramid, unsure of what to do.
He stopped by a large rectangular hole dug into the sand. A path, wide enough for three people to walk side-by-side, led from the edge of the hole down a gentle sandy slope and into a dark tunnel that angled toward the pyramid. Tim knew that it led to a central subterranean shaft, which in turn led down to the granite-plugged vault where Djoser’s mummy had once lain.
The tunnel was big enough to hide the two tourists.
He took a few steps into the tunnel and then forced a cough; he didn’t want to interrupt the couple if they had found a hiding place for a more personal reason.
As he stepped into the tunnel and out of the sunshine, the contrast between the bright sand outside and the shadows took his sight away. He pinched his eyes shut, hurrying his pupils to dilate. Then he took only a few more steps before the tunnel ended at an iron gate.
No one else was in the tunnel.
He pushed on the gate, expecting it to be locked. It was.
But there was no guard, he realized. So why was a guard assigned to a small, nearly unknown tomb out in the open while the antiquities department trusted an unattended gate at the end of a dark tunnel to keep tourists out of the Step Pyramid?
Tim pressed his face between the bars of the iron gate, but the darkness inside the tomb was too complete.
“Hello! Anyone in there?” he called. He pulled on the gate. There was no give to it, as if it were not just locked shut, but welded in place.
He called again, expecting at least a hollow echo of his voice to come back to him from the ancient room that lay out of sight.
“Anyone? Hello!” he shouted louder.
The reality of the tomb suddenly struck him: its age, how it had been carved from the desert rock by hundreds of men using primitive tools, how a flesh-and-blood king with the power of life and death over an ancient kingdom had been entombed here amid chanting and incense and songs and prayers.
He closed his eyes and imagined the tomb lit by torches. He pictured the rough, granite walls alive with shadows cast by a procession of priests in sheer white linen robes led by Anubis, jackal god of the underworld, and Thoth, ibis-headed scribe of the gods, and the goddesses Ma’at and Hathor. He imagined the sounds of keening mourners, the hollow rattling of sacred sistrums, the shuffling of pall bearers carrying the royal mummy prepared for an eternal life of joy in Khert-Neter, the Field of Reeds. He could almost smell the sharp tang of incense spread to sanctify the chamber, the perfumes of the men and women of the king’s court, the dryness of the desert.
With his face pressed against the iron bars, Tim waited for the vision to fade, for the echo of his calls to answer him. But the air in the granite chamber, compressed by the weight of thousands of stones and the stillness of thousands of years seemed too dense for his words to penetrate.
“Or there’s no one here,” he said to himself, shaking off the vision.
He walked back up the slope to the surface and was surprised to see that the afternoon had given way to dusk. A tour bus engine started in the distance and he realized that unless he ran through the courtyard and waved the bus to a stop, he would have to make the hike to Memphis or spend a night sleeping by the tomb. Unless I cat
ch a ride with my buddy, the guard, he thought.
Suddenly he understood why a guard had been assigned to an insignificant tomb that few tourists knew existed: because the lock on the tomb gate was broken.
Until the lock was repaired, a bureaucrat in the department of antiquities could assign someone - a friend or a cousin or a nephew - to guard the tomb. The guard would accept bribes to permit guides to get their guests into the “secret” tomb. The guide would earn a hefty tip from the impressed tourist. The guard would split the bribe with the bureaucrat and so three families would have additional income, all from one broken lock.
Which meant that if he waited until the guard left for the night, Tim could enter the Tomb of Kanakht, satisfy himself that the Americans really had sneaked out of the tomb and, more importantly, spend hours sketching tomb drawings undisturbed by other tourists.
He went back down the sandy tunnel to the Step Pyramid gate. Shrouded by the darkness, he removed his backpack and sat against the cool granite stone to wait for night to fall.
This is the kind of thing Addy would have done, he thought as the dusky light soaked into the sand. Before Addy, he never would have broken rules by staying somewhere after closing. He never would have considered sneaking into a tomb that wasn’t open to the public. He would have returned to his hotel and called the embassy. Let them handle it.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Addy would have said.
He could almost hear her voice. He missed her more than he ever imagined he could.
They had been planning this trip to Egypt for more than a year. They had researched all the archaeological sites, studied Egyptian history and bought a language course to teach themselves Arabic, laughing over whose accent was worse.
She had bought a large National Geographic map of Egypt, which they had hung on a wall in their small apartment. As they had decided which sites to visit, they had pinned notes to the map. They had used red yarn to track their travel plans, even bringing the yarn into Cairo, their starting point, from off the map.
An orange pin marked Cairo. “Four days” was underlined on the note the pin held. Beneath the heading they had listed: Giza: Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure; Bazaar: cartouche necklace saying ‘life and love;’ an ankh; Alabaster mosque.
Abu Simbel, Aswan and Kom Ombo were marked with yellow pins, signifying day trips.
The longest notes, held by red pins, had been stuck on the map at Saqqara and Luxor. They had planned to stay a week at each of the sites, plenty of time for him to sketch the pyramids of the Old Kingdom at Saqqara and the temples of the New Kingdom built at Luxor. It would have given Addy time to talk with camel drivers, laborers, farmers, shop clerks and policemen.
They had planned to create a book of Tim’s pencil sketches, capturing the ancient feel of the country, and intimate profiles Addy would write about the ‘real people’ of the country, not the leaders and the fads.
They had limited themselves to three weeks, because that was all their credit cards could absorb.
Tim had agreed to the trip to satisfy her; he would have been happy to simply hide in their apartment during their vacation and sketch and make love to her.
“That’s a typical weekend, Tim,” she had told him. “We need an adventure. You need an adventure. We’ll remember this all of our lives.”
He leaned back against the tunnel wall, closed his eyes and cried.
Into the Tomb of Kanakht
The night was darker than he had expected.
Tim swung his backpack off his shoulder and set it on the ground by the tunnel entrance. Using his flashlight he searched through his backpack for extra batteries. He put the spares in his pants pocket, flicked off the flashlight and pulled the backpack onto his shoulders.
There were no electric lights at Saqqara. A crescent moon hung low in the sky casting indistinct shadows that stretched from low standing walls, half-rebuilt pillars and mounds of debris from recent excavations. Tim squinted at the Step Pyramid and it seemed to magically disappear, its existence marked only by the absence of stars where its form pushed into the night. He opened his eyes wide and allowed the grainy texture of the exterior to take form, giving the pyramid substance again.
It was a trick of the light. Tim loved it because it gave shape and form to the darkness.
He walked to the Serdab. Through the small opening he saw the shadowy face of Djoser, dead five thousand years, staring back at him through the darkness. He reached through the opening to touch the statue and suddenly imagined the king’s stone arm coming to life and grabbing his wrist in its dead grasp.
He yanked his arm quickly out of the hole, breathing deeply through the unexpected rush of adrenaline.
His arm was intact, untouched by the inanimate stone. He laughed at his panic. Still he was cautious as he put his hand back into the hole and traced the contours of the king’s face with his fingers.
The cheekbones were higher and broader than in portraits of kings from later dynasties, especially the religious rebel Ahkenaten. Djoser wore a ceremonial beard, a long and narrow goatee. His ears were pushed forward by the royal nemes head cloth that covered a thick traditional wig. His eyes, even in this reproduction, were empty sockets, the crystals stolen long, long ago and left out of this reproduction.
He pulled his arm out and looked through the opening again, recalling what he remembered about Djoser.
He had been the first Egyptian king to claim he was divine, giving himself the royal name of Horus Netjerikhet: “Divine of Body.” He had been king during a disastrous seven-year famine when the Nile had failed to flood the banks and leave behind the rich soil carried down from central Africa that the ancient Egyptian farmers depended on. And despite his royalty and power, Djoser's memory had almost been overshadowed by his physician and architect, the famous Imhotep.
Tim sat back on his haunches and stared at the Serdab and beyond it at Imhotep’s most famous work, the Step Pyramid.
It had been built five thousand years ago. Easy to say, so hard to grasp, he thought.
My grandfather’s father fought in World War One, just a hundred years ago, but that’s so distant in the past that it might as well have been fought by Roman legions. No one alive now actually remembers it. In another hundred years it will be as distant to people living then as the Civil War is to me, he thought. And in nine hundred years, it will be as distant as “Beowulf” or the crusades is now.
Another thousand years and I’m back to Christ, back before the Dark Ages, before the plague, before people understood that the planets circled the sun. The world was small and flat.
And I’m not even halfway to Djoser and Imhotep.
He stood, grabbed his backpack in his hand and headed around the pyramid for the southern wall where the Tomb of Kanakht was waiting, had been waiting for five thousand years.
The area was deserted; the parking lot dark and empty. No one was standing guard at the tomb. Tim put his hand on the iron bar of the gate and pulled. It swung open easily. He nodded to himself, he had been right about the broken lock.
Stepping past the gate, he stopped for a moment listening and calming himself.
He clicked on the flashlight.
He was standing on an iron grate. Two steps ahead, it disappeared. Tim took one step and looked down. An open, narrow staircase spiraled underground. There was no banister, just a central post or newel to provide a handhold. He grabbed the newel and began his descent. The iron lattice work of the staircase steps scattered the flashlight’s beam into pale shards of light that were quickly eaten by the heavy darkness.
I should have counted the steps, he thought after what seemed a full minute of climbing down the narrow stairs. When he paused to shine the flashlight around him he saw that he was near three pale beige walls. The entrance above him was beyond the reach of his flashlight’s beam. A few more steps brought the sand covered floor into view.
He stepped off and bent down to look closely at the floor. There were smudged footprin
ts, but the sand was too loose to hold anything well defined.
Two of the walls of the chamber were painted with scenes typical of tombs for high officials. One held a mural of men hunting hippos from a reed boat, the other showed Kanakht and his wife seated before an array of naked dancers at a banquet. The scenes were not completed, Tim realized. In some areas the painting gave way to line sketches as if the artist had not had time to finish the work. Apparently Kanakht had died before the tomb was complete.
Other than the stairwell there was only one exit from the chamber. Walking toward it, Tim played his flashlight on the floor, watching the smudged footprints. The lintel of the doorway smacked hard against the top of his head. He stepped back and brought his free hand to his scalp to check for bleeding. Although he was not tall for a modern American, he was about half an inch taller than the mourners for whom the doorway had been built.
Tim rubbed his forehead and thought about the tall tourist. His head would almost have touched the low ceiling.
The next chamber also was empty. Unfinished murals edged the top of the walls; the ceiling was painted dark blue with stars. A sketch showed that the sky goddess Nut was to be painted supporting the ceiling painting. In the corners of the room sat round spotlights, placed there when the tomb had been open to tourists.
Tim entered the next chamber, careful to duck as he passed through the doorway.
A huge granite sarcophagus lid, much larger than Tim remembered from other tombs, took up the center of the room. Tim moved the flashlight’s beam around the walls, which were more fully decorated than the previous chambers. Diagonally from him, there was another opening, a hole more than a doorway; probably the entrance robbers had used thousands of years ago. It wasn’t surprising, almost all the tombs had been raided. That was why King Tutankhamun’s tomb was so unusual; ancient thieves had overlooked it and the treasures buried with the boy-king had been found intact.
The sarcophagus lid had been raised and then swung to the side to allow the modern grave robbers, calling themselves archaeologists, to remove the body. The lid was raised about a foot above the floor, balanced on two rough stones under opposing corners. Tim could see that the bottom half of the stone coffin, sunken into the floor, held an opening shaped to receive a mummy. He knelt to look more closely, to be sure that it didn’t hold the two American tourists.
