by Warren Adler
The chatter of river birds drew his attention to the water, rippling forward on its serpentine path, proud and arrogant in its timelessness. It mocked man and all his vanities. It had witnessed the follies of a thousand generations, bestowing the sustenance of its bounty on countless nations that rose and fell in its moist embrace. It survived every contrivance of man’s imagination, his greed, his joys and sorrows, his agonies. Nor did it fear man’s potential for extinction. What did it matter? It would continue its endless journey from deep Africa to the Mediterranean until the end of earthly time.
Samya’s voice startled him. He had not heard her approach, but her alert, eager eyes told him that she had met with success. As if in celebration, she carried two pita loaves filled with ful, and an earthenware jar of cool milk, which she set on the ground between them. He attacked the ful with salivating fury.
“He is here,” she announced. Si stopped chewing, his mouth filled, unable to ask the questions that stumbled in his mind.
“The mullah was very cautious,” Samya said, “very suspicious. He is not known here as Ezzat. But it is unmistakably him. He is known as the professor. He knew very little about him. I told the mullah he was my father. Fatherhood is a very important thing in these villages.” She sighed, remembering, he was sure, her own sad experiences. “He questioned me very carefully. I told him about the university and the man we had met in Edfu. I was very convincing. The mullah, too, is curious.”
“And Isis?”
“The professor has a wife and children. Beyond that, I was afraid to inquire.”
The caution seemed sensible and he nodded agreement.
“He said the professor lived about three miles from here. His directions were elaborate, much more than the information he had about them.” They finished the ful and the milk.
He wondered if his feeling for her had invested her with inordinate wisdom. She had undone the black head covering of her malaya, showing her youth again, and he moved toward her to kiss her lips, which were soft and tasted milky.
“We had better go,” she said.
She stood up, peeking cautiously at first over the high grass. The heat had begun to nudge a light sweat out of his pores.
“There is a narrow road,” she said. “But we must not risk that. We will go through the fields.” With her instinct for direction, he did not dispute her. “I will go first. Just follow me at a distance.”
She set a pace that seemed, at first, almost leisurely, cutting into the fields when she saw a group of people approaching at a distance. Once, she squatted against a shade tree at the edge of a field, waiting until a worker in the distance had finished weeding a row of beans in slow, back-creaking motions. He followed, obeying her actions to the letter, trusting her instincts.
She moved to the edge of an irrigation ditch, following its trough of muddy water, almost to the point where the desert began. Crouching in a copse of palm trees, she waved him forward, and he joined her. In the distance, they saw some young boys harvesting the low-growing bean crop. The land was flat. Where the desert began, he saw a cluster of mudbrick structures attached to each other. They appeared ramshackle, their walls not quite plumb.
A black-clad woman moved along the shade of a wall. She held a baby in her arms while two small children played in the brown dust. A black goat and two scruffy sheep were tethered to a post near the entrance to one of the houses. Nearby, a gray donkey stood impassively, its front legs tied together by a rope staked to the ground. She nodded.
“Here,” Si whispered, incredulous. “He lives here?”
He watched as Samya’s eyes surveyed the landscape. A narrow, rutted road bisected two fields. It was a breezeless day and the dust of the road seemed too heat-exhausted to rise, giving her a clear view of its straight line to the river in the distance.
“It must be there,” she said. “As I said, the mullah was quite elaborate with his directions.”
“Ezzat is an educated man, a scholar. He couldn’t be living under such circumstances,” Si said.
She gripped his arm. “You must go,” she said. He started to move forward, but her grip restrained him.
“I will go and watch in the village,” she said, recalling the sense of danger. His resolve seemed to drain away. It is pointless, he told himself, frightened for her. “If I see them in the village, I will come back to warn you.”
“And then?” he added, pointing with his chin to the forlorn houses.
She shrugged. One had to assume, he decided, that Zakki’s men would be in the village sooner or later. Yet he did not want to go alone.
“I shouldn’t go,” he said. “If it is them, I can only risk doing them harm. And I’m not sure that Isis is there.”
“It is what you want,” Samya said, offering an odd reassurance.
“I want you,” he said, reaching for her hand. “The other doesn’t seem to matter anymore.” His eyes searched hers, finding the doubt.
“Come with me,” he said, tightening his grip on her fingers. He knew, of course, that she was too practical for that. Schooled in survival, she knew instinctively the methods of self-protection. In her black malaya, she could lose herself among the village women, for whom to display public individuality was an affront to society. Considering the passion of the predators, the precaution offered an undeniable layer of extra protection.
“I will be very cautious,” she assured him.
He fought his reluctance to release her, feeling suddenly the abstract terror of her loss, flailing himself for his inability to control circumstances. It was more than caution that moved her. She knew that this was his obsession. Not hers. It had to be resolved by him alone.
“When will you come back?”
“Soon.”
He could not find the will to resist. He watched her move along the edges of the green fields until the heat shimmers destroyed any focus on the far distance. When he could not see her anymore, he turned toward the brown monochromatic landscape, watching the motionless scene, as if all life were suspended, lost in a single flat dimension, timeless and inert.
He stepped from the green river-fed carpet of fertility to the parched, deadened earth. A swarm of desert flies, like a friendly military honor guard, escorted him forward.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
As he did every morning, Dr. Ezzat placed his ancient field glasses against his pale, dim eyes to watch the birds. Observing these creatures streaking across the sky, in the changeless patterns of their breed, had become more ritual than curiosity. The process gave him reassurance, conclusive evidence of continuity.
Continuity, he knew, was the obsession of all archaeologists, as if the proof of the past was necessary to validate the future, about which he had lost all confidence. He was convinced that when the ultimate holocaust arrived, the birds, in some aberrant species, would survive in the wasteland of the future, as the radioactive waste settled its deadly blanket over the earth’s crust.
In the flight of the birds, the wagtails and onyx swallows, the spur-winged clover, even in the massed squadrons of Nile ducks, pochards, teals, mallards, and the indigenous Egyptian geese, he was convinced he saw the future of life. He was also convinced that the ancient Egyptians, with their herons and falcons and egrets carved into the timeless stone, offered another clue to this surety. Wisdom was finite, a lifetime of study had concluded, and the ancient Egyptians knew it. There was, indeed, nothing new under the sun.
Secure in this knowledge, he removed the field glasses from his eyes and placed them on a plank beneath the paneless window of his tiny abode. The plank was cluttered with chipped pottery, dog-eared books, crumpled papers, bits of dry uneaten food, the tin cup, still moist with the dregs of the herbal leaves that Isis used to prepare his morning tea. She had not bothered to rouse him, but placed the cup of tea on the plank, not realizing that, although he lay supine and unmoving on the pallet,
he rarely slept. But he did not want to spoil the sense of her consideration, which presupposed that it was better for him to remain in the void of sleep rather than face the day with his myriad infirmities.
He hadn’t expected himself to live this long, to nearly eighty. Both his parents had died in their fifties, softened perhaps by the affluent life of that era. He placed his longevity squarely on the shoulders of Isis, who had, unwittingly, proved necessary to his long life.
Isis had always been the supreme test of his humanity. He knew that almost at once, facing the near hysterical woman who pressed her on him, as if she were a debt that had to be paid.
“You must take her and hide her,” the woman had begged as the girl squatted on the floor of his office, a huddled, pitiful figure, a far cry from the memory of the fat, pink baby whom Thompson had jostled on his knee. The girl had listened with indifference as the woman recycled her story, stunning him with its graphic, painful images. The woman, it was obvious, had relished the telling of it, as if she herself had wielded the castrating knife. Looking at Isis, he was certain the girl’s reportage was far more matter of fact.
How she had managed to steal away from the Bedouins and find her way back to the City of the Dead, the only home she could ever remember, was nothing short of a miracle as if she had received some secret instruction from her own mother, who had found her own path of escape from the pursuing monster.
Indeed, finding safe passage for the woman’s offspring seemed to Ezzat as if it was necessary for her belief in a personal salvation, a way to neutralize the horrors of her own evil acts and soften the judgment of Allah in the realm of the afterlife. Finding a safe haven for this much abused girl child, he supposed she believed might assure her a place in paradise. For him, that was hardly a consideration.
***
Zakki’s reputation had, by then, penetrated even Ezzat’s own sphere. By then, too, the silver chalice of the revolution had tarnished considerably and there were even those in his own circle who agreed that the people needed their dream weed as much as bread. He was, he knew, unmoved by the girl’s plight, although aghast at the horror of the story.
And he was not without fear. Reprisal seemed almost a necessity to avenge such an atrocity. He could feel, too, the urgent shaft of pain in his own crotch, discovering that even he, who had wrestled to subvert the urge, while channeling energy into other pursuits, could not shed the penultimate fear of a lost manhood.
What could he do, he had protested? He was involved now with the monumental international effort to move the Temple of Abu Simbel from the inevitable flood to be caused by the construction of the big Aswan Dam that the Russians were building. But, then the woman had dredged up Thompson. Not his name. But the deduction was inescapable.
It was Zakki who had brought Farrah and the baby to her on the day of Thompson’s death. She had recounted the threat, Farrah’s terror and flight. Ezzat knew instantly what she had meant.
Thompson’s death had left a residue of guilt. It was he who had found the body and notified the Americans, who efficiently disposed of everything, including the man’s existence. It continued to haunt his memory.
The woman pleaded, while the girl sat nursing her terror behind a blank mask. She seemed so unlikely a prey. And yet, her instinct for survival was formidable, considering the distance she had to traverse.
Perhaps he had nodded assent or given some other sign of compassion. He would never be sure. He had deliberately created a life without human ties, without obligations. Then, suddenly, the woman was gone and he had acquired this albatross. The next day, he left with Isis for Abu Simbel.
He established housekeeping in a modest villa near the site, letting others assume that she might be his daughter or, maybe, his mistress.
He had his work, although even the enormous concentration required could not relieve him of the ever-present gnawing fear of discovery followed, surely, by some form of horrible death.
It was not in his nature to be cruel. An abstract idealism and a certain self-righteous piety about human degradation in its most blatant forms, poverty, disease, repression, had prompted him into a brief foray of political romanticism. Deposing the monarchy seemed to satisfy both his own need, and the larger purpose. But once that had been done, the spectacle of Nasser seemed a worse travesty, and he had turned away from activism with disgust. Better to poke around in the relics of yesterday’s megalomania, he had decided.
Abu Simbel had been a godsend, marred now by this obscene irony of his brief political past. Isis actually reminded him of some stray dog, scruffy, unaffectionate, teeth poised to snap at the tiniest hint of a hostile act. Except for her fear, which was in itself doglike, she showed barely a trace of a human persona. He had, he assured himself, tried to extend to her the hand of kindness, but she had treated the effort with indifference.
“I knew your mother,” he had told her, remembering vaguely the pretty girl with the green eyes, like hers, who had joyfully attended Thompson. He remembered, too, the obvious involvement, berating Thompson for it as if it had been some crime. It filled the overflowing beaker of his guilt to be reminded that it was he who had prevailed upon Thompson to get moving with his story. He tried to explain this to Isis and to justify Farrah’s actions. The girl was indifferent.
“You don’t care?”
The girl shrugged. It seemed beyond the periphery of her consciousness and her reaction was to absorb herself in an interminable kayf.
“What choice had your mother?” he told her. “She traded her absence for your life.” Perhaps, he was ascribing a nobility to her act. Why the devil was he defending her?
“All right,” he said, drawing no reaction, pulling down the curtain. He had tried other ploys as well to draw her out, finally withdrawing himself to pure recrimination.
“Some fix you got us into.” He would bombard her with that more out of pique than brutality, and she would skulk away as if he had slapped her. Finally, he ignored her completely, letting her live a kind of protected pet life, roaming around the temple construction sites on the psychological tether of their mutual fear. That she understood.
“Just make yourself invisible,” he told her. “Don’t talk to anyone.” He didn’t really have to tell her that, and she seldom left the villa except in early morning or at twilight, when the army of foreign workers left for their ethnically segregated encampments. He had toyed with the idea of dumping her somewhere, sending her abroad, boarding her in some remote Nubian desert village, but he declined for a variety of synthetic reasons. The effort was too time-consuming, and he did not want to bring strangers into the orbit of these events. Nor did he have any illusions about his own culpability. He was harboring someone who had, for whatever the reasons, committed so grotesque an act that vengeance was an absolute certainty. Even the fact that Zakki had killed Thompson in cold blood could not, somehow, equalize the atrocity. Death he could understand, but the loss of one’s manhood…
Perhaps it was his study of the ancient Egyptians, who had begun to seem more real than contemporary people, that added to his revulsion. To them, nothing was more sacred than their sexuality and the attendant joys of procreation. The frenetic replication of themselves, the awesome and devoted worship of the male erection, artfully hewn out of the Aswan quarries as obelisks, was embedded in the genes of the people, his people. Zakki, he knew, would stop at nothing to find this killer of his manhood and all who might willingly abet the culprit. Like me, thought Ezzat. He was as marked as if he had worn a skin of blood-red stripes in a white-duned desert.
But he couldn’t keep her locked in a cage. Actually, she was so uncommunicative she seemed in a cage of her own making. Imprisoned in her somber cocoon, she drifted, furtive and alien, in some secret dank impenetrable swamp of anger and fear.
Thankfully, the enormous task to which he was committed, helping to supervise the moving of four hundred thousand tons
of temple from its perch in the sandstone rock cliff to another spot ninety feet above it, was enough to absorb his every waking hour, and he was able to shove Isis and all her consequences to an obscure corner of his mind. It was enough that he was hindered in this task by the jabber of conflicting opinions, arguing engineers and archaeologists, an army of heat-crazed workmen and platoons of flat-faced, implacable Russians who considered the task theirs alone.
He despised Nasser for bringing the Russians to Egypt, with their overbearing, bureaucratic joylessness and paranoia. To them, Egypt was exile, and they expressed their frustration by maintaining themselves in superior and antiseptic isolation. Bringing in the Russians was the final betrayal of the revolution, Ezzat had decided, another alien occupation that Egypt had to endure.
But the saving of Abu Simbel transcended everything. At least present-day Egypt would not fail the ubiquitous spirit of Ramses II and his crowning masterpiece, this temple to the imagined glory of the three great enduring gods of that millennium, Ptah, god of the Underworld; AmenRa, patron god of Thebes; and Ha-Rakhte, the sun god. The sly old bastard had placed four sixty-five-foot statues of himself at the temple’s entrance and, as if to assuage his regal loneliness, two smaller statues of his mother and his favorite wife.
In the press of events and all its attendant aggravations, his interest in Isis paled and, although the fear was an ever-present specter, they both settled into a routine of indifference.
Then, suddenly, the long-lit fuse sputtered to the point of impact.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The wall to protect the temple had been fully erected, and the laborious and painstaking task of disassembling the ancient temple had begun. They had already reached the second hall and had begun removing great chunks of the beautifully preserved wall reliefs, showing a heroic Ramses on his chariot, speeding to some mythic battle.
