Tommy continued. “In terms of options—there’s the dig itself, but you’d have to be prepped on what to do, and how not to damage the samples, and also how to label them properly. So, I’m afraid, your choice is between kitchen duty and post-dig labeling.”
“You can’t be serious,” Luke scoffed. “Do you think I came here to wash dirty pots and catalog old bones?”
Tommy’s face grew stone-cold, or more stone-cold, to be precise, since he wasn’t a ray of sunshine to begin with. I wished Luke would just stop with his macho posturing or whatever this was. Alarmed, I watched a little crease form on Tommy’s forehead. When his eyes slid over my face again, I mentally flinched. He must’ve been super unhappy with me for bringing my friends here.
To Luke Tommy said, “Sure, I’m going to let you join the excavation crew. Do you know how to use the tools to get stuff out of the ground without breaking it? Can you tell a trowel from a plumb bob? And are you aware of the procedures we must follow in case we do come across human remains, or, as you call them, ‘old bones’? Or does your entire knowledge of archaeology come from watching Indiana Jones movies?”
Stunned into belligerent silence by Tommy’s outburst, Luke seethed for the rest of breakfast. I couldn’t be seen publicly taking Tommy’s side over my friend’s, but secretly Tommy’s putting Luke in his place pleased me.
By the time I finished with my porridge, I made my decision about my work assignment. I wanted to be on labeling duty. Minh and Luke joined me, and Lori and Rowen, surprisingly, chose to help out in the kitchen.
We all tagged along while Tommy took Lori and Rowen deeper into the cafeteria tent, around the serving counter, and into the fiery heart of the field kitchen. There, he introduced my friends to Riley Hassan, the camp’s head cook. Born in Hobart to Lebanese Australian parents, Riley first met my father when young Riley was an apprentice chef straight out of cooking school. Years later, when Dad had the first project of his own to manage, he sought out Riley and invited him to join the dig. Ever since, the two of them frequently worked together. On rare occasions when Riley was not available, it was a real struggle to find a good replacement.
Riley and I greeted each other like old friends before he and Tommy led Lori and Rowen away to get them started, leaving me, Minh, and Luke to our own devices. I wanted to chat with Riley some more but didn’t get a chance, though he winked at me and said something embarrassing about me growing up so fast. This was the thing about being a camp brat: Everyone still saw me as some little rascal running around in her shorty shorts. Luke snorted at Riley’s words, and despite my amazing self-control, I reddened in the face.
Tommy had told us to wait for his return, but I was familiar with the camp’s layout by now and had a solid idea where the labeling tent was. I told my friends I was going, and, having nothing better to do, Minh and Luke followed me out into the suffocating heat.
WHEN A STRANGER COMES FROM THE DESERT
Dr. Archer Palombo’s booming voice could be heard before we even entered the tent. Memories warmed my heart when Dr. Palombo’s large frame came into view. He and his family were a common fixture at my parents’ house all throughout my childhood. The Scholls and the Palombos used to be tight. We celebrated everything together, from birthdays to tenure milestones. That is, before the divorce. Archer’s wife, Milena, was a close friend of my mother, and to preserve their friendship, Milena distanced herself from anything involving my dad. Which meant no more loud and busy end-of-the-year parties with the Palombos.
Walking up and down the length of a long and narrow table, Dr. Palombo reminded me of a father hawk looking over his beloved hatchlings—the four volunteers he had in his care. They were busy working through their allocated bags of finds. Among the volunteers was Rufus, Dr. Palombo’s youngest son, and, at thirteen years of age, likely the youngest person on this dig site. Rufus was the first to notice me.
“Alif!” He jumped out of his seat, nearly tipping over his water basin as he came in for a hug. Some of the muddied liquid sloshed on the table, prompting the other volunteers to give Rufus evil looks. He was like an overeager puppy, full of energy and enthusiasm.
Clad in his camp-issued khakis and white shirt, Dr. Palombo still carried a touch of his eccentric style. A red silky scarf traveled around his neck and a black dusty fedora sat crooked on his head. The hat was worn ironically, of course. Real archaeologists were not huge fans of Indiana Jones–type fedoras, but most had a healthy sense of humor. Dr. Palombo’s expression changed from annoyance to a huge smile when he spotted me.
“You made it!” he exclaimed. “And here’s Ms. Minh Quoc, gorgeous as always! You’re all grown up! Amazing!”
Minh grinned at him; hers was a rare, disarming smile. I introduced Luke to Dr. Palombo and Rufus, explaining that we’d all gone to school together. “Luke’s waiting for his acceptance into Dunstan Law,” I added.
“Well, here’s one sure thing—the world needs more lawyers.” There was not a hint of teasing in Dr. Palombo’s voice, but he did give me a mischievous wink when Luke looked away.
After Dr. Palombo crushed me in a bear hug, he repeated the gesture with Minh and Luke. “And what about our lovely Minh? Are you here because you’re thinking of following in the footsteps of our own brave, dear Dr. Andreas Scholl?”
Minh looked away and mumbled something about doing a gap year. The ugly truth was that even if she did receive her first-choice university offer, there was no guarantee she could afford to go. Therefore, she was seriously considering a gap year to work. Her family was never well-off, and this trip to Dubai was only possible thanks to some help from my dad and Luke’s family, but we were sworn to secrecy on this. We didn’t want to embarrass Minh, so the official story was that she was a recipient of some grant from a generous sponsor. I was just glad she didn’t go digging into this explanation. It wouldn’t take her long to uncover that Tucker Oil didn’t really exist.
To Dr. Palombo Minh said, “I’m considering a career as a car mechanic, like my granddad.” This was the first I’d heard of it, but I let it go.
Luke was not so subtle. “Going to break some gender barriers, huh, Minh?” he asked.
Minh shivered from a nonexistent draft. “At least I’m going to do something original with my life. Unlike some third-generation wannabe lawyer.”
Dr. Palombo changed the topic, looking my way. “Andreas was really torn he couldn’t be here when you arrived, Alif. But he’s been busier than expected.” He urged Rufus to come back to his seat at the labeling table before taking me and my friends aside.
“What’s with all the foreign-student volunteers?” I asked Dr. Palombo when we were out of hearing range of the table-bound group. “I mean, it’s a lot more international grad students than usual. Where are all the locals?”
“Well … there were some unforeseen circumstances affecting the logistics of the dig and Andreas had to issue a call for more grad students to come out here. Most of our local student force, and quite a few Londoners as well, pulled out right after we finished with all the heavy-duty excavation and extraction work.”
“What happened?” Minh asked.
Dr. Palombo sighed, staring into space, gathering his thoughts or being caught in a memory. “This place is nun. Apparently.”
“What, like bad luck?” My knowledge of Arabic was eclectic at best, random vocab fluttering in my brain like spooked butterflies ever since we landed in Dubai. But the word Dr. Palombo used? I knew that one. Nun was the fourteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet. Other languages, like Hebrew and Aramaic, also used the same or a similar pictogram for nun. The pictogram itself looked like a zigzag, but more likely was meant to symbolize a snake—hence its evil or “bad luck” connotation.
Dr. Palombo nodded gravely. “It’s like we’re on the set of some ridiculous Hollywood movie! We’re certain we know how the rumor started though. There was a minor accident here on the second day of the excavation, and two men—a local named Amir we hired to operate
the excavator and one of my own students, Matthew—got injured and had to be taken to a hospital. Amir told us that Matthew caused the accident when he became sort of ‘entranced’ and released the harness too soon … When we finally managed to speak with Matthew in the hospital, he told us he saw a stone-walled city rise out of the sand far out in the desert. This city was surrounded by a flock of white birds—like a halo. This is pretty much verbatim. After that, neither Amir nor Matthew wanted to return to the excavation site. And now we’re having trouble retaining students at the dig. Some people are … uncomfortable.”
“Superstitious bunch, aren’t they, these locals?” Luke swallowed whatever he was going to say next when I glared at him.
I said, “It sounds like this Matthew was the one who started the rumor.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Dr. Palombo said. “The damage is done. We just have to work with what we’ve got. We’ll make do.” He went back to the table and started setting up our workstations. The three of us got seated and were given some easy tasks to do first.
There’s a certain art to the processing of finds. When I was a kid, Dad would set me up with a plastic basin and give me little trinkets to wash. I would sink each object—unassuming pebbles, arrowheads, ceramic fragments—under water and brush off the dirt with gentle strokes, careful not to damage the object’s surface. Not much has changed since then. Washing, marking, and sorting are still the three pillars of finds processing. And we already had ten days’ worth of stuff in need of cleaning and labeling. Here were the rules to follow: Work with one bag of finds at a time, and always, always comply with the filing system’s rules. If you don’t, you might mislabel things, and that’s going to cause trouble later on. Each bag of finds we were given had a site code—a two-letter abbreviation for the site itself and the last digits of the year of excavation. Dad’s site was split into three sectors, each coded clockwise. I picked up an unopened bag labeled ceramics. I took it to my station, on my way grabbing an empty tray. I poured some water into the tray …
When I checked my watch again, it was nearly lunchtime. I stood up to stretch my legs and let the momentum carry me out of the tent. Minh followed me outside. Together we covered a small distance to where Luke was smoking in a shadowed spot overlooking the desert. Droplets of sweat were streaming down his face, which must have washed away his sunblock. I wondered where Luke’s baseball cap was. I could already see red patches on his forehead where his skin was starting to burn.
“How can you smoke in this heat?” I asked, but Luke had no chance to give me his snarky response because a commotion drew our attention. A crowd was forming at the far right of the dig camp, down where the outer tents met the desert proper. From afar, a familiar blotch of red stood out in the thickening sea of white, gray, and beige—Dr. Palombo’s scarf. Before I fully registered what I was doing, my legs were carrying me toward the chaos.
“Some excitement, at last!” Luke commented as he fought to keep up with me. Leaving Minh behind, the two of us got to the outer edge of the gathering crowd first. Standing on tiptoe, a girl with cropped red hair was saying something to her friend that ended with “a French tourist!”
I joined her example and stretched higher, trying to see above the crowd. To my right, a young man with a shaved head, turning pink under the merciless sun, was murmuring to Ada, who we had met yesterday, “Dehydrated and completely out of it.”
To which Ada replied in a low, heavily accented voice, “Maybe our defectors weren’t wrong after all. Maybe this place is bad luck.”
I saw him then, the reason for this gathering. They carried him away on a makeshift cot. A white man, possibly in his late forties, though it was hard to tell exactly. His face had suffered some awful sunburns, and his hair was bleached white.
Dr. Palombo, one of the people carrying the cot, noticed me in the crowd and called over his shoulder by way of explanation, “He wandered in from the desert … Alif, why don’t you go back to the admin tent and wait for your father there? He’s due to come back any second now.”
I was about to take off when the man lying semiconscious in the cot opened his eyes wide and grabbed my hand. “Dup Shimati awaits. She grows restless.”
He passed out again.
Frozen in my spot, I watched as they carried him into the med tent.
“What was that about? Dup Shimati?” Minh asked, her tongue awkward on the foreign words.
I hadn’t seen when she caught up with us.
“I have no idea,” I told her.
In the spot where the man had touched it, my hand was cold amid the heat.
THE THING ABOUT CURSES
If adventure filmmakers are to be believed, every significant past archaeological discovery is plagued by a horrible curse or two. A disturbed mummy will come alive and devour the hearts and brains of everyone implicated in the mummy’s unearthing … A wicked artifact will poison the souls of whoever dared take it out of its altar at the center of an ancient subterranean temple. No matter how the story began it’ll most likely end with a hero sprinting away from the source of the curse while swinging a bullwhip and smacking the heads of the undead against each other as if they’re petrified coconuts. (Real archaeologists aren’t normally very buff, by the way, so I seriously doubted they’d hold their own against an army of mummified nasties thirsty for vengeance.)
What allegedly befell the excavation group led by Howard Carter, the discoverer of King Tutankhamun’s tomb (though whether it was truly his discovery or that of a local water boy who fatefully stumbled across some steps in the sand is a point of debate), is probably the most well-known non-movie-invented curse in archaeology’s history. As legend had it, the inscription on the tomb heralded a warning: They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death. Conveniently though, the inscription was never photographed, and the plaque holding the said inscription went missing shortly after the tomb’s discovery.
King Tut’s first victim to be swiftly visited by the “wings of death” was Carter’s pet canary. When the poor bird got swallowed by a cobra (I’m not making this shit up), all hell broke loose at the excavation site, panic quickly reaching far beyond the site’s bounds. The importance of the cobra as a pharaonic symbol of royalty, confirmed by its prominent placement on the pharaoh’s crown, didn’t escape the fearful attention of those fearing the curse.
The notion of student volunteerism didn’t really exist back then, and archaeologists had to hire local labor to work the digs. It was said that after Carter’s canary met its end, the locals working Carter’s dig became reluctant to continue on with the excavation. Maybe they had a point. Pet canaries aside, notably, it was Carter’s benefactor, Lord Carnarvon, who officially “began” the countdown of Tut-attributed human fatalities. Carnarvon died shortly after Tut’s discovery from an infection caused by a mosquito bite.
But in the end, statistically speaking, King Tut’s curse wasn’t that effective. Out of twenty-five notable citizens (and probably several other people, such as the many unnamed locals working the dig) present at the tomb’s opening, most managed to live into their seventies. Maybe Tut’s curse just took a while to get them? Modern archaeologists are as skeptical of curses as they are of the Indiana Jones franchise, so, naturally, I wasn’t going to put much stock into the weird events happening at Dad’s dig site.
* * *
After the Desert Man was carried away, the crowd quickly dissipated. I stayed on with my friends, lingering at the vague line where the camp ended and the desert proper began. Soon though, Minh lost interest and walked away, leaving me alone with Luke. Then he sighed and left.
Subtle wind was blowing out from the desert, gentle waves moving across the sand, slaves to the wind’s folly. The buzzing sensation remained in my hand where the man had clutched on to me, the cold burn spreading over my skin, even sneaking into my bloodstream. It was just my imagination. It had to be. Still, I rubbed the spot, fingers growing prickly and numb against the clammy
skin. Perhaps I was sticking around here because I hoped to see something in the depths of the desert. Was I expecting a stone-walled city to spring up out of nowhere and claim the horizon? Or maybe a flock of white birds? When my head cleared, all lingering excitement and adrenaline drained away. I started on my way back into camp, my dazed feet stumbling over the sand-laid pathway.
* * *
About thirty minutes following the Desert Man’s grand reentry into civilization, my father arrived at the camp. I dropped the filing I was doing at the admin tent and went outside to greet Dad. His four-wheel drive was encrusted with dust, and Dad’s shadow appeared longer and thicker than anyone else’s. As if he were shrouded in trouble.
By then, Minh and Luke had gone off to the cafeteria. Their excuse for leaving their assigned stations early was that they wanted to gossip with Lori and Rowen about the camp’s “curse,” but I suspected they’d just grown bored with washing and filing. I didn’t blame them. This aspect of archaeological fieldwork was not for everyone. Overhearing Luke’s mutterings about the “tediousness” of archaeology while he was slugging through his bag of finds would be infuriating to me if only I didn’t agree with him on some level. I myself enjoyed processing the finds, but only to a degree. More like I didn’t mind it. Plus it always brought some happy memories from my childhood. But there were other things in life that made me feel a lot more invested—like creative writing. This was a secret I carried close to my heart. No one needed to know about my aspirations, because that way no one would know if I failed.
When Dad saw me, he paused for a second before covering the space between us in long strides and gathering me up into a hug. Dad’s familiar aftershave carried a smell of sweat along with the dry heat of the sand. It made me feel safe.
“Alif, I’m so relieved you made it here without a hitch. Were they nice to you at passport control?”
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