Dead men’s hearts

Chapter Nine

Ninety minutes later they deplaned at el-Minya, a drab, sprawling city chiefly known for processing sugar and making cheap soaps and perfumes. There, as directed by Phil, they went to a waiting area where transportation to el-Amarna was to be waiting for them. There was nothing there. Passersby looked curiously at the stranded-looking knot of Americans surrounded by videotaping gear in dented metal trunks and valises.

Forrest turned apprehensively to Phil. “I thought there was supposed to be a van to meet us.”

Phil nodded. “Sort of.”

Forrest twitched slightly. “What do you mean, sort of?”

“Sort of a van,” Phil explained.

“Well, where is it? We’re almost two hours late, why isn’t it waiting?”

“They probably went for tea when they heard we’d be late. They’ll be along.”

A tic beside Forrest’s right eye started jumping. “Now, but-look, Phil, we’re on a very tight schedule, we, we need our transportation to be right bang on time, right on the minute.”

“Then my advice is to shoot this thing in Switzerland.”

Phil said pleasantly. “Cheer up, Forrest, you know the way things work here. You ought to be used to it by now.”

“Oh, God, do I know the way they work,” Forrest said, “but I’ll never get used to it. Not in a million years will I get used to it.”

Phil smiled encouragingly at him. “Everything will work out; you can trust me.”

Forrest heaved a great, pathetic sigh, and sank down onto a metal bench. “Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why don’t I ever learn?”

But at that moment, the “sort of a van” came coughing and chugging up to meet them, with two smiling Egyptians in the front seat. It was a doddering old flatbed truck with benches bolted to the bed and a canopy rigged on top, probably used for hauling local workmen to and from their jobs.

“Christ,” said Forrest, but he wasted no time getting his equipment aboard, and within a few minutes they were on their way. They boarded the ferry to cross the Nile, then drove in the deepening twilight past dilapidated tenements, falling-down houses, and beautifully, meticulously cared-for garden plots of tomatoes, onions, wheat, and potatoes, then into the desert, and finally to their lonely destination on the east bank of the Nile. To everyone’s astonishment, and even Phil’s mild surprise, the ship was there waiting for them; a white, modern, two-level affair tied up beside a dusty, rubble-strewn embankment, boxy and welcoming in the uneven glare of a couple of wavery, generator-powered spotlights set up on the shore. On its side, in gleaming metal lettering was its name: Menshiya.

They boarded by means of a gangplank, under the engrossed, unswerving gaze of a row of Arab men from the nearby village of el-Till. A pack of giggling, bakshish- demanding, sociable children (“Hello, mister! What’s you name?”) were kept ineffectually at bay by an unshaven, patently unmenacing local policeman in a frayed, untidy black uniform with a private’s stripe safety-pinned to one sleeve.

The Americans ran this lively gauntlet and reported to the dining room, where the boat’s manager, Mr. Murad Wahab, formally introduced the ship’s captain, Reis Ali, a ferocious-looking, weathered old man who seemed to be wondering how he’d gotten mixed up with all these infidels, and the lined-up staff, ten dark, shy, friendly men, half of whom would work on the upper deck as servers and room attendants, and the rest of them out of sight as cooks and boat crew on the lower.

Mr. Wahab then gave a short speech of welcome on behalf of the Happy Nomad Navigation Company, cordial in tone, but consisting mainly of admonitions to report to the dining room at the stated times if they wished to eat. Breakfasts would be from seven to eight o’clock, lunches from one to two, dinners from seven to eight-thirty. Exceptions would be made in cases of illness only. Tea, coffee, and biscuits would be served on the poolside terrace at ten-thirty in the morning and four in the afternoon for forty-five minutes. Guests were strongly advised not to drink or brush their teeth with water from the taps. Ample bottled water would be provided to each room daily. Women guests were asked to refrain from using the swimming pool or wearing immodest clothing when the ship was close to land, as when going through the locks at Asyut the following day.

Mr. Wahab, himself an amiable man, moderated the severity of this presentation with the announcement that this evening’s special meal would be a typical American dinner in honor of the guests and their recent national holiday of Thanksgiving.

Whereupon the four servers who had gone back into the kitchen returned with happy smiles, wearing white jackets and black ties, and bearing trays of roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and Yorkshire pudding.

It made a pretty good combination, Gideon thought.

The staterooms were forward on either side of a lushly carpeted corridor. Gideon and Julie’s surprised them with its roominess, and with the small but sparkling bathroom and shower. Heavy curtains covered two big rectangular windows. There was a table, three chairs, an ottoman, a TV set, a knee-high refrigerator, an ample chest of drawers. The air-conditioning was quiet and effective. The only importantdeficiency was readily repaired by their moving a night table aside and pushing the two single beds together.

“Posh is right,” Julie said appreciatively. “I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble living here for a few days. As long as our luggage catches up with us pretty soon.”

“ Bukhra,” said Gideon.

“That’s what worries me.” She took a hairbrush out of her bag, put it on the chest, and lined it up neatly with the edge. “Well, it certainly makes unpacking a snap.” She held up a plastic container. “At least we have toothbrushes.”

She kicked off her shoes, plumped up the pillow and sat on the bed. “Is there anything cold to drink in here?”

In the little refrigerator he found miniature soft-drink bottles, water, and a stack of plastic glasses. He poured them each a glass of mandarin-flavored Schweppes. “Did you happen to notice the name of the ship?”

“The Menshiya!”

“Right. Phil probably lined it up on account of the name. Do you happen to know what the original Menshiya was?”

She shook her head.

“Have you ever heard of the Deir el-Bahri cache?”

She sighed. “Gideon, dear, have I ever pointed out to you that you have a slightly annoying habit of starting your stories by asking me if I’ve heard of something that hardly anybody has ever heard of? The Deir el-Bahri cache, the Menshiya, the Neiman-Marcus fragment-”

“Many times,” he said, flopping into one of the beige armchairs, putting his feet up on the ottoman, and stretching comfortably out on his lower spine. “It’s just a pedagogical stratagem, well known to ensure listener participation in the communication process.”

“Well, sometimes it just ensures listener teeth-gnashing. What’s the Deir el-Bahri cache? Just tell me, don’t worry about my participation in the communication process.”

Deir el-Bahri, he explained, was the name of one of the rocky burial canyons near the Valley of the Kings. In it, at the beginning of the Twenty-first Dynasty in about 1000 B.C., the authorities took action to protect the great pharaohs’ mummies from the profanations of the thief-families that had been robbing the nearby royal tombs for five hundred years. They had gathered up the desecrated mummies from their plundered tombs and put them all in a single place-the tomb of Queen Inhapy, behind the more famous, more showy temple of Hatshepsut, and there, stripped long ago of anything worth stealing, they were to lie undisturbed and eventually be forgotten.

Centuries passed. Millennia passed. Then, in 1891, a thief named Ahmed er-Rassul, a member of one of the local families that still made their living by systematically looting the same tombs-a piece here, a piece there, so that the market was never flooded-had a falling-out with his brothers. Out of spite he led officials into the unremembered mass tomb, which only the er-Rassul family knew about. There the officials were stunned to see, stacked on top of one another like so many logs, something that scholars thought no longer existed: the actual, preserved bodies of most of the legendary pharaohs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties: Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramses II-“

“And where does the Menshiya come into it?” Julie said, finishing her drink and stretching. “I don’t mean to rush you, but we have to be up early tomorrow morning.”

“They couldn’t leave the bodies where they were,” Gideon said, “so they shipped them to Cairo for safekeeping. The boat that took them was called the Menshiya. Can you imagine? The ancient kings of Thebes on their last journey after three thousand years. The news got out and people lined the shore all the way from Luxor to Cairo. Women tearing their hair, men firing guns into the air…”

“Can I ask you something? Did you actually know all this before, or did you learn it from boning up these last few weeks?”

“Don’t ask rude questions. Anyway, there’s more. I haven’t gotten to the best part. When they arrived, these old mummies had to be assessed for duties, like anything else coming into Cairo. The problem was, there wasn’t any classification they fit into. They weren’t stone, they weren’t cloth, they weren’t wood. So the tax collector and the officials got their heads together, came up with a compromise solution… and the greatest rulers of the ancient world made their triumphal entry into modern Cairo classified as dried fish.”

Julie spluttered with laughter. “Not that far off, when you think about it. You know, there’s got to be a moral there somewhere.”

“There sure does. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what it is.”

The morning began on a happy note. The baggage had arrived at el-Minya at 12:30 a.m., and Phil had somehow gotten it delivered to the ship in (and on) two rickety taxis. So as individuals began emerging from their staterooms a little before 7 a.m., they found their luggage stacked neatly in the corridor beside their doors. There were yips of joy as people were reunited with their underwear and toiletries. Even Haddon went out of his way to shake Phil’s hand.

It was all mildly amazing and a bit amusing to Gideon. At home Phil’s life was an exercise in planned disorganization. Constantly behind in his schedule, constantly overlooking things like bills and appointments, perpetually late (“Sorry, I remembered I had to do the laundry.”

“Sorry, the rubber plant needed repotting.”), he bumbled along from one day to another, happily enough, to be sure, but always seemingly on the edge of chaos. Here, in his professional capacity, he was a man of infinite capacity, his fingers on the strings of every available resource.

During breakfast, a bright buffet of melons, figs, dates, tangerines, and warm loaves of sweet bread, Forrest went over the shooting schedule. All of the morning’s interviews would take place in or around the Tel el-Amarna Museum not far from the ship. At 8:00, Haddon would talk about his early experiences there. At 9:30, it would be Gideon’s turn; he would discuss Pharaoh Akhenaten and his times. And Arlo would display and discuss some of the old finds from Lambert’s day at 11:00. TJ had an off-day.

“But which finds?” Arlo asked. “What do you want me to talk about?”

“Anything,” Forrest said. “Talk about jewelry.”

“Well… there a some jewelry here that I’m quite interested in myself, but I don’t know-”

“Fine, perfect.”

In his own way, Arlo looked pleased.

“So long as it’s visual,” Forrest said.

“Well, of course it’s visual.”

“Fine, perfect.”

As Forrest went on, Arlo leaned worriedly toward Gideon. “What does he mean by visual?”

“You’ve got me, Arlo.”

“Isn’t jewelry visual? I mean, by definition?”

“You’d sure think so.”

“I’m really not very good at this sort of thing,” Arlo said.

“Okay,” Forrest said, “anybody who’s not involved in the shooting, you’re free to spend the morning wherever you want. But remember, the boat has to leave at one o’clock sharp, so please -give my ulcer a break and be back in plenty of time. We’re on a tight schedule and I wouldn’t even want to try to extend our time in Egypt.”

And miss even a single, splendid day of Anatolian boar-hunting, Gideon thought.