Reflections in the Nile (2 page)

“Yep,” I said around an olive.

“You should be excited, you are about to be related to a very famous person.” Her navy eyes were sparkling.

“Did you find another King Tut's tomb?” I asked carelessly.

“Maybe,” she said smugly. She ate a piece of pita, watching me. She had always been overly dramatic.

“Are you going to tell me or just let the curiosity kill me, Cammy?”

“It's weird.”

“Weirder than your monkey?” Her first find had been a small clay monkey from around the time of Ankhenaton, now lost in the vaults of the Egyptian Museum. It was anatomically correct and
strategically
painted blue. She was still teased about it.

“No,” she said firmly. “It's not like the monkey.” She sighed. “I really can't describe it.”

Oh, great, twenty questions. “Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“It's papyrus.”

“And … ?” I prompted. Really, she had learned too much discretion.

“Well, let me start with the initial hypothesis. The religious artifacts found at the temple—”

I cut her off. “English, dear sister. Plain, everyday English. No references, no footnotes, no mentioning names like Carter, Petrie, Mariette, nobody. What have you found?”

Cammy opened her mouth, then shut it again. “No references?”

“None.”

She tapped her fingers, thinking. “Right. It is possible there are some undiscovered tombs in the eastern desert. We—” She stumbled, and I knew she was rephrasing. “The university … is excavating out there. It's almost a joke, which is why we have mostly grad students working on it. Then we found this subterranean cavern. It looks like it was inhabited at least once. We found several huge earthenware water jugs leaning against one wall.”

“How big is huge?” I asked between bites of baba ghanouj. I love eggplant.

“About five feet tall.”

“Cool.”

“They reminded me of the jars found in Qumran. Do you remember?”

Yep, I remembered. Summertime by the Dead Sea. It had been around one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade and smelled like a rotten egg farm. We'd hiked all over the wadi, with Mom and Cammy commenting and comparing theories about the dig and the find while Father and I followed, sunburned, peeling, and dehydrated. “Go on,” I said.

“Well, these jars we found are filled with papyri. We brought them back to Luxor to unfold….” Her eyes gleamed fanatically. “It's completely amazing, because according to all our tests, the papyri are from about 1450
B.C.E
. That's around the time of Thutmosis the Third,” she said to me, the Egyptologically impaired one. She leaned closer and whispered, “What's so unusual and baffling is that they are depictions like nothing the Egyptians have ever been known to do!”

Citrus and incense teased my nose for just a second.

“They are illustrations,” she continued, with enthusiasm. “However, they are so perfect and so detailed that they look almost like photographs.” She leaned back abruptly. “Then there are the lions.”

I choked on an olive. “Lions?”

Cammy shrugged. “The entire site appears to be where the lions came to die. There are hundreds of bones; generations and generations of lions died there.” Her voice again dropped to a whisper. “I had the eerie sensation they were still watching us.” She shivered.

I took a sip of my bottled water. “Let me get this straight. This is such a marvelous find because you have found photographic-quality illustrations of ancient Egypt?”

“Yes. I think we have, anyway.”

“Are the colors bright? Do they have writing on them, or are they easy to identify as everyday scenes or what?”

Cammy thought for a moment. “We've only unrolled a few. One is a scene of daily life, done in bright colors; another is … well, just unexplainable. Another is a masterpiece of ink and charcoal.”

I felt professional artistic curiosity rise in me. “May I see them?”

Cammy bit her lip, looking at me. “Well, they are kept in high-security cases.”

“But you have the keys?”

“Yeeesss,” she said reluctantly.

“I won't touch them. I'm just curious to see them since I've been drawing Egyptian-style pictures for you since we were kids. Do you realize even your paper dolls were ancient Egyptian?”

Cammy laughed. “So I was a little obsessive. It runs in the family.”

“What am I obsessed with?” I asked foolishly.

“Roots,” she said.

I agreed.

Roots that had kept me connected even while I grew up in alien and foreign lands. Roots that gave me pride in my European heritage and southern family. Roots that consisted of an iron-filled, camellia soft grandmother, Mimi, who had been my best friend and anchor, until her death six months ago.

I woke, not quite rested, my mind still clouded with disturbing dreams. Ancient dreams. Dreams of death, passion, possession. Not my normal fare. I'm more likely to dream about rewriting Cadillac ads and having dinner parties with Monet and Michelangelo. Or better yet, running a Coca-Cola campaign. But the feeling stayed with me. A definite Middle Eastern ambience, exotic, fragrant, and sensual. I shook my head. Apparently fries and chick-pea dip before bed was a really bad idea.

The day passed in a jet-lag blur, but I managed to jot off a few postcards, eat a couple of times, and work halfway through Agatha Christie's ancient Egyptian murder mystery. Then Cammy cracked her whip and the tourist bit began in earnest. She had me walking through the Valley of the Kings by seven in the morning, followed by an extensive tour of Deir El-Bahri, the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut. However, as Camille said, you were either pharaoh, which translated literally to “great house,” or consort. Since there was no word referring to queen as an absolute monarch, every reference to Hatshepsut was masculine. Therefore she was usually depicted as a man.

Camille had taken on her lecturing voice. “No one knows what happened to cause her temple, her obelisks, and her other monuments to be symbolically destroyed—”

I interrupted, “Symbolically destroyed?”

“Yes. You see, her name is obliterated. If she had no name, she would have no part of the afterlife; to destroy her presence here would be to destroy her also in the hereafter. Names were of great consequence; even the gods’ true names were kept secret to protect them. For instance, the name ‘Amun’ literally means ‘Unknowable One,’ which is partially the reason he had such awesome power. So to eradicate Hatshepsut's name would be to make her an unknown, wandering throughout time and eternity.”

I fingered the chipped-away cartouche. “How malicious! I thought pharaoh, regardless of sex, was revered as the incarnation of god on earth? Who would have the authority?”

As I spoke, my stomach churned. I felt a widening around me, a feeling of space, as if I were suspended over a precipice; suddenly I smelled incense and citrus. I blinked rapidly, reaching out to touch the brilliant white stone walls, trying to steady the fuzzy reflections.

I turned to Cammy. “What?”

“I said, ‘You've picked up a lot more about Egypt than you realize, sis,’” Cammy repeated.

“What did you say before that?”

She frowned, apparently confused. “Before?”

“Yeah. You called me something, it began with an ‘R’; a word I haven't heard before. Ray-something? Or maybe it was Ra …?”

Cammy eyed me askance. “Hatshepsut's ghost must be getting to you, Chloe, because I didn't call you anything. Are you feeling well? Do you need to get in out of the sun?”

I looked across the columned porch. “No, I'm fine. I must have heard the wind or something.”

“Probably. It can whip through this site pretty fiercely sometimes.” She caught her blowing hair in one hand, twisted it deftly into a knot, and secured it with her pencil. “To answer your question, most historians and archaeologists suppose that Thutmosis the Third defaced Hat's things out of spite, since she effectively usurped his throne for twenty-something years. It's really a gray area in Egyptology. No one knows and no records exist except what's been left standing.”

In silence we observed the graceful ramps and columns that merged into the craggy rock behind, highlighting the delicacy of the structure and the strength of the cliff. It was a perfect artistic statement. I snapped off some photos, trying different angles and wishing I had sprung for a wide-angle lens before I'd left Dallas.

The temple was a monument to an aberration in Egyptian history, a triumph of art over human desire, because Hatshepsut, despite the best efforts of her descendants, lived on in this architectural masterpiece. This was her immortality.

Cammy wandered through the sunlit porticoes and practiced reading the faded hieroglyphs, while I crouched in the dust and made thumbnail sketches of the soaring columns with their carved female faces. What had I heard before? It had been a soft word, which still whispered, undefined, on the edges of my consciousness. Just the wind, I told myself with a mental shake, and turned back to my notepad.

We were quiet the rest of the visit, each absorbed in her own thoughts.

That afternoon Cammy had to help with some translations at the university. I walked to the Nile and looked out toward Karnak Temple, imagining it in ancient times, garnished with embroidered flags hanging from the vibrantly painted pylons.

As the sun cast a golden-and-rose glow over the city, I caught a taxi back to the inn. Dinner was my treat tonight, since Cammy had treated last.

We met in the darkened hallway to go out. “Do we have time to see your find?” I asked, still curious.

Cammy glanced at her watch. “Well, there is a Christmas party tonight, so I guess I can sneak you in.”

She wasn't overly enthusiastic, but then I had always been the one who got us in trouble. She had more than a healthy respect for the rules. Ironic that I was the one with a military rank and serial number, since I had always been the one willing to bend the rules.

However, officer's candidacy school for this spoiled daughter of an American diplomat had been more than enough to curb me. Not only had I been different from the other officer trainees—definitely more foreign than American—I was also younger. As a twenty-year-old with a degree in art, I had a hard time making friends. I proved to be a whiz, however, at emergency management, my reservist assignment. Whatever the situation, the Kingsley pride kept me going. Kingsleys never gave up, I'd been told, so I persevered.

Military service had actually been my brother's “duty,” but he'd been the black sheep for so long, his name not even spoken, that it was unlikely he'd follow through. My father's family had served since the War Between the States, known to the rest of the country as the Civil War, and it was time for the next generation. I'm not sure my joining the air force reserves was what Mimi had had in mind when she'd told me stories of glory about my southern heritage, however.

At any rate, here I was leading Cammy astray … again. Maybe I wasn't as curbed as I thought.

A few minutes later we stepped into the foyer of her university's dorm and research facility, known as Chicago House. A scraggly artificial Christmas tree stood in the dimly lit room, decorated with glass balls and cut-out cardboard hieroglyphs. Fortunately the place was deserted.

Cammy pulled a hefty ring of keys from her daypack and stepped up to a metal door. She unlocked it, and we walked into the lab. After turning on the light and unlocking another room, Cammy went to a wall-length cabinet, passed an ID card through a scanner, unlocked the door, passed the card again, and entered a code. Finally she opened the door and pulled out a long metal drawer. I helped her set the huge thing on the table.

“This place is tighter than Fort Knox!” I exclaimed. “Is the papyrus plated in gold?”

Camille unlocked the drawer, her hands trembling faintly. “What we have found is far more valuable than gold. It's knowledge. Though, as yet, we have no explanation for what is in these boxes,” she said, gesturing to the drawer. “At the very least, we must protect it.” She opened the top. “The papyri we have unwrapped are lying between sheets of glass. It's a prolific find—we estimate there are more than fifty scrolls altogether.” We stood in semidarkness. “I have a feeling that these scrolls will be as significant as the Dead Sea scrolls,” she murmured as she turned on the specialized overhead light.

They
were
startlingly un-Egyptian.

I shivered suddenly and reached for my silver ankh necklace, letting its heat seep into my chilled blood. The papyrus scroll was about two feet by three and a half feet. The paper had aged to a pale honey color, the edges curled and ripped.

It was a sketch of a mud-brick village. Instead of the two-dimensional profile paintings typical of Egyptian work, this was rendered in a realistic perspective. The people were not dressed in djellabas, as if it had been drawn today, but wore the kilts and sheaths of ancient Egypt.

Cammy moved the plates, and I stared at painstakingly detailed botanical drawings of pomegranates, figs, grapes, lotus, palm, and several other plants I couldn't immediately identify. Under each was what I assumed to be the name in hieroglyphs. I looked into Cammy's face, stunned.

“Cammy, are you sure these are not modern practical jokes?”

She shrugged. “The papyrus is ancient. I don't know how to explain the content. This next one is the piece de résistance; it was pieced together and wrapped oh the outside, probably because it is more fragile than the rest.”

I stared at the huge unrolled scroll. Unlike the others, it was about five feet long by five feet deep and the entirety was dense with detailed illustration—there was no other word. A broad avenue was filled with people, possessions, and animals. In the distance stood a huge archway, silhouetted against the delicately shaded sky. I looked closely. Unlike a lot of drawings of multitudes, many faces were visible, and each was distinct. A mother and child talked over a gaggle of geese, the woman bent under the weight of an infant on her back, the girl's tousled hair banded with a cloth around her forehead. An old man, his beard halfway down his chest, leaned heavily on his walking stick, surrounded by sheep. To the right of the artist's perspective was a man.