The Sacred River (23 page)

Harriet felt a sudden and powerful reverence. Human hands had made these marks, perhaps three thousand years ago. They’d made them because they believed that words had power. This was what she had come to Thebes to see and what she had written her own magic to bring about, she reminded herself again. She wanted to understand what their message was.

She called Dr. Woolfe and he returned to where she stood. “Yes?”

“I want to copy down the hieroglyphs and try to read them.”

“Read them, Miss Heron?”

“Yes.”

Harriet reached into her pocket and drew out her book. Putting her own lamp down at her feet, holding the journal to the light of his, she opened the pages where she had worked on the columns of hieroglyphs from the Luxor temple, accompanied by her tentative interpretations, made in the evenings at the hotel.

“May I?”

He held out his hand. She hesitated and then, for the first time, put her journal into the hand of another. He looked at the drawings, nodding, his face impassive.

“Once again, I must apologize to you,” he said, closing the red leather cover and handing it back.

Harriet’s heart sank. He was going to refuse. She could hardly return to the tomb without his agreement. She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice.

“Apologize for what, Dr. Woolfe?”

“I did not understand, Miss Heron,” he said, shaking his head, the ends of his hair brushing the shoulders of his jacket. “I mistook you for a tourist.”

THIRTY-SIX

Yael sat in the courtroom, surrounded by onlookers, dignitaries, and men of all shapes and sizes. Um Fatima, the young mother from the clinic, had pleaded with her, through Suraya, to intercede on behalf of her husband, who was accused of not paying his taxes. Um Fatima was nowhere to be seen; Yael was the only female present and Mustapha, who’d insisted on accompanying her, sat nearby.

Drifts of red dust had collected on the unevenly plastered walls and a portrait of the khedive, the Ottoman ruler of the country, flyblown, decorated with red tinsel, hung high behind the judge. The judge, addressed by all as Bey, wore the Turkish-style fez, a shirt, and trousers. He held a fly switch in his hand; at intervals he flicked the switch over his face, closing his eyes as he did so. Next to him, at a smaller, lower desk, sat a skinny clerk, writing in a ledger almost as big as he.

The accused was brought into the room by court officials. Yael’s first thought was how very young he looked, scarcely more than a boy himself, and yet he was Um Fatima’s husband, the father of the three small children she saw at the clinic. He was barefoot, dressed in a peasant’s blue robe, had a skull cap askew on his dusty black hair, a wispy beard on his chin. As soon as he was within sight of the judge, he began protesting, his words slightly slurred, as if he had a speech impediment, but no less impassioned for that.

“He calls on the bey to think of the tender heart of his own wife and have pity,” Mustapha whispered.

The judge hammered on the table for silence but the man continued imploring for mercy. Yael considered getting to her feet and making the intercession but thought it too soon. She had hoped that her presence might exercise a restraining influence, but the judge had given no indication that he had noticed her at all.

The bey consulted a paper passed to him by the clerk and read out the charge. The accused responded in a torrent of Arabic in which Yael discerned several of the names of the Prophet—the Noble, the Forgiver, the Just. Seeing the vehement and unaffected nature of the man’s faith, Yael felt a confusion in her heart. Few of the laboring classes, or indeed, any classes at home, could be trusted to exhibit such unaffected passion for their Savior.

The judge passed his tail of horsehair over his face and, banging a gavel on the desk, issued what sounded like a verdict. Yael caught the word
bastinado
; next to her, Mustapha tensed. The word held a peculiar horror for Egyptians. The time had come.

Summoning all the strength she could muster, Yael rose to her feet. Victoria was not a tall woman but nonetheless she held sway over half of the world. It was said that Her Highness never needed to raise her voice.

“Sir,” Yael said quietly. “
Bey
. May I have your permission to say a few words on behalf of the accused?”

The young man turned his head toward her. He was streaming with perspiration, the back of his patched gown soaked. His eyes looked violently and unnaturally dilated. He was a laborer, his wife had told Yael, working on building sites for a few piastres a day, but was required to pay a tax on each and every one of the palm trees at his mother’s small farm, an amount that they did not have and would never have.

The judge looked blankly at Yael while his clerk whispered in his ear. After some moments, the bey spoke.

“Permission refused,” he said.

Seconds later, before Yael had time to gather her wits, the young man had been thrust facedown on the floor of the courtroom, his knees bent and feet raised to the ceiling, held in position by a wooden contraption fitted around his ankles. His piteous cries increased as he called on Allah for mercy. Two men, each of whom looked almost as poor as the accused, began with leather whips to thrash the soles of the man’s feet, taking turns to deliver the lashes.

Fearing she might faint at the awful sound of leather whipping through the air, the man’s screams, Yael sat down. He was calling not on his god but on his mother, weeping like a child. Yael made herself watch, observing the contemptuous expressions of the men doing the whipping, the apparent detachment of the bey, now taking a cup of coffee. She had been unable to help the man by preventing the barbarous punishment, she told herself, blinking back tears that were as much of rage as of pity. She would not shirk her Christian duty to bear witness to it.

The man’s feet turned first red then purple then raw, like steak meat. Trickles of red ran down his ankles, the ends of the whips grew crimson, and the cracked floor tiles became smeared with blood mixed into the dust. The cries grew less frequent. At the point where she feared he must die, the man let fall from his mouth a small silver coin. One of the policemen snatched it up, wiped it on his gown, and laid it on the table before the bey.

The man’s eyes were closed, his body motionless. Yael kept her own eyes on him until he was carried from the room like a corpse.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Harriet sat on a folding canvas chair. She had her scarf wrapped around her head, one end of it covering her mouth and nose. The smell in the tomb was not as overpoweringly strong as it had seemed on her first visit but the air was dusty. Working on a sheet of cartridge paper on a drawing board, by the light of a lamp tied to a stick propped against the wall of the tomb, she was copying the painting of the Lady of the Two Lands.

Dr. Woolfe had called at the hotel and invited her to return to the site. It would be helpful to him, he said, to have an accurate record of the panel in the outer passage. Harriet had immediately expressed her willingness. Louisa, encouraged perhaps by his formal manners, his disinclination to engage in small talk or even to sit down and take a cup of tea, had agreed. Harriet always had a facility for drawing, she told him, embarrassing Harriet. And since her health was so much improved, she believed it would be quite safe. Her only condition was that Fouad should be in attendance.

Each day since then, Harriet had risen early. By the soft gleams of reflected light that spread from the east before the sun appeared on the horizon, she’d put on what she’d come to think of as her tombs dress—an old muslin, in deep cornflower blue. The skirt was frayed along the hem but the cotton was cool and light, the color matched the midday sky. Clothes that might have looked odd in London looked unremarkable here.

Encouraged by the thought, she’d pinned to her bodice a gift Aunt Anna had sent her from India—a silver brooch in the shape of a tree, its ruby-red fruits made of garnets, dangling from slender branches. However dusty it might be over there, she wanted to dress up to meet the ancient Egyptians, enter their sacred place. She wanted to announce through the vibrant colors that she shared their dream of life, and their reverence for it.

The life conjured up by the spells in the Book of the Dead, the pictures on the walls of the rock tombs, looked more like life than the years Harriet had known on earth. She hadn’t realized so clearly until now that people lived not only lives of different lengths but of different intensities, of varying degrees of beauty and joy and pleasure. She didn’t just want a long life. She wanted one filled with interest and adventure, a life of her own making. Or, if one day she became ill again, if the struggle became too much, she wanted a death of her own making.

She’d laced on the soft leather boots with the low wooden heels; the ground was rough everywhere in Luxor and the light shoes Aunt Lavinia had insisted on buying for her were no use at all. On this fourth day, on her way out of her room, she’d stopped, glanced at herself in the oval mirror set into the wardrobe door. Looking back at her was a woman: her long, crinkled red hair worn loose, the orange scarf on her shoulders glowing in the dim light. The dress the woman wore was soft and practical, and a brooch glinted at her neck. Harriet was changing. She couldn’t identify quite how but she could see it plainly in the mirror. She was altered, in ways that went beyond her improved health. She looked like herself.

With Fouad, she’d crossed over the river in one of the small white sailing boats called sandals that from dawn till after dark flew across the surface of the water like white-winged birds. Looking back toward the east bank, from far out in the river, the village of Luxor appeared small and insignificant. The reflected columns of the Luxor temple lay in long rippling lines on the surface of the water, the stone undulating with its movement.

When the little boat was near the bank, the same donkey that she’d hired each morning had been brought by its boy into the water, splashing its way to the side of the boat. Fouad had lifted her from the sandal on to its back in one easy movement and they made their way to the white valley.

She worked carefully, at pains to copy the shapes exactly, keep the proportions true. Dr. Woolfe was nearby, scraping with a trowel at the blocked doorway. She could hear him but not see him, feel his steady concentration on the task at hand. It matched her own. Two Egyptian workers carried away the spoil in baskets on their heads, hurrying past in bare feet, returning at intervals. Harriet tried to labor as tirelessly as they did. She enjoyed the feeling of being part of a team.

Taking a sip from her water bottle, she applied herself again to the drawing she was making of the queen. Her ceremonial headdress appeared to be made of the wing of a bird, coming down behind her ear. The queen’s head was in profile but her chest was turned forward, both shoulders showing. One slim arm curved in front of her body, holding the
sekhem
or “scepter,” symbol of authority and power. Her feet were clad in sandals so flimsy they would not have lasted a day in the valley where she was entombed. Harriet found her both beautiful and enigmatic. At the thought that the queen might be only yards away, on the other side of the blocked entrance, Harriet felt a chill run down her spine despite the warmth and closeness of the atmosphere. The prospect of encountering her was becoming real.

“Why did you come here, Miss Heron?” said Dr. Woolfe.

In the near darkness, the question took her by surprise.

“To the dig?” she said.

“To Egypt.”

“We came for my health. I persuaded my doctor to insist on it. I always wanted to see Thebes before I . . . if I was going to die.”

“Die?” He sounded angry. “Why should you contemplate such a thing?”

“I have been forced to, Dr. Woolfe. I have been an invalid for much of my life.”

Harriet concentrated on the uraeus, the cobra poised on the queen’s forehead ready to spit in the eye of ill-wishers. Part of this one had been scratched out, was present only as absence. She’d wanted, on the first day, to fill in the gaps in the images and hieroglyphs, make good what was missing in the queen’s profile, restore what had been defaced or destroyed. Eberhardt Woolfe had stopped her from doing so. He explained that to make the images and the signs whole was not the endeavor. The aim was to faithfully record what was. What was not. The time for making whole would come later. Draw as if you were a camera, he had repeated.