The Time Travelers, Volume 2 (25 page)

“I will take you,” he said suddenly, surprising her; perhaps surprising himself; definitely surprising his staff, who took a second glance at the female in their midst.

They approached the base of the Pyramid. Camilla touched one of the great yellowing stones. She swayed from the impact of such antiquity. She felt she almost knew the men who had piled these stones. Knew their wives and children, their gods and dreams.

“Are you faint already?” demanded the great man irritably.

“I am overcome not by heat, but by history. Not by weakness, but by strength.” Camilla caught Dr. Lightner’s arm. “Tell me how the stones were quarried and moved. Tell me who was here. Tell me how they lived.”

He stared at her as if she were an artifact. “Put your hat back on,” he said gruffly. “Fasten the scarf. You must be shaded from the glare.” He tightened the chin strap on his own stiff, wide-brimmed hat and took her hand to help her up. She did need help, as her skirt proved confining. Dr. Lightner could vault easily up to
the next level, from whence he would reach down to grip her hand, and lean backward. Up the tautness of his body she would scramble. She felt her arm would be pulled from its socket with every yank. She bruised her shin and banged her elbow, but gave no sign, unwilling to ask for rest.

“From the top, Miss Matthews, you will see for miles because the land is flat and the air so clear. You will comprehend this area as one vast graveyard. You will see the floor plan, so to speak: the causeway, the quadrangles of lesser tombs and the remains of minor pyramids.”

Twice he dusted her off, apologizing for the intimacy of this act. Once Camilla dusted him off. She was thorough. She did not apologize.

“Tell me,” said Dr. Lightner. “What reading did you do to prepare for this article you will write about me?”

“I began of course with your own three books,” said Camilla, having purchased them from American tourists who didn’t care if they ever heard another word about Egypt again. “My favorite is volume two, in which you discourse about the current events in Egypt as compared to the upheavals of Egypt’s magnificent past.”

He said casually, as one to whom the topic is of minor interest, “I am preparing volume four.”

“Dr. Lightner! What an honor it would be were I permitted to gaze at your first draft.”

They reached the summit. Two or three stones of the
final tier remained, creating shade and seating. It might have been designed for tired ladies and handsome men to rest and eat an orange. Dr. Lightner had a tin canteen hanging at his waist, and they shared sips of water. Her lips rested where his had been and now when their eyes met, his dropped first.

In the distance was Cairo with minarets and towers. Closer were farms of emerald green, split by canals, dotted with camels and donkeys moving down dusty lanes.

Peace descended over Camilla.

It was not possible to think of revenge and rage. Perhaps rage and revenge had once occurred in Egypt, but today it was serene and Camilla was part of the eternally repeating life of that eternal river.

“This is the stage of a great theater, isn’t it?” Camilla said softly. “Cairo is the audience. A million people are crammed into the auditorium that is Egypt.”

“How beautifully you expressed that.” Dr. Lightner pointed to a line as sharp as an edge of paper that divided the green fields from the yellow desert. “Look there. Fields and sand are not friends,” he told her. “They march up to each other and neither will surrender. That sand extends from the Nile to Morocco! To the Atlantic Ocean itself.”

“I should like to travel from oasis to oasis with my camel train,” said Camilla, “and meet the Bedouin.”

“Yes! And write an article about it! I will help you arrange it.” He took her hand for a different purpose than hauling her upward. He took it, she thought, from
excitement. From looking forward to her company. He held her hand flat between both of his, as in Egyptian wall paintings.

An emotion as ageless as revenge entered Camilla’s heart. She knew suddenly what could cause a lady to lose her balance and topple.

Falling in love.

T
wice that day, Strat felt the presence of Annie. Twice he reached into thin air, thinking to grasp her and haul her through to him. Twice he caught only the wind.

She is near, he thought, but a year or a century divides us.

He could have wept or screamed or even thrown himself off the Pyramid, but he managed to laugh and go on taking photographs of tourists and saving the money to send to Katie.

The third time he so intensely felt the presence of Annie, he lost his grip on the heavy wooden tripod that held his camera. It tipped to the side, falling heavily against a pile of stones. Oh, no! If his camera were broken …

Strat’s heart sank.

But what was damaged was the stone.

Impossible. A stick of wood could not break stone. Strat kicked the stone with his boot—and it broke. He picked up a piece and rubbed it—and it turned to white dust in his palm.

It was plaster.

Who would apply plaster to a stone in the desert?

Strat opened his penknife and stabbed experimentally at the stones around him. He was surrounded by plaster. He, Strat, was standing on the entrance to a tomb. Some royal tomb had been camouflaged by that plaster for thousands of years, and
he
—not the brilliant archaeologists! not the scholars! not the historians!—
he
, Strat, had found it.

I’ll be famous. I, Hiram Stratton, Jr.—

—but he did not want anyone else knowing he was Hiram Stratton, Jr. Already he felt vulnerable and anxious, because Archibald Lightner knew the truth. What if word spread?

Father, thought Strat ruefully, you have truly followed me to the grave. Luckily, it isn’t
my
grave. And though I dare not take credit, for publicity would tell you where I am, at least I can take photographs.

He could not wait to tell Dr. Lightner. He ran across the sand and rubble to the dig and saw, several hundred yards away, Dr. Lightner talking with a tall slim girl in a long romantic skirt.

Annie had come
.

The other night when he climbed to the top of the Pyramid, he
had
reached her. Time
had
let his prayer cross the century.

His body leaped forward and his heart followed. He soared toward her, as an eagle soars on rising heat. He plunged over the crevasse where some archaeologist was digging in the hope of finding a buried tomb ship. He
raced over trenches where yet another hoped to find a queen’s tomb. He could not slow his steps and he certainly could not slow his heart.

And when he arrived, plunging down a slope, leaping from rock crest to sand hill, he saw that the girl had blond hair.

Annie’s was dark.

“L
et us descend,” said Dr. Lightner at last. “There is work to do.”

Down was easier than up. There were fewer occasions on which it was necessary to cling to each other. Camilla could not bring herself, an athlete, to pretend she needed help when she did not.

Halfway down Dr. Lightner said, “Tell me what sort of ball games you delight in.”

She was touched that he had been paying attention to her from the first. “Basketball. Have you ever had the pleasure?”

“Oh, yes! We play basketball here for amusement. My young men all played for their colleges. How your team must relish you! You are so magnificently tall.”

Camilla stared at Dr. Lightner’s weathered face. Sun had burned it to bronze and split it in cracks.

They walked slowly toward the tents, finding much to say. How marvelous to be with a man who was not letting go of her hand. How marvelous, in fact, were hands.

A boy about Camilla’s own age suddenly came bounding and yelling toward them.

Camilla was pretending to be thirty, which seemed like the right age for a seasoned reporter sent halfway across the world to write about scientific events, but in fact, she was seventeen. The boy too had the air of somebody pretending to be older, but in fact, still in his teens.

She had the oddest sense that he was racing toward
her
. That they knew each other. She even had the thought that she shocked him; that he was not prepared for the sight of her.

It was not until he pulled up next to them, breathless and excited, that Camilla saw he was astonishingly handsome and very unkempt. His jacket was in desperate need of button reattachment and his trousers needed mending.

“Dr. Lightner! Sir!” he cried. “I have found an undiscovered tomb.”

Camilla laughed out loud at this pathetic claim. It was surely the daydream of every tourist: I’ll stoop down, find pottery with hieroglyphs, kick away a rock and expose a tomb, which will be filled with gold.

“I knocked over my tripod whilst preparing my camera,” said the boy. “The wooden legs are heavy and topped with brass casings. They hit against a desert stone and when I looked, it was not stone at all, but plaster camouflaged as a rock!”

Dr. Lightner quivered. “Perhaps I should take a look.”

He and the boy walked with measured pace, though Camilla thought they wanted to fly through the air, dive into the sand and come flailing to the surface with their arms full of Egyptian gold.

In moments, the entire expedition was trooping along, whispering and wondering. What a gathering of fine young men! Camilla gathered that these were intellectuals from the great universities of the world, taking six months or a year to indulge a passion for archaeology. She wondered what it could be like to have the money to do such a thing.

“What is the significance of the plaster?” she asked one of them.

“In my studies at Yale,” he told her, “I learned that in ancient times, the entry to a tomb was often disguised with plaster dyed to match the desert.”

It did not seem to Camilla it had been necessary to wedge Yale into the response. She decided that she, in turn, would wedge an important women’s college into the conversation, as if she too recalled tidbits from otherwise dull lectures.

“You are a lucky reporter, Miss Matthews,” said one of the young men. “A real scoop. What an article you will write!”

Camilla was horrified. She didn’t know a thing about reporting. She had planned to fake all that.

“What newspaper are you from?” asked the Yale man. “Boston?” he said. “New York?” It had to be one of these; no other city mattered.

“I’m from Kansas,” she said, preparing to hand him
the fake card she had had printed up to support her fake credentials.

They burst into uproarious laughter at the idea that people in Kansas could read, or even printed newspapers.

Furious and embarrassed, Camilla took pad and pencil from her satchel and pushed her way to the front. Ladies did have a few advantages in this world. No man would think of pushing back.

A few taps of the chisel and it was established that behind the plaster were flat stones, easily dragged aside, and below them … a man-made rectangle. The entrance, perhaps, to the shaft of a tomb.

Dr. Lightner stood for the boy to photograph him above the unopened site. He contained his excitement poorly. He could not stay motionless for the lengthy time a photograph required.

Camilla found she had already written three paragraphs.

The removal of rubble from the shaft began.

The Egyptians were told to work faster, but that did not occur. They had a tempo. They did not rush. After all, thought Camilla, the rocks have been there five thousand years. It’s Americans who rush.

Long before they had made much progress, the shadows were too thick for work to go on. People sighed, agreeing to leave the rest for the morrow, and went sadly and separately to their tents.

Camilla, however, approached the boy. She was amazed by his physical beauty. Burnished by the
Egyptian sun, the youth shone. He had retreated over the sand, and was facing the Sphinx, but his thoughts were clearly on a tiny envelope in his hand.

The envelope was not two inches long, the color of an American sky before an autumn storm: gray with tints of angry yellow. He held it to his lips. It was not a kiss, more a communion.

Communion
.

She was Camilla Mateusz again, thinking of all the Sundays in this wicked year in which she had not gone to Mass and had not taken Communion and had not been a good person. Her eyes blurred with shame.

The boy put the envelope in his shirt pocket, so that it lay over his heart. Uncertainly, Camilla interrupted and was met by a sweet half-smile.

“Might we sit upon one of the Pyramid stones and talk to each other?” asked Camilla. “If you are willing, tell me the details of your discovery for my article.”

They circled the Sphinx. The serpent charmers had packed up, the watermelon vendors were sold out and the tables of souvenirs had vanished. The boy took her arm as if they were off to a dance, and they walked over a vast pavement, tilted now by the ravages of Time, and arrived at Khufu’s Pyramid.

The best spot was several stones up and they climbed together. “Girls can’t usually swing up like that!” he said respectfully. “I’ve known only one.”

“What was her name?” asked Camilla.

“Annie.” His voice was so soft she could hardly hear. He traced the outline of the tiny envelope in his pocket.

“What is that in your pocket?” she asked. Working for Duffie had destroyed her inhibition against asking about people’s private lives. She must remember that ladies did not pry. Of course, reporters always pried. Perhaps she could not be both.

He answered with courtesy. “Once, long ago, I loved a young lady. We left each other. There was no choice in the matter. All I have of her, and all I ever will, is a lock of her hair.”

He carried that girl’s token against his heart. Camilla’s own heart was assaulted. Would any man ever feel that way toward her? She could not prevent a prayerful vision of herself and Dr. Lightner together, and had to blush at such foolishness. A great scholar? Interested in a half-educated girl, half his age, pretending to be a reporter?