“Are these flints part of your dissertation?” I ask.
He nods, scratching numbers onto a tiny metal label. “Yeah, I’m all about how ancient Egyptians worked with their hands. These are all primitive tools; I’m recording the season number, the date, and the location found.”
“These used to be paper tags,” I murmur.
Joe glances up, surprised that I know this. “There was a European expedition working in the south that was storing potsherds in palm-rib crates in their magazine at Aswan, and they got termites and basically were left with an unmarked pile of broken sherds. This system saves us from two things that are hard to avoid in Egypt: fading and bugs.”
I set the flint down gently on the table. “That’s a scraper,” he says. “We’ve found a huge number of them, which suggests that there was a lot of hide preparation in the deep desert.”
“That’s really inter—”
“Don’t encourage him,” Wyatt jokes. “Or he’ll pull out his hand axes.” He leads me to the other side of the room, where a man in his thirties has his dark head bent over a computer screen. “Alberto, did you get it up and running again?”
He nods, looking up to notice me for the first time. His face, thin and sharp-nosed, changes when he smiles, white teeth flashing. “You did not tell me we were having company. Beautiful company.”
I feel myself blush. When was the last time I did that?
“She’s not company. She’s working here.” Wyatt looks at me. “Maybe.” I glance at the computer screen, on which a three-dimensional model of a rock-cut tomb pivots. “Alberto’s a digital archaeologist from Italy.”
Fifteen years ago, that job didn’t exist.
Wyatt laughs when he sees that expression cross my face. “I know. We’re old.”
“You draw digital models of the site?” I ask.
Alberto shakes his head. “I do photogrammetry and geomatics. Digital mapping in 3D, instead of the linear measuring that used to be the standard.”
Wyatt hits a few keystrokes, zooming in on the model on the screen, until I can read the hieroglyphs on the wall. It’s almost like being there. “Amazing, right?” Wyatt murmurs.
“It’s incredible,” I say. “How does it work?”
“I take a photo of a site and enter it into software, and—how is it you say?—bam, we have a 3D model with topography.”
Wyatt points to an icon on the desktop. “Show her this one.”
He hands me a set of gaming goggles and I fit them over my head, waiting as a picture loads before my eyes. I draw in my breath, suddenly transported to a wadi I know well: a rock overhang; a quiet, dark hollow beneath. I stretch my arm out as if I might touch it, but of course, it’s only digital.
“Turn left,” Wyatt instructs, and I do, leaning forward to simulate walking, until I am close enough to read the painted hieratic rock inscription we had found years ago.
It’s so different from the way we used to do things. The Mylar we used attracted dust and melted in the brutal heat and there were constantly shimmers of light caught in the plastic so I’d be forever correcting my image against the actual carved sign. This—this is nothing short of revolutionary.
“The sites we excavate are in situ in a landscape,” Wyatt says. “They’re meant to be viewed there. This is about as close as you can get, without flooding Middle Egypt with tourists and their fanny packs. The way we used to do it, you lost half the information—why the inscriptions were put in that particular place, instead of somewhere else.”
I lean forward again, moving closer to the virtual rock wall. “Epigraphy must take half the time.”
“You have no idea,” Wyatt replies. He tugs the goggles off me and hands me an iPad. “Alberto makes a flattened ortho image based off the high-def 3D image and sends it here. Then I can trace the hieroglyphs like it’s a coloring book. You can manipulate the color and change the contrast if the stone itself is busy, like limestone, and you need to tell what’s aspect of the stone and what’s part of the carving.”
“Then after he traces everything, I can put it back into the 3D image of the site,” Alberto adds.
“It means we can get a final drawing even within one part of a given field season.”
“And it’s incredible for sites like the one we are working on now,” Alberto says. “Instead of having to decide whether you’ll put a section through this way or that way, and instead of destroying layers with each excavation, you take a 3D photo before you start, another photo after you clear the first layer, another photo after the second layer—e così via—it is like having a birthday cake you can slice and unslice and reslice any way you want.”
“The only downside,” Joe pipes in from across the room, “is that the iPads overheat and the batteries die and my tender ears are subject to curses in a variety of languages.”
For a moment, I think that maybe I am years too late. That there’s no way to continue where I left off. Then Wyatt takes his iPad from my hands, tapping a few icons until a new three-dimensional image appears. “Djehutynakht’s tomb,” he says, and he offers it to me.
As a grad student I had read up on the excavation of the Djehutynakhts whose coffins were in the MFA—but this doesn’t look familiar. Instead, there is a tomb chapel, and a shaft in various stages of excavation.
“Not Djehutynakht II,” Wyatt clarifies. “Djehutynakht, son of Teti.”
I pinch at the screen, trying to get closer.
“It’s not published yet,” he says quietly.
In other words: I am the first person outside of his team to see it.
There is nothing—nothing—like being the one to discover a piece of the world that has gone missing. Your pulse races, your heart pounds, you forget to breathe. You go still, wanting to hold on to this moment, when it is just you and your miracle, before everyone else intervenes. I was lucky enough to have had that experience, once, with Wyatt. The closest I ever came to it, again, was giving birth to Meret.
“I’d heard you’d found it,” I murmur. But reading that tidbit and seeing this on the screen are two very different things.
I don’t realize I’ve said this aloud until I find Wyatt looking down at me, his face inscrutable. “It’s even better in person,” he says. “Let’s go to Minya.”
* * *
—
WYATT ASKS ME if I want to change before heading back to the city. When I tell him I didn’t come with luggage, he narrows his eyes. “You flew to Egypt without a suitcase?”
“Yes.”
“Planning to work at an archaeological site.”
I raise my chin a notch. “Yes.”
“Without any appropriate clothing.”
“It was,” I say, “sort of a last-minute decision.”
He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then snaps it shut. “Alberto,” he calls, “I need your help.”
I hear their voices, muffled and argumentative. The only words I can make out are unqualified and daily. Wyatt says, “I’m still the director.” In Italian: Avere gli occhi foderati di prosciutto. Then footsteps recede.
Ten minutes later, I am wearing a pair of Alberto’s pants. Of the archaeologists at the Dig House he is the one closest to my size, slim-hipped and only a few inches taller than I am. I belt the waist tight and roll the cuffs, and then Wyatt gives me one of his own long-sleeved cotton shirts. It’s fresh from the laundry, but it still smells like him. “Here,” he announces unceremoniously, and he dumps a pair of boots in front of me as I am still fixing the sleeves of his shirt so they don’t hang over my fingers. They are women’s boots, size eight, a perfect fit. I wonder whom they belong to, but I do not have the right to ask.
From a table near the doorway, Wyatt grabs a hat—battered, with a stiff brim that won’t bend in the incessant wind. “Take one,” he says, gesturing to the collection: panama hats and bucket hats and baseball caps with long tails to keep the sun from blistering the back of your neck. I grab a straw cowboy hat and jam it on my head, hurrying to match Wyatt’s long strides as he walks to a Land Rover that is covered in a film of grit. It feels strange to sit in the passenger seat; as a graduate student, I always had to walk. I watch Wyatt expertly shift gears as we jostle over the pitted road that leads from the Dig House into the desert.
The local office of antiquities is in Mallawi, but the main permissions are processed in Minya, so we drive back exactly the way I have come. The ride is bone-jarring, dusty, sweaty. The cracked leather seat is so hot it feels like the sun is a cat curled between us. I keep leaning forward to peel my sweaty shirt away from my body. Behind us, a billowing cloud of dirt erupts like a plume.
After about fifteen minutes of silence, I offer an olive branch. “I didn’t know if I’d find you here in August.”
“And yet here you are,” Wyatt said.
I turn my attention to the road again, unsure of where to go from there.