We shimmy down the rope ladder in quick succession—first Wyatt, then me, then Safiya the conservator, and finally Omar. There is virtually no room in the chamber with all of us, plus half a dozen workers having an in-depth discussion with Wyatt about the best way to lift the top of the outer coffin, so the inspector offers to wait at the top of the shaft again. Sweat pours off my face and under the collar of my shirt; it is easily a hundred degrees in this tiny stone room, and the air does not move inside it. Fans to improve air circulation are, of course, forbidden. What has been a blessing for preservation makes our work a living hell.

Abdou comes up with the best plan, and the workers and Wyatt lift the massive lid of the exterior coffin and muscle it sideways. In the weak, splintery light that the wheezy generator provides, I can see an inner coffin made of cedar nested inside, much like the ones we had gazed at in the Boston MFA as graduate students. I cannot make out any of the individual markings; I can only tell that the paint is even more vibrant than that on the outer coffin.

It takes nearly an hour for the cedar lid to be removed, and it requires a human Jenga of positioning as we bunch together to make room for the wood to be gently rested on its side. Alberto darts between and around us as we jostle, so that he can continue snapping his photographs.

Wyatt wipes his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “That was such great fun,” he says. “Let’s do it again.” He gestures to the inner coffin, and curls his fingers under the seam of the lid.

It’s not as heavy, but it is still unwieldy and there is very little space in the burial chamber for the sheer number of bodies needed to open and lift it. I am at the far end of the burial chamber, squeezed between the rock and the short end of the coffin.

When it opens, there’s no smell of death. Just resin, heady and sharp. Djehutynakht’s dessicated mummy lies on his side facing east, the shape of his body hidden beneath tight layers of linen. The light flickers over a funerary mask, and the outer layer of wrappings has been bored into by insects. The mummy is draped in a shroud with a fringed edge. Opposite him are lines of spells from the Coffin Texts, as well as a vividly painted false door through which his ba soul could come and go. The mummy is flush against the other interior wall, but above his hip and head I get a glimpse of a colorful offering frieze with sandals, jugs of wine, haunches of meat. For a moment we stand in awe, as Alberto captures our reverence with his camera.

“Right,” Safiya says, jerking us all back into motion. “Let’s get started.”

She scrambles out of the chamber and up the ladder, calling orders to workers to bring padding and ropes, which will be used to secure the mummy as the open coffins are lifted in tandem. Alberto follows her, because once everyone descends on the burial chamber to pack up the mummy for excavation into the main tomb chapel, space will be at even more of a premium.

Wyatt starts after them but turns back when he realizes I am standing with my hands lightly balanced on the wooden edge of the inner coffin, staring at Djehutynakht’s mummy.

“The answer is: I don’t know,” he says.

“What’s the question?”

“Is there a Book of Two Ways under him?”

I glance down, where a thick layer of dust lies on the interior coffin floor.

“For your information, that isn’t what I was thinking about.”

“No?” Wyatt says. “Taking mental notes for a Halloween costume, then?”

“You have to admit this is not an average Thursday,” I reply.

I look down at the funerary mask. It appears to be embellished in gold leaf, but the features are detailed—one nostril larger than the other, corners of the eyes dotted with red. They would have mirrored the features of the nomarch in a stylized way, so that his soul could recognize his mummy as part of its daily resurrection.

It makes me think of the death masks that were taken of kings and scholars and artists from the Middle Ages to the Civil War, from Henry VIII to Napoleon to Nikola Tesla, displayed at funerals and then in museums. “Have you ever heard of l’inconnue de la Seine?” Wyatt shakes his head. “She drowned in Paris, in the 1880s. Someone at the morgue made a death mask of her face, and it’s…beautiful. She looks like she fell asleep smiling, even though it was probably a suicide. She was compared to the Mona Lisa, and rich people had copies of the mask on their walls as art. In the 1960s, it was used as the face of the first CPR mannequin.”

Wyatt slips his hands into his pockets. “Irony, in a nutshell.”

“It’s pretty amazing, to think that you could go so peacefully into death.” I look down at Djehutynakht. “Do you think it worked, for him?”

“What?”

I wave my hand at the spells written on the coffin. “All of this. All the preparation. Do you think he got where he wanted to go?”

Wyatt shrugs. “I sure as hell hope so, because it was a shit ton of work to get him in here, and it’s going to be a shit ton more work to get him out.”

He turns and I hear the groan of rope as he starts to climb the ladder. I take a last look at the mummy. I know, philosophically, that the only way to learn more about the way people lived in the past is to do just this: pick apart what they believed to be their final resting place. From an academic standpoint that justifies our work. I also know that religion is what we make of it. But what if Djehutynakht—and the others—were right? What if, when the sun goes down tonight and his ba soul returns to his coffin, the corpse he needs to reunite with is gone?

What if the piece of you that’s missing is the critical one?

* * *

—

I HAVE HEARD that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, which is the only explanation I can give for why I fell so hard for Wyatt, so fast. As a grad student I’d been in a two-person race with him, trading places every now and then. I’d spent so much time trying to surpass Wyatt that it was a revelation to stand on equal ground and stop running long enough to truly see him.

He was not the persona he projected—an arrogant, quick-witted Brit used to being the smartest one in the room. That, I learned, was an act. He had nightmares that made him thrash in my arms. He was mischievous, leaving me dirty hieroglyphic messages that would steam up in the bathroom mirror when we were showering. He touched me as if I were made of gold or mist or memory.

It was hard to hide a romance from eight people living in a single small household, but we were determined. We had to work together at the wadi on the newly discovered dipinto, so we continued to snipe at each other and generally act as if we could not stand to be in close proximity, when—in fact—every time Wyatt passed me he’d slide his hand along the shallow of my spine, and when we were sitting beside each other at dinner, I’d hook my pinkie finger with his and draw his hand onto my thigh beneath the table.

When the household napped in the high heat of the afternoon, I would listen for Wyatt’s footfall outside my bedroom door. There were two loose tiles that rocked, no matter how quietly you moved. I’d count to a hundred, and then I would follow. Sometimes I would have to sneak past Hasib, Harbi’s father, sleeping in the shade of the courtyard underneath the bright flags of laundry flapping on the line. As soon as I was outside the gates of the Dig House, I’d look down at the dust, shading my eyes from the glare of the sun. Wyatt would have left me a handful of stones in the shape of an arrow, or a line carved along the edge of the path that led to the bank of the river. I would be halfway to the Nile when I saw him waiting. Or he’d spring from a crop of corn planted by a farmer and wrap his arms around me from behind.

We stole those hours for ourselves. The sun never bothered us, even when our cheeks pinkened and our hair bleached lighter. We would walk the narrow paths between raised garden beds, kissing amidst the sharp smell of wild onions. We lay on a bed of hay, Wyatt painting me from nape to navel with a brush made of timothy, as a donkey rolled in the dust and sang for us. We would sit on the edge of the river and talk—about his father, who had managed to deplete the family fortune on a series of terrible business investments, but still insisted on sending his sons to Eton to keep up appearances; about my mother, who worked two jobs to pay off my student loans. What it would be like to see our names in print together. How it felt to get lost in time by getting lost in time.

At night, I’d count off the number of people who headed to the showers, waiting until I was second to last. Then I’d wander into the bathroom and Wyatt would follow—which wasn’t odd, because there were multiple stalls—except that we’d wind up in one together. He would lift my hips and pin me against the tile wall. Or he’d sink to the tile floor and feast on me until my own knees gave out. I remember his head thrown back in the steam; his fingers leaving bruises on my thighs. I remember being so close to him that even the water couldn’t slip between us.

* * *