In July 2003, I was back at the Dig House for my third season in Deir el-Bersha with Yale Egyptology. It was not our normal season—that was in January—but Professor Dumphries had scheduled an extra trip before the start of the fall semester because of an upcoming publication deadline, and there was no way I was missing it, even if it was brutally hot. Wyatt and I were working in the tomb of Djehutyhotep II, who ruled in the mid-Twelfth Dynasty.

We had a routine. Every morning, my alarm would go off at 4:30, and I would stumble in the dark to pull on my long-sleeved cotton shirt and khakis, and to lace up my boots. Whoever got to the table earliest got the first omelets that Hasib would make and didn’t have to wait. I was usually the fastest, along with an osteologist from England, who was working with us that season. There was also a first-year grad student, a conservator who was cleaning some of the art in the tomb, and Dumphries.

Wyatt was always the last to get to the table, his hair wet and shaggy, his eyes bright. He was the type of cheerful morning person that the rest of us wanted to kill. “Well,” he announced, as forks clattered against plates. “I’m a four, if anyone’s wondering.”

“Out of a possible ten?” asked Yvonne, the osteologist.

“More like a possible hundred,” I murmured.

“It’s not a ratio,” Wyatt said. “It’s the Bristol stool scale. Type four: like a smooth, soft sausage—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Please. For the love of God. We’re eating.”

Dumphries laughed. “It’s good to monitor, in the desert. I’d put myself at a Type three, actually.”

“Clearly someone’s a Type two.” Wyatt grinned at me. “Mild constipation.”

“If I’m having any digestive issues, it’s because you’re a pain in my ass,” I replied, and the others laughed.

I usually managed to time my breakfast so that as Wyatt sat down, I could get up and begin to pack my bag for the day. I had to spend eight hours with him inside a rock-cut tomb, but outside of that, I tried to stay out of his presence. Every other grad student on digs worked so hard during the day that by eight o’clock at night we were fast asleep, but Wyatt wasn’t like every other grad student. He didn’t fear Dumphries’s censure—in fact, he courted it, brandishing a bottle of whiskey one night that he’d carried down from Yale and challenging the rest of us to a game of Never Have I Ever; playing poker with Dumphries until midnight; teaching the local workmen how to curse fluently in English.

As Wyatt regaled the table with a story that began with the Bristol Royal Infirmary, which developed the scale, and ended with an overweight bulldog and Prince Charles, I rose from the table and moved into our work space, to pack up.

I rolled up a fresh sheet of Mylar and set it next to my bag. Then I checked the contents: a small mirror, a dozen Sharpies, brushes, a notebook, a camera, a centimeter scale for measurement, a bottle of water, and printouts of the reference photos of the scene we were working on. Packing the bag had become a science, because I had to carry it all the way to the dig site. Dumphries and the larger equipment went in the Rover; underlings walked.

“T minus five,” Dumphries announced, and he stood up from the table, heading to collect his own materials and to talk to Hasib.

I glanced down at my bag again, sensing something missing. My scarf. I wore it to keep out the blowing sand and dust, but I must have left it in my room.

I hurried down the hallway toward the sleeping quarters and was on my hands and knees, crawling under my iron bed frame to get the scarf where it had dropped, when Wyatt stuck his head through the door. “That’s an improvement, Olive.”

“Why are you in my room?” I shimmied backward and sat on my heels, the scarf caught in my hand.

“I’ve lost my notebook.”

“Why would your notebook be in my room?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I’m looking for it.”

I got to my feet. “Ask the last person in your family that died.”

He blinked. “What?”

“That’s what my mother says. It’s a superstition. She’s Irish.”

“Of course she is. No wonder we get on like oil and water.”

I shrugged. “I’m not the one without a notebook.”

Wyatt ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know the last person in my family who died.”

I turned off the light beside the bed, and the fan. “Sounds like a you problem.”

“For fuck’s sake. Fine, then. Uncle Edmond, from Surrey.”

I folded my arms, and raised my brows.

“Uncle Edmond,” Wyatt ground out, “where’s my notebook?”

Suddenly Dumphries appeared in the doorway. “There you are,” he said to Wyatt, holding out a small brown notebook. “Is this yours?”

I breezed past them both. “Erin go bragh,” I murmured to Wyatt.

* * *

—

THE TOMB OF Djehutyhotep II had an entry that always reminded me of Planet of the Apes—an impressive rock-cut stone fa?ade, listing to the left after years of earthquakes and quarrying and robbery. The architrave and doorway were carved and decorated with Djehutyhotep’s titles and the names of the kings under whom he served. The porch was supported by two fluted columns, and the outer chamber had a large desert hunting scene and fishing scene. A narrow doorway led to the inner chamber—the spot where I worked that July—which was 25 feet deep by 20 feet wide by 16.5 feet high. Inside was the most famous scene in the tomb: a massive statue of Djehutyhotep II being transported. It was accompanied to the left by a large image of Djehutyhotep joined by his family and guards and important officials. The gate of the building where the statue was being hauled was on the right, and in front of that gate were people bearing offerings. In Egyptian art, you’d see hierarchic scale—the most important people were the biggest—but you also would see composite perspective. The faces of the individuals were in profile, but the eyes were straight on. The artists back then would take the most salient feature—eyes, or for the torso, a nipple—and emphasize it.

The best-known publication of the tomb was from 1894, by Percy Newberry. Working under him to create the drawings were Marcus Blackden, and seventeen-year-old Howard Carter—long before his own discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But there were errors in the Newberry publication—bits that were incomplete and inaccuracies that only became evident if you were standing in front of the actual wall, like Wyatt and I were. It was our job, that season, to find and record those mistakes, so that Dumphries could publish a corrected version.

It was early morning in the tomb, and the air was already stagnant and blistering. Mohammed and Ahmed, two of the Egyptians we had working with us that season, were using the total station to mark elevation points. The first-year grad student was sitting outside the tomb, sorting broken potsherds into types: bowls and cups, bread molds, jars, and anything unusual—like a piece with a stamp on it. I had brushed off the surface of the statue-hauling scene I was working on and had finished the daily struggle to affix the Mylar to the rock wall surface with masking tape. Mylar was an entire level of hell, as far as I was concerned. In the heat, it got gooey and limp; in the winter, it grew hard and stiff. The thinner it was, the worse it held up in this kind of heat—but the thicker it was, the harder it was to see through in order to trace the hieroglyphs. It wasn’t particularly efficient, but it was all we had at the time—a way of taking a three-dimensional inscription on the wall and putting it onto two-dimensional paper.

I glanced over at Wyatt talking to Mostafa, the antiquities inspector. Mostafa had expressed an interest in learning hieroglyphs, and Wyatt was endlessly accommodating, drawing in the dust of the tomb floor or finding a sign on the wall. “This one, that looks like a touchdown?” Wyatt tested.

I glanced over, surprised he knew the word from an American sport.

He had drawn the biliteral sign for ka, the part of the soul that has to do with what’s handed down from generation to generation. While Mostafa tried to remember that, I turned my attention back to the wall.

Harbi was holding a large mirror to shine the light from the entrance of the tomb to fall from left to right over the area of text I was studying. When tracing, you had to pretend that light was coming from the upper left at a forty-five-degree angle, and if the hieroglyph happened to be in sunken relief, you’d draw a shadow line, slightly thicker.

I lifted my Sharpie from the Mylar, squinting at a detail I couldn’t quite see.

“Harbi,” I said, “can you get me a little more light here?”

He was young and wiry and strong, wrestling with the large mirror to try to direct the light where I needed it. But given the placement of that particular sign, he couldn’t shine it close enough.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. I hopped off the ladder I was standing on and rummaged in my bag for my small mirror. “Aim up here,” I told Harbi, pointing to a spot above my head on the wall. I held up the hand mirror, catching the stream of light he directed that way, and bounced it down to the sign I wanted to scrutinize.

“This one’s my favorite,” Wyatt was saying.

He pointed to the sign he had sketched into the dirt:

Mostafa frowned. “A pistol?”

“In a matter of speaking,” Wyatt said. “Think more…below the belt.”

“It is a phallus?”