“Yes. As a preposition, it means in front of.”
Of course it did, I mused.
“There’s a bit in the Coffin Texts where the deceased talk about each part of themselves, from their fingers to their toes to their ears to their phallus, and each part is a different god.” Wyatt pointed to the symbol in the dirt. “I’d call mine Re. Because it, too, would be resurrected nightly.”
I tweaked the little hand mirror so that a beam of light struck Wyatt directly in his eye. He winced, holding up his palm to block it.
“Hey, Wyatt?” I said sweetly. “You planning on working today?”
He stood, wiping the dust off his hands. “Lesson time is over, my friend,” he said to Mostafa. “I’ve got to earn my keep.” He scuffed out the picture he’d drawn with one boot, and then walked underneath the ladder I was perched on.
“I can’t believe you did that!” I said.
“Taught Mostafa a hieroglyph?” he said innocently.
“No…you just walked under the ladder.”
“Let me guess. Another superstition from your Irish mother.” He rummaged for a Sharpie in his own bag. “What should I do to keep the whole tomb from falling down around me, then?”
“My mom would say you should walk through the ladder again, backward. Or cross your fingers and keep them crossed till you see a dog.”
“A dog…?” He shook his head. “I’ll just take my chances and live on the edge.” He spread one hand over a section of Mylar and began to trace hieroglyphs he could reach from his spot on the ground. “The only superstition my family ever adhered to was to not leave a finger of brandy in the decanter. You have to finish it. But I don’t know if that was superstition or alcoholism.”
“My mother has so many of them.”
“What’s the oddest one?”
I thought for a moment. “Don’t put your feet on the table, because it’s where God’s face is.”
“On the table?”
“Allegedly. And if you give someone a handkerchief as a gift, it means the recipient’s life will be full of sadness,” I added. “Oh. And breaking dishes is lucky.”
He turned to me. “Did you break a lot of dishes?”
I noticed that the light Harbi had been trying so hard to catch for me touched Wyatt’s hair effortlessly, like a benediction. “Yeah.”
“Then maybe she was just trying to make you feel better. I’m told mothers are supposed to do that.”
I glanced at him, but there was enough bitterness in his tone to suggest that his own mother might not have been very kind. The Wyatt I knew was a titled white guy with all the privilege in the world; maybe his mother had forgotten to pick him up from cricket practice once.
And yet as soon as I thought that, I felt embarrassed.
Before I could question whether Wyatt might deserve more than my usual scorn, we were interrupted by Dumphries. “Hello, my chickens,” he said. “How’s our colossus?”
I came down from the ladder and stood beside him. Wyatt joined us, and we all looked at the image of the tremendous statue of Djehutyhotep II being hauled. It had been much more impressive, once. In 1890, the inscription was damaged—all the hieroglyphs to the left had been hacked out. There was also graffiti scrawled over other parts of the text—Coptic, from people who had lived in the tombs, and Greek, from ancient tourists. Our job was basically to replicate this image, with all its scarring from age and erosion and mankind, and to hypothesize about missing pieces. In the Middle Kingdom, autobiographical inscriptions were pretty straightforward, but there was always a weird turn of phrase or grammar that was time-consuming and hard to translate, that required reference books and publications. In those cases, two heads were better than one.
That’s why Dumphries had assigned us both to the task.
He clapped us both on our shoulders. “So let it be written, so let it be done,” he joked, quoting Ramesses II from the movie version of The Ten Commandments. “Which as you know is complete bullshit.”
He wandered off to check on the others as Wyatt and I climbed back into position. “So,” Wyatt said drily, “did you know the Cecil B. DeMille movie used this scene of the colossus as a reference?”
Dumphries had told us that fact at least twenty times in the two weeks we’d been here. “Why no,” I said, deadpan. “That’s totally news to me.”
Dumphries loved to talk about everything that the movie got wrong. The film made it seem like when a pharaoh said something was law, no questions were asked. But Egyptians were big on tribunals. Even when a pharaoh was presumed assassinated, like Ramesses III, an independent panel of judges was set up and everyone had to be interviewed before a sentence could be meted out to his murderer.
I was working on sketching the overseer, who stood on the actual statue, directing those who were hauling it.
“Did you ever see The Ten Commandments?” I asked Wyatt.
“Every Easter,” he replied.
“They got this part wrong. The overseer wasn’t holding a whip. He’s clapping. Look.”
All of a sudden Wyatt was scaling the opposite side of the ladder. He traced a finger over the hieroglyphs beside the overseer. “Words spoken: keeping time for the soldiers by…can’t read that bit…Djehutyhotep, beloved of the king.” He met my eyes. “He’s the DJ.”
“Dropping that sick beat.” I laughed.
“DJ Hutyhotep,” Wyatt said. “Whassup, Deir el-Bersha! Lemme see some hands in the air!” He leaped off the ladder, pointing to the men who were hauling the colossus. “That’s not all Cecil DeMille cocked up. The guys dragging this thing aren’t enslaved. There’s a missing part, an inscription, that says it was hauled by three troupes of recruits, along with the sculptors and quarrymen who carved it.”
“Yeah, but Charlton Heston had to be in the shot,” I said, and just then I lost my balance.
I would have crashed onto the stone floor, but somehow Wyatt was there, and we collapsed together in a heap. He rolled, taking the brunt of the fall, his arms tight around me.
In this tomb where time had stopped, it might have well been just the two of us, suspended. His hands flexed on my shoulders and I could see actual fear in his eyes—not for himself, but for me. “Are you all right?” he murmured, and pressed against the length of him, I could feel his voice better than I could hear it.
Was I?
Then he grunted beneath my weight, and I rolled off him. “Thanks for breaking my fall,” I said.
“Thanks for breaking my knee.” He flexed the joint and stood. “And here I thought I was supposed to have the shit luck.”
Somehow, we had managed to tear off the Mylar as we tumbled to the ground. I groaned, thinking of what a pain it would be to hang it again in just the right position. But with the Mylar removed, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the beauty of the art: the rich red skin of those hauling the statue, the faded yellows of the stone figure, the turquoise faience necklace of the domineering nomarch walking behind, the delicate pleated white of his robe. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” I murmured, quoting Shelley.
Wyatt settled beside me, staring up at it. “Wrong colossus,” he said.
I knew that. Shelley had written his poem about the massive model of Ramesses II. “Yeah,” I conceded, “but same basic idea.”
Wyatt was quiet for a moment. “I think that Djehutyhotep would be delighted to know that four thousand years later, we’re talking about him. Just by our saying his name, he lives on. I mean, look.” He waved his arm around the tomb. “The names, the deeds, the autobiographical texts all over the place—that’s because tombs were meant to be visited. That’s how memories get preserved.” Wyatt looked at me. “It’s why we want to publish, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “You think we’ll be immortalized? Two insignificant grad students who are a footnote in one of Dumphries’s papers?”
Wyatt laughed. “I won’t forget you, Olive. No matter how hard I may try.”
I punched his shoulder. “That’s not the same as being remembered.”
He smiled at me. “Isn’t it?”
* * *
—
I DO NOT know how many hours pass while I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading Wyatt’s dissertation. The sun has sunk so low that my eyes burn, trying to find enough light to read. There are lamps, but I don’t want to get up to turn one on. I’m too afraid that all this will disappear; that I will wake up in Boston and this will be only the filmy soap left from the bubble of a dream.
Although the Coffin Texts do not say that the coffin is the microcosm of the Underworld, the arrangement of texts shouts this (McDowell, 2001), I read.