“Ah,” Julie said, nodding. “Human interest.”
They sat in companionable silence, sipping the cooling tea, digesting their breakfasts, and soaking up atmosphere. The Savoy’s cafe was about as international as a restaurant could be. At the tables around them were Arabs, black Africans, Europeans, Americans, and Asians laughing and chattering away in a happy babble of languages. At their feet a slate-gray cat worked the crowd, moving from table to table, eyeing the clients, and then, depending on its appraisal, either waiting for a handout or moving contemptuously on. From Julie and Gideon it got offers of the baconlike mystery meat (reservedly accepted) and marmaladed toast (scornfully declined).
“We’d better go,” Gideon said after a while. “They’ll start thinking we’ve gone over the hill altogether.”
Leaving the cafe they passed close by the table of two thin, elderly Englishmen who looked like brothers, sharing a pot of tea and a basket of pastries.
“Smog in Luxor,” said one of them, sighing deeply. “Who would have thought?”
The other shook his head. “There wasn’t any in ‘49, I can tell you that. Think what it’s doing to the monuments.”
“Think,” said the first, “what it’s doing to the people.”
The other tore a piece of baklava in two and licked his slender fingers. “That too,” he agreed languidly.
Two hours later, in the heat of the afternoon, both of the Horizon House vans drove up the Shari el-Matar to the small airport outside Luxor, arriving with twenty minutes to spare before the chartered ZAS flight to el-Minya at 2:00. In the vehicles were the participants, direct and indirect, in the making of Reclaiming History: The Story of Horizon House. In all, twelve people piled out of the vans and into the concrete-block terminal.
Besides Julie and Gideon, there were Bea and Bruno Gustafson, representing the Horizon Foundation, and Haddon, Arlo, TJ, and Jerry from Horizon House. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh members of the group were Forrest Freeman, who was directing the documentary, and his bare-bones staff: Cy, an aging, placid, child of the sixties who wore his much-thinned hair in a graying ponytail; and Patsy, a rail-thin, sinewy woman of forty-five who smoked little black cigars and might have been mute for all she said. Cy was the cameraman. Patsy seemed to do everything else, a combination soundperson, gaffer, grip, and gofer. The third member of the crew-Kermit Feiffer, the assistant director-was being left behind in Luxor to make copies of the tapes that had already been made and do arcane things with them at the local MisrFilm studio.
Their leader, Forrest Freeman, was a burly man of forty with the body of a wrestler and the soul of a worry wart. Forrest was a fretter, a man who expected the worst and expected it to be worse than he expected. Gideon had spoken with him for no more than five minutes at dinner the evening before, and another five in the van, but he had already heard about problems with the shooting schedule, with lighting, with transportation, with weather, and with the equipment. Actually, none of these had yet come to pass, but from Forrest’s point of view, it was only a matter of time. The Fates, he seemed convinced, had it in for him personally.
To be fair, he’d already had his share of woe. One of his crew, he told Gideon, had been arrested at the Cairo airport for bringing in half a kilo of hashish inside a camera. (“Can you believe it? Smuggling hash into the Middle East? Where do I get these guys?”) Forrest had been lucky they’d let him and the rest of the crew in, but he was left with only three people instead of four, and one camera instead of two. On top of that, the authorities had gotten sticky about work permits, requiring him to finish up in Egypt and move on to his next production in Turkey five days sooner than planned. Did Gideon have any idea of the pressures that created on this job? Everything was going to have to go like clockwork.
Only of course, Forrest had said, staring moodily out the window of the van, it wouldn’t. That went without saying. But what the hell, the sooner he got to Turkey and to bribing the local officials for the permits and concessions he needed to begin work on Hunting the Anatolian Boar, the happier he would be. Five extra days in Turkey would mean, with any luck, that he would have time for some avocational hunting of his own. You could still shoot wolves, and fox, and mountain goats in the Anatolian mountains, did Gideon know that? Now there was life at its best: it was-well, splendid. Up in the morning with the sun to the smell of coffee being brewed by your guide… and Turkey! Turkey was a civilized country compared to Egypt.
Forrest had accepted the assignment to make The Story of Horizon House in a weak moment, because it was so easy to tack onto the Turkish trip, and, frankly, the money wasn’t bad, but it had been sheer misery from the beginning. In the first place, as he should have remembered, he couldn’t stand Egypt; he’d made five documentaries here in the last seven years, and you’d think he’d know by now. In the second, Clifford Haddon, as he also should have remembered, was the most self-centered, fault-finding, aggravating old fart anyone ever had to deal with. And third, the project itself was the most excruciatingly dull, pedestrian thing he’d worked on since The Joy of Spring Bulbs. He didn’t mind exacerbating his ulcer, he’d said, as long as it was in a meaningful cause, but this…! He was a maker of serious films, after all, not just another hack for hire.
And so he was. Despite his twittering air of impending doom, Forrest had built a respectable reputation as a maker of archaeological documentaries. A few years ago Gideon had seen and admired the one that had made his name, The End of Eternity, a four-part PBS special on the destruction of Upper Egypt’s greatest monuments by erosion, pollution, and the crush of tourists. That had been a six-month project, produced as well as directed by Forrest, and he had done most of his on-site research at the Horizon House library, getting to know the institution and its people.
All of which made The Story of Horizon House a natural for him, at least from the foundation’s point of view.
The last of the twelve was Gideon and Julie’s old friend, Phil Boyajian, free spirit. Divorced (amicably), a few years older than Gideon, and also an ex-student of Abe Goldstein’s, he now lived in Bellingham, a couple of hours north of Seattle. Of all the anthropologists Gideon knew, Phil had had perhaps the most peculiar career. Armed with a Ph. D. in cultural anthropology and Middle Eastern studies, he had begun with fieldwork in Jordan and Tunisia, but claimed it made him feel like a voyeur. So he’d taken an assistant professorship at the University of Washington, only to find university politics more than he could stand. He’d then tried teaching at a Seattle junior college, but couldn’t bear the committee assignments. And finally, completing this resolutely backward progression, he’d wound up teaching at a high school in Olympia, which had kept him contented for almost five years-a long time for Phil.
Then, seven or eight years ago, he’d spent a summer vacation doing travel research for a new guidebook called Egypt on the Cheap, geared primarily to students and backpackers. The book had been a great success, and Phil was now firmly and happily ensconced as a contributing editor to the flourishing On the Cheap series, which helped travelers get around in developing countries with a minimum of stress and confusion. In addition, two or three times a year he accompanied alumni tours to North Africa or the Middle East, acting as a sort of cultural liaison to ensure that their existence was as untroubled as possible. Whenever he came back from such a trip, Gideon and Julie could be assured of an evening’s good stories, but this time they wouldn’t have to wait for them. It was Phil who had arranged the flight to el-Amarna, and the Nile cruise, and he was along to head off whatever problems might arise.
Gideon understood the need for him. Egypt wasn’t an easy country to get around in. There were frustrations at every turn: bureaucratic muddles, “rules” that didn’t exist yesterday and wouldn’t exist tomorrow, unexpected demands for fees or for permits that could only be gotten in Cairo on the first day of the second week of alternate months. There were confusions and noisy fracases over matters whose import-whose very sense-eluded foreigners. And, especially, there was an utter unconcern for time-nobody in Egypt was ever in a hurry- and a disinclination to interfere with the not-always-transparent manifestations of God’s will that had driven more than one harried Westerner around the bend.