“And where does the Menshiya come into it?” Julie said, finishing her drink and stretching. “I don’t mean to rush you, but we have to be up early tomorrow morning.”
“They couldn’t leave the bodies where they were,” Gideon said, “so they shipped them to Cairo for safekeeping. The boat that took them was called the Menshiya. Can you imagine? The ancient kings of Thebes on their last journey after three thousand years. The news got out and people lined the shore all the way from Luxor to Cairo. Women tearing their hair, men firing guns into the air…”
“Can I ask you something? Did you actually know all this before, or did you learn it from boning up these last few weeks?”
“Don’t ask rude questions. Anyway, there’s more. I haven’t gotten to the best part. When they arrived, these old mummies had to be assessed for duties, like anything else coming into Cairo. The problem was, there wasn’t any classification they fit into. They weren’t stone, they weren’t cloth, they weren’t wood. So the tax collector and the officials got their heads together, came up with a compromise solution… and the greatest rulers of the ancient world made their triumphal entry into modern Cairo classified as dried fish.”
Julie spluttered with laughter. “Not that far off, when you think about it. You know, there’s got to be a moral there somewhere.”
“There sure does. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what it is.”
The morning began on a happy note. The baggage had arrived at el-Minya at 12:30 a.m., and Phil had somehow gotten it delivered to the ship in (and on) two rickety taxis. So as individuals began emerging from their staterooms a little before 7 a.m., they found their luggage stacked neatly in the corridor beside their doors. There were yips of joy as people were reunited with their underwear and toiletries. Even Haddon went out of his way to shake Phil’s hand.
It was all mildly amazing and a bit amusing to Gideon. At home Phil’s life was an exercise in planned disorganization. Constantly behind in his schedule, constantly overlooking things like bills and appointments, perpetually late (“Sorry, I remembered I had to do the laundry.”
“Sorry, the rubber plant needed repotting.”), he bumbled along from one day to another, happily enough, to be sure, but always seemingly on the edge of chaos. Here, in his professional capacity, he was a man of infinite capacity, his fingers on the strings of every available resource.
During breakfast, a bright buffet of melons, figs, dates, tangerines, and warm loaves of sweet bread, Forrest went over the shooting schedule. All of the morning’s interviews would take place in or around the Tel el-Amarna Museum not far from the ship. At 8:00, Haddon would talk about his early experiences there. At 9:30, it would be Gideon’s turn; he would discuss Pharaoh Akhenaten and his times. And Arlo would display and discuss some of the old finds from Lambert’s day at 11:00. TJ had an off-day.
“But which finds?” Arlo asked. “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Anything,” Forrest said. “Talk about jewelry.”
“Well… there a some jewelry here that I’m quite interested in myself, but I don’t know-”
“Fine, perfect.”
In his own way, Arlo looked pleased.
“So long as it’s visual,” Forrest said.
“Well, of course it’s visual.”
“Fine, perfect.”
As Forrest went on, Arlo leaned worriedly toward Gideon. “What does he mean by visual?”
“You’ve got me, Arlo.”
“Isn’t jewelry visual? I mean, by definition?”
“You’d sure think so.”
“I’m really not very good at this sort of thing,” Arlo said.
“Okay,” Forrest said, “anybody who’s not involved in the shooting, you’re free to spend the morning wherever you want. But remember, the boat has to leave at one o’clock sharp, so please -give my ulcer a break and be back in plenty of time. We’re on a tight schedule and I wouldn’t even want to try to extend our time in Egypt.”
And miss even a single, splendid day of Anatolian boar-hunting, Gideon thought.
Chapter Ten
The Tel el-Amarna Museum stood at the desert’s edge a few hundred yards from the river, a little more than a mile south of the huddled brown village of el-Till and hard against the scant remains of what had once been the King’s Street in the great city of Akhetaten. No more than a utilitarian structure when constructed in 1913 as headquarters for Lambert’s first excavation, the plain, one-story stucco building had been going downhill ever since. For twenty years after 1913 it had gone unused. In the 1930s, the University of Bern had taken it over for two decades. Then, in the 1950s, it had been turned over to the Egyptian government for use as a museum, but the money had never come through to properly maintain or staff it, and its finer pieces had gone one by one to more prestigious institutions. Now its undistinguished and slowly deteriorating collection was open to the public only a few afternoons a week, and irregularly at that.
It was nobody’s fault, Gideon knew. Egypt, possessor of the greatest accumulation of archaeological material in the world, also happened to be one of its poorest countries. If there wasn’t enough money to shore up the Great Sphinx against the groundwater that was eating it away, or to safeguard Luxor Temple against the corrosive salts in its soil, what chance was there to turn the dowdy Tel el-Amarna Museum into anything special? And if they did, how many people would come to visit it? Why would anyone, given the mind-numbing wealth available in the rest of the country?
Those members of the Horizon expedition who had the choice went elsewhere this morning. TJ took Julie on a tour of the ruined estates and houses that had made up the northern “suburbs” of Akhetaten, Bruno and Jerry trudged up the long incline to the famous painted cliff tombs on the ridge behind the city, Phil wandered around the village of el-Till making new friends, and Bea got a book and a pitcher of tea and went up to the Menshiya’s sun deck.
Gideon, Arlo, Haddon, and the film crew had the museum to themselves except for Dr. Afifi, the cadaverous, understandably hangdog museum director, who hovered, apologetic and solicitous, in the background.
Shooting began in the workroom, formerly a classroom in which a bright and single-minded twenty-year-old named Clifford Henry Haddon had been among those who had succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of hieroglyphic symbols at the feet of the celebrated Professor Heinrich Wiedermeister of the University of Bern.
But this morning’s interview, with Gideon watching from the back of the room, got off to a poor start. Haddon, standing in front of some racks of inscribed stone fragments and looking slightly ridiculous in an oversized bush jacket with enough shotgun-cartridge loops to satisfy the most bloodthirsty White Hunter, was stiff and fussy, squinting under the hot pole-lights. Patsy, cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth, was sweating grouchily over a tangle of wires while Cy, looking as if he might topple over asleep at any second, manned a videocamera set up on a tripod. Forrest, who had the ability to look bored and desperate at the same time, was alongside the camera, keeping his eyes mostly on a monitor a few feet away and prompting Haddon with edgy questions.
“And so after you got your master’s degree at Yale, you came directly here to work on the dig and study with Wiedermeister, is that right?” He was maintaining the singsong, doggedly cheerful tone employed by the edgy young when dealing with the recalcitrant elderly.
“Well-”
“Cut,” Forrest said. “Please, Dr. Haddon, look, I don’t mean to keep interrupting, but would you try not to start every sentence with ‘well’?” It was only 8:10 in the morning and already his smile was tight and glassy. “Okay? All right?”
Haddon compressed his lips and nodded. His beard stuck out straighter.
“All right, do you want to start again? Try to make it sound interesting now.”
“I will try,” Haddon said, “difficult as it may prove.”