There’s a loud gagging sound.
“It’s not mine. It’s Garret’s,” Bart sniggers.
And over the top of all the ensuing hilarity and Riley’s screeches of horror is the unmistakeable sound of violent retching.
Garret is hanging over the side of the boat, emptying his stomach into the Nile.
“Welcome to Egypt.”
There are advantages to being on a small, slow-moving boat, as opposed to the massive tourist ships Riley eyes with envy.
Unlike the bigger boats, Khaled is able to stay close to the shore and we get a wonderful view of women doing their washing on rocks in the shallows. Weather-worn men with lined faces and tobacco-stained teeth fishing and gossiping. Childrenherding goats. Farmers riding their heavily laden donkeys to the local markets. Daily life along the Nile.
“Are you kidding me?” Sadie exclaims, as a massive boat steams past us, casting us into deep shade. “Did you see that?”
She’s racing to the bow of the boat, camera at the ready.
“Why can’t we be on a boat like that?” Riley whines, dropping her book and looking wistfully at the floating hotel.
“See what?” Jeremy asks.
Sadie points to the small deck on the back of the boat, before raising the camera, zooming in, and snapping. I feel the rumble of the engine increase as Khaled speeds up, trying to catch Sadie’s quarry. Is nobody immune to her charm?
“There’s a woman. There. Ironing. She’s in freaking Egypt, sailing past the most spectacular scenery, and she’s ironing.”
Sure enough, there’s a woman in matching pink pants and shirt ironing. We all roar laughing. Except for Riley.
“Not everyone thinks it’s a badge of honour to look like you just climbed out of the rag bag,” Riley snaps.
“Amira never looks less than regal,” Sayed responds from his position coiling ropes at the very prow of the boat, his tone conveying his level of affront at Riley’s accusation.
“I never said I was talking aboutSadie.” When every eye on the boat turns towards her, eyebrows raised, she at least has the good grace to blush. But not enough sense to stay silent. “But if the wrinkled clothes fit …” And with a flounce, she descends the stairs not to be seen again until dinner time, when we pull into the little dock where we’ll be moored for the duration of the dig.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sadie
Digs are hard work.
Even though it’s winter in Egypt, and the nights are really cold, the sun is bright, and the temperature often gets up above twenty-five degrees Celsius during the day.
It’s hot, dusty work. And I never want to leave.
Amarna is enormous and has been pretty thoroughly excavated, apart from the small area where we are working, far to the north of the main city, away from the areas most tourists are keen to see.
Here and there, ancient mudbrick walls are visible, peeping up through the sand. Exposed for the first time in perhaps thousands of years. At one end of our dig site, there’s the beginning of a stone wall, which suggests either a temple or a palace once stood there, but we’re concentrating on the workers’ village where ordinary Egyptians worked and lived.
The site is broken up into sections in a grid pattern and cordoned off with ropes staked in the sandy ground. Black-and-white level measures stand in one corner of each section, allowing us to record the stratification of the dig for later comparison.
Ethan has assigned us to sections in teams of two, and I sagged with relief when he teamed me with Bart and not Riley. Or Garret, who seems to have developed a nervous tick and jumps at the slightest unexpected sound. Poor thing. The rat gnawing on his toothbrush really freaked him out. I feel sorry for him. I don’t think he’s cut out for dig life. He belongs in a dusty library somewhere. But I don’t feel sorry enough to want to have my first dig ruined by his constant fretting and freaking out.
We start out scraping layers of sand back with trowels and depositing it in small buckets, looking for changes in the colour or consistency that might indicate something is there. Sometimes little things appear, and we move to brushes, so as not to damage potential artefacts.
Sieves are piled neatly beside the giant sifting machines the Egyptian team use to gently sift the sand we remove from our sections, looking for tiny things we may have missed, like beads or little fragments of broken pottery. Everything we find, no matter how small, will be recorded, numbered and cross-referenced for inclusion in the dig report. Because you never know what might prove to be important.
When Ethan isn’t checking on our progress, which he does several times a day, he largely works on his own or with one of the Egyptian assistants. There are lots of them. They’re helpful and friendly and really know their stuff. They’ve also picked up Sayed and Ashraf’s nickname for me and have taken to calling me Amira, which is sweet but kind of embarrassing.
There’s constant chatter and laughing from the Egyptian staff, loud directions from Tarek, the head of the team of local workers, and the sound of shovels and trowels in the sand. Itsomehow manages to be both loud and peaceful at the same time.
