Her fingers like lotuses.
To anyone who might read Wyatt’s thesis, this would be taken at face value: a beautiful example of Ancient Egyptian love poetry.
That is…to anyone but me.
—
THE FIRSTEUROPEANto visit Deir el-Bersha was a Dominican friar, Johann Michael Vansleb, who wrote about his visit to the “hieroglyphick cave.” What people who aren’t Egyptologists don’t realize is that the art is not just fine lines and chicken scratch. It fills the walls and the ceilings of tombs with vivid cobalt, russet, turquoise, yellow, ocher, pitch black. The figures show movement, sound, emotion. These aren’t just monuments to the men and women who were buried inside. They are stories.
Unlike the later New Kingdom tombs of royals, where texts about how to get to the afterlife were written on the walls and images of the gods were the norm, the tombs of nomarchs in the Middle Kingdom were filled with scenes of ordinary life. You’d see cooking, grinding grain, dancing, games, music, wrestling, basenji dogs, hunting, sex, trapping game, winemaking, harvesting, building, plowing. The tomb of Baqet has an entire wall of wrestling holds. There’s one tomb where the owner is pictured with a pet griffin on a leash, to suggest that the man was an explorer—someone who had traveled so far and so wide he met a magical creature at the edge of the known world. There were cryptographic hieroglyphs meant to be puns and puzzles for visitors. All in all, you couldn’t walk into a Middle Kingdom tomb without thinking that these people had fun, even four thousand years ago. Their tombs were celebrations of here and now—what you did during your life and what you would take with you after you died.
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.”
“Clearlysomeone’sa 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 wouldyournotebook be inmyroom?”
“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.”
