I shrugged. “I’m not the one without a notebook.”
Wyatt ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know the last person in my family who died.”
I turned off the light beside the bed, and the fan. “Sounds like ayouproblem.”
“For fuck’s sake. Fine, then. Uncle Edmond, from Surrey.”
I folded my arms, and raised my brows.
“Uncle Edmond,” Wyatt ground out, “where’s my notebook?”
Suddenly Dumphries appeared in the doorway. “There you are,” he said to Wyatt, holding out a small brown notebook. “Is this yours?”
I breezed past them both.“Erin go bragh,”I murmured to Wyatt.
—
THE TOMB OFDjehutyhotep II had an entry that always reminded me ofPlanet of the Apes—an impressive rock-cut stone façade, listing to the left after years of earthquakes and quarrying and robbery. The architrave and doorway were carved and decorated with Djehutyhotep’s titles and the names of the kings under whom he served. The porch was supported by two fluted columns, and the outer chamber had a large desert hunting scene and fishing scene. A narrow doorway led to the inner chamber—the spot where I worked that July—which was 25 feet deep by 20 feet wide by 16.5 feet high. Inside was the most famous scene in the tomb: a massive statue of Djehutyhotep II being transported. It was accompanied to the left by a large image of Djehutyhotep joined by his family and guards and important officials. The gate of the building where the statue was being hauled was on the right, and in front of that gate were people bearing offerings. In Egyptian art, you’d see hierarchic scale—the most important people were the biggest—but you also would see composite perspective. The faces of the individuals were in profile, but the eyes were straight on. The artists back then would take the most salient feature—eyes, or for the torso, a nipple—and emphasize it.
The best-known publication of the tomb was from 1894, by Percy Newberry. Working under him to create the drawings were Marcus Blackden, and seventeen-year-old Howard Carter—long before his own discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But there were errors in the Newberry publication—bits that were incomplete and inaccuracies that only became evident if you were standing in front of the actual wall, like Wyatt and I were. It was our job, that season, to find and record those mistakes, so that Dumphries could publish a corrected version.
It was early morning in the tomb, and the air was already stagnant and blistering. Mohammed and Ahmed, two of the Egyptians we had working with us that season, were using the total station to mark elevation points. The first-year grad student was sitting outside the tomb, sorting broken potsherds into types: bowls and cups, bread molds, jars, and anything unusual—like a piece with a stamp on it. I had brushed off the surface of the statue-hauling scene I was working on and had finished the daily struggle to affix the Mylar to the rock wall surface with masking tape. Mylar was an entire level of hell, as far as I was concerned. In the heat, it got gooey and limp; in the winter, it grew hard and stiff. The thinner it was, the worse it held up in this kind of heat—but the thicker it was, the harder it was to see through in order to trace the hieroglyphs. It wasn’t particularly efficient, but it was all we had at the time—a way of taking a three-dimensional inscription on the wall and putting it onto two-dimensional paper.
I glanced over at Wyatt talking to Mostafa, the antiquities inspector. Mostafa had expressed an interest in learning hieroglyphs, and Wyatt was endlessly accommodating, drawing in the dust of the tomb floor or finding a sign on the wall. “This one, that looks like a touchdown?” Wyatt tested.
I glanced over, surprised he knew the word from an American sport.
He had drawn the biliteral sign forka,the part of the soul that has to do with what’s handed down from generation to generation. While Mostafa tried to remember that, I turned my attention back to the wall.
Harbi was holding a large mirror to shine the light from the entrance of the tomb to fall from left to right over the area of text I was studying. When tracing, you had to pretend that light was coming from the upper left at a forty-five-degree angle, and if the hieroglyph happened to be in sunken relief, you’d draw a shadow line, slightly thicker.
I lifted my Sharpie from the Mylar, squinting at a detail I couldn’t quite see.
“Harbi,” I said, “can you get me a little more light here?”
He was young and wiry and strong, wrestling with the large mirror to try to direct the light where I needed it. But given the placement of that particular sign, he couldn’t shine it close enough.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. I hopped off the ladder I was standing on and rummaged in my bag for my small mirror. “Aim up here,” I told Harbi, pointing to a spot above my head on the wall. I held up the hand mirror, catching the stream of light he directed that way, and bounced it down to the sign I wanted to scrutinize.
“This one’s my favorite,” Wyatt was saying.
He pointed to the sign he had sketched into the dirt:
Mostafa frowned. “A pistol?”
“In a matter of speaking,” Wyatt said. “Think more…below the belt.”
“It is a phallus?”
“Yes. As a preposition, it meansin front of.”
Ofcourseit 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?”
