He stood, wiping the dust off his hands. “Lesson time is over, my friend,” he said to Mostafa. “I’ve got to earn my keep.” He scuffed out the picture he’d drawn with one boot, and then walked underneath the ladder I was perched on.
“I can’t believe you did that!” I said.
“Taught Mostafa a hieroglyph?” he said innocently.
“No…you just walked under the ladder.”
“Let me guess. Another superstition from your Irish mother.” He rummaged for a Sharpie in his own bag. “What should I do to keep the whole tomb from falling down around me, then?”
“My mom would say you should walk through the ladder again, backward. Or cross your fingers and keep them crossed till you see a dog.”
“A dog…?” He shook his head. “I’ll just take my chances and live on the edge.” He spread one hand over a section of Mylar and began to trace hieroglyphs he could reach from his spot on the ground. “The only superstition my family ever adhered to was to not leave a finger of brandy in the decanter. You have to finish it. But I don’t know if that was superstition or alcoholism.”
“My mother has so many of them.”
“What’s the oddest one?”
I thought for a moment. “Don’t put your feet on the table, because it’s where God’s face is.”
“On the table?”
“Allegedly. And if you give someone a handkerchief as a gift, it means the recipient’s life will be full of sadness,” I added. “Oh. And breaking dishes is lucky.”
He turned to me. “Did you break a lot of dishes?”
I noticed that the light Harbi had been trying so hard to catch for me touched Wyatt’s hair effortlessly, like a benediction. “Yeah.”
“Then maybe she was just trying to make you feel better. I’m told mothers are supposed to do that.”
I glanced at him, but there was enough bitterness in his tone to suggest that his own mother might not have been very kind. The Wyatt I knew was a titled white guy with all the privilege in the world; maybe his mother had forgotten to pick him up from cricket practice once.
And yet as soon as I thought that, I felt embarrassed.
Before I could question whether Wyatt might deserve more than my usual scorn, we were interrupted by Dumphries. “Hello, my chickens,” he said. “How’s our colossus?”
I came down from the ladder and stood beside him. Wyatt joined us, and we all looked at the image of the tremendous statue of Djehutyhotep II being hauled. It had been much more impressive, once. In 1890, the inscription was damaged—all the hieroglyphs to the left had been hacked out. There was also graffiti scrawled over other parts of the text—Coptic, from people who had lived in the tombs, and Greek, from ancient tourists. Our job was basically to replicate this image, with all its scarring from age and erosion and mankind, and to hypothesize about missing pieces. In the Middle Kingdom, autobiographical inscriptions were pretty straightforward, but there was always a weird turn of phrase or grammar that was time-consuming and hard to translate, that required reference books and publications. In those cases, two heads were better than one.
That’s why Dumphries had assigned us both to the task.
He clapped us both on our shoulders. “So let it be written, so let it be done,” he joked, quoting Ramesses II from the movie version ofThe Ten Commandments. “Which as you know is complete bullshit.”
He wandered off to check on the others as Wyatt and I climbed back into position. “So,” Wyatt said drily, “did you know the Cecil B. DeMille movie used this scene of the colossus as a reference?”
Dumphries had told us that fact at least twenty times in the two weeks we’d been here. “Why no,” I said, deadpan. “That’s totally news to me.”
Dumphries loved to talk about everything that the movie got wrong. The film made it seem like when a pharaoh said something was law, no questions were asked. But Egyptians were big on tribunals. Even when a pharaoh was presumed assassinated, like Ramesses III, an independent panel of judges was set up and everyone had to be interviewed before a sentence could be meted out to his murderer.
I was working on sketching the overseer, who stood on the actual statue, directing those who were hauling it.
“Did you ever seeThe Ten Commandments?” I asked Wyatt.
“Every Easter,” he replied.
“They got this part wrong. The overseer wasn’t holding a whip. He’s clapping. Look.”
All of a sudden Wyatt was scaling the opposite side of the ladder. He traced a finger over the hieroglyphs beside the overseer. “Words spoken: keeping time for the soldiers by…can’t read that bit…Djehutyhotep, beloved of the king.” He met my eyes. “He’s the DJ.”
“Dropping that sick beat.” I laughed.
