“I can’t make any guarantees, but I’ll see if I can get you a temporary permit.”
My head snaps up. “You will?”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“Yes,” I breathe. I take a step toward him, and then that strange and shifting invisible wall between us reminds me to stay where I am. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” Wyatt stands. “I haven’t done anything yet, and if you do get to stay, you’re going to be worked to the bone. Let me introduce you to everyone, and then we can drive into Minya to the antiquities office this afternoon.” He starts out of the library, expecting me to follow. I can hear the house humming, the Arabic chatter of Harbi and his family preparing a meal; the pipes clearing their throats as water rushes through them.
Suddenly, Wyatt stops so abruptly that I nearly crash into him. He turns around so that we are frozen in the hallway, eye to eye. “One more thing?” he says. “I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know what you’re hiding. And you may well be out of practice.” Then a smile ghosts over his lips, a challenge. “But I unearth things for a living.”
—
UNTIL RECENTLY,EGYPTIANSwho graduated from college were guaranteed jobs by the Egyptian government, which meant there was a glut of government employees and not a tremendous amount of work to do—one study suggested that the average government employee only actually performed about a half hour of labor per day. Because of this, working with the Yale concession was a plum occupation, and Harbi’s father and the others I had known fifteen years earlier were so good at their jobs that it became a family affair, passed down over generations. Wyatt introduces me to Mohammed Mahmoud, son of the Mohammed I knew when I was last here. He works now with Harbi, Abdou, and Ahmed to prepare food, clean the Dig House, and labor on site. In between dig seasons, he and his family live in Luxor.
Wyatt introduces me as an old friend to those who weren’t here before. Some call medoctora,like Harbi did. “It’s just Dawn,” I say cheerfully, but I am aware of Wyatt’s eyes on me the entire time. When he leads me out of the kitchen, I ask, “What happened to Harbi’s leg?”
He props a shoulder against the stucco wall. “How come you didn’t finish your degree?” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Think of it as currency. You want an answer, you have to give one.”
“I got an MSW instead,” I say. “Academia wasn’t going to pan out.”
Wyatt regards me, as if he’s trying to figure out if I am telling the truth. “Harbi’s leg broke when a ladder gave way in a tomb shaft about five years ago. Never set right.”
I suddenly see a ladder tangling under my own feet in the tomb of Djehutyhotep II, Wyatt catching me and breaking the fall. I remember how he smelled like the sun baked into his clothes and also butterscotch. How, weeks later I would learn that he kept sweets in his pocket, for himself and to give to the barefoot children who waited for him in the blistering heat at the entrance to thewadias we left for the day.
“Come on,” he says. “Let me show you what we’re working on.”
In the main room of the Dig House, there is still swing music playing. A young man with tightly cropped hair is bent over a table, sketching Paleolithic flints, which are lined up in neat rows. Wyatt picks one up and passes it to me; I run my finger over the scalloped edge. “Joe,” he says, “this is Dawn.” Joe pushes his glasses up and nods to me, waiting for an explanation from Wyatt that isn’t forthcoming. “He’s the only grad student here this late in the year,” Wyatt explains.
“I’m hoping for a trophy.” Joe laughs. “Or at least a grave marker: Here lies Joe Cullen, dessicated in the desert.”
“Are these flints part of your dissertation?” I ask.
He nods, scratching numbers onto a tiny metal label. “Yeah, I’m all about how ancient Egyptians worked with their hands. These are all primitive tools; I’m recording the season number, the date, and the location found.”
“These used to be paper tags,” I murmur.
Joe glances up, surprised that I know this. “There was a European expedition working in the south that was storing potsherds in palm-rib crates in their magazine at Aswan, and they got termites and basically were left with an unmarked pile of broken sherds. This system saves us from two things that are hard to avoid in Egypt: fading and bugs.”
I set the flint down gently on the table. “That’s a scraper,” he says. “We’ve found a huge number of them, which suggests that there was a lot of hide preparation in the deep desert.”
“That’s really inter—”
“Don’t encourage him,” Wyatt jokes. “Or he’ll pull out his hand axes.” He leads me to the other side of the room, where a man in his thirties has his dark head bent over a computer screen. “Alberto, did you get it up and running again?”
He nods, looking up to notice me for the first time. His face, thin and sharp-nosed, changes when he smiles, white teeth flashing. “You did not tell me we were having company. Beautiful company.”
I feel myself blush. When was the last time I did that?
“She’s not company. She’s working here.” Wyatt looks at me. “Maybe.” I glance at the computer screen, on which a three-dimensional model of a rock-cut tomb pivots. “Alberto’s a digital archaeologist from Italy.”
Fifteen years ago, that job didn’t exist.
Wyatt laughs when he sees that expression cross my face. “I know. We’re old.”
“You draw digital models of the site?” I ask.
Alberto shakes his head. “I do photogrammetry and geomatics. Digital mapping in 3D, instead of the linear measuring that used to be the standard.”
