In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (12 page)

A word of power. The mind does not reel. A word, we know, has no power. So I once believed. But in a lifetime of research into Egypt, I have become skeptical—unsure of much we in our century take on faith.

I would adduce my reasons; I cannot. A word of power has nothing to do with reason.

Look around you: how much of the power that affects your life has to do with
reason?
A half-bright undergraduate can tell how long a pebble dropped will fall before it hits the bottom of a well. But not one of my colleagues on the faculty in physics can tell you
why
. Mass attracts mass, they say. Why? Because it does, they aver, uncomfortably echoing Aristotle. If pressed, they will confess it: We don’t know
why
.

And so it is, for every phenomenal and noumenal event you name. Trace the chimera Reason to its den, and the ground collapses at your feet. Certain things are. Then they are not. And if, at their beginning and their end, things challenge our sense of how events ought to proceed, the outrage committed against reason is the least of consequences that should concern us.

Evidence, then. On my side of the issue I can produce, as some have already observed, no evidence. I can only suggest, in words, that which I feel with a poignancy that makes all reason hollow, all evidence evanescence, all words the stuff of dream. What I feel, what I know, I cannot speak outright; only sidelong, only glancingly can I tell you what will never be the thing itself.

It has that to do with what you will never know, unless you have, as I, been present at the opening of an Egyptian tomb.

The door is sealed, plastered over from threshold to lintel with a fine, smooth grout, mud of the Nile, the stuff of Chaos itself. In it, one can see the impression of the trowel: here and there the thumbprints of the plasterers, the loops and whorls of their fingerprints intact—fingers that went in time into their own tombs, and moldered into dust—here, still, after five thousand years: you may place your own thumb there, into the lapse of fifty centuries, fit it into the empty socket, filling up the space that once was filled by fingers of a living hand.

Behind the plaster is stone. It comes down, course by uneven course, baulked by oak logs light as balsa now. A haze of dust rises, hovers around you in the stillness, until the moment when your chisel enters the emptiness beyond: a hot, dry air escapes. The tomb has let its final breath at last, as if the one immured within has only now, after long millennia of sleep, given up the ghost.

In a clean tomb, where no water has seeped, the air is adust, and the odor it carries seems to rise from the parching of your own nostrils. In the tombs where rot has entered, that most ravenous of tomb-robbers gusts great squalls of laughter, leaps eagerly to greet you, draw you in to share the sport of its long feast. So it was in Nur-Mar’s tomb: at the opening of the probe-hole, the candle we held into the escaping wind died, and the tunnel filled with a horrible presence—not decay, not a smell at all: the presence in the tunnel was sensible only in the hairs it stirred upon our necks.

The clearing of the door told why. Nur-Mar had been buried with an Answerer.

The
ushabti
were, in later dynasties, an artistic convention: small, painted figurines in the image of the deceased and his servants, who were to do for him the onerous labor required in the Duat. They have long fascinated me, in the way all things Egyptian do; the attempt to make literal and concrete what we now conceive as only symbolic: this is essentially Egyptian. Before the opening of Nur-Mar’s tomb, it had never occurred to me to wonder what the origins of this abstracting process might have been in the case of the
ushabti
: if we looked back long enough, would we find the place where art lapses back into the flesh?

The Answerer in Nur-Mar’s tomb lay just inside the door. I do not know if there were theoretical or practical reasons for the location. Theoretically, I suppose, stationed near the door an Answerer would be placed so as to intercept anyone who entered with a task for the deceased. Practically, the issue is clearer: whoever stapled his fetters had made certain the chain would stop him short of the offerings of food and wine that filled the chamber just beyond.

There is this quality in any Egyptian tomb: they annihilate time. Whether it is in the clear preservation of the marks left by Nur-Mar’s Answerer in his last hours, or in the simple bouquet of dried flowers that we found atop the steward’s sarcophagus, in each case, with every trivial find, there is an overwhelming sense that these events stopped only moments before you entered. If the object of Egyptian funerary practice was to preserve the identity (the
Ka,
or
Ba,
or
Kau,
or
Ku,
call it what they would, and did) of the deceased, who is to say they did not succeed? Are there any other faces from the third millennium B.C.E. familiar to us now—not through stone or pigment, but the flesh itself, identifiable and individual, as Ramesses’ is in Cairo, or Nur-Mar’s is this moment in my memory?

When I was still a boy, almost forty years ago I won, as a prize in a national science competition, a two-week tour of Europe, in company with four dozen other prodigies. My memories of the trip are all decayed now into a series of hotel rooms with exotic fixtures and a damp smell, and a series of interminable bus rides. All lost now, except for one gray, drizzling morning in the valley of the Dordogne, when we descended into the caves of Lascaux. The image of a hand, silhouetted in a haze of charcoal, hangs above me to this day—too high for me to reach. Still I could tell the hand—the left—had been larger than my own. I felt almost a stroke from that hand, a touch on my skin that lingered. I emerged into the gray damp daylight of France and found the surface of the earth a hollow dream.

Never in my life have I felt so utterly alone, a boy of twelve, in a tour bus in Europe, a continent away from a land where I had no home.

As the works of the Egyptians bettered the hunting magic of the Magdalenian—the one hazy image of a hand ramifying, resolving out of chaos to become a face, a body swathed in linen, a room with furniture, almost a life—I am tantalized by the sense that, somewhere in the three millennia of their active seeking, someone in ancient Egypt may have done it. Someone may have reached a hand clear through the rock and pulled himself alive through death’s abiding wall.

With classes done, and no research expedition before me, I am reduced to examining a limited body of evidence. I have the lab results before me: copies; the originals the doctor retains, as if jealous of them. They show the chemistry of my blood, the skipping of my heart, the slow, dreaming drift of the EEG. All, the doctor said, were negative. He thinks I am a healthy man.

The X-ray shadows, CT slices, the MR angiograms all show the same object: my skull. The flaring void of nose, wide-staring sockets, the brain behind them in this view only indifferently visible, merely suggested by the net of veins, a fine haze upholding the invisible that is me.

Nothing reveals itself: no tumor sprouting at the center, no erosion mining the stem. I hold the gray films to my desk lamp, and the bright ghost of the bulb hovers a thumb’s width away from the obscuration in my eyes.

Nothing is there. But I wonder if, to other eyes, trained in mysteries I do not know, that net of nothing might reveal—what? I do not know, only that the thought of it sends horror through me: fear in my groin, a hand brushing cold up through my viscera. I feel the whispers almost audible, as though dust were blowing already through my heart.

A
PPLIED AND
E
NGINEERING
P
HYSICS

M
AXWELL
L
ABS

———
U
NIVERSITY

“B” was Budge, who I knew had had his own application in. We are the same vintage, Budge and I, having been hired, reviewed, tenured and promoted in lockstep, as if he were my shadow or I his as we skipped up the steps of academic advancement together. Today I had learned who was whose shadow. Budge, I could tell from what the note did not say, had won his grant. Budge was through the door, and I had simply vanished from the track. Or was about to. When Budge came back from wherever he would spend his grant money, I would not be there to greet him.

This saddened me, more than I would have expected. I have no family, few friends. In my line of work—I cannot blame it on my line of work. But Budge and I, although our shared interests are few, and he has his family and his work beside, Budge and I have shared something like friendship this past decade. If friendship is the expectation that a certain face and voice will be there, met by chance and passed as easily, that was what we had. At the thought that one of our faces would be missing, I found myself growing what may have even approximated affection for Budge.