ANCIENT EVENING
A story in which Archaeology digs up a little humor!
REPOSTING STORY FOR BENEFIT OF RECENTLY-ADDED SUBSCRIBERS. I LIKE THIS ONE A LOT.
(i)
James Dulford didn’t need his pocket watch to know that quitting time, or as close as he ever came to one in this God-forsaken place, drew near. To the west, the sun, white-hot and searing in its crawl across the daytime sky, had morphed into a vast golden globe melting into the horizon. The desert air before it, while still shimmying gently at ground level, had gained a nip at his elevation that would become a frigid bite within the half-hour.
As he wrapped and stowed his tools, Dulford imagined where this very sun might sit in sweet Betsy’s life right now, concluding that it probably cast his wife’s shadow upon The Metropolitan Museum’s steps as she fed the pigeons her late-lunch sandwich crusts . . . if she was even eating lunch today. Her schedule – in the weeks before he boarded the RMS Scythia, anyway -- had been hectic, with her boss, Cyril Hathaway, riding her hard through breaks and well into each evening as she prepared Dulford’s itinerary for his work here in Hawara.
He’d last seen her six months ago. She stood in the distance, on a crowded dock with New York’s crane-littered skyline rising in the background and Hathaway’s stork-like figure looming by her side. While Hathaway smiled and waved goodbye, she appeared to dab at the tears welling in her big brown eyes before resting her head against his shoulder – her melancholy, Dulford was certain, too much to bear.
Of course, as sad as she’d been over his departure, Betsy herself had volunteered Dulford for the assignment; she’d explained her reasoning to him during a dinner she’d surprised him with weeks earlier at Murray’s Roman Gardens.
Tutankhamun’s recent discovery, she’d said that evening as they sipped their first of numerous bath-tub gin martinis, had kindled an unprecedented public interest in Egyptology, and his active participation in field work there would serve two purposes, with any reasonable find raising both the museum’s public profile and his station within the close-knit archeological ranks.
And beyond that, she’d offered, as she reached across the table to grip his hand, what was a single year abroad, really, in the grand scheme of things?
Well, Dulford couldn’t tell her what a year abroad was, but half of one in this hell-hole had seemed an eternity – with scorching heat, gamy food, (although, mercifully, not much of it), and a mounting lack of success stretching each day to its breaking point. Each nightfall, aching and weary, he returned to his quarters, a frigid, filth-encrusted tent swarming with dull-witted mosquitoes in search of heat and sustenance, and the same evening repast: a piece of flat bread, a small bowl of runny hummus, and a handful of dates.
The one appreciated, no, necessary oasis in this desolate existence, was Gamal: Handsome young Gamal, purveyor of his tent-keeping duties, meals . . . and bearer of one still-resisted yet basic primal need.
The thought of this temptation caused Dulford’s face to flush. He looked away – reflexively, of course, for he stood alone, some 128 feet above a seemingly endless expanse of sand and 6000 miles from home. And as he stared, downcast and ashamed, his eye caught a razor-thin crease, just a shadow that the setting sun chose to highlight at that very moment and that exact location in the southwest corner of the Amenemhet III pyramid.
Dulford’s heart seemed to stop momentarily before kicking in like a trip hammer. The crack in the rounded mud-brick core looked far too manufactured to have occurred naturally, so could it be . . .? And if it were, in wake of a prompt telegram, might Hathaway be here within two weeks (along with more museum staff and those five men and three boys still waiting in Cairo that Betsy supposedly had assembled as his site crew)?
With shaking hands Dulford opened and rummaged through his backpack, retrieving a Marshalltown trowel and his trusty Eveready. He propped the flashlight on his pack, trained it on the excavation point, and started scraping – meticulously at first, with the patience of an experienced archeologist, then quicker when he realized that other than his small cone of light, only a thick swath of the Milky Way aided his vision and guided his hand.
Twenty minutes later, he’d fully uncovered a three-foot-square receptacle. Dulford couldn’t be sure if it was an opening to an antechamber or not, but at that moment he didn’t care . . . because before him, coiled to fit like skeletal origami, lay the bones of what appeared to a full-grown adult. That alone would have been enough to shake him to his foundation, but what thrust out from one of the remains’ fleshless fists dropped him to his knees as swiftly as a Jack Dempsey left hook.
Dulford’s urge to continue overrode the more prudent course of action, which would be to cover up the find with his small canvas tarp and return with the sun in the morning, and he found himself reaching out from his kneeling position, prying open clenched and yellowed three-thousand-year-old digits, and freeing a thick papyrus scroll from a brittle death-grip.
(ii)
When Dulford burst through his tent’s front flaps he found dinner for two set on his worktable and, amongst the dim flicker of strategically placed oil lamps, a single white candle burning upon the table by his cot.
Upon his bed sat Gamal, freshly bathed, shaved, and clothed in a clean gray jellabiya.
“You are late Mr. James,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, Gamal. I’m sorry, but work held me up and . . .”
He looked at his man-servant now, fully noting his aquiline features, his shock of jet-black hair, the setting, and for an instant a flood of familiar, awkward emotions stalled the freshly-fueled anticipation that had propelled him from the site.
Then, just as quickly, his anticipation returned.
“. . . and I’m afraid I’ll have to keep going through the night.”
Gamal stood and extinguished the candle. “As you wish, Sir.”
“And, Gamal, after you clear the table, could you bring me coffee, lots of coffee – hot and strong?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Dulford recognized the signs in Gamal’s behavior, the stilted gait and lack of eye contact as he gathered plates and walked to the exit, but what could he do? What could he ever do?
He looked to the scroll in his hand again, hefted it. Both it and the body had been left under the most improbable conditions. No pharaoh or nobleman would have been buried this way. Reconsidering the possibility that he might discover major insights into the life of a more or less average Ancient-Egyptian citizen sent a new surge of energy through him.
Placing the document on the table, Dulford weighed down its top with a lantern and began unrolling the papyrus slowly, in tiny increments, guarding against millenniums’ worth of dehydration. When he’d opened it fully, he held the bottom in place with another lantern and drank in a six-foot length of hieratic script, its recognizable right-to-left horizontal flow illuminated from both ends.
As if on cue, Gamal entered, carrying a tray bearing a copper coffee pot with lit warmer, a small China cup, a pen and inkpot, and a sheaf of paper. He placed the tray on the corner of the table and backed out of the tent.
Dulford poured himself a coffee, downed it, poured himself another, removed his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on; then, organizing pen, paper, ink and pulling up a chair, he set to work.
(iii)
Verily, I should have known, having seen how ardently Anstay ii contemplated the female water-bearers’ forms as they swayed by him and up the ramps under the weight of their loads; how he bared his sand-worn-nubbins-for-teeth at them as they passed, thinking that his rictus of a leer might pass for a smile warm and caring . . . and how, on numerous occasions, his loin cloth did rise.
Yet, in truth, the sly ones are not always so easy to know; they are misleaders, draping their intentions beneath a myriad of false cloaks, as Anstay ii has done with me throughout our history and unto this very night . . . when all of his cloaks did fall and his soul stood naked before me, poisoning my judgement.
It occurred thusly:
I, Ahmose, Evening Overseer of Masonry, on the first night of the waxing moon and in the season of Shemu, was tending to my own affairs when Anstay ii, Director of Workers, did approach me.
“Ahmose,” he said. “How goes it?”
“It goes well, Anstay ii,” I replied, “although, in truth, I await shift’s end with great anticipation.”
“Who wouldn’t,” Anstay ii said. “But I’m here to tell you, you must stay on till sunrise, for Menkheperresenb has been smitten with the Giza two-step and may not stray from his toilet.”
“A pox on Menkheperresenb,” I said.
“As you would have it,” Anstay ii said. “Nonetheless, you are here, he is not.”
“Yet this be the fifth time in a fortnight that Menkheperresenb suffers this illness,” I replied. “He is not ill; he is lazy, flatulent, and suffers the consequences of excessive beer consumption.”
“Mayhap. And still Our Lord Amenemhet iii’s monument-in-progress maintains its need of overseeing.”
“Most assuredly. Yet the skills required to man the shift between midnight and sunrise need not be those of Overseer of Masonry. With the evening crew departed and the night grown silent, the duty requires no more than sharp eyes and ears; serviceable arms and legs: a mere lout to bar any wrong-doer or vandal from sacred ground with a harsh lashing of either tongue or whip, depending upon said rogue’s proximity.”
“Verily – tongue or whip, both of which you possess,” Anstay ii answered.
“Yea . . . verily, as do you.”
“If you imply that I, Anstay ii, take on this unexpected duty when clearly my station rests above yours . . ..”
As is his way, Anstay ii talked on and on, chirping and clicking as might a large cricket, waving his stick-like arms, causing the oil lamp posted behind us to stir, smoke, and cast flickering shadows over the dusty ramp and across my sandals. He broached many subjects: his years of seniority; his superior intellect (an obvious untruth); the lack of respect shown to elders in these modern times, and so forth. Yet as he droned, my mind drifted, and presently all I could think of was Bahita, laid out before our hearth, blanket thrown off, a patina of sweat making her skin glow and her sweet scent rise as she restlessly awaited my return.
(iv)
Although still engrossed, Dulford stopped here. Something troubled him. Then suddenly he realized that thoughts of Betsy had encroached: Betsy, with her cupid’s-bow pout and her nightie askew; with that single curl lying flat against her alabaster forehead as she tossed and turned in her solitude each night amidst damp and rumpled sheets.
But why? Why would this image rise up while he was in the midst of such an obvious life-altering event as translating his present find? He reached for the coffee and found the warmer extinguished. He poured a shot anyway, downed it in one head-shaking gulp, and let the cold, bitter jolt reel his mind back into the moment and his attention back to the one-third-finished manuscript.
(v)
Like Mighty Iteru herself, Anstay ii’s mouth ran on and on, until I thought his words might never cease. But when he commenced once more with those incessant tales of yesteryear, that is, how much better things were during Senusret iii’s day – the food and drink, the mores and music (apparently, no one of my generation could make harp strings dance with the vim and intricacy of Isetnofret . . . as if I’d not heard that one before) and, of course, his unrivaled skills as Evening Overseer of Masonry during that reign – I’d reached my fill. Finally, when he paused for breath, I spoke.
“Verily, the years-gone-by held much that was good; yet gone they are and having survived two score plus ten of them has made you weak and thin. Your time is over, Anstay ii, and your boasts now ring hollow.”
Upon hearing these words, Anstay ii’s eyes did protrude from their sockets and his words did spew from gnarled lips.
“Oh, yeah! Sayeth you!”
“Nay,” I replied. “Sayeth all.”
And then his lips did transform, slowly yet surely, from angry and gnarled to a smile bearing much mischief.
“Nay . . . not all.”
“Then sayeth who”? I answered.
Anstay ii studied me long and hard, as if the thoughts behind his soulless eyes finally held weight and now moved with the suffocating pace of the greatest sandstone blocks upon their wooden tracks. And only when his mischievous smile did at last settle into a grin of serious malcontent did he speak:
“Sayeth Bahita!”
“Eh?” I replied.
“Pretend not that you heard naught,” he spat. “Bahita!”
“Verily, I heard. But what meaneth you?”
“I meaneth she does not think me old and thin, and she cherishes the nights that Menkheperresenb lies at home, too ill to work, while you stand here, oblivious, in his place.”
He made an odd hooking motion, just above his shoulders, with the two main fingers of each hand upon the word “ill.” I’d not seen this gesture before, and for a moment the odd pantomime confused me.
“Again, what meaneth you?” I asked.
He took displeasure in my confusion, but, seemingly, great pleasure as he dispelled it.
“You stated not long ago that I possessed both tongue and whip, Ahmose. Well, I tell you now; no one knows better or appreciates more how I wield these implements of pleasure than your precious wife.”
Now I understood, and a redness to match a sunset over Dashur came across my vision.
“Verily, you lie . . . like a serpent amongst the reeds!” I cried, hoping beyond hope that he did speak an untruth.
“Oh, do I? Then how would I know that a little mole lies sleeping like a mouse in the crease beneath Bahita’s left buttock, and how perky and joyous it seems when thrust skyward; or, how might I claim knowledge that she utters the name Osiris three times upon achieving satisfaction?”
I knew now that he did, indeed, speak the truth.
Unless . . .?
“Perhaps,” I said, “you have spied upon us, peering through the window of our sleeping quarters as I, Ahmose, satisfied her in a similar manner.”
Anstay ii shook his head slowly, seeming to pity me the way he would a crestfallen child. “Think what you would, but know this,” he said next. “When I issued you to Memphis last year to oversee construction of the Northern gate in The Temple of Ptah, I did so at the request, nay the pleading of Bahita.”
I considered his words, remembering exactly how and when Anstay ii apprised me of the assignment in question. I then thought back to shift’s end of that same day and recalled that Bahita – before she could have known of unfolding events – was already preparing a special meal in honor of my imminent departure. We ate heartily that night, and as she plied me with drink, she said: “Worry not, Ahmose; for what is one season, anyway . . . especially the season of Peret?”
With these memories, a dozen more that no longer rang quite so true came flooding back, and my thoughts did coalesce.
I looked at Anstay ii now and recognized the same grin, the same tiny-toothed smirk of satisfaction that I’d seen adorning his face on the morn of my leave, as I stood upon the barge moored on the East banks of Iteru most sacred. And then I recalled how he had hailed my farewell as we pushed off and the bargemen poled us Northward. His zest most certainly belied the occasion. Beside him stood Bahita, looking mournful – or so I’d thought all this time; but upon present inspection, with this newly-gained knowledge at my command, I knew otherwise.
Yes, how close she stood to him – verily, her head rested upon his shoulder. And those tears rolling down her cheeks like river water diverted to distant fields in the time of flood. . . they were not tears of grief!
I strode forward with whip handle raised, brought it down hard upon his temple, and Anstay ii crashed to the ground like an ox brought to slaughter. I smote him again, and again, and yet again, until he lay still and silence surrounded me save for a single bat screeching overhead. Or was it a bat? My mind was abuzz. The only facts I could ascertain for sure were these: the night-time sky was now splashed with milk and the crescent moon had begun its descent. I had scant hours to say my piece, hide my mistake, and make my peace with Ma’at.
(vi)
Dulford looked at his watch: 3:00 am.
He was dizzy with hunger and fatigue, and his mind raced, then stalled, then raced again beneath the onslaught of his new-found knowledge, of the uncanny parallels between his life and Ahmose’s; but ever since adolescence, when, for reasons beyond his understanding, he’d first dreamt of his future in archeology, he’d had a premonition that a life-altering moment of this magnitude, some kind of monumental unearthing, would come to him. He just wasn’t exactly sure when, or how, or why it would occur.
Now he knew with certainty; and with this knowledge, the sting of Betsy and Hathaway’s obvious betrayal dissipated.
Leaving the scroll unrolled, he stood, extinguished the oil lamps, walked to the edge of his cot, and sat next to the nightstand. For a moment, he did nothing more than sit in the dark and listen to the choppy, night-time desert wind throw fine sprays of sand against his tent. And then he heard it – something more than the sand and wind stirred beyond his walls; something living and drawing heavy breath lurked there.
Reaching out, he struck a match and set it to the small white candle sitting at table’s center. When the wick finally caught and the flame grew, he whispered:
“Gamal?”