The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  They were going west, away from the river, the sun at their backs as they traveled along the edges of lush fields of heavy-headed maize plants, around forests of sugarcane that came up to the haunches of the donkey. The farmland ended and the horse turned north, leading the way up a stony track into a white mountain valley. Harriet held onto a tuft of its mane as her donkey began to scramble up the path.

  Dr. Eberhardt Woolfe had pulled up his horse.

  “How do you fare with the donkey, Miss Heron?” he called as she approached.

  “Not bad. I used to ride them on the beach, when I was a girl.”

  “We shall arrive in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  A smaller track led off from the main one and the horse took it, its hindquarters swaying, tail swishing against the flies. Harriet’s donkey followed, its hooves sending showers of small stones back down the slope, Harriet feeling as though she might slide off the back of it.

  Louisa had refused the invitation to come to the tomb but at the encouragement of Monsieur Andreas—who assured her that everyone in Luxor knew Dr. Eberhardt Woolfe, and that everyone who knew him respected him—she’d acquiesced to the expedition, on the condition that Fouad accompany Harriet.

  Fouad had made clear his opposition to the outing. Despite his claim to be an Alexandrian, and therefore superior in all ways to his fellow Egyptians, Fouad was full of superstitions. He swore that there were men who could with a breath turn silver coins into gold ones and salt into sugar; he believed that the evil eye caused troubles ranging from death or sickness to the failure of crops, and wore a small leather pouch around his neck that contained a prayer from the Qur’an, to counter it.

  He’d muttered, as they crossed the river in a small felucca, about evil spirits, ill fortune, the unfailing superiority of the city to the village. Now, as they climbed the path through barren hills, Fouad was silent. Having refused Dr. Woolfe’s offer of a donkey for himself, he trudged at the head of Harriet’s, his heels rising out of the laced shoes with every step.

  A breeze got up and fanned Harriet’s face, lifting the hair around her forehead. The donkey quickened its pace, pricked its ears; the sound of its hooves altered on the shale. They rounded a bend in the track and entered a narrow ravine of white rock, the lower part of it in shade, the tops of the slopes on each side blinding to look at. Dr. Woolfe dismounted.

  “We have arrived.” He gestured toward a dark opening that looked like the entrance to a cave, farther along the valley and up a slope, in the white cliff of rock. “Are you ready, Miss Heron?”

  Sliding down from the donkey, assisted by Fouad, Harriet discovered that she felt unready. All through the winter in London, struggling breath by breath through the lonely nights, she had resisted death. With the fortitude that she could summon in her mind if not in her enfeebled body, she’d told herself that she refused to die—until she reached the city of the dead.

  Now that she was here, she felt differently. Harriet wanted to live. She wanted it fiercely. She hadn’t known that the world could be so expansively beautiful, so full of possibility. From the day when she had landed in Alexandria, she had changed her mind about life. She could hardly explain that to Dr. Woolfe.

  She took another sip of water from the tin flask that Louisa had insisted on, replaced the cork, and slid it back into her pocket next to her journal. Blotting her forehead with her scarf, she cleared her throat.

  “Yes, Dr. Woolfe. I am ready.”

  “Come.”

  He set off along the valley floor and Harriet followed, first walking along the bottom of the narrow gorge, then scrambling behind him up the path to the entrance of the tomb, stepping into a passageway hewn from the rock. It was just tall enough to stand in and inside the entrance was a wooden table, on which stood several small, old-fashioned lamps, matches, and a stack of wooden boxes.

  Dr. Woolfe lit two lamps, the smell of the smoking wick reminding her oddly of London. He handed one to Harriet.

  “This way, Fräulein. Watch your step.”

  She followed behind him into the downward-sloping passageway. The walls and ceiling were undecorated and the ground scattered with rocks and chips of stone. A sweet, unpleasant smell hung in the air. She remembered Fouad and turned to see him still standing at the entrance, with Dash cowering by his ankles.

  “Come, Fouad,” Harriet called over her shoulder. “Hurry.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Why not?”

  “Afrit, Miss Harry. Spirits. This bad place.”

  His face was ashen. She’d promised Louisa that she would not allow Fouad to leave her side, but he looked as if he might faint.

  “All right,” she called. “Wait for me there. Don’t go anywhere.” The dog’s mournful yelps echoed into the tunnel behind her as Harriet walked on into the passage to where Dr. Woolfe was waiting. In the lamplight, his suit was the color of the rock. It occurred to her that he looked at home in the tomb, as if he were at ease, more so than he had been on the steamer or even by the river. She smiled at him.

  “My dragoman is afraid.”

  “Ach, I thought you had changed your mind.”

  Dr. Woolfe began talking about his excavation. Sand and rock and rubble, debris from the occasional flash floods that could fill the ravine, had over the centuries been washed into the tunnel and silted up the entrance to the tomb. Artifacts he had already found suggested that the tomb had been robbed in antiquity, the entrance blocked originally by departing thieves. He explained his resolve to cause no further damage to the tomb, either in the excavation or once they gained entry, but only to preserve what was there and record it for posterity, with the help of the Egyptian workers.

  “Where are the workers?” she asked.

  “It is Friday, Miss Heron. The men are at the mosque. They are faithful fellows.”

  The air in the tunnel was warmer than outside, almost suffocating. The darkness was so dense it seemed to Harriet as if it were something solid, not merely an absence of light. She made herself keep walking, taking small steps behind Dr. Woolfe, breathing slowly and steadily, fighting the gut instinct to turn and run back toward the entrance, to sunlight and air.

  Dr. Woolfe gestured at something on the wall. He held up his lamp to it and Harriet found herself looking at a picture. It was blackened and sooty, as if fires had been lit underneath it, and the plaster on which it was painted was flaking, in some places had been gouged away. Despite the damage, she could make out an elegant seated woman, dressed in a white robe and with an elaborate headdress on her black hair. Her face—calm and contemplative—was in profile, the nose missing. The woman was sitting at a table, playing a board game.

  Above, painted on the wall, were hieroglyphs. Harriet saw a cartouche, the circle that enclosed the name of a royal, containing the symbol of a windpipe, with lungs attached. The half-effaced signs seemed to speak directly to her, and despite the heat, Harriet shivered.

  “Once, all of this section would have been decorated. This is all that remains. Come. I will show you where I am working, Miss Heron.”

  Dr. Woolfe continued round a bend in the passage, the light from his lamp vanishing. Harriet’s dress was clinging to her skin, her palms damp. The ground here was soft, carpeted with feathers and embers, desiccated animal droppings. She felt as if she were standing inside the nest of a bird. She leaned against the wall of rock, afraid she was going to be sick from the stench.

  She stood up as straight and tall as she could and felt for her journal in her pocket. It was for this that she had come to Thebes. Written her spells. Now that she was here, she must explore whatever she could, experience it as it was. Wrapping her scarf over her mouth, wiping sweat from her eyes, she continued along the passage.

  Dr. Woolfe was standing by a wall of rocks and debris that made a dead end. He held up the lamp again.

  “This is the site of my work, Miss
Heron. Not very exciting, as I warned you, but you can see from the lintel above”—he directed the lamp at a white stone beam running across the highest point of the passage, above the rubble—“that there is a tomb behind.”

  “Whose tomb is it?”

  “I think that it belongs to a royal female.”

  “A queen?”

  “Yes. The one you have seen, on the plaster panel. The lady in white.”

  Harriet thrilled to the thought that the woman depicted in the wall painting might lie on the other side of the rubble, her body preserved, her spells, written on papyri, kept close by her. The sweet smell assailed her again and she put her hand to her mouth.

  “The smell, Dr. Woolfe. Is it from . . . mummies?”

  He laughed and held up his lamp to the ceiling of the passageway, illuminating a line of black clustered shapes hanging motionless over their heads. One came to life and took off, darted past them. Harriet gasped as its wing brushed her face, soft as cobweb.

  “Bats. Don’t be afraid. The worst they will do is to blow out your lamp as they pass.”

  Harriet pulled her scarf from her shoulders up over her head, wrapped it around her face, and tied the ends behind her neck.

  “How can you tolerate being down here?” she said.

  “Ach, one grows accustomed to it. Lepsius, the great German Egyptologist, even lived in a tomb.” Dr. Woolfe put out his hand to the blocked doorway and pulled a pebble from the mass of rubble. A trickling sound, like water, filled the air as a shower of sand and chips of stone ran down to the ground. He held out the round stone to her. “I am called by this work, Miss Heron. I have a sense of connection to those who planned for the eternal life with as much faith as Christians do now. Sometimes, I feel they might be my own ancestors.”

  Harriet pulled the scarf away from her mouth.

  “That’s how I felt when I first saw the hieroglyphs and learned about the Book of the Dead. The people were so real, they seemed closer to me than my own relations.”

  The stone in her palm was soft and cool. She slipped it into her pocket as another bat swooped past their heads in a strange, flitting movement, and the nausea returned. Dr. Woolfe bowed his head toward her.

  “Are you finding it too hot? Would you like to get back into the daylight? Come, follow me.”

  He began to walk back in the direction they’d come. Harriet followed, stepping carefully. She felt something sharp under the leather sole of her boot and couldn’t contain a cry of revulsion; she’d read about tombs littered with shards of bones, with skulls smashed like teacups, ribs scattered around like kindling. She might be walking on the remains of the queen.

  Reaching the place in the passageway where the painted panel was, she stopped and held up her lamp. The light fell on the last column of the hieroglyphs. At the top was a painted oval, symbol of the protective eye of Horus. Peering at the wall, she made out below it the shape of the seated figure that denoted a woman, facing to the right, which indicated that these hieroglyphs were to be read from right to left. Hieroglyphs were always read toward the faces of the living beings in them.

  Looking again, she saw the sign for neb, and the feminine indicator underneath it, followed by the two lines that represented Lower and Upper Egypt. Lady of the Two Lands, she murmured to herself. It meant Lady of the Two Lands.

  Harriet felt a sudden and powerful reverence. Human hands had made these marks, perhaps three thousand years ago. They’d made them because they believed that words had power. This was what she had come to Thebes to see and what she had written her own magic to bring about, she reminded herself again. She wanted to understand what their message was.

  She called Dr. Woolfe and he returned to where she stood. “Yes?”

  “I want to copy down the hieroglyphs and try to read them.”

  “Read them, Miss Heron?”

  “Yes.”

  Harriet reached into her pocket and drew out her book. Putting her own lamp down at her feet, holding the journal to the light of his, she opened the pages where she had worked on the columns of hieroglyphs from the Luxor temple, accompanied by her tentative interpretations, made in the evenings at the hotel.

  “May I?”

  He held out his hand. She hesitated and then, for the first time, put her journal into the hand of another. He looked at the drawings, nodding, his face impassive.

  “Once again, I must apologize to you,” he said, closing the red leather cover and handing it back.

  Harriet’s heart sank. He was going to refuse. She could hardly return to the tomb without his agreement. She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  “Apologize for what, Dr. Woolfe?”

  “I did not understand, Miss Heron,” he said, shaking his head, the ends of his hair brushing the shoulders of his jacket. “I mistook you for a tourist.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Yael sat in the courtroom, surrounded by onlookers, dignitaries, and men of all shapes and sizes. Um Fatima, the young mother from the clinic, had pleaded with her, through Suraya, to intercede on behalf of her husband, who was accused of not paying his taxes. Um Fatima was nowhere to be seen; Yael was the only female present and Mustapha, who’d insisted on accompanying her, sat nearby.

  Drifts of red dust had collected on the unevenly plastered walls and a portrait of the khedive, the Ottoman ruler of the country, flyblown, decorated with red tinsel, hung high behind the judge. The judge, addressed by all as Bey, wore the Turkish-style fez, a shirt, and trousers. He held a fly switch in his hand; at intervals he flicked the switch over his face, closing his eyes as he did so. Next to him, at a smaller, lower desk, sat a skinny clerk, writing in a ledger almost as big as he.

  The accused was brought into the room by court officials. Yael’s first thought was how very young he looked, scarcely more than a boy himself, and yet he was Um Fatima’s husband, the father of the three small children she saw at the clinic. He was barefoot, dressed in a peasant’s blue robe, had a skull cap askew on his dusty black hair, a wispy beard on his chin. As soon as he was within sight of the judge, he began protesting, his words slightly slurred, as if he had a speech impediment, but no less impassioned for that.

  “He calls on the bey to think of the tender heart of his own wife and have pity,” Mustapha whispered.

  The judge hammered on the table for silence but the man continued imploring for mercy. Yael considered getting to her feet and making the intercession but thought it too soon. She had hoped that her presence might exercise a restraining influence, but the judge had given no indication that he had noticed her at all.

  The bey consulted a paper passed to him by the clerk and read out the charge. The accused responded in a torrent of Arabic in which Yael discerned several of the names of the Prophet—the Noble, the Forgiver, the Just. Seeing the vehement and unaffected nature of the man’s faith, Yael felt a confusion in her heart. Few of the laboring classes, or indeed, any classes at home, could be trusted to exhibit such unaffected passion for their Savior.

  The judge passed his tail of horsehair over his face and, banging a gavel on the desk, issued what sounded like a verdict. Yael caught the word bastinado; next to her, Mustapha tensed. The word held a peculiar horror for Egyptians. The time had come.

  Summoning all the strength she could muster, Yael rose to her feet. Victoria was not a tall woman but nonetheless she held sway over half of the world. It was said that Her Highness never needed to raise her voice.

  “Sir,” Yael said quietly. “Bey. May I have your permission to say a few words on behalf of the accused?”

  The young man turned his head toward her. He was streaming with perspiration, the back of his patched gown soaked. His eyes looked violently and unnaturally dilated. He was a laborer, his wife had told Yael, working on building sites for a few piastres a day, but was required to pay a tax on each and every one of the palm trees a
t his mother’s small farm, an amount that they did not have and would never have.

  The judge looked blankly at Yael while his clerk whispered in his ear. After some moments, the bey spoke.

  “Permission refused,” he said.

  Seconds later, before Yael had time to gather her wits, the young man had been thrust facedown on the floor of the courtroom, his knees bent and feet raised to the ceiling, held in position by a wooden contraption fitted around his ankles. His piteous cries increased as he called on Allah for mercy. Two men, each of whom looked almost as poor as the accused, began with leather whips to thrash the soles of the man’s feet, taking turns to deliver the lashes.

  Fearing she might faint at the awful sound of leather whipping through the air, the man’s screams, Yael sat down. He was calling not on his god but on his mother, weeping like a child. Yael made herself watch, observing the contemptuous expressions of the men doing the whipping, the apparent detachment of the bey, now taking a cup of coffee. She had been unable to help the man by preventing the barbarous punishment, she told herself, blinking back tears that were as much of rage as of pity. She would not shirk her Christian duty to bear witness to it.

  The man’s feet turned first red then purple then raw, like steak meat. Trickles of red ran down his ankles, the ends of the whips grew crimson, and the cracked floor tiles became smeared with blood mixed into the dust. The cries grew less frequent. At the point where she feared he must die, the man let fall from his mouth a small silver coin. One of the policemen snatched it up, wiped it on his gown, and laid it on the table before the bey.

  The man’s eyes were closed, his body motionless. Yael kept her own eyes on him until he was carried from the room like a corpse.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Harriet sat on a folding canvas chair. She had her scarf wrapped around her head, one end of it covering her mouth and nose. The smell in the tomb was not as overpoweringly strong as it had seemed on her first visit but the air was dusty. Working on a sheet of cartridge paper on a drawing board, by the light of a lamp tied to a stick propped against the wall of the tomb, she was copying the painting of the Lady of the Two Lands.