The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  Dr. Woolfe had called at the hotel and invited her to return to the site. It would be helpful to him, he said, to have an accurate record of the panel in the outer passage. Harriet had immediately expressed her willingness. Louisa, encouraged perhaps by his formal manners, his disinclination to engage in small talk or even to sit down and take a cup of tea, had agreed. Harriet always had a facility for drawing, she told him, embarrassing Harriet. And since her health was so much improved, she believed it would be quite safe. Her only condition was that Fouad should be in attendance.

  Each day since then, Harriet had risen early. By the soft gleams of reflected light that spread from the east before the sun appeared on the horizon, she’d put on what she’d come to think of as her tombs dress—an old muslin, in deep cornflower blue. The skirt was frayed along the hem but the cotton was cool and light, the color matched the midday sky. Clothes that might have looked odd in London looked unremarkable here.

  Encouraged by the thought, she’d pinned to her bodice a gift Aunt Anna had sent her from India—a silver brooch in the shape of a tree, its ruby-red fruits made of garnets, dangling from slender branches. However dusty it might be over there, she wanted to dress up to meet the ancient Egyptians, enter their sacred place. She wanted to announce through the vibrant colors that she shared their dream of life, and their reverence for it.

  The life conjured up by the spells in the Book of the Dead, the pictures on the walls of the rock tombs, looked more like life than the years Harriet had known on earth. She hadn’t realized so clearly until now that people lived not only lives of different lengths but of different intensities, of varying degrees of beauty and joy and pleasure. She didn’t just want a long life. She wanted one filled with interest and adventure, a life of her own making. Or, if one day she became ill again, if the struggle became too much, she wanted a death of her own making.

  She’d laced on the soft leather boots with the low wooden heels; the ground was rough everywhere in Luxor and the light shoes Aunt Lavinia had insisted on buying for her were no use at all. On this fourth day, on her way out of her room, she’d stopped, glanced at herself in the oval mirror set into the wardrobe door. Looking back at her was a woman: her long, crinkled red hair worn loose, the orange scarf on her shoulders glowing in the dim light. The dress the woman wore was soft and practical, and a brooch glinted at her neck. Harriet was changing. She couldn’t identify quite how but she could see it plainly in the mirror. She was altered, in ways that went beyond her improved health. She looked like herself.

  With Fouad, she’d crossed over the river in one of the small white sailing boats called sandals that from dawn till after dark flew across the surface of the water like white-winged birds. Looking back toward the east bank, from far out in the river, the village of Luxor appeared small and insignificant. The reflected columns of the Luxor temple lay in long rippling lines on the surface of the water, the stone undulating with its movement.

  When the little boat was near the bank, the same donkey that she’d hired each morning had been brought by its boy into the water, splashing its way to the side of the boat. Fouad had lifted her from the sandal on to its back in one easy movement and they made their way to the white valley.

  She worked carefully, at pains to copy the shapes exactly, keep the proportions true. Dr. Woolfe was nearby, scraping with a trowel at the blocked doorway. She could hear him but not see him, feel his steady concentration on the task at hand. It matched her own. Two Egyptian workers carried away the spoil in baskets on their heads, hurrying past in bare feet, returning at intervals. Harriet tried to labor as tirelessly as they did. She enjoyed the feeling of being part of a team.

  Taking a sip from her water bottle, she applied herself again to the drawing she was making of the queen. Her ceremonial headdress appeared to be made of the wing of a bird, coming down behind her ear. The queen’s head was in profile but her chest was turned forward, both shoulders showing. One slim arm curved in front of her body, holding the sekhem or “scepter,” symbol of authority and power. Her feet were clad in sandals so flimsy they would not have lasted a day in the valley where she was entombed. Harriet found her both beautiful and enigmatic. At the thought that the queen might be only yards away, on the other side of the blocked entrance, Harriet felt a chill run down her spine despite the warmth and closeness of the atmosphere. The prospect of encountering her was becoming real.

  “Why did you come here, Miss Heron?” said Dr. Woolfe.

  In the near darkness, the question took her by surprise.

  “To the dig?” she said.

  “To Egypt.”

  “We came for my health. I persuaded my doctor to insist on it. I always wanted to see Thebes before I . . . if I was going to die.”

  “Die?” He sounded angry. “Why should you contemplate such a thing?”

  “I have been forced to, Dr. Woolfe. I have been an invalid for much of my life.”

  Harriet concentrated on the uraeus, the cobra poised on the queen’s forehead ready to spit in the eye of ill-wishers. Part of this one had been scratched out, was present only as absence. She’d wanted, on the first day, to fill in the gaps in the images and hieroglyphs, make good what was missing in the queen’s profile, restore what had been defaced or destroyed. Eberhardt Woolfe had stopped her from doing so. He explained that to make the images and the signs whole was not the endeavor. The aim was to faithfully record what was. What was not. The time for making whole would come later. Draw as if you were a camera, he had repeated.

  “And has the mission succeeded?” he said, his voice softer. “Is your health improved?”

  “Since we arrived in Luxor, I’m much better. I can’t be certain that it will last.”

  Harriet carried on working as she spoke, her answer coming with the rhythm of her pencil strokes, the light sound of the point moving on the thick paper Dr. Woolfe had brought for her to work on. There was something pleasant about talking to someone without being able to see them.

  “And now that you are here, Miss Heron, are you happy?”

  Harriet licked the end of her pencil, carried on shaping what remained of the queen’s fine, lonely profile. Mr. Soane’s continuing absence had marred her happiness. But since working in the tomb, she’d thought less about him. Her mind was filled not with Mr. Soane, the picture he had said he wished to make of her, but with the queen playing her game of senet, one brown, gold-cuffed arm outstretched over the board, about to move a piece in the game symbolic of trials and obstacles. The passage into everlasting life was a dangerous one, beset by perils. Perhaps the passage through mortal life was the same.

  “I am happy now. This minute. I like this work, Dr. Woolfe. Your work. I like entering the distant past, seeing their world through their symbols and pictures. In fact, now that I’ve gotten used to the smell, I’m beginning to think I prefer being in the tomb to being anywhere.”

  He gave one of his dry, private smiles. She couldn’t see it but she could hear it in his voice.

  “Ach, you are an Egyptologist.”

  Putting down her pencil, Harriet took a sip of water from the flask. She struggled with what she knew she must say. He should know the truth about her. She didn’t want to be here under false pretenses.

  “I never went to a school, Dr. Woolfe. Because of my poor health, my mother thought it unwise. I picked up a little French from my brothers’ governess but not much. Not enough to make sense of Champollion. I know only what I gleaned from books at home.”

  “You are self-taught,” came the voice in the darkness. “In Heidelberg, that is considered an honorable way to begin.”

  Harriet picked up the pencil and carried on with her drawing. “How did you begin doing this work, Dr. Woolfe?”

  “I discovered the ancient Egyptians as a student, reading Lepsius and the other great German explorers. I came here when I left the university”—he pronounced it uniwersi
ty—“five years ago, as an assistant on the excavation of Klaus Kranz. I spent half a year working with him and returned on my own account two years later. Since then, I’ve come every winter, conducting research.”

  “Do you ever go home?”

  “To Germany, you mean?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Last year, I returned to Heidelberg only at Christmas to collect the piano and see my family. This year also . . .” He paused for so long she thought he had finished his sentence. “This year also, I will remain here throughout the summer.”

  “Have you abandoned your poor wife in Heidelberg?” Harriet said. “Are you married?”

  Dr. Woolfe was silent; if it hadn’t been for the slight scraping noises made by his trowel, she could have believed he was no longer there. As Harriet opened her mouth to repeat the question, it occurred to her that he might think she had a personal interest in the matter. She flushed, as the noises from the trowel—hollow when he applied it to the rubble and mortar, ringing when he tapped on the larger stones in the doorway—ceased.

  “In answer to your question, Miss Heron: I am married. But I did not leave my wife at home.”

  “She is here with you?”

  “No. She is not.”

  The taps recommenced, sharp and repetitive, like a woodpecker on a tree of stone. Eberhardt Woolfe was married but had not left his wife at home. Nor was she here. Harriet could not decipher it. She would leave it as a gap, she decided, returning to her drawing board and trying to regain the concentration she had lost. An absence to be filled in later.

  Soon afterward, Dr. Woolfe came along the passage in his long worker’s apron, the tools slotted into pockets specially shaped for them. In the largest pockets were the hammer and the trowel, but he used smaller tools too and had showed them to Harriet: a scalpel and a box of toothpicks; a paintbrush, for removing dust.

  “Look,” she said, pointing at the wall. “This eye symbol is pronounced wasir; it stands for Osiris. The flag here is the sign of a god and the aa, the long a sound, means great. I think that this line relates to Osiris the great god.”

  “It makes sense that it should,” he said. “Osiris is the god that gives life. That is, if the heart hasn’t testified against the person.” The shadow of his profile fell over the page of drawings, the living figure softer and more tentatively outlined than the copied queen.

  He cleared his throat. “I believe the light must be fading outside, Miss Heron.”

  “I’ve lost track of time,” Harriet said, feeling suddenly awkward.

  She rose from the chair and rolled up the sheet of cartridge paper.

  Carrying the folding chair, Dr. Woolfe accompanied her out of the tomb and walked with Harriet to where Fouad waited in the shade with Dash and the donkey, on the west side of the steep valley. She handed him the rolled scroll of paper and he nodded his head to her, in the stiff gesture that was becoming familiar.

  “Will you return in the morning?”

  His eyebrows and beard were pale with dust and his eyes green as leaves, searching, as if they held questions he didn’t utter.

  “I will, Dr. Woolfe.”

  He nodded again as Harriet, with Fouad’s assistance, mounted the donkey from a boulder, seating herself on the roll of faded carpet roped around the animal’s back and setting off along the narrow path.

  “Hold tight,” Dr. Woolfe said.

  “I will!”

  On the way out of the white valley, Harriet looked back. Dr. Woolfe still stood where she had left him, watching; she lifted her arm in a wave before the donkey lurched down an incline and broke into a trot, Fouad and the boy running to keep up. Donkeys were always in a hurry to get home.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Louisa stood in her room, sniffing the warm, still air. Seeping under the door, mixed with the smell of frying fish from the hotel kitchen, was the stinging intrusion of Cuban tobacco. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d known, deep down, that he would pursue them. Eyre Soane had no inkling of what he risked in attempting a revenge on her. He didn’t know whose happiness he jeopardized.

  She crossed the room and stood by the chair under the window, staring out at a strip of bruised-looking purple sky. The swifts were congregating in the trees in the front garden of the hotel, their shrill chatter hailing the dusk. On the far side of the river, the sun was a gold disk poised over the mountains, the palm trees along the bank no more than spiky silhouettes that looked as if they had been cut from black paper.

  At the tap on the door, her heart made a feeble movement. She opened the door to see Monsieur Andreas, dressed for the evening in a white shirt with a small white bow tie at the neck and a golden, soft-petaled flower in the buttonhole of his lapel.

  “Monsieur Andreas. Good evening.”

  “Good evening, madame.”

  He smiled at her apologetically. “There is a visitor. Downstairs.”

  “Thank you. You may inform the visitor that I shall come down shortly.”

  Closing the door again, Louisa sat at the dressing table, propped her elbows on it, and tilted the looking glass forward. The ­painting must have altered. Her skin, which he used to say was the shade of hawthorn blossom, might by now be darkened, her eyes and lips and breasts crazed with cracks. In its essentials, though, the picture would be the same as on the day Augustus had laid down his brushes.

  She, by contrast, had changed utterly. The living figure had not had the immunity to time that, when she’d posed for the painting, she’d assumed was hers. Louisa drew closer to the mirror, searched for the sullen look that Augustus called her gypsy glare. Now her eyes held a wary, guarded expression. Her face had lost its oval definition and her mouth had grown thinner.

  One thing had not changed. She smoothed her hair back from her forehead. On one side of the parting in the center, the hair grew in a crescent, forming the top of a heart shape. On the other, it grew in a regular line. Augustus had accentuated the asymmetry in the painting and it was still there. Her distinguishing mark. He had called it her hallmark.

  The smell of a smoldering, cured leaf was growing stronger. Louisa picked up her fan, rose from the stool, and let herself out of the room.

  • • •

  For a moment, as she descended the stairs, Louisa saw Augustus again. Full lips and thick brows. Dark, waving hair swept back from a low forehead and a broad, flattish face that had made her think of a bull in the field and had been at odds with her idea of what a painter would be. She’d imagined artists to be ethereal, connected only lightly to the earth, halfway already to the realms above.

  Digging the end of her fan into the palm of her hand, she continued around the curve in the stairs. How ignorant they had been of their own youth. Even Augustus, whom she’d considered hopelessly, irredeemably old, had been younger than she was now. How could he have behaved as he did? She’d never understood. She hurried across the floor toward him; she must speak with him, demand to know why.

  “What a pleasure to see you, Mrs. Heron. I was afraid you might be gone.”

  The figure that rose from the wooden bench had clean-shaven cheeks, brown eyes, not hazel ones. He wore a bright scarf at his neck and smelled of a cosmetic preparation. He lacked the substance of the ghost, seemed barely real at all, as if she might reach out and put a hand through him. Louisa gripped her fan, felt the sharp filigree of carved bone, the brush on her skin of the silk tassel that fell from the handle.

  “Mr. Soane. What brings you here?”

  He made a bow.

  “The same as everyone else, ma’am. Exploration of the past.”

  Louisa made an odd, choking sound in her throat, and Monsieur Andreas, hovering behind the reception desk, flicked over a page of the open ledger.

  “Any assistance, madame? Cold refreshments?”

  Louisa shook her head. Eyre Soane sat down again on the bench. />
  “How is your daughter?”

  “Harriet?”

  “Who else?”

  She looked at the floor, at the square honesty of terra-cotta tiles, pitted with use and mopping, and the rich, worn rug laid on top, its fringes flat at either end like combed hair. Monsieur Andreas had retreated to the bar; she could hear the delicate tap of glasses being set down on a brass tray.

  “Is this a social call, Mr. Soane?”

  “It is not.” Soane crossed one ankle over his knee, blew a ring of smoke into the air over his head. “I have come for Harriet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I intend to paint her. Didn’t she tell you? She has consented.”

  Louisa opened her fan, sweeping the half-moon backward and forward through the air.

  “I forbid it.”

  “Really? Your daughter will doubtless wish to know on what grounds.”

  Louisa moved away from him across the dim lobby and took hold of the arm of the raised shoeshine chair.

  “Mr. Soane, I believe you said you have a sister. A younger sister.”

  “I do indeed, Mrs. Heron. What is it to you?”

  Louisa swallowed. Without the chair, she felt she might slide to the ground.

  “In that case,” she said, “you understand how easily a girl’s head can be turned, her feelings swayed. Have you no pity?”

  “Why should I have pity?”

  Soane’s face for an instant looked young and frightened; it was the face of the child on the beach, intercepting the look between herself and his father.

  The door from the garden swung open and Harriet walked through it, the dog straining in front of her on the lead, her book under her arm, a pencil stuck in her hair.