The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  I flushed so deeply that I thought my face would melt. Wyatt mumbled something unintelligible and handed off the comforter to Hasib, slinking into the chair beside mine. We didn’t touch. We barely even breathed. “You’re not the only one who can hear a loose tile,” Dumphries said, and he turned to me. “Pass the creamer?”

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS A water main break at the Minya antiquities magazine, which means that the coffins cannot be moved there as planned. Fortunately, no artifacts already inside were harmed, but the building itself is hard to get in and out of, so the decision is made to transport everything to the Dig House magazine for more detailed study, and to station extra police guards there for protection.

  It also means that Wyatt and I will have round-the-clock access to the coffin. I could literally roll out of bed, and study the Book of Two Ways. But if I had any dream of my head bent beside Wyatt’s as we pored over the image on the coffin floor together, it vanishes as I realize that this discovery only means there is even more work to be done, and I am not the one who decides what we get to analyze first.

  Fifteen years ago, I’d been writing my thesis on how the coffin was a microcosm of both the tomb and the universe itself. At a basic level, each funerary text contained information the deceased would need in the afterlife. But zoom out a bit, and the coffin itself became a miniature of the cosmos, from the sky painted on the lid to the map of the Book of Two Ways on the floor, to the mummy that filled the space in between. Zoom out again, and the tomb itself—with its superstructure of a public chapel space and underground burial chamber and the coffin contained within—was another symbolic representation of the layers of the universe.

  But here, in the Dig House magazine, we are deconstructing even further. Set on separate sawhorses, the inner coffin and the exterior coffin are both intact and quite large, with walls over a meter high. We’ve set up scaffolding so that we can climb up and look inside, but even so, the text is small and distant enough for it to be a struggle to see. Instead, we rely on Alberto to photograph, his camera affixed to a long pole.

  I have already started copying the art in the coffins, tracing it on my iPad so that Alberto will be able to input the images into a three-dimensional digital representation. Wyatt has directed me to start with the paintings on the inside of the exterior coffin, which are so breathtaking that I cannot do them justice. On my screen I can see the brushstrokes of the artist, the shading and detail that leap off the cedar in white and sienna and blue directly across from where Djehutynakht’s head would have faced. There is the head of an ibex, its horns grooved and its ear patterned. A huge ceremonial wine jar in terra cotta is given dimension with a white highlight on one side. There are tables groaning with fruits and vegetables and meat and cones of bread, the haunch of a steer with spotted skin, a coiled rope with individually articulated fibers and strands, and one stunning goose whose broad wings are painted with mottled feathers in every shade of gray. The most intricate artwork is the ornately drawn false door through which the ba soul can slip between the Netherworld and the tomb. Above it is a text asking for offerings from the king and Osiris on festival days, with a handy list of suggested items on the far right side of the wall.

  My eyes are burning after an hour of painstaking work on the iPad. I rub them, and glance at Wyatt. He is deep into his own iPad images, his mouth silently moving as he murmurs transliterations of texts that Alberto has already photographed on the sides of Djehutynakht’s inner coffin. There are 1185 individual spells within the Coffin Texts; he has to figure out which ones Djehutynakht included.

  He isn’t paying attention to what I’m doing, so I glance at the inner coffin. As on the outer coffin, there are udjat eyes on its outside front panel. These line up with a matching pair of udjat eyes on the flip side of the wood, painted above a false door, as if the mummy would have been able to peer through both sets of them to see through the wood and look at all the gorgeous artwork I’ve been copying from the inside of the exterior coffin. On the floor of the coffin is the telltale wavy map of the Book of Two Ways. I flip through the digital files until I find the photographs Alberto has taken of it.

  When I first studied the Book of Two Ways, I didn’t start with Egypt. I began with maps—Anaximander’s world map from Greece in the sixth century B.C.E., Fra Mauro’s medieval map, the Atlas Maior, maps of Atlantis and Middle-earth, maps of what the United States would have looked like if the South had seceded and Europe if D-Day had never happened. Maps don’t have to be literal. They don’t have to be to scale, or to be tangible. They might be drawn to depict the real world, to dream a fictional space, or to inspire a symbolic one—like medieval maps of cathedrals that moved from door to nave to altar in a journey toward Christ. In that sense, the map mirrors the belief system of its maker—just like the Book of Two Ways. Middle Kingdom artists sketched a graphic image of how to walk through the afterlife, complete with entry points and impassable gates and lakes of fire. Crossing this landscape successfully was like winning the best ever season of Survivor, with an eternal home in the same neighborhood as the gods. Here in Deir el-Bersha, there have been four published generations of coffins with the Book of Two Ways in them. Wyatt’s will precede them all.

  Djehutynakht’s coffin contains the long version of the Book of Two Ways, 101 spells, which cover two long bands on the cedar floor, and which are broken into segments. It begins at sunrise as Djehutynakht sets sail on the sun god’s solar bark. The distinctive geographic map—the upper blue water route and the lower black land route—comes next. The trails are divided by a red band, the “Lake of Fire of the knife-wielders.” Text fills the rest of the space, describing mountains and fields and rivers and shrines and the names of armed monsters trying to knock the deceased off course. In the loops and hills and valleys, there are tiny, faint pictures of these beasts. Finally, the deceased gets special clothing and accessories to show that he’s conquered this part of the journey, and has made it to Rosetau, the place of hauling, where a coffin would have been moved into a tomb.

  In the next section, things only get harder. There are three chambers with fiery walls guarded by “watchers.” If the deceased survives this hurdle, he gets tossed into the paths of confusion on the flint walls in Rosetau, where illustrated tracks crisscross. Beyond that are demons with heads made of scarabs, and demons who hold snakes and lizards, who must be defeated before the deceased reaches Osiris and can live forever.

  There is a shorter version of the Book of Two Ways that usually ends here, but in Djehutynakht’s coffin, there is more: an appeal to the god Thoth, patron of this geographic region; and then a thick block of text with no stories or descriptions of the afterlife. Instead, it is a justification of the life of the deceased, meant to prove him worthy of sailing with Re. Then seven gates are shown, each with a more terrible guardian. Finally, the deceased channels his immortality, and is compared to both Re at sunrise and Osiris in the underworld.

  This map was the way an Ancient Egyptian reached the afterlife. But it also shows us what Ancient Egyptians thought of the afterlife. This wasn’t all pearly gates and cherubs playing harps. The gates were on fire, and the creatures were terrifying—chimeras with human heads and animal torsos and knives, snake bodies and wings and claws. In this Book of Two Ways, I find a baboon-snake chimera wielding a knife in the water route, and a leopard-bodied monster with a cow head and divine horns.

  There’s another image, too. I scroll lower on the photograph, zooming in on it. A seated man, a white crown, a crook and flail in his hands. This is no monster, but a classic Middle Kingdom image of Osiris, seated on a stepped platform, with Thoth as a baboon above him—a direct allusion to the Judgment Hall of Osiris in the much later Netherworld Books. Beside him are empty scale pans. It’s drawn in the part of the Book of Two Ways that is usually solely text, no illustrations.

  Scrambling up the side of the scaffolding, I c
heck the photograph against the actual art in the coffin. This can’t be right. I’ve never seen a Book of Two Ways with Osiris and scales in it before. In fact, the only place you ever see that is in Spell 125 of the Book of Going Forth by Day, where the heart of the deceased is weighed against the white feather of truth.

  Except that text will not exist for another four hundred years.

  “Wyatt,” I say, “I think you should come look at this.”

  He glances up from his iPad and frowns at me. “You’re supposed to be working on the exterior coffin,” he says, but he climbs up beside me on the scaffolding.

  “I may be rusty,” I tell him, “but I think this is the Hall of Two Truths.”

  “From the Book of Going Forth by Day?” he says. “It can’t be. That’s New Kingdom.”

  “What if something in the Coffin Texts evolved into it?”

  I could see Wyatt reaching through the vast store of knowledge in his mind. “Coffin Text 47 comes closest,” he says. He starts flipping through the images Alberto has downloaded for us. His finger passes over the hieroglyphs, reading so much faster than I ever could, until he finds the text in question on a photo of the inner coffin’s western-facing wall: “As for any god, any spirit of any dead person who shall oppose themselves against these dignities of yours…they shall be crushed as the confederates of Terrible of Face. Your seat shall be spacious within the disk. You shall measure in the scales like Thoth. Your reputation shall be recognized by He who is in his Disk as that of a god who is beside him. You shall eat bread in the Broad Hall. You shall be given meals just like Re, by those in charge of the storehouses of Heliopolis. Your heart belongs to you. It shall not be stolen by the guardians of the roads…Raise yourself to life forever!”

  The deceased, weighing his own heart. The immortal result of a passing grade: keeping company with Re. The Broad Hall of Two Truths. Heliopolis—beneath the neighborhood now closest to the Cairo Airport, and the chief cult place of Re. It’s all there, the ingredients of what will become Spell 125 in the New Kingdom. But until now, there hasn’t been an image in the Middle Kingdom to connect the two.

  I lean down to find the placement of the actual text inside the coffin and notice something strange. I can match a string of the hieratic, but it’s bisected by a split in the cedar that isn’t reproduced on the iPad image of the text. “Where’s the break in the wood?”

  Wyatt tilts his head, baffled. His eyes scan the coffin, narrowing. “The spell’s duplicated on both sides of the coffin.”

  “Is that normal? To repeat?”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “In this case, it could be intentional. The Hall of Two Truths.”

  From where we are on the scaffolding, we are just too far away to accurately read it. I scroll through Alberto’s photos for the opposite wall, and look for Coffin Text 47. Wyatt and I hold our iPads side by side, so that we can read the matching spells on both the eastern- and western-facing walls.

  Except they don’t quite match.

  As for any god, any spirit of any dead person who shall do evil against your soul…you are justified within the Hall of Two Truths. You are pure! You are pure! You are pure! You are pure! Your purity is the purity of He who is in his Disk. No evil can happen to you in the land, in this Hall of Two Truths, because you know the names of the gods who are in it. Raise yourself to life forever!

  “This one’s almost verbatim Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, except it’s in the second person, like the rest of the Coffin Texts—”

  “Wyatt,” I interrupt. “Look.” Using the tip of a pencil to reach, I point to the spot on the eastern-facing wall where this spell is painted, and then the board directly opposite it. I imagine the mummy as he was found, lying on his side. If you drew a line from one spell to the other, it would most likely have passed through Djehutynakht’s heart.

  If I ever wanted proof of how inextricably linked text and location on the coffin were, this is it.

  “Dawn,” Wyatt says. “I think we just found the missing link.”

  * * *

  —

  NOT LONG AFTER our relationship was outed by Dumphries, Wyatt and I were tangled together in my twin bed one late afternoon. He was naked, the fan cooling the sweat on his spine, his profile obscured by that tangled beacon of hair. The sun gleamed at the window, a peeping Tom. This was the time of day when everyone else in the house usually napped, and Wyatt had drifted off after making love. For some reason, I couldn’t fall asleep. I sketched my finger over his shoulder as if I were drawing a map of the world where I wanted to live.

  We had come together like a conflagration, as usual, like there was not enough time and we had a terrible need to consume each other. My bra was looped around the base of the fan, where Wyatt had thrown it. His pants were caught in the bedding. One of his shoes was upside down.

  My mother would have said that’s bad luck; that it needed to be turned right side up. But I couldn’t do that without pulling away from him.

  Wyatt mumbled something, swatting at his neck, then catching my hand with his own. “Let me be, wench, you’re going to kill me.” He rolled over, his eyes slitted, a smile already playing at his lips. “But what a way to go.”

  “Wench?” I pinned him to the mattress. “You misogynist pig.”

  He reached for me, pulling me closer. “Talk dirty to me.”

  My laugh was caught between us, passed back and forth in a kiss. Wyatt flipped me onto my back and licked my throat. My skin cooled as it dried, as he traced a trail down the middle of me.

  At first, we didn’t hear the knock on the door. Then, when we did, Wyatt yelled out to whoever was on the other side of it. “Piss off…”

  “Dawn.” Dumphries’s voice was grave.

  I looked at Wyatt and grabbed his shirt from the floor. Pulling it on so that it fell to my thighs, I waited for him to wrap himself in the sheets, and then opened the door.

  “There’s been a message,” Dumphries said.

  Back then, I didn’t have a cellphone with international coverage. Very few people did, but Dumphries was one of them. It was the emergency number we all left for our families at home. He held out the phone. “You should call your mother.”

  He left me with the phone, with Wyatt. When the door closed, I dialed the country code and my home phone number. While I waited for the connection to be made, I stared at Wyatt’s upside-down shoe.

  Wyatt curled himself around me as I sat on the edge of the bed, his arm around my waist, as if he knew in advance that I was going to need something to anchor me. “Mom?” I said.

  When she started to talk, when she told me about the cancer, I went still. I thought maybe if I stopped moving, I could stem the flow of words. But they kept coming: ovarian…hospice…weeks.

  I don’t know if Wyatt could hear her speaking, but he knew something was very, very wrong. I felt his fingers thread with mine, squeeze.

  She was still talking, recounting the chemo that had not worked, explaining why she hadn’t told me earlier, insisting that I not interrupt my life for her death. “I’m coming home,” I announced. I stood, letting go of Wyatt.

  * * *

  —

  THE TEXTS THAT Wyatt and I have found in the interior coffin are all about morality—namely, being able to stand up to the gods after death and say with honesty that you haven’t done anything wrong. But what does it really mean to be good? Is it finding a calling that helps other people? Is it running to the bedside of someone who is dying? Is it putting someone else’s needs before your own? You could argue, I suppose, that any of those actions are about not selflessness, but martyrdom. Driven not by ethics, but guilt.

  For that matter, what does it mean to be immoral? Is it pursuing your own dreams at all costs? Is it lying to others, or lying to yourself? Is it falling in love with a person when you are supposed to be in love with someone else?
Does it matter if you only have the feelings, and tamp them down?

  I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it’s not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.

  Wyatt misses dinner because he is on the phone with the dean of graduate studies at Yale, and then with their communications department, working through the messaging that will be sent out tomorrow morning after the Ministry of Antiquities puts out the initial press release. It’s not nearly as thorough as what will be revealed when he publishes the coffin, but because that is months away, this will give him—and Yale—a bump of recognition in the academic archaeological community.

  When everyone in the Dig House has turned in for the night, I stay on the roof balcony, too keyed up to fall asleep. I know Wyatt will put my name on the paper he publishes. Long after I’ve left, my work will remain in the canon for future Egyptologists. It is what I told Wyatt I wanted, the reason I gave him for coming here.

  I watch a mayfly hop along the balustrade before it is joined by two others.

  “There you are,” Wyatt says. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  I thought I’d lost you.

  I turn, a bright smile pasted on my face. “Finished with your calls?”

  “For now,” he says.

  “Did you get in touch with Dailey?”

  He frowns a little. “Why do you ask?”

  “I just assume that the benefactor would want to know about a major discovery.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about Dailey,” Wyatt says, leaning against the balcony. He swats at one of the flies.

  “No, don’t,” I tell him.

  “Please tell me you haven’t become one of those people who carries a spider outside in a paper cup so it can live out the rest of its life…”