In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  We think we understand the torrent of speech that bursts out of every Egyptian tomb and temple, the glyphs like locusts crawling everywhere, a plague consuming stone. We know the signs, we can construct a grammar. But do we apprehend the flood itself? How much more difficult to know the channel of the flood, or the darkness from which it bursts.

  Before Egypt, the record of the past is scattered slabs of incised clay memorializing: what? Tallies of sheep and grain. A battle, a building, a banality that might have constituted all the history of our kind but for the uncanny efflorescence of Egyptian. With the rise of civilization in the Nile, language explodes, a universal shout reverberating to this day so loudly it still fills our ears: we cannot articulate it from the noise of our thinking. We cannot comprehend it, nor how deeply they appreciated its function in their world. This was a people for whom speech was actually life and death: whose funerary rite consummated in the Opening of the Mouth, that the dead could speak the spells of power in the underworld, and prevent his dying there a second time.

  Spells. Childish superstition. Picturesque nonsense. Has it occurred to no one that the most breathtaking omission in the record may be not in Egypt’s chronicles but in our comprehension? How is it that no one—no one—has given even a passing thought to the possibility that the Egyptian texts were something more than superstition? What people wastes itself on dreams? Waste themselves they might have, had their understanding been as limited as ours. The Egyptians evidently needed to make their spells material. It is this emphasis on the physicality of the word, its translation from thought to sound to durable object, that seems to have consumed them to the point that they gave over lifetimes by the thousand to achieve this metamorphosis—and make it last.

  They labored, in a way we cannot begin to imagine, driven by something passing our comprehension, at the hardest materials they could find, the stuff of which they built their passage to eternity. In stone cut and dressed and piled mountain high as if with only this purpose they carved, laboriously, with instruments barely harder than the stone itself, year after year these childish, superstitious, picturesque, nonsensical, fabulous, infinitely variable glyphs that speak insistently and everywhere of one thing only: the survival of the spirit beyond death. Only amid this clamorous beseeching, this vocal assault on the obduracy of the world, does the silence annihilating Egypt assume its true significance. What could have silenced such a people? What could have stifled a need that until then had triumphed over the most intractable elements of the material world? Even now, with the pieces of the answer all at hand, I am unable to say.

  And that inability, I fear, has been my undoing. “Insufficient evidence,” the Foundation says. What more evidence must I produce? What evidence can I? I could have revealed my theft of the urn from Nur-Mar’s tomb. It would have been enough. Perhaps I would have escaped censure.

  But were I to have revealed, even in so obscure a document as a grant proposal, the existence of the papyrus of Nur-Mar, I do not doubt disaster would have followed. The map would have dispersed itself into the public domain, and all associated with it—the tomb, the spells, and—all else, all else—become the idle stuff of tabloids. A million people chanting the name of the nameless one and all would have been lost—for him, and for me. If I know nothing else I know this: the silence was essential.

  But now, because of that same silence, all has been lost. For without that grant, I cannot go into Egypt. And go to Egypt now I must, and find the tomb, and learn the Word, while I still have voice to utter it.

  Even before the Foundation uttered its anemic curse, I doubt I still believed in the possibility of mounting an expedition. It was plain to me that I was dying. The only mystery remaining was the ordering of events: At what stage would I be incapacitated? And how? How many days and nights would I lie abed with death until it took me?

  The answers took their time in coming. For months I lived, and worked, met my classes, and among the stacks of the library heard my own footsteps click hollowly, echoes in a world grown mute and vague. The obscuration at the center of my vision was only occasionally troublesome. I soon learned to look sidelong at what I wished to see clearly.

  The whispers grow louder: often of late I have caught myself looking up to see who is calling. I look up, and almost speak, before I see I am alone.

  company of gods said, “What hath happened?” and his gods exclaimed “What is it?” But Ra could not answer, for his jaws trembled; the poison spread swiftly through his flesh. When the great god had found his heart, he cried unto those who were in his train, saying “A calamity hath fallen upon me. My heart perceiveth it, but my eyes see it not; my hand hath not caused it, nor do I know who hath done this unto me. Never have I felt such pain, neither can sickness cause more woe than this.”

  Then Isis came unto him, her mouth full of the breath of life, saying, “What hath come to pass, O holy father?”

  “That which I saw not. Is it fire? Is it water? I cannot see the sky.”

  “O tell me thy name, holy father, and I will cure thee.”

  “I have multitudes of names and multitudes of forms, but my true name my father uttered. It hath been hidden within me before he begat me, who would not that the words of power of another should have dominion over me. I am Khepera in the morning, I am Ra at noon, and I am Tmu at eventide. Let those call the poison from me.”

  The poison pierced deeper, and the great god could no longer walk.

  “What thou hast said is not thy holy name. O tell it unto me, and the poison shall depart.”

  Now the poison burned like fire, and it was fiercer than the flame and the furnace, and the majesty of the god said, “I consent that Isis shall search me, even unto my navel, and that my name shall pass from me into her.”

  Thus was the name of the great god taken from him, and Isis said, “Depart, poison. It is I who work, for it was I who made to fall down the poison. And what I made I claim.”

  Then the god hid himself from the gods, and his place in the boat of millions of years was empty.

  These are the words of her whose own name we know not, who knew Ra by his holy name. In later days her son took the name, and the two eyes of the holy god, and the name of the queen his mother, but the story of this is not told.

  The story cannot be told. I cannot imagine the story of the King. I know there was a King, and that he lived, day to day, under the same sun as I, on the same Earth as I, in a world not so different from the one I inhabit, among faces not so different from the faces I see, the voices I hear on any day, speaking a language not so strange that I, some forty-five centuries later, cannot form its syllables upon my tongue. He had a tongue like mine to speak, a hand like mine to scribe.

  But I cannot imagine the story of the King.

  There it is: I tell myself that human nature does not change, and this may be so. I tell myself that the world does not change, and this also may be so: the conditions of existence remain. But for all the comfort such endurance offers, when I face the gulf dividing us, the heart goes out of me. Before the appalling fact of those four millennia and more—one million five hundred and sixty-nine thousand five hundred and so many days from the moment he went into his tomb, so many countable minutes each following each in unbroken succession until the day I came squalling and slippery into life: words desert me.

  I know now why they required spells to remember their names in the underworld, why they treasured up spells empowering them to speak. Already before the same void I find myself falling silent. The Summer is upon us; the halls are emptied of students, and the campus has gone lush and quiet. The echo of my footsteps flies down the hallway, fading, and I know that before the Fall term comes, I will follow them.

  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.

  APPLIED AND ENGINEERING PHYSICS

  MAXWELL LABS

  ———UNIVERSITY

  Heard about your news. Think I can help.

  Drop by here Fri. aft?

  B.

  “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 friendshi
p 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.

  But that note! The cheery briskness of it—so like him, and so unlike my mood. Thought he could help. With what, friend B.? For a moment the exception I had made for Budge broke down, and I included him in my resentment against the well-funded world of the (as they like to say) hard sciences. I tossed the wad of paper in a corner of my office, and strode angrily out of doors.

  none who is outside know this spell, for it is a great mystery. Thou shalt not perform this in the presence of any person except thyself alone, for it is indeed an exceedingly great mystery which no man whatever knoweth.

  These are the words of power to be spoken alone for entering into the underworld like a god. Thou shalt not speak these words, nor cause them to be spoken, in the presence of any person, for they are a great mystery, and the eye of no man soever must see them, for it is a thing of abomination for every man to know it. Hide it, therefore; the Book of the Lady of the Hidden Temple is its name.

  —They’re in what? Astronomy? Agronomy you say, oh dear. Were their shoes clean? They won’t start tilling up the back yard, will they? What? Nematodes? They’re little worms, I think. Well I don’t think worms are preferable to animals, no.

  I could hear Budge sigh, and then silence, cut through by a tiny insect’s voice. When it was still at last Budge spoke again.

  —Fly out? I don’t think—Yes, you’re right, I will be the one to complain if it’s a sty. The schools? Oh, I’d forgotten, they’re coming too, aren’t they. We could board—You spoke with them about it? And they? Oh. Like that. My idea? Well I suppose you’re right it was.