by Anna Butler
Sam Hawkins focused less on bathrooms and more on security. He rigged the exterior of the expedition house with cameras and Cowens flash boxes, co-opting Hugh and me to help set up the security perimeter. Brass-coated steel pillars, set twenty feet apart, ringed the house, each studded with birefringent hemimorphite crystals. The system had only to be reconnected to the generator. My job was to secure the connections at each pillar; I laughed to see the crystal terminals were pyramidal in shape.
“It’s principally an alarm system. It won’t damage you or anything else to walk through it while I keep it unarmed. But it’ll set off enough sirens to wake every mummy in Aegypt unless you’re wearing one of these.” Sam held up a thin, flexible metal tube about three inches long, its gold surface cut and inlaid with intricate lines like those on the aether-harnessing boards in an aeroship’s controls. He made me roll up my left sleeve and slid the tube up onto my upper arm, just above the elbow. “It’ll shrink to fit once I’ve activated it, snug as another skin. It won’t shift. You can’t wash it off, and you can grub around in sand all day for a month and you won’t damage it. It will only come off when I deactivate it. As long as you wear it, you can walk through the fence and not set it off. You won’t even remember it’s there.”
Oh, but I was a fool—I asked him to explain how the armband worked.
“It rotates linearly polarized aether, creating circular birefringence.” Sam touched what looked like a screwdriver to the edge of my armband.
Sometimes I know what the individual words mean but balk when they’re strung together in sentences like that. In this case I didn’t understand the words either.
The band shrank with a slight humming noise. It didn’t hurt; a flashing sense of electricity shivered all over me, putting my hair on end before the shivering passed and the armband bedded itself in. It looked rather like a sailor’s tattoo, so thin I could barely feel the edges with my fingertip. I flexed my arm, but as Sam had promised, the armband felt part of me. It didn’t constrict movement in any way.
Sam tapped the armband and nodded. “It’s fine. You next, Hugh. We’ll have to get everyone’s armband in place before we get done today.”
While he repeated the process with Hugh, I wished him luck getting one of those things on Molly. She was a good-tempered animal, but even I’d bite in those circumstances.
Sam stared. “I’m not that daft, Lancaster. I fixed up a special collar for her. So long as it’s touching her skin, she can get through.”
Oh, shame. I’m not a vicious man, but I would have quite enjoyed seeing Sam put at a disadvantage by a small dog with every curly hair on end.
The house is on the outskirts of a hamlet called Arabat el-Madfuneh, beside an ancient canal running from the Nile to the procession way to the temple before taking a dogleg turn north again to the old city of Abydos half a mile away. The temple sits at the edge of the cultivated land: fields with their dykes and ditches to control the annual Nile floods to one side and the beginnings of the arid deserts on the other. There’s no gradual transition from one to the other, but a sharp dividing line between vegetation and sand, as if cut by a knife.
The expedition house is by far the best house in the village. The villagers’ houses are constructed from Nile mud and roofed with straw. They’re built around an inner courtyard—as, indeed, is the expedition house, but there the resemblance ends. The village houses are very small with mud floors. The people live and cook in the courtyard where they have mud-built ovens and fires for cooking. Mud, you will notice, features greatly in the local architecture since it is free and copious, thanks to the Nile’s bounty. The houses probably haven’t changed much since Seti’s day.
Sam, of course, has taken security here very seriously. He’s licked every one of us into shape until even the students can manage one of his emergency drills, and he’s plastered half the desert with alarm pillars and sirens—just in case a desert rat sneaks in, I suppose. You can’t see much of the perimeter alarm fence by day since the connecting lines of luminiferous aether are invisible in sunlight. But at night they can be seen lancing from crystal to crystal, pillar to pillar, fencing out the world with a fluorescent cobweb.
“The villagers are always in two minds about having the house occupied.” Sam was now supervising as Hugh fitted the aether generator room door with a padlock Sam must have stolen from the Tower of Londinium. “They like the extra income from the dig, but they don’t like that I’ve disconnected their illegal power line from the generator.”
Hugh glanced at the village. “Don’t they have one of their own? I thought I saw some lights last night.”
“Not many, and they don’t burn all night. It’s a poor village, and their own generator is too old for full-time use. They can’t afford to fuel it.” Sam coiled the loose end of the illegal power line and hung it on a hook inside the generator room. “I’ll reconnect them every evening for a few hours, so long as one of us is here to keep an eye on things. I can’t give them free rein behind the perimeter, but letting them have some excess power won’t hurt.”
Well, well. Sam Hawkins had hidden depths, did he?
Sam glared as we turned to leave. “Mention this to anyone, even Mr. Edward, and I will kill you.” The glare deepened. “I mean you, Lancaster.”
“Naturally.”
Very hidden depths.
We certainly aren’t as badly off as some poor blighters excavating northwest of us, right on the edge of the cliffs marking the high desert, and who seem to have one tent and one shovel between them. Another dig, French, is working on the old city and the necropolises. We’ve been sociable and invited them to dinner.
There must have been dozens of expeditions between Abydos and Luxor, a hundred miles by boat to our south. We had three within five miles of us. Our nearest neighbor was a French expedition that had arrived in Abydos a week or so before we did. Led by Professor Laurent Fouquet, they had set up camp north of the temple in the village of El-Khirba near the monastery of Deir el-Sitt Damiana, where they were excavating the remains of the ancient city of Abydos. Ned knew Fouquet, as did M. Archambault, and they shared a grimace when they realized who was close by. Although Fouquet had paid us a visit out of politeness to return the early call Ned made on him, he was hardly an active supporter of the entente cordiale, considering us interlopers and rivals. He’d declined our invitation to dinner. Ned told me later that Fouquet had hoped to get the permit to excavate the temple, and his mouth was permanently puckered from the sourness of the grapes he chewed.
A little farther north and west, a pair of Englishmen, Harper and Symington, searched for the lost city of Thinis. Unlike Fouquet, they were friendly and arrived at the expedition house for dinner, full of respect and nascent hero worship. Ned’s book on rituals and death in Ancient Aegypt was apparently the best thing they’d ever read. I’d read it too, but I’m shallow enough to prefer more action and a plot. Ned gave them a warm welcome. They weren’t from his own old college or connected to the British Museum, but had apparently graduated from the University in Manchester.
“We’re independents,” Symington said. “I’ve filled in with teaching for the three years it’s taken to raise enough money for the dig. Harper worked at the university museum. Everything’s on a shoestring.”
Ned was all sympathy. “Damned hard work, I’m sure. Drop in at any time. We can compare notes.”
They wanted to know all about his excavation plans and wheedled most prettily to get the details. Not that Ned needed much encouragement. You’d have more luck trying to hold back the inundation.
The Abydos site comprised a part-excavated, well-preserved temple built by the aforementioned Seti I, and a smaller one a little to the northwest, built by Seti’s son Rameses. They sat on the desert fringe, with the cultivated land edging them on the east and the sands of Aegypt’s sepulchral deserts spreading away to the west.
Our workers came from the surrounding villages, brigaded and overseen by the redoubtable Mr.
Bakhoum, a legend along the Nile for his excavating abilities. He had worked with every major expedition to Aegypt in at least the last thirty years. Ned was delighted to have secured him. Mr. Bakhoum, who spoke excellent English, was just as pleased to have a job close to home—he lived in our hamlet.
They had worked together under Flinders Petrie, and on the first morning of the dig, he greeted Ned at the temple as a friend, smiling, hands held out in welcome. Ned beamed back and shook hands heartily before offering the old man a deep salaam in the local style, a mark of respect that earned him approving nods and smiles from the watching workers drawn up in serried ranks outside the temple ruins. The energetic discussion in Arabic that followed, involving much arm waving and pointing from a Ned who was bouncing on his toes with barely restrained enthusiasm, and much nodding and beard stroking on Mr. Bakhoum’s part, was incomprehensible to me. Still, they both looked happy.
While Ned addressed the waiting villagers, Mr. Bakhoum stood at his side, the picture of dignity. Even wearing his red fez cap, he barely reached Ned’s shoulder, and the deep furrows in his face suggested that he might have been excavating for something closer to half a century. It was quite a contrast, the quiet old man still and calm against Ned’s energy as he walked up and down, arms waving and pointing to the great temple behind the villagers. The workers chuckled often as Ned talked, and when Ned salaamed them all, he met with loud laughter and obeisances in return before the men broke into song and marched to their assigned work points.
Ned rejoined me where I’d stood watching the ceremonial greeting. He pushed his hat to the back of his head, the brim tilted skyward. “They’re a good bunch, aren’t they? Mr. Bakhoum’s the best. We’re going to get so much done this year! There’s so much here, so much to find….” His grin widened. “Come on! Time to get started. I can’t wait to show you this, Rafe.”
And he was off, moving quickly and lightly. A faint humming and singing filtered back to me as I scrambled to catch up. I laughed when I reached him, and linked my arm through his. Far be it from me to put a cloud over Ned’s cheerful enthusiasm, but he couldn’t carry a tune, not even a wavering Arabic chant, in both hands.
We start each day with a procession to rival that of any pharaoh. We gather in the courtyard in the predawn dark, with varying amounts of enthusiasm for the coming day. I leave it to your imaginations where I fall on that spectrum. Then out we go through the arch in the courtyard wall in a… what is the collective noun for a gaggle of archaeologists? A dig? A shovel? Anyhow, we clamber over the dykes protecting the village from the Nile’s inundations and all head out across the desert as the sun comes up, accompanied by Mr. Bakhoum, who’s in charge of the work crews.
Ned strode along with Mr. Bakhoum at his side, already discussing the day’s work with him and where the workers’ efforts should be directed. Tom Causton, Ned’s second-in-command, strove to be at Ned’s other side, listening intently so he missed nothing. Sam, of course, elbowed Causton out of the way.
I paused in my task of brigading children and donkeys just as Ned turned his head.
“Come on, Rafe! I need that equipment today, not next week! Catch up!”
My ironic salute was met with an airy wave of the hand, and off Ned went.
Hugh rubbed a gentle hand down one old donkey’s nose as he attached a rope to a bridle as worn and threadbare as she was. He’d given her a much lighter load than her younger companions. “He’s a bit different out here, don’t you think? I mean….” His voice trailed off and he grimaced. “I’m not sure what I mean. He’s more forceful, like. Bossy, even.” He added, hastily, “No disrespect, mind.”
“It’s not that. After all, he never forgets that he’s First Heir to the richest House there is. In Londinium, he’s more cautious around people. He can’t afford to be too open. He’s more relaxed here, I think. More himself.” I shrugged into my thin linen jacket, all I needed against the cool dawn, and slapped my hat, an old straw boater, onto my head. “He’s blossoming out here.”
Hugh grinned and started the old donkey on her way. “What I said. Bossy.”
Our two German professors follow along behind Ned. They already have pipes of the most obnoxious tobacco well alight; they spend the day wreathed in smoke. Keeps the mosquitoes away, at any rate. Monsieur Archambault ambles along in a world of his own, lugging a big canvas bag of art supplies that he declines to trust to anyone else’s care—he is recording the temple paintings. Hugh and I bring up the rear, two sheepdogs with a particularly troublesome flock.
Our task was to keep a weather eye on the donkeys loaded with our photographic equipment and poles and canopies to make temporary shelters from the sun. Trotting along with us came Nasr, the cook’s eldest son, balancing a small wooden table upside down on his head, since Ned, always encumbered with maps and photographs and notebooks, needed a worktable. The second son, who was about Harry’s age, and a couple of his cousins carried folding canvas chairs. The children were cheerful and willing. Between working each season on the digs and the school founded years before by some archaeologist’s bored wife, they spoke English as well as they did Arabic.
They danced along beside us, full of chatter. “Captain sir, Captain, tell us about….” was a constant cry. They were insatiably curious about anything outside their narrow world, afire to learn, thirsting to absorb as much from us as they could. I found myself giving impromptu lessons on anything from the art of flight to cinematography. Thank God they didn’t demand anything of me that involved higher mathematics or chemistry. I’d have been sunk.
Ned is far too warped by his morally correct upbringing. He’s itching to get to the area behind the temple where there’s a curious underground structure that fascinates him, but has he gone straight for what he wants? Ha! Not Ned. Instead, he’s opened up the season’s digging by carrying out intensive surveys of each temple, checking against the records made the previous year, and shoring up the exposed structures. The man’s restraint is noble, I’m sure. You can tell he’s not a Stravaigor.
“There’s been some looting over the summer.” Ned pointed toward the back of the temple wall, where some of the painted frieze had been chipped away. He glanced to the toiling workers cleaning out six months of windblown sand from the interior. His mouth tightened hard. “It always happens. And some of them are likely responsible.”
“They’re poor,” Sam said. His tolerance might have surprised me before the incident with the generator room. “You pay them well during the season, but they have large families and the whole of the summer to live through. A tourist willing to pay a few pounds for a hunk of carved rock is a godsend.”
Ned’s glower was a black thunderhead, but he didn’t argue with Sam’s logic. Instead he sent Causton to check the pillars holding up the temple’s massive portico. “See how much repair work we can manage, Tom, before the buggers steal them from under us.”
Sam rolled his eyes at me. “You’re going up on a flight, aren’t you? Take him with you until he gets his temper back.”
“You trust me with him, then?”
Sam snorted. “Of course not. I’ll be checking you for weapons before you take off.”
He did too, damn it.
Ned has me doing some aerial mapping of the whole area around Abydos. There’s a small aerostrip running along the edge of the desert near the hamlet, more than enough for the little two-seater scout ship. I took the Brunel back to Cairo for storage, so all I have to worry about here is the little bird. It reminds me of my old aerofighter. I’ve been taking her up with someone in the seat behind me armed with a celluloid-film camera and a kinetoscope to take aerial photographs of the site to help with the surveying. Ned’s been up with me a few times.
Ned sulked until we actually got into the air. “Sam doesn’t understand. We can’t afford to lose our history like this, with bits chipped off and sold to any passing tourist. I’m right behind Maspero’s drive to arrest and convict antiquities smugglers. He’s quite right to want t
o keep as much as possible here in Aegypt.”
“That wasn’t what you said when you read the permission chit and realized how much Maspero will take of anything you dig up.”
“Oh well.” And there was humor in Ned’s tone at last. Then: “Rafe!”
I almost had an apoplexy at the sudden roar in my ear and the painful jab in the back of my shoulder. An involuntary jerk on the joystick had the little ship dancing all over the sky. “Good God, Ned! What’s the matter?”
“Look!” He pointed down. “Look! There, at the foot of the cliffs near Sesostris’s cenotaph. They’re new! They aren’t on the maps. Oh gosh, Rafe, they’re new!”
With Ned whooping like a demented banshee, I banked the little bird over several ghost outlines visible in subtle changes to the surface of the sand where the desert had crept out over the tombs and temples beneath.
Ah. Hitherto unknown tombs. Guaranteed to cheer even the most morose archaeologist. For days afterward I only had to mention “new tombs” and Ned beamed like the sun for hours.
This is my sort of archaeology: sitting down, flying, and ne’er a shovel in sight. My other main task also helps keep me away from the business end of a shovel. I am getting a lot of practice with the camera, as Ned’s asked me to take responsibility for recording and photographing all the finds….
Trained by Flinders Petrie, Ned had adopted all the older man’s meticulous methods. He wanted a complete photographic record to support the excavation diary and daily written reports.