“Right. Phil probably lined it up on account of the name. Do you happen to know what the original
She shook her head.
“Have you ever heard of the Deir el-Bahri cache?”
She sighed. “Gideon, dear, have I ever pointed out to you that you have a slightly annoying habit of starting your stories by asking me if I’ve heard of something that hardly anybody has ever heard of? The Deir el-Bahri cache, the
“Many times,” he said, flopping into one of the beige armchairs, putting his feet up on the ottoman, and stretching comfortably out on his lower spine. “It’s just a pedagogical stratagem, well known to ensure listener participation in the communication process.”
“Well, sometimes it just ensures listener teeth-gnashing. What’s the Deir el-Bahri cache? Just tell me, don’t worry about my participation in the communication process.”
Deir el-Bahri, he explained, was the name of one of the rocky burial canyons near the Valley of the Kings. In it, at the beginning of the Twenty-first Dynasty in about 1000 B.C., the authorities took action to protect the great pharaohs’ mummies from the profanations of the thief-families that had been robbing the nearby royal tombs for five hundred years. They had gathered up the desecrated mummies from their plundered tombs and put them all in a single place—the tomb of Queen Inhapy, behind the more famous, more showy temple of Hatshepsut, and there, stripped long ago of anything worth stealing, they were to lie undisturbed and eventually be forgotten.
Centuries passed. Millennia passed. Then, in 1891, a thief named Ahmed er-Rassul, a member of one of the local families that still made their living by systematically looting the same tombs—a piece here, a piece there, so that the market was never flooded—had a falling-out with his brothers. Out of spite he led officials into the unremembered mass tomb, which only the er-Rassul family knew about. There the officials were stunned to see, stacked on top of one another like so many logs, something that scholars thought no longer existed: the actual, preserved bodies of most of the legendary pharaohs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties: Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramses II—“
“And where does the
“They couldn’t leave the bodies where they were,” Gideon said, “so they shipped them to Cairo for safekeeping. The boat that took them was called the
“Can I ask you something? Did you actually know all this before, or did you learn it from boning up these last few weeks?”
“Don’t ask rude questions. Anyway, there’s more. I haven’t gotten to the best part. When they arrived, these old mummies had to be assessed for duties, like anything else coming into Cairo. The problem was, there wasn’t any classification they fit into. They weren’t stone, they weren’t cloth, they weren’t wood. So the tax collector and the officials got their heads together, came up with a compromise solution… and the greatest rulers of the ancient world made their triumphal entry into modern Cairo classified as dried fish.”
Julie spluttered with laughter. “Not that far off, when you think about it. You know, there’s got to be a moral there somewhere.”
“There sure does. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what it is.”
The morning began on a happy note. The baggage had arrived at el-Minya at 12:30 a.m., and Phil had somehow gotten it delivered to the ship in (and on) two rickety taxis. So as individuals began emerging from their staterooms a little before 7 a.m., they found their luggage stacked neatly in the corridor beside their doors. There were yips of joy as people were reunited with their underwear and toiletries. Even Haddon went out of his way to shake Phil’s hand.
It was all mildly amazing and a bit amusing to Gideon. At home Phil’s life was an exercise in planned disorganization. Constantly behind in his schedule, constantly overlooking things like bills and appointments, perpetually late (“Sorry, I remembered I had to do the laundry.”
“Sorry, the rubber plant needed repotting.”), he bumbled along from one day to another, happily enough, to be sure, but always seemingly on the edge of chaos. Here, in his professional capacity, he was a man of infinite capacity, his fingers on the strings of every available resource.
During breakfast, a bright buffet of melons, figs, dates, tangerines, and warm loaves of sweet bread, Forrest went over the shooting schedule. All of the morning’s interviews would take place in or around the Tel el-Amarna Museum not far from the ship. At 8:00, Haddon would talk about his early experiences there. At 9:30, it would be Gideon’s turn; he would discuss Pharaoh Akhenaten and his times. And Arlo would display and discuss some of the old finds from Lambert’s day at 11:00. TJ had an off-day.
“But which finds?” Arlo asked. “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Anything,” Forrest said. “Talk about jewelry.”
“Well… there
“Fine, perfect.”
In his own way, Arlo looked pleased.
“So long as it’s visual,” Forrest said.
“Well, of course it’s visual.”
“Fine, perfect.”
As Forrest went on, Arlo leaned worriedly toward Gideon. “What does he mean by visual?”
“You’ve got me, Arlo.”
“Isn’t jewelry visual? I mean, by definition?”
