Dead Men's Hearts

“Oh. Thank you, Doctor,” Arlo called absently after him, staring dejectedly into the boxes. “Just look at this,” he said to Gideon. “Nobody but an anthropologist would know this was anything but a pile of junk.”

“Mm,” said Gideon. He was an anthropologist, and it looked like a pile of junk to him.

In the boxes, arranged without apparent design, were blackened, kinked strands of metal—probably low-quality gold—squashed into shapeless clumps; dull pebbles that on closer examination were drilled beads of faience, carnelian, and jasper, the remains of necklaces or collars that had fallen apart millennia before; flattened, crumpled, copper armlets and anklets; bent, broken amulets in the forms of fish and flowers; various gewgaws of faience, the ubiquitous glass paste of ancient Egypt. There were gobs of unrecognizable stuff with tags attached to them by red string—like toe tags in a mortuary, Gideon thought, and there was something appropriate in the parallel.

It was material that had been in storage for fifty years, Arlo told him, ever since Lambert had excavated it; never written up in the literature, never even properly catalogued. Apparently it had been dug up out of the ground, brushed off, stuck in its boxes, and then utterly forgotten. If there had been any attempt at repair or restoration, there was no sign of it.

It was Egyptian archaeology’s old, familiar story, Gideon thought. There was simply too much, that was the problem. Too much material, too many eager excavators over too many decades, and not enough patient, expert people to make something of what came out of the ground. Even the great CairoMuseum was reputed to have an attic and two basements full of crates from the 1890s that they hadn’t yet gotten around to opening.

“They’re no help to you in your book?” Gideon asked.

Arlo uttered a rueful laugh. “Not in this condition. And half these things aren’t jewelry anyway, despite the labels.”

He fingered a clump of dull metal strands in one of the boxes. Bits of black flecked off to join the layer of similar debris in the bottom. He picked up a small almond-shaped eye of black and white faience, rimmed with metal, and turned it disgustedly over. “The eye shows up frequently enough as an amulet motif in the Amarna Period,” he said in a dusty, disheartened voice, “but never in its naturalistic form. Only as the Eye of Horus.”

Gideon nodded. The Eye of Horus, or udjai, with its characteristic, curling ornamentation, was familiar to anyone who had ever opened a book on Egyptian art. “What are they then?”

“What?” Arlo shrugged and put k down. “Bits of toys, funerary objects, what difference does it make? No doubt they’d be of interest to others, but not to me.” He flicked some of the other things with his fingers. “Very possibly there are some things here that might amount to something, but it would take someone months of restoration even to begin to know.”

“And you don’t want to do it?”

“Me? I wouldn’t know how. I’ve spent my whole life as an epigrapher. I’m not like you, you know. I don’t know how to do anything.”

Well, what was there to say to that? Arlo’s doughy, woeful face and subdued little mustache, combined with the depressing state of the Tel el-Amarna Museum, was getting to him. His spirits, which had started the day blithely enough, were sinking fast. “I guess I’d better get back to the workroom, Arlo,” he said. “I’m up next after Haddon, and Forrest will get nervous if I’m not around. He wants to shoot before the sun gets too bad.”

“Yes, do that.” Arlo’s eyes were still on the boxes of blackened metal. “Do you suppose I really ought to talk about this on camera, or find something else?”

“I’d say something else,” Gideon said gently. “Whatever ‘visual’ is, I don’t think this is it.”

When he peeked gingerly back into the workroom, Gideon found things much improved. Haddon, perhaps more relaxed now that he was used to the lights and the equipment, was being charming. In front of a broken tablet that had been mounted on the wall, he was bent sharply at the waist and had his head tipped ludicrously, as if he were trying to read the inscriptions upside down.

Indeed, he explained for the camera (but looking at Forrest), he was reading them upside down because it was the only way he could translate them. That was the way he’d learned because in 1944, with the war going on, books were hard to come by. The class had been held—in this very room, sitting right at this very table—with only one copy of the text for old Professor Wiedermeister and his three students. The professor, a better scholar than he was a teacher, had mumbled his lectures with the book on the table in front of him, turned toward himself most of the time.

“And I,” Haddon said with a comical grimace, “had the misfortune to have the seat directly across from him.”

Forrest urged him on with a rolling wave of his hand. “Great,” he mouthed. Gideon, smiling, thought so too. Haddon could be charming when he wanted to.

“And let me assure you,” Haddon added, twinkling away, “that was far from the worst aspect of sitting opposite him, in his line of fire, so to speak. Old Wiedermeister, you see, had the habit of chewing raw garlic cloves.” He rolled his eyes. “The man had breath that could knock over an Apis bull at fifty yards.”

“Cut, that’ll do it right there,” said Forrest. “That was wonderful, Dr. Haddon, just outstanding.” He was patently pleased but already glancing at his watch and worrying about the time. “Don’t go anywhere, Gideon,” he called over his shoulder. “We’ll set up outside on the King’s Street, in front of the palace.”

* * *

King’s Street. Palace. The words seemed overblown now, even ironic, Gideon mused aloud, trusting that the tiny lavaliere mike that Patsy had clipped onto his windbreaker was picking it up. His hand rested on a leaning, rusted stake that was part of the single-strand, barbed-wire fence surrounding what had once been the house of the pharaoh. The royal boulevard of Akhetaten was now the desolate, sandy track stretching away into the distance behind him, the remains of the royal palace all of two feet high. The gracious villas and open temples, the elegant pools and gardens, were desert once again. In the whole of this vast, once-glorious capital city, virtually nothing remained that was higher than the waist of a man.

It had all been built of mud-brick that began to deteriorate the day it was made. In ancient Egypt, stone had been saved for the afterlife: for the tombs of the dead and the temples to the gods. Living people, from humble laborers to great pharaohs, had settled for sun-baked mud. In all of Egypt, with its hundreds of temples and thousands of tombs, not a single standing building remained to tell us how the ancients actually lived. What we knew, we knew from the clay models sometimes left in the tombs and—here Gideon waved an arm to encompass the acres of crumbling, desert-colored foundations glaring in the sun—excavations such as this one.

“Very nice, very nice,” Forrest said, nodding, as Gideon went on in this vein, “but could we get to the city itself