here?”
In the little refrigerator he found miniature soft-drink bottles, water, and a stack of plastic glasses. He poured them each a glass of mandarin-flavored Schweppes. “Did you happen to notice the name of the ship?”
“The Menshiya!”
“Right. Phil probably lined it up on account of the name. Do you happen to know what the original Menshiya was?”
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 Menshiya, the Neiman-Marcus fragment-”
“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 Menshiya come into it?” Julie said, finishing her drink and stretching. “I don’t mean to rush you, but we have to be up early tomorrow morning.”
“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 Menshiya. Can you imagine? The ancient kings of Thebes on their last journey after three thousand years. The news got out and people lined the shore all the way from Luxor to Cairo. Women tearing their hair, men firing guns into the air…”
“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 a some jewelry here that I’m quite interested in myself, but I don’t know-”
“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?”
“You’d sure think so.”
“I’m really not very good at this sort of thing,” Arlo said.
“Okay,” Forrest said, “anybody who’s not involved in the shooting, you’re free to spend the morning wherever you want. But remember, the boat has to leave at one o’clock sharp, so please -give my ulcer a break and be back in plenty of time. We’re on a tight schedule and I wouldn’t even want to try to extend our time in Egypt.”
And miss even a single, splendid day of Anatolian boar-hunting, Gideon thought.
Chapter Ten
The Tel el-Amarna Museum stood at the desert’s edge a few hundred yards from the river, a little more than a mile south of the huddled brown village of el-Till and hard against the scant remains of what had once been the King’s Street in the great city of Akhetaten. No more than a utilitarian structure when constructed in 1913 as headquarters for Lambert’s first excavation, the plain, one-story stucco building had been going downhill ever since. For twenty years after 1913 it had gone unused. In the 1930s, the University of Bern had taken it over for two decades. Then, in the 1950s, it had been turned over to the Egyptian government for use as a museum, but the money had never come through to properly maintain or staff it, and its finer pieces had gone one by one to more prestigious institutions. Now its undistinguished and slowly deteriorating collection was open to the public only a few afternoons a week, and irregularly at that.
It was nobody’s fault, Gideon knew. Egypt, possessor of the greatest accumulation of archaeological material in the world, also happened to be one of its poorest countries. If there wasn’t enough money to shore up the Great Sphinx against the groundwater that was eating it away, or to safeguard Luxor Temple against the corrosive salts in its soil, what chance was there to turn the dowdy Tel el-Amarna Museum into anything special? And if they did, how many people would come to visit it? Why would anyone, given the mind-numbing wealth available in the rest of the country?
Those members of the Horizon expedition who had the choice went elsewhere this morning. TJ took Julie on
