a tour of the ruined estates and houses that had made up the northern “suburbs” of Akhetaten, Bruno and Jerry trudged up the long incline to the famous painted cliff tombs on the ridge behind the city, Phil wandered around the village of el-Till making new friends, and Bea got a book and a pitcher of tea and went up to the Menshiya’s sun deck.
Gideon, Arlo, Haddon, and the film crew had the museum to themselves except for Dr. Afifi, the cadaverous, understandably hangdog museum director, who hovered, apologetic and solicitous, in the background.
Shooting began in the workroom, formerly a classroom in which a bright and single-minded twenty-year-old named Clifford Henry Haddon had been among those who had succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of hieroglyphic symbols at the feet of the celebrated Professor Heinrich Wiedermeister of the University of Bern.
But this morning’s interview, with Gideon watching from the back of the room, got off to a poor start. Haddon, standing in front of some racks of inscribed stone fragments and looking slightly ridiculous in an oversized bush jacket with enough shotgun-cartridge loops to satisfy the most bloodthirsty White Hunter, was stiff and fussy, squinting under the hot pole-lights. Patsy, cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth, was sweating grouchily over a tangle of wires while Cy, looking as if he might topple over asleep at any second, manned a videocamera set up on a tripod. Forrest, who had the ability to look bored and desperate at the same time, was alongside the camera, keeping his eyes mostly on a monitor a few feet away and prompting Haddon with edgy questions.
“And so after you got your master’s degree at Yale, you came directly here to work on the dig and study with Wiedermeister, is that right?” He was maintaining the singsong, doggedly cheerful tone employed by the edgy young when dealing with the recalcitrant elderly.
“Well-”
“Cut,” Forrest said. “Please, Dr. Haddon, look, I don’t mean to keep interrupting, but would you try not to start every sentence with ‘well’?” It was only 8:10 in the morning and already his smile was tight and glassy. “Okay? All right?”
Haddon compressed his lips and nodded. His beard stuck out straighter.
“All right, do you want to start again? Try to make it sound interesting now.”
“I will try,” Haddon said, “difficult as it may prove.”
Things, Gideon thought, were not improving.
Haddon waited for the signal to begin again, and peered frankly into the lens. “In the fall of 1944, with my master’s degree in hand, I leaped at the chance to come-”
“Cut,” Forrest said. He smiled harder. “This is just great, really great, but it would be even better if you didn’t look into the camera. It makes it a little severe. You know, like Uncle Sam saying ‘I want you’? We can’t have that, can we?”
He laughed. Haddon glowered.
Forrest’s massive face arranged itself into a merry smile. “So. Just speak right to me, not to the camera. ”Okay? All right?“
Haddon gritted his teeth, nodded, and started when Forrest dropped his chin. “Well-”
“Please.” Forrest’s voice was a little strangled. “No ‘well’s’. Okay? All-”
“Young man, I will make a bargain with you,” Haddon said. “If you stop saying ‘Okay? All right?”, I’ll stop saying ’well.“ How does that suit you?”
Gideon winced. Tempers were already simmering, and it was just the first hour of the first morning of taping. Making a movie, a retired Port Angeles neighbor who had worked in Hollywood had once told him, was like making sausage. The finished product might be terrific, but you didn’t necessarily want to watch the process.
He made an unobtrusive exit and wandered for twenty minutes or so through the ill-lit, poorly labeled museum, but there wasn’t much to hold his attention: broken stelae, fragmentary statues, a few shabby, anonymous mummies and mummy cases. All in all, watching the rest of Haddon’s interview promised to be more uplifting.
On the way back he passed a small library in which Arlo and Dr. Afifi stood at a table, arranging five or six shoebox-sized containers. When Gideon entered, Dr. Afifi excused himself and humbly backed out, leaving the room to the two Americans as if he had been the intruder.
“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.
