“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 now? And just stick to the main points, okay? All right?”
Gideon had thought he was doing rather well but was willing to trust to Forrest as the director. “The royal city of Akhetaten-” he began accommodatingly.
“And could you make it a little punchier? You know, just the main points? We’re not looking for ‘Ozymandias’ here. No offense, but we have a boat to catch and I still have Arlo to do.”
Gideon took no offense, or hardly any. It was probably good for him to have somebody like Forrest around. His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.
And he was glad now that he’d taken Julie’s advice and decided not to start with a quotation from “Ozymandias” after all.
Sticking closely to the main points, he told of how Akhenaten and his beautiful queen, Nefertiti, had decided in 1348 B.C. that the mighty priests and pantheon of Thebes had had their day. They had built this completely new capital city far to the north, and almost overnight the cult of Amon, supreme until then, had been stripped of its power. The new supreme deity-the only deity-was the god Aten, until then very small-fry indeed. The political and social ramifications were terrific.
The Amarna Age it is called now, and its religious and artistic upheavals were tremendous. In religion, it was the beginning of the great tide of monotheism. In art, a revolutionary new style, naturalistic, varied, and no longer unquestioningly reverential, burst on the scene. The famous head of Nefertiti, possibly the best-known piece of art in the world, had been sculpted in a studio in the workmen’s village a few hundred yards from where Gideon was standing.
Society, in short, had been stood on its ear-for a while. After Akhenaten’s death, the supporters of Amon had their revenge. The city was razed. The court and all the people were moved back to Thebes. The subversive art style was purged. Images of Aten were obliterated. The name of Akhenaten was chipped out of inscriptions and struck from the historical roll of kings.
The grand experiment had lasted fourteen years.
“That’s a wrap,” Forrest said jubilantly. “Just great, Gideon. Nice and lively.”
Nice and short was what he meant, Gideon thought. Under half an hour in all. There would be plenty of time for Arlo’s segment before they had to get back to the ship.
Arlo’s search had turned up a few modestly presentable items-part of an inscribed boundary stela, a bit of painted pavement, some fragmentary inscriptions dealing with Akhenaten’s eldest daughter, Meritaten-and Forrest had agreed that they were sufficiently visual. It took a while to get the lights set up in the main exhibition room so that they didn’t reflect off the glass cases, but finally everything was ready.
Forrest pointed one finger at Arlo, who swallowed, and the other one at Cy, behind the camera. “All right, Arlo, tell us what’s so interesting about that stela,” he said, and to Cy: “Roll tape.”
Arlo peered woodenly and somewhat dazedly into the lens, like a frog gazing down the throat of a snake.
“Well-” he began.
Gideon quietly made his escape.
Chapter Eleven
“This could be a hundred years ago,” Julie said dreamily.
“Hm?” Gideon wasn’t sure where his own thoughts had been, but he brought them back and turned toward the eastern shore, in the direction she was looking.
He nodded. “It could be a thousand years ago.”
It could have been five thousand. Along a waterside path, perhaps a hundred yards from where they sat, walked a family group and its animals, slowly returning from its maize or bean plot to their village a quarter of a mile downstream The galabiyaed father, head down, led a water buffalo on which a young boy sat. Behind it came a veiled woman on a donkey and a little girl on foot, holding on to its tail. Against a near background of date palms and tamarisks and a distant horizon of tawny desert hills, moving at the lolling, rhythmic pace of the animals, they made a picture that would have been familiar in the time of Abraham.
And even then, thought Gideon, even then as it was now, the tomb complex at Saqqara, not far to the north along this same river, would have been the oldest man-made structure in the world.
It had been like this all afternoon, ever since the crew had let loose the Menshiya’s mooring lines and the big white ship had drifted to the middle of the river and begun to pull against the slow, steady Nile current, heading upstream toward Abydos, Dendera, and Luxor. Gideon and Julie had found an awninged, isolated corner of the upper deck, and there, a stack of untouched novels and guidebooks on the table beside them, they did what boatloads of Nile cruise passengers had been lazily and contentedly doing for centuries: they sat and watched the Nile slide by.
Flocks of white egrets drowsed in brown, foam-flecked shallows and rose in great, wing-beating clouds when the boat came too near. Children shouted “Hello-hello!” from the banks and responded with glee to any hint of a friendly response while their more reserved mothers and sisters washed clothes in the river. They saw mud-brick village after mud-brick village, the next one coming into sight before the previous one was gone. Since el-Amarna, the only reminders that they were in the twentieth century had been the clattering, ramshackle diesel engines that pumped water up the low banks and into the fields every few hundred yards, replacing in a single generation the primitive, counterbalanced shadufs that had served since the time of the pharaohs.
Whether the local inhabitants were pleased with the simplicity of their lives was open to question, but to a couple of tourists-and for the time being Gideon and Julie were working at being tourists-it was Egypt as Egypt was supposed to be. For over four hours they sat at the railing, hardly moving, speaking little except to point things out to each other. And even then they were sorry when it came time to leave.
