year or so and certainly on this present trip, that hadn’t been the case. When she’d first met Shawn at a New York gallery opening almost four years ago, she was defending her Ph.D. thesis on mitochondrial DNA, and had been bowled over by his affection and attention. She’d also been bowled over by his erudition: He was fluent in more than a half-dozen exotic Near Eastern languages and knew things about art and history that she only wished she knew. The breadth of his knowledge made her seem like the stereotypical narrow-minded scientist by comparison.
Recommencing walking but at a much slower pace, Sana wondered whether her mother had been right. Perhaps the twenty-six-year age difference between them was too great.
At the same time, she distinctly remembered the difficulty she’d had dealing with the juvenile nature of men her own age, who wore their baseball caps backward and acted like perfect asses. Unlike most of her girlfriends, she’d never been interested in having children. Early on she recognized herself as an academic and, in that sense, much too selfish. For her, Shawn’s two sets of children, from his first and third marriages, were enough to satisfy what meager maternal instincts she possessed.
As Sana retrieved her key card, she considered their departure, scheduled for early the next morning. Before the trip she’d been disappointed that Shawn had been unwilling to take her to Luxor to see the tombs of the nobles and the Valley of the Kings. Without regard for her feelings, he’d said he’d already seen them and couldn’t take the additional time off. But now that her DNA conference was over, Sana was relieved they hadn’t planned on the detour. She hadn’t been working at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons long enough to feel secure, especially with several key experiments under way.
She entered her room in one continuous swift motion, and before the door had time to close, she had undone the top two buttons of her blouse and was halfway to the bathroom. Spotting Shawn, she pulled herself up short as he leaped to his feet. They eyed each other. Sana was the first to speak as she took in a magnifying glass in Shawn’s white cotton-gloved hands. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you out at the pool?”
“You could have knocked!”
“I need to knock on my own hotel room’s door?” she questioned in a mildly sarcastic tone.
Shawn chuckled, recognizing the unreasonableness of what he’d said. “I suppose that does sound a bit unrealistic. At least you didn’t have to come barging in here like there was a fire, scaring me out of my wits. I was concentrating.”
“Why aren’t you at the pool?” Sana repeated. The door slammed on its own behind her.
“It’s our last day, if you haven’t forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Shawn said, a gleam coming into his eye. “I’ve been busy.”
“So I see,” Sana said, eyeing the gloves and the magnifying glass. She went back to unbuttoning her blouse and headed into the bathroom. Shawn came to the threshold.
“I just made what I thought was my biggest archaeological find in that antiquities shop I told you about. The one where I got the prehistoric Egyptian pot.”
“Excuse me,” Sana said, easing Shawn back from the threshold so she could push the door almost closed. She didn’t like to change in front of anyone, even Shawn, especially since their level of intimacy had faded of late. “I remember,” she called out. “Does it have something to do with your white gloves and the magnifying glass?”
“It certainly does,” Shawn said to the door. “The concierge helped me out with the gloves and the magnifying glass. Talk about your full-service hotel!”
“Are you going to tell me about your find, or do I have to guess?” Sana asked, now interested. When it came to his profession, Shawn didn’t exaggerate. For sure, he’d made a number of important finds digging in multiple locations throughout the Near East earlier in his career. That was before becoming a high-ranking curator whose responsibilities had devolved to be more supervisory and fund-raising than fieldwork.
“Come out, and I’ll show you.”
“Is it not as good as you hoped? I noticed you used the past tense.”
“At first I was disappointed, but now I think it is even a hundred times better than my initial impression.”
“Really?” Sana questioned. With her bathing-suit bottoms halfway up her thighs, she stopped. Now her curiosity had truly been piqued. What could Shawn possibly have found to warrant such a description?
“Are you coming out? I’m dying to show you this.”
Sana wiggled her bottom into the suit and adjusted the crotch, then checked herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She was reasonably happy with what she saw. A devoted runner, she had a slim, athletic figure and short, dirty-blond but healthy hair. Gathering up her clothes, she opened the door. Depositing the clothes carefully on the bed, she walked to the desk.
“Here. Put these on,” he said, handing her a second pair of freshly laundered white gloves. “I got them especially for you.”
“What is it, a book?” Sana asked, once she got her hands into the gloves. She could see an ancient-looking leather-bound volume sitting on the corner of the desk.
“It’s called a codex,” Shawn said. “It’s an example of the first books that superseded the scroll, since you can get more in it and access various portions of the text far easier.
What makes it different from a real book, like the Gutenberg Bible, is that it was done completely by hand. Handle it carefully! It’s more than fifteen hundred years old. It had been preserved for more than a millen nium and a half by being sealed in a jar buried in the sand.”
“My word,” Sana said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hold something quite so old for fear it might disintegrate in her hands.
“Open it!” he urged.
Gingerly, Sana folded back the cover. It was stiff, and the binding audibly complained.
“What’s the cover made of?”
“It’s kind of a leather sandwich stiffened with layers of papyrus.”
“What are the pages made out of?”
“The pages are all papyrus.”
“And the language?”
“It’s called Coptic, which is kind of a written version of ancient Egyptian using a Greek alphabet.”
“Truly amazing!” Sana said. She was impressed but wondered why Shawn had said it was such an important find for him. Some of the statuary he’d found in Asia Minor seemed far more substantial.
“Can you see that a large section of the book has been torn out?”
“I can. Is that significant?”
“Very much so! Five of the original, individual texts of this particular codex had been roughly removed in the 1940s to sell them in America. Other pages had been rumored to have been removed to start kitchen fires in a fellahin mud hut.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Indeed. Many an academic has cringed at the thought.”
“I also notice that the inside of the front cover has been opened up along its edge.”
“I did that myself very carefully with a steak knife about an hour ago.”
“Was that wise? I mean, considering the age of this thing. I imagine there are more appropriate tools than a steak knife.”
“No, it probably wasn’t wise, but I did it because I couldn’t help myself. At that point I was horribly disappointed with what’s in the codex. I had expected a virtual gold mine, and instead I’ve rescued the equivalent of the output of one of the world’s first copy machines.”
“I don’t think I’m following you,” Sana admitted. She handed the ancient book back to Shawn to absolve herself from responsibility. She pulled off the gloves. His excitement was palpable. She was more than intrigued.
“I’m not surprised.” He took the codex and replaced it to its former position on the corner of the desk. In the middle of the desk, under the glare of both a desk lamp and a floor lamp, were three individual pages held flat by various objects, including a pair of Shawn’s ancient-coin cuff links. The pages were heavily creased from being folded up for thousands of years. It too was papyrus, like the pages in the codex, but it seemed to be older. The edges had blackened to the point of appearing burnt.
“What’s this?” Sana asked, pointing at the papyri sheets. “A letter?” She could see the first page had a possible addressee, the last a signature.
