Imhotep (2 page)

The
guard followed Tim’s gaze and saw the footsteps.  He scuffed at the sand,
wiping out the prints, and then stood in front of the gate, his arms folded
across his chest.

“Closed
to public.”

Tim
and the guard stared at each other for a moment, and then Tim shook his head
and walked out to the parking lot.

Hamzah
and the taxi were gone. 

It was
possible, Tim thought, that the couple had come out of the tomb while the guard
had been around back, while he had his head down writing in his journal or
studying the map.  It was possible that they had been hiding in the back
of the cab and were now reunited with Hamzah.  He remembered the playful
smile on the American’s face.  Perhaps he had planned to play a
joke.  Or perhaps the girl had felt ill and they had gone to the taxi for
her to rest.

Or
they could have crossed over to the colonnade, walked back to the Step Pyramid
and could be wandering around the northern courtyard.

And it
was possible that they were still in the Tomb of Kanakht.  Although there
didn’t seem to be a reason for it, Hamzah had seemed genuinely confused. Tim
didn't think the Americans were hurt, he couldn't imagine the little guide
being able to overpower the big American.  Still.

He
looked around for another official, but didn’t expect to see one.  The
antiquities department was understaffed and the idea of guarding a huge mound
of stones that had been around for thousands of years was a low priority.

Back
home Tim would use a cell phone, call 9-1-1 and let the police sort it
out.  He hadn’t bothered to bring his cell phone on the trip.  Even if
he had it, he had no idea who he would call, perhaps the embassy.  And
tell them what?

Following
the ruins of the colonnade that ran along the eastern edge of the complex, Tim
walked away from the Tomb of Kanakht and the angry guard.  He reached the
northern end of the pathway and scanned the area for the Americans. 

The
Step Pyramid now lay between him and the angry guard.  He walked across
the courtyard toward the pyramid, unsure of what to do.

He
stopped by a large rectangular hole dug into the sand.  A path, wide
enough for three people to walk side-by-side, led from the edge of the hole
down a gentle sandy slope and into a dark tunnel that angled toward the
pyramid.  Tim knew that it led to a central subterranean shaft, which in
turn led down to the granite-plugged vault where Djoser’s mummy had once lain.

The
tunnel was big enough to hide the two tourists.

He
took a few steps into the tunnel and then forced a cough; he didn’t want to
interrupt the couple if they had found a hiding place for a more personal
reason. 

As he
stepped into the tunnel and out of the sunshine, the contrast between the
bright sand outside and the shadows took his sight away.  He pinched his
eyes shut, hurrying his pupils to dilate.  Then he took only a few more
steps before the tunnel ended at an iron gate.

No one
else was in the tunnel.

He
pushed on the gate, expecting it to be locked.  It was.

But
there was no guard, he realized.  So why was a guard assigned to a small,
nearly unknown tomb out in the open while the antiquities department trusted an
unattended gate at the end of a dark tunnel to keep tourists out of the Step
Pyramid?

Tim
pressed his face between the bars of the iron gate, but the darkness inside the
tomb was too complete.

“Hello! 
Anyone in there?” he called.  He pulled on the gate.  There was no
give to it, as if it were not just locked shut, but welded in place.

He
called again, expecting at least a hollow echo of his voice to come back to him
from the ancient room that lay out of sight.

“Anyone? 
Hello!” he shouted louder.

The
reality of the tomb suddenly struck him: its age, how it had been carved from
the desert rock by hundreds of men using primitive tools, how a flesh-and-blood
king with the power of life and death over an ancient kingdom had been entombed
here amid chanting and incense and songs and prayers.

He
closed his eyes and imagined the tomb lit by torches. He pictured the rough,
granite walls alive with shadows cast by a procession of priests in sheer white
linen robes led by Anubis, jackal god of the underworld, and Thoth, ibis-headed
scribe of the gods, and the goddesses Ma’at and Hathor.  He imagined the
sounds of keening mourners, the hollow rattling of sacred sistrums, the
shuffling of pall bearers carrying the royal mummy prepared for an eternal life
of joy in Khert-Neter, the Field of Reeds.  He could almost smell the
sharp tang of incense spread to sanctify the chamber, the perfumes of the men
and women of the king’s court, the dryness of the desert.  

With
his face pressed against the iron bars, Tim waited for the vision to fade, for
the echo of his calls to answer him.  But the air in the granite chamber,
compressed by the weight of thousands of stones and the stillness of thousands
of years seemed too dense for his words to penetrate.

“Or
there’s no one here,” he said to himself, shaking off the vision.

He
walked back up the slope to the surface and was surprised to see that the
afternoon had given way to dusk.  A tour bus engine started in the
distance and he realized that unless he ran through the courtyard and waved the
bus to a stop, he would have to make the hike to Memphis or spend a night
sleeping by the tomb.  Unless I catch a ride with my buddy, the guard, he
thought.

Suddenly
he understood why a guard had been assigned to an insignificant tomb that few
tourists knew existed: because the lock on the tomb gate was broken. 

Until
the lock was repaired, a bureaucrat in the department of antiquities could
assign someone - a friend or a cousin or a nephew - to guard the
tomb.  The guard would accept bribes to permit guides to get their guests
into the “secret” tomb.  The guide would earn a hefty tip from the
impressed tourist.  The guard would split the bribe with the bureaucrat
and so three families would have additional income, all from one broken lock.

Which
meant that if he waited until the guard left for the night, Tim could enter the
Tomb of Kanakht, satisfy himself that the Americans really had sneaked out of
the tomb and, more importantly, spend hours sketching tomb drawings undisturbed
by other tourists. 

He
went back down the sandy tunnel to the Step Pyramid gate.  Shrouded by the
darkness, he removed his backpack and sat against the cool granite stone to
wait for night to fall.

This
is the kind of thing Addy would have done, he thought as the dusky light soaked
into the sand.  Before Addy, he never would have broken rules by staying
somewhere after closing.  He never would have considered sneaking into a
tomb that wasn’t open to the public.  He would have returned to his hotel
and called the embassy.  Let them handle it.

“Where’s
the fun in that?”  Addy would have said.

He
could almost hear her voice.  He missed her more than he ever imagined he
could.

They
had been planning this trip to Egypt for more than a year.  They had researched
all the archaeological sites, studied Egyptian history and bought a language
course to teach themselves Arabic, laughing over whose accent was worse. 

She
had bought a large National Geographic map of Egypt, which they had hung on a
wall in their small apartment.  As they had decided which sites to visit,
they had pinned notes to the map.  They had used red yarn to track their
travel plans, even bringing the yarn into Cairo, their starting point, from off
the map.

An
orange pin marked Cairo.  “Four days” was underlined on the note the pin
held.  Beneath the heading they had listed: Giza: Khufu, Khafre and
Menkaure; Bazaar: cartouche necklace saying ‘life and love;’ an ankh; Alabaster
mosque. 

Abu
Simbel, Aswan and Kom Ombo were marked with yellow pins, signifying day trips.

The
longest notes, held by red pins, had been stuck on the map at Saqqara and
Luxor.  They had planned to stay a week at each of the sites, plenty of
time for him to sketch the pyramids of the Old Kingdom at Saqqara and the temples
of the New Kingdom built at Luxor.  It would have given Addy time to talk
with camel drivers, laborers, farmers, shop clerks and policemen.

They
had planned to create a book of Tim’s pencil sketches, capturing the ancient
feel of the country, and intimate profiles Addy would write about the ‘real
people’ of the country, not the leaders and the fads.

They
had limited themselves to three weeks, because that was all their credit cards
could absorb.

Tim
had agreed to the trip to satisfy her; he would have been happy to simply hide
in their apartment during their vacation and sketch and make love to her.

“That’s
a typical weekend, Tim,” she had told him.  “We need an adventure. 
You need an adventure.  We’ll remember this all of our lives.”

He
leaned back against the tunnel wall, closed his eyes, and cried.

T
he night was darker than he had
expected. 

Tim
swung his backpack off his shoulder and set it on the ground by the tunnel
entrance.  Using his flashlight he searched through his backpack for extra
batteries.  He put the spares in his pants pocket, flicked off the
flashlight and pulled the backpack onto his shoulders.

There
were no electric lights at Saqqara.  A crescent moon hung low in the sky
casting indistinct shadows that stretched from low standing walls, half-rebuilt
pillars and mounds of debris from recent excavations.  Tim squinted at the
Step Pyramid and it seemed to magically disappear, its existence marked only by
the absence of stars where its form pushed into the night.  He opened his
eyes wide and allowed the grainy texture of the exterior to take form, giving
the pyramid substance again.

It was
a trick of the light. Tim loved it because it gave shape and form to the
darkness.

He
walked to the Serdab.  Through the small opening he saw the shadowy face
of Djoser, dead five thousand years, staring back at him through the
darkness.  He reached through the opening to touch the statue and suddenly
imagined the king’s stone arm coming to life and grabbing his wrist in its dead
grasp.

He
yanked his arm quickly out of the hole, breathing deeply through the unexpected
rush of adrenaline.

His
arm was intact, untouched by the inanimate stone.  He laughed at his
panic. Still he was cautious as he put his hand back into the hole and traced
the contours of the king’s face with his fingers.

The
cheekbones were higher and broader than in portraits of kings from later
dynasties, especially the religious rebel Ahkenaten.  Djoser wore a
ceremonial beard, a long and narrow goatee.  His ears were pushed forward
by the royal nemes head cloth that covered a thick traditional wig.  His
eyes, even in this reproduction, were empty sockets, the crystals stolen long,
long ago and left out of this reproduction.

He
pulled his arm out and looked through the opening again, recalling what he
remembered about Djoser.

He had
been the first Egyptian king to claim he was divine, giving himself the royal
name of Horus Netjerikhet: “Divine of Body.”  He had been king during a
disastrous seven-year famine when the Nile had failed to flood the banks and
leave behind the rich soil carried down from central Africa that the ancient
Egyptian farmers depended on.  And despite his royalty and power, Djoser's
memory had almost been overshadowed by his physician and architect, the famous
Imhotep.

Tim
sat back on his haunches and stared at the Serdab and beyond it at Imhotep’s
most famous work, the Step Pyramid.

It had
been built five thousand years ago. 

Easy
to say, so hard to grasp,
he thought.

My
grandfather’s father fought in World War I, just a hundred years ago, but
that’s so distant in the past that it might as well have been fought by Roman
legions.  No one alive now actually remembers it.  In another hundred
years it will be as distant to people living then as the Civil War is to me, he
thought.  And in nine hundred years, it will be as distant as “Beowulf” or
the crusades is now.

Another
thousand years and I’m back to Christ, back before the Dark Ages, before the
plague, before people understood that the planets circled the sun.  The
world was small and flat.

And
I’m not even halfway to Djoser and Imhotep.

He
stood, grabbed his backpack and headed around the pyramid for the southern wall
where the Tomb of Kanakht was waiting, had been waiting for five thousand
years.

The
area was deserted; the parking lot dark and empty.  No one was standing
guard at the tomb.  Tim put his hand on the iron bar of the gate and
pulled.  It swung open easily.  He nodded to himself, he had been
right about the broken lock.

Stepping
past the gate, he stopped for a moment listening and calming himself.

He
clicked on the flashlight.

He was
standing on an iron grate.  Two steps ahead, it disappeared.  Tim
took one step and looked down.  An open, narrow staircase spiraled
underground.  There was no banister, just a central post or newel to
provide a handhold.  He grabbed the newel and began his descent.  The
iron lattice work of the staircase steps scattered the flashlight’s beam into
pale shards of light that were quickly eaten by the heavy darkness.

I
should have counted the steps, he thought after what seemed a full minute of
climbing down the narrow stairs.  When he paused to shine the flashlight
around him he saw that he was near three pale beige walls.  The entrance
above him was beyond the reach of his flashlight’s beam.  A few more steps
brought the sand covered floor into view.

He
stepped off and bent down to look closely at the floor.  There were
smudged footprints, but the sand was too loose to hold anything well defined.

Two of
the walls of the chamber were painted with scenes typical of tombs for high
officials.  One held a mural of men hunting hippos from a reed boat, the
other showed Kanakht and his wife seated before an array of naked dancers at a
banquet.  The scenes were not completed, Tim realized.  In some areas
the painting gave way to line sketches as if the artist had not had time to
finish the work.  Apparently Kanakht had died before the tomb was
complete.

Other
than the stairwell there was only one exit from the chamber.  Walking
toward it, Tim played his flashlight on the floor, watching the smudged
footprints.  The lintel of the doorway smacked hard against the top of his
head.  He stepped back and brought his free hand to his scalp to check for
bleeding.  Although he was not tall for a modern American, he was about
half an inch taller than the mourners for whom the doorway had been built.

Tim
rubbed his forehead and thought about the tall tourist.  His head would
almost have touched the low ceiling.

The
next chamber also was empty.  Unfinished murals edged the top of the
walls; the ceiling was painted dark blue with stars.  A sketch showed that
the sky goddess Nut was to be painted supporting the ceiling painting.  In
the corners of the room sat round spotlights, placed there when the tomb had
been open to tourists.

Tim
entered the next chamber, careful to duck as he passed through the doorway.

A huge
granite sarcophagus lid, much larger than Tim remembered from other tombs, took
up the center of the room.  Tim moved the flashlight’s beam around the
walls, which were more fully decorated than the previous chambers. 
Diagonally from him, there was another opening, a hole more than a doorway;
probably the entrance robbers had used thousands of years ago.  It wasn’t
surprising, almost all the tombs had been raided.  That was why King
Tutankhamun’s tomb was so unusual; ancient thieves had overlooked it and the
treasures buried with the boy-king had been found intact.

The
sarcophagus lid had been raised and then swung to the side to allow the modern
grave robbers, calling themselves archaeologists, to remove the body.  The
lid was raised about a foot above the floor, balanced on two rough stones under
opposing corners.  Tim could see that the bottom half of the stone coffin,
sunken into the floor, held an opening shaped to receive a mummy.  He
knelt to look more closely, to be sure that it didn’t hold the two American
tourists. 

It was
empty.

He
stood and started to walk around the sarcophagus toward the other
doorway.  His face became entangled in a spider’s web and as he brought
his hands up to wipe away the threads, he stepped backward.  Instead of
solid floor, his foot found emptiness where the sarcophagus lid had been swung
aside.  Falling backward into the void, his foot dropped to the bottom of
the lower stone coffin, throwing him off balance.  He lurched forward in
panic, and his kneecap hit the edge of the stone opening.

He
yelped and spread his hands to catch his fall.  The flashlight clattered
across the tomb floor.  Misjudging the angle of the sarcophagus lid, he
hit his shoulder against the stone.  He twisted away from the pain and
found himself falling.

When
he stopped moving, he slowly flexed his left arm and reached across his body to
rub his right shoulder and arm.  Nothing seemed broken.  He sat up in
the darkness and hit his head hard against the sarcophagus lid.

“Jesus
Christ,” he swore as he realized that he was now lying in the mummy-shaped
opening where Kanakht’s body had once lain.  Above him the massive stone
lid was supported only by two, uneven corner props.  He waited silently,
listening for a grinding sound that would precede the falling of the lid,
sealing him in the granite coffin.

He
heard his heart beat, he heard air pass in and out of his lungs, but there was
no sound from the stones.

A dim
glow from the edge of the opening told him that his flashlight was still
working.  Gingerly he reached up and touched the stone lid.  His
other arm found the edge of the opening and he rolled gently toward it. 
He pulled himself through it and stood up.

The
low light from the flashlight cast an ominous shadow from the sarcophagus lid
against the wall.  Tim pictured its crushing weight falling back into
place, trapping him beneath it.  His legs suddenly felt rubbery and he sat
on the tomb floor, his back against the wall, his eyes on the lid and the
narrow opening through which he had fallen.

The
flashlight lay just beyond his reach, its yellow light aimed at the stone
crypt. He rolled on his side and reached out for it.  When he picked it up
the beam went off.  He shook it.  The light came back on and then
flickered away leaving him sitting in complete darkness.

Forcing
himself to stay calm, Tim unscrewed the flashlight lens and checked the
bulb.  It seemed to be seated firmly in the socket.  He pushed the
power button forward.  Nothing happened.  Shifting to his left, he
reached into his pocket and removed the fresh batteries.  He unscrewed the
bottom of the flashlight and carefully slid the batteries out onto his
lap.  Then he put the fresh ones in, tightened the bottom and tried the
light.

Nothing.

He
decided that a contact inside the flashlight body must have snapped during the
fall.  It was damage he couldn’t repair.

He put
the flashlight and the old batteries in his backpack.  In the front pocket
of the pack he had stored a handful of wooden matches.  He pulled them out
now, put them in his pants pocket, saving one, which he ignited.

Getting
to his feet he walked to the doorway.  Before he passed through it, he
glanced across the room at the hole he had seen earlier.

“Anybody
over there?” he shouted.

The
match burned close to his fingers.  He shook it and dropped it.  He
pulled out another match.  There were five remaining.  He lit the
match and walked quickly toward the damaged door, his free hand shielding the
small flame from the air created by his movements.  He swept the opening
at the doorway with his hand to clear away cobwebs, but the area was clear.

He
pushed the match through the doorway and leaned in behind it.

“Hello?”

There
was no answer.  He saw an empty hallway that ran as far as the light from
his match reached.  The match burned low and he dropped it.  The
falling, failing flame briefly illuminated footprints in the sand beyond the
opening.

The
Americans could have hidden behind this wall, he thought, and waited until the
guide had left.  They could have emerged while he was on the other side of
the pyramid complex.  Or maybe they had left while he was looking at the
map.  Either way, they weren’t here now.

He lit
another match and then followed it back around the sarcophagus and through the
doorway.  It took one more match to reach the winding stairs.  He
climbed in darkness, both hands on the center post, his feet feeling their way
up the steps.

Outside
the tomb, he turned and pushed shut the gate.

The
site was still deserted; the moon still lay just above the horizon.

Back
at the tunnel by the Step Pyramid, Tim used another match to find a smooth
resting spot, and then he laid his head on his backpack and tried to sleep.

He
thought of the granite lid that could have fallen back in place and sealed him
in the tomb.  He doubted if his screams would have been heard by anyone
unless they were in that room.

He had
never felt so scared or so alive.