Imhotep (8 page)

“But
we can when we are alone, can’t we?”

Paneb
shook his head.  “No, Ahmes, not even then.” He saw the disappointment in
his son’s eyes.  “Except when we are here and there are no workmen with
us.  Only then.”

Ahmes
looked at the tomb entrance, his eyes still seeing the gods who had emerged
there.

“Father,
did you see how strong his arms were?  Did you see how he threw the
spear?” Ahmes threw a pretend spear, mimicking the god’s motion and swagger.

Paneb
reached down and stroked his son’s smooth head.

“Yes,
Ahmes, he was the tallest and strongest netjer I have ever seen.”

P
aneb and Ahmes entered the tomb to search
for the entrance the gods had used to journey from Khert-Neter, but they found
only what they expected – walls and rock.

Later,
instead of returning home, Paneb decided to spend the day alone with Ahmes,
hoping to exhaust the topic of gods and spears by letting him talk and ask his
questions.  Paneb thought it would be easier for them to keep the secret
if Ahmes had a chance to ask all the questions he could find.

The
next day they worked alone in the tomb and Ahmes remained full of questions.

Was
the goddess Bastet?  And shouldn’t her head have been a cat’s head like
all the statues?  Why did she have red hair?  Which god was he? 
Was he a god from some other land?  Could a god even be “hesy” – from
outside Kemet?  What was outside Kemet?  Did anyone go there? 
Did they have different gods?  I wouldn’t want to share our gods, would
you?  If a god could come here from Khert-Neter, could we go to Khert-Neter
and then return?  Would we see our ancestors there?

By the
evening of the second day Ahmes at last grew quiet.  Although Paneb
welcomed relief from the constant questions, he wondered what the
reflectiveness meant.

N
ow as they approached the tomb on the
third day since the gods’ arrival, Ahmes had grown more interested in repeating
what he had seen, as if planting the memories so that one day he would be able
to tell his children about the time gods had walked out of a tomb.

It was
too early for Paneb to breathe a sigh of relief, the threat Djefi had made
still clutched at his heart whenever he thought of the fat priest, but he felt
at last that it might be possible that they could keep the secret.

He
wondered how much longer they would need to.  Eventually, he reasoned, the
gods would leave Sobek to visit other gods at their temples.

Paneb
and Ahmes sat on stools under the palm shelter.  Paneb had removed his
kilt and hung it from the canopy.

A sack
with rolls of papyrus lay in the sand at their feet.

Ahmes
looked at the rolls and realizing what they were, tried to sit quietly and
erect, like an adult.

“You’ve
guessed, haven’t you?” Paneb asked.

Ahmes
nodded.  “You’ll let me draw today.”

Paneb
reached into the sack and pulled out a papyrus.

“Thoth?”
Ahmes asked, remembering which god his father had been drawing the day before.

Paneb
shook his head.  “Yes and no.”

“No,
Father, not baboons,” Ahmes slid off his stool and sat on the sand, his arms
touching the ground like a baboon, which often represented the god Thoth. 
He grunted like a baboon as he reached one arm high in the air and scratched
his armpit with the other.

“Wait,
don’t move,” Paneb said suddenly.  “That is a perfect pose, let me sketch
it.” Then he smiled and Ahmes started to laugh, happy to have been tricked by
his father.

A
noise from the tomb stopped their laughter.

Ahmes
looked anxiously at his father. 

Paneb
reached into the bag and pulled from it a stone mallet.

He
stood slowly, Ahmes moved closer to him.  Together they watched the tomb
entrance where a shadow had separated itself from the background and a figure
stepped out into the morning sunlight.

Ahmes
gasped and Paneb raised the mallet.

Seeing
the fear in their faces and the stone hammer in the man’s hand, Tim Hope raised
both his hands to show he was unarmed.  In his best Arabic he said the
first thing that seemed helpful: “I come in peace.”

H
orus swept in from the west, riding
updrafts from the hot desert sand.  The hawk was watching the man and boy
in the wadi when it saw a shadow move at the bottom of the sandstone
outcropping.  Tucking its wings, it dove closer and saw that it was
another man.  Calling out once in a raspy cry, the hawk spread its wings
and veered away toward the river leaving the desert necropolis behind.

Tim
had an unsettling premonition that something fundamental was about to change.

Earlier,
after the wall had slid back into place inside the tomb, he had waited a few
minutes to be sure the taxi driver and guard had not found a way to follow
him.  Then he had pulled the plastic toothpick from his Swiss army knife
and wedged it into the nearly invisible crack at the top of the section of wall
that had opened for him.

It had
taken only a minute to see that Brian and Diane were not in this section of the
tomb.  During that time, Tim had felt a strange lightness settle over him
as if the air were richer and cleaner.

The
hallway he had found himself in was different from the other parts of the tomb.

Although
most of the paintings were unfinished, the outlines were cleaner and
stronger.  The scenes that were painted seemed artificially bright and
vivid, as if they had been painted yesterday.  They looked as if paint
would come away on his fingers if he touched them.

And
the floor here was clean, as if it were swept on a regular basis.

He had
followed the corridor toward the morning light and stepped outside the tomb to
see a naked man with a stone hammer standing under a small palm-topped canopy
made of four poles stuck into the sand.  Near him, a boy crouched by some
papyrus rolls; one of them was unfurled showing a baboon.  The sky above
them and the desert beyond them was vast and empty.

Tim’s
appearance at the tomb entrance had startled Paneb and Ahmes into stillness as
they waited to see what the strange god would do.  Paneb lowered his arm
from his baboon pose and waited by his father whose fingers tightened on the
handle of his stone mallet.

They
had watched the flight of Horus as the sacred hawk approached and then called
to the god outside the tomb.  Now the god spoke to them.

“Sabah
el-kheir,” Tim spoke slowly in Arabic and then in English, “Good morning.”

For
Paneb, the appearance of another god from this tomb was more than he could
absorb.  He dropped his stone mallet and stood unmoving, his eyes wide and
fearful.

Tim
wondered how bad his Arabic was.  Had he mistakenly said something
threatening?

“Do
you speak English? Parlez-vous Francais?”

“Father,”
Ahmes said quietly.  “Is he another netjer?”

Paneb
nodded his head and whispered back, “Did you not see Netjer Horus greet
his arrival?”

Tim
shrugged out of his backpack and swung it in front of him.  Squatting, he
dug through a pocket until he found his Arabic-English phrasebook.

Paneb
took a hesitant step toward Tim.

“Welcome,
Eternal Netjer,” he said, remembering how Djefi had addressed the gods. 
“I am Paneb, chief artist of the necropolis of Saqqara.  This is my son,
Ahmes.”

Ahmes
stepped up beside Paneb, beaming with joy that his father had thought to
introduce him to a god.

Tim
looked up from his book.  Whatever language they were speaking, it was
unlike anything he had heard.  He knew there were dozens of dialects of
Chinese, but he thought that Arabic was pretty standard.  

Saqqara? 
The man had said Saqqara.

He
tucked the phrase book back into a pocket.

Standing,
he opened his arms and looked left and right to show that he was taking in the
entire area.  “Saqqara,” he said.

The
man and boy both nodded vigorously.

Tim
took his bearings from the sun and then pointed east toward the river and
Memphis.

“Memphis.”

The
man and boy looked at each other.  The man shook his head and said,
“Ineb-Hedj.”

The
limestone wall into which the tomb entrance was cut blocked Tim’s view of the
plateau behind him.  He waved his hands toward the monuments that he knew
sat atop the plateau.

“Step
Pyramid.  Bent Pyramid.  Any of this ring a bell?” he said, smiling
in frustration.  “King Djoser?”

“Netjerierkhet
Djoser,” Paneb said quietly, unconsciously nodding his head

Tim
pointed to the tomb behind him.  “The tomb of Kanakht?”

The
artist nodded and repeated Kanakht’s name.

“OK,”
Tim said to himself, “We’ve got the nouns down.”

He
worried that Memphis didn’t seem familiar to them and their nudity bothered
him, but they seemed comfortable, like a nudist family.

He
picked up his backpack and walked over to them.

“I’m
Tim,” he said, extending his right hand.

The
man looked curiously at Tim’s outstretched hand.

Ahmes,
who had seen Brian shake hands with the bodyguard Bakr, understood what Tim
wanted to do.  He stepped forward and took Tim’s hand.  “I am Ahmes,
son of Paneb,” he said.

Paneb’s
knees suddenly felt weak.  What was his son doing, touching a god? 
But the god seemed pleased and was gripping Ahmes’ hand firmly.

“Pleased
to meet you, Ahmes,” Tim said, repeating the sounds that he hoped were the
boy’s name.

Paneb
hesitantly reached out to the god with his hand.  Tim released Ahmes and
took Paneb’s hand.

“I’m
Tim,” he repeated to the artist, emphasizing his name.

“Tim,”
Paneb said, marveling at the soft, warm touch of the god’s skin.  He had
feared that the god’s touch would have been burning, or perhaps as cold and
hard as stone.

Ahmes
spoke for his awe-struck father. “Paneb,” he said gesturing at his father.

“Paneb. 
All right, then,” Tim said, careful to keep his voice cheerful.  “We’ve
got the introductions out of the way, and I know you don’t understand a word
I’m saying, but I want to find out where Brian and Diane went.”

Ahmes
caught the name of the god ‘Brian.’  He looked at his father and pointed
across the desert to the path Bakr had taken when he led Brian and Diane to the
oasis of To-She.  “Brian,” he said.

“You
understand me?  That’s great!” Tim said.  “Now, it was two days ago,
right?  Did they say where they were going?  Were they, oh, I don’t
know, lost, confused, injured?”

Ahmes
and Paneb waited for the god to say another word that they could understand.

“You
have no idea what I’m saying do you?  You just pointed over that way and
said ‘Brian’ because ‘Brian’ means desert or something else that’s over there.”

Tim
scratched his head, trying to think of a way to communicate.

Ahmes
saw his frustration.  He ran back to the shelter and took a long-handled
brush from the bag.  Kneeling on the sand by Tim’s feet he drew a smiley
face.  “Brian,” he said, pointing to it.

Tim
looked at the round face and wondered if ‘Brian’ meant happy.  But why did
they point across the desert when they heard ‘Brian’ if the word meant happy?

Paneb,
shaken out of his daze by his son’s fearlessness, finally moved.  He
touched Ahmes' shoulder and gestured for the brush.  Then he cleared a
space on the sand and re-created his drawing of Brian wearing his baseball cap
and riding a camel.

“Of
course,” Tim said, looking at the cleanly drawn profiles. “You’re the guy who’s
re-creating those tomb drawings.  You’re an artist.”

He
held out his hand for the brush and then, copying Paneb’s flat style, drew a
second camel with a woman on it, her head covered with the straw hat he
remembered her wearing.

Paneb
and Ahmes nodded their heads eagerly.  Tim pointed at the drawing of the
woman and said, “Diane.” Then he pointed to the man and said, “Brian.”

Then
he pointed off across the desert and shrugged, hoping they would name a town he
recognized.

“To-She,”
Paneb said.

Tim
dug out his map of Egypt and spread it on the desert floor.  Paneb stood,
looking over his shoulder; Ahmes sat beside him, his eyes bright with
excitement as he looked at the colors and shapes on the map.

Tracing
the blue wavering line that ran down the center of the map, Tim looked at Ahmes
and said, “The Nile River.”

When
he got no response, Tim dug through his backpack and pulled out a plastic
bottle of water.  He splashed some on his hand and then pointed again to
the river.  “The Nile,” he repeated.

Paneb
understood and spoke first. “Iteru,” he said.

“Iteru?”
Tim said.  He looked at Paneb and Ahmes.  How could they live along
the Nile and know it by another name?

Suddenly
his fearful premonition returned.

Leaving
his backpack behind he ran to the edge of the wadi and scrambled up its loose
sand.  He reached the top of the steep bank and looked toward the tomb,
expecting to see the top of the Step Pyramid rising above the plateau.

Impossibly,
he saw nothing but sky.

He
kicked off his sandals and ran across the desert, climbing the slight rise to
the plateau’s top.  He came to the desert highland where half an hour
earlier he had arrived with Musa, where he had walked through the reconstructed
entrance-way and entered the small building that housed the plateau entrance to
Kanakht’s tomb.  Now the colonnades and the walls, the cars and the
parking lot, the temple pillars and the huge pyramids themselves were
gone. 

He
stopped, breathless from exertion and panic.

Standing
there shaking and wobbly, he stared across the flat expanse.  It was
broken only by a few low mastabas, sand and emptiness.  Two nights ago he
stood here and squinted at the Step Pyramid at night making its form seem to
disappear in the darkness.  But even as a dark shadow, the pyramid had
been massive and eternal.

Now it
wasn’t here.

He
slowly turned, taking in the ancient burial ground’s spacious emptiness. 
And then, continuing to turn, he saw in the distance the green of the Nile’s
valley, richer and darker and fuller than he remembered it.  And along the
river, rising from its banks he saw a city of mud brick homes surrounded by a
thick white wall: The long-dead city that Tim knew as Memphis, the city that
Paneb and Ahmes had called Ineb-Hedj.

H
e didn’t know how long he stood there, his
mind struggling to make sense of what he wasn’t seeing.

The
last time this plateau had been empty was five thousand year ago, before the
Step Pyramid had been built.  He thought of the sweep of days, the
billions of lives that had not yet been lived, the dreams not yet dreamt.

The
faces of his friends, his dead parents, of Addy, swept past him.  Here in
this incredibly distant past none of them had been born.  And none of them
had died.  They each had lived, or would live, in a sliver of time that
was yet to come.

He
looked west, into the desert, into the land the ancient Egyptians called
Deshret, the red land.  He pictured the thousands of miles that stretched
out before him from this spot, out across the rest of Africa, across the
Atlantic Ocean to his home, to the dark street where he had lost Addy. 
But all he saw was endless sand and air shimmering above it as it gave up its
heat.

The
emptiness of the space between this place and his home, the incomprehensible
length of time between this now and the now when he had held Addy overwhelmed
him with sadness.  In all this space and time, there would be only a few
years when she would live.  Those years were far in the future from this
moment, and, for Addy, they had already ended.

He
realized that it didn’t matter to him where or when he lived in the long sweep
of time if it couldn’t be with Addy, and she had been taken from him.

Standing
alone, five thousand years from his life and from Addy, he realized that until
now he never had really understood that he would never see her again. 
Their time together had come and gone.  It had ended.  Forever.

He
shouted her name, a long, strangled cry of pain and loss. 

Over
and over again he cried out her name.

The
atmosphere is a closed environment.  He had read that with every deep
breath, a person inhales molecules of air that had been breathed out by Julius
Caesar as he lay dying on the steps of the Roman Capitol.

And so
Tim filled the air with Addy’s name.  Ages from now when she would be born
and they would meet and love, their every breath would be filled with his love
for her and with his pain at his loss.

He
shouted and screamed and cried until he sank to the barren desert floor,
drawing ragged sobbing breaths.