The Sacred River (33 page)

Her chest had constricted in the moment of the lamp going out; her heart was thudding and her lungs were tightening. The familiar feeling afflicted her of the air having lost its capacity to satisfy. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to breathe down to her stomach. One, two, three. Out through the mouth. One . . . two . . .

The darkness was absolute and Harriet was disoriented. She could not picture where she was in the chamber, or the direction of the steps that led out of it. She took a step forward, pointing her toe in front of her, feeling for obstacles, before putting down her foot. After several steps, she reached a corner. With one hand touching the wall, she inched her way along, moving a little faster, feeling an urgency to get out of the tomb. The ground disappeared from under her. She fell off what seemed to be a ledge, about a foot in height. When she’d recovered her breath, rubbed her knees and her grazed knuckles, she crawled back up to where she’d fallen from, inched her way back to where she believed she must have been standing before.

She set off in the other direction, more cautiously. This time, after moving a short distance, she fell down another flight of steps. She’d seen before the light went out that the tomb didn’t end in the chamber that contained the sarcophagus. She pictured herself walking down the steps, farther inside the earth, getting more lost.

Feeling in her pocket for the water bottle, she eased out the cork and took a sip, felt a warm spilled drop run down her chin. The bottle was almost full. She felt tired. She would have to do what she feared to do and sit down. Trying to put out of her mind that she might be sitting on human bones or a nest of scorpions, she eased herself to a sitting position, hugging her knees through her skirt.

She dared not move any farther without knowing which way she was going. It was better to stay still. The tomb was large. A maze of chambers and antechambers. There was air in it and all she needed to do was to keep breathing and remain where she was until help came. Help would come.

“You won’t suffocate,” she said aloud.

It was a comfort to hear a voice. She spoke again, more resolutely.

“You won’t die, Harriet. You’re not going to perish—”

At the word
perish
, she began to scream, a series of harsh, staccato cries that flew around the chamber. Then she stopped. Her throat hurt and no one could hear her. The rocks were deaf. Shouting would only exhaust her.

Harriet opened her eyes. She kept them open for a few seconds, hoping they might even now adjust, that some vision would become available. Nothing. She shut her eyes again, tightly, so that the darkness was of her own creation. It was a horrible thing, to have your eyes open in the dark.

Fouad was outside. He would be alarmed when it began to grow dark and he would go to the house on the mountainside. If he was present, Dr. Woolfe would come to assist her. If he was not, Fouad would have to cross the river to summon help. It must be getting toward evening, already. Most likely, Fouad had already gone to raise the alarm.

The silence was roaring in her ears, merging with the darkness and the steady, oppressive heat. Her eyes hurt. She opened them and immediately closed them again. Such darkness was a horror. It was death. The Lady of the Two Lands had endured it, perhaps for centuries. But she was no longer here. Harriet was quite alone.

She brushed away a wetness from her cheek and felt in her pocket for her journal. Pressing it against her chest, she pictured the vivid red hue of the cover. She sniffed the leather and felt the creased softening of corners, the ties, with one side smooth and the other softly rough. She pictured in her mind the creamy paleness of pages, the patterns that covered them, her own signs. The spell she had written in December, in London, that she would escape her bedroom. The one she’d written in Alexandria, that she would reach Thebes, meet the man with the paintbrush. And another she’d written since, of herself playing senet
with the Lady of the Two Lands, engaged in her own game of chance, making a path through the trials and obstacles and opportunities of life.

Laying the book on her lap, she pressed her back against the rock. With her eyes closed, she could still see the flame of the lamp as it had been before it went out. The outline of the flame and the pool of light around it. She thought of all the lamps she had known, from when she first became aware of her own life, and used to watch the night-light, trying to stay awake longer than it did, aware that darkness and sleep were almost the same but not the same, that there could be darkness but no sleep. Louisa always expected her to be afraid of the dark but Harriet remembered a time before she was ill, when she was not afraid of the dark. It was only when the dark filled up with the whistling creature that sat on her chest and prevented her breathing, the thing she could hear but not see, that she became afraid.

She pictured herself as a girl in the attic room, listening to the wind outside, trying to hear life itself, fathom her place in it. The bed had seemed huge, a world in itself. She saw herself with Rosina, sitting on her lap, cushioned by her plump thighs and stomach, her smells of boiled onions and cough drops, her even kindness, and remembered how she loved her when she didn’t know any better, didn’t know that servants weren’t for loving. She had wished that Rosina was her mother, had told Louisa so at the age of three or four and been surprised, first by Louisa’s laughter then by her tears.

She considered Louisa, who had been so dissatisfied with her daughter, so anxious for her transformation into another girl, for as long as Harriet could remember. From when she was born, it seemed to her now. Harriet had believed as a child that she must have been a foundling. Later, she understood from her reading that it was a common conceit amongst girls who fancied themselves misunderstood. It wasn’t the simple truth that she didn’t look like Louisa that caused those thoughts to flourish. She did, after all, take after her father. It was the knowledge that on the inside she did not resemble Louisa, that in their hearts and minds they were somehow unrelated. Strange to each other. That as much as Harriet had wished for another mother, Louisa too had wanted another daughter. She never said so but Harriet felt it. The signs were in her voice, her eyes.

In the hours that followed, Harriet grew calm. Opening her eyes, she let the darkness wash over her and welcomed it. She need not fear it. The chamber was the same as it had been by lamplight. A place of beauty and magic. Nothing had changed. What a fool she had been. She had no feelings for Eyre Soane. And he had none for her. She’d always known it, deep down, if she’d only admitted it to herself. She had no wish to see him ever again. In that, at least, Louisa had been right.

If she survived, she would carry out her plan and plead with Eberhardt Woolfe to take her on as his assistant. If she could assist in the exploration of the tomb, help record its treasures of pictures and hieroglyphs, then whatever happened afterward, she would have done something exceptional that could never be taken from her. At whatever age she might die, she would do so in the knowledge that she had lived.

The dust caught again at the back of her throat and she swallowed, tasted its sour, enduring strength. This dust was what every person returned to. The small clay figures of servants and handmaids, the shabtis that the people who made this chamber put in the tombs with the mummies, were longer-lasting than the people they represented. Death was a greater truth than life. The wrapped bodies of kings and queens were no more than macabre dolls, the vain attempts of the ancients to defeat the human foe.

The darkness changed again. It became iron, pressing on her from every direction, constricting her. She hated to breathe it in, feel its intimate reach in her mouth and ears, between her fingers, entering the pores of her skin. It was death, her body telegraphed to her mind. She heard herself whimpering and experienced an animal fear that counting could not tame.

The minutes, even the seconds, seemed to pass very slowly, as if time wasn’t a line, as she had always imagined, a line that might have been drawn by a pencil, that went from birth to death, but something in three dimensions, someplace where gravity failed, and she drifted like a leaf caught in the wind. Only now had she appreciated the grandeur of a moment. A heartbeat. Three thousand years in the tomb might be fifty thousand in the land above. Time was an altered thing here; it too had died. Was stilled. She was its frail representative, its ghost from the overworld. It was the Egyptians who had invented time, Herodotus said. It was they who first divided a year into months, a day into hours. Harriet felt as if she was in the time before time, when such divisions had not been devised, when time simply was.

She thought about the queen. She’d been young once, and perfectly alive, must have zigzagged across the Nile in a felucca, eaten the muddy-tasting perch and perhaps had a pet cat that wore gold earrings. She had brushed her black hair, watched the moon out of a window, and dreamed of a man. Harriet felt sorry that the girl who grew up to be the Lady of the Two Lands had not been allowed to rest undisturbed in her coffin of pink stone. As she thought about her, she pictured her cartouche and at last its meaning came to her. The queen was called Nefer-hor, beautiful of face, and she was beloved of the goddess Isis.

Unwrapping the orange scarf from her head, she matched the corners to each other and laid it on the ground. Lying down on her side, she felt for the soft cotton with her hand, rested her cheek on it. Sharp shards of rock, or bone, pressed through it, painfully, into her flesh. She groped in her pocket for her journal, laid it on the scarf, and rested her face on its cover. The leather was smooth and blank, skin against her skin. Resting her head on it, she slept.

FIFTY-TWO

Eberhardt Woolfe was dressed and drinking his first cup of coffee when the pounding on the door began. Setting down the cup, he emerged from the kitchen, swallowing. It was barely light and he felt annoyed. It was the foreman’s role to deal with the complaints and problems the workers had, their crises when children fell sick, wives died, or they themselves had accidents and could no longer work. Eberhardt took the view that for every problem there was a solution, was willing in all cases to see what help could be found, but he disliked having emergencies thrust at him. If he could not get away from the dramas of the living here, there could be no escape anywhere. “
Ach
, what is it now?” he muttered to himself, reaching the door, opening it.

On the step, her head wrapped in a green turban, was Harriet’s mother, Mrs. Heron. Behind her, in evening dress, stood Monsieur Andreas from the Luxor Hotel.

“Good morning, Mrs. Heron. Monsieur Andreas. What can—”

“Is she here, Dr. Woolfe?” said Mrs. Heron.

He struggled to take in the meaning of the question. “Forgive me?”

“My daughter. Is she here?”

“Your daughter?” He shook his head, befuddled. “
Nein
, she is not.”

Mrs. Heron broke into a wail and covered her face with her hands.

“She was over on this side,” Monsieur Andreas said. “She has not returned.”

“Come in, please.”

Eberhardt held open the door, led them into the single large room that he used for study, dining, and sitting, that had no satisfactory name. Swiping dust from the leather seat of a chair, he helped Mrs. Heron into it. Pulled his own forward for Monsieur Andreas. Was Harriet with the Englishman? Had she eloped with the fellow? A tide of anger ran through him and he believed for a moment he would smash something, pick up the scarab that he had been working on the previous night, after his return, and hurl it at the wall. The fury was not with Harriet. It was not even with Soane, cad though he’d appeared from the first to be, in his ludicrous clothing, his sneering superciliousness. It was with himself. He ought to have acted. He had been a coward.

Mrs. Heron was hunched forward on the chair, rocking backward and forward, her hands still clasped over her face. She was dressed in a traveling coat over what appeared to be a nightgown, her head curiously wrapped in a length of green muslin, and she was moaning like an animal. From the other side of the small room, Monsieur Andreas regarded her with a look of helpless pity.

“Take some coffee, Mrs. Heron.”

Eberhardt returned to the kitchen, stood by the slab of pink granite on which he kneaded bread, chopped onions. Testing the bottom of the coffeepot on the palm of his hand, he found it still hot, almost burning. He filled two cups, placed them on a tray, with a bowl of sugar, a slender silver spoon. Ritual. Routine. They were always there, present when people died. Vanished. Altered. Eloped. He returned to the room.

“
Bitte
, Mrs. Heron,” he said, his voice even, as he put the cup of coffee into her hand. “Let me understand what has happened. Where is Harriet now?”

“We don’t know, Doctor,” she wailed. “What time did she leave you yesterday?”

Eberhardt stared at her white, upturned face, her swollen eyes. He was confounded again.

“Leave me?”