A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore Read online

  When I crossed the line between the valley and the desert, I heard the eerie voices that issued from the two massive statues of Amenhotep III. The wind filled the crevices in the statues, which emitted a fearful, keening sound. The Greeks thought that the spirit of their great leader Agamemnon inhabited the statues, and that he was stricken with both unending sorrow for his daughter Iphigenia—whom he had sacrificed in order to raise the winds of war—and anger toward his wife, Clytemnestra, who betrayed him, and then killed him on the day of his triumphant return. But I felt that these voices spoke particularly to me, warning me not to enter the world of the dead. They were all that occupied this holy silence, but I didn’t listen to them. I crossed all the boundaries in the hope of winning for myself something of that silence for which I longed.

  As was my habit, I did not seek accommodation in lodgings or a rest house. I settled where I found the reliefs and paintings at which I never tired of looking. I found a place for myself within Deir al-Bahri. The rocky outcropping in whose embrace the temple had been erected shielded me from the vast and empty desert. I awoke each morning to smell the residual fragrance of Hatshepsut’s perfume (Hatshepsut, whose trees came from the distant land of Punt: the wood had turned to stone, but its essence remained). Then I would spend the whole day reproducing the paintings with which the walls were covered: of women in diaphanous robes bearing offerings, of the sacred mysteries of childbirth, and the ritual sacrifices to the gods. At night, when I fell exhausted into slumber, Queen Hatshepsut came to me unclothed, wearing nothing but her false beard.

  Every day time stole away a piece of my life—I was passing beyond my twentieth year, and the filament binding me to the world of the living had been severed. Ever since I left Beni Hassan and took up the work of excavating and searching for antiquities, swallowing great quantities of dust, I had dwelt in the silence and chill of Deir al-Bahri. I had become more solitary and withdrawn, but I realized this only when I met Rosalind Paget, or Rosa, as she insisted I call her.

  One day at noon, I stood rapt before a wall—it was at this time of day that the light was best diffused throughout the temple halls. The mural that now drew me was filled with paintings of ships and sails and oarsmen wielding dozens of oars as they plied the waters of the Red Sea: paintings depicting one of the great journeys of discovery to the land of Punt in the interior of ancient Africa. Many details had been effaced—a not infrequent occurrence among fractious dynasties. I was trying to fill in the missing parts of the panel in my imagination—I saw it as if I were living the moment in which the artists completed it, and then I saw a shadow fall across the wall in front of me. At first I supposed that Abdel Rasul had come to bring me my daily provisions of food and drink, and I didn’t bother to turn toward him—he was used to my long silences, and accustomed to leaving the supplies next to one of the columns and taking his leave.

  But now I heard a woman’s voice. “You are very much taken with this panel,” the woman said, “are you not?”

  Startled, I turned to her. I found her standing before me, tall and slender as a reed, dressed in khaki, like a man, holding a straw hat in one hand and in the other a portfolio full of papers. Her hair was cut boyishly short; she had attractive, delicate features and a pale complexion touched by the sun, which had lent a rosy blush to her cheeks. She held me in her blue-eyed gaze, surprised and perplexed.

  Taking a step toward me, she said, “They told me a great deal about you, but I hadn’t imagined that you were so countrified and removed.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant, but she didn’t seem alarmed by me. She took another step forward and contemplated the lines I was still sketching. She turned over my papers without troubling to ask my permission. She was so close to me that her perfume filled my nostrils. She was absorbed in her scrutiny of my work. All at once she turned and gave me a delighted smile. Extending her hand, she said, “I’m Rosa. And you, I believe, are Mr. Howard Carter.”

  Her hand was small and soft. Afterward I saw traces of color on her fingers. She wasn’t an ordinary tourist as I had at first assumed. She opened her portfolio and showed me the paintings it contained: strange sketches inspired by the Temple of Dendera, and Edfu, and even the temples at Philae, which were submerged most of the year. Her paintings were not representative—there was much in them that was spontaneous and of her own invention. She put something of herself into all the old pictures—her work was not staid, like mine. She was a free spirit who thought little of traditional constraints—perhaps she had never had occasion to encounter Percy Newberry and receive his stern instructions, which had not troubled me until now.

  Brushing some tendrils of hair out of her eyes, she said to me, “I was one of Professor Petrie’s students at London University. All the while I was hoping to come to Egypt to dig with him, but when at last I managed to get here I found him packing up his tools. He had completed his task. He was angry because he couldn’t finish his excavations at Thebes. Now I’m working at Dr. Edouard Naville’s site. He’s the one who recommended I come find you.”

  I had worked with Petrie on his excavation after I left the tombs at Beni Hassan. He thought he was the only true scholar of antiquities, that the rest—including Naville himself—were merely scavengers, relying upon hazard and strokes of luck. I wanted to tell her that I liked Naville, despite Petrie’s opinion of him. He was Swiss, a large man full of life and the spirit of adventure. He received support and ample monetary gifts from a French tramway company, without which he wouldn’t have been able to carry on his work for so many years, removing thousands of tons of rock from in front of the Bahri temple, until he exposed its façade. He had paved the way for me to gain access to the place in which I now lived.

  Just then, however, all words escaped me. My heart began to pound furiously, while she talked on, simply and naturally. I had grown used to protracted silence, and sustained speech was no longer possible for me. This was the first time I had stood before an unaccompanied woman who worked in this field.

  “How can you live here?” I said to her. “I mean, encamped among all those men?”

  Laughing, she replied, “It’s never been a problem as far as I’m concerned—I don’t care much for women in any case.”

  We wandered together through the halls of the temple, as if Hatshepsut had transcended time and come to walk with me, without the artificial beard this time. I told Rosa that this temple had been built for love—Hatshepsut used to meet her lover, Senenmut, here. We stopped in the inner sanctum before a picture of the goddess Hathor made with deeply incised lines. The goddess of joy, love, and beauty, she originated as a divine cow, and she retained her large ears. The custom was to depict her on the walls of the mausoleums for the sake of those interred there, in the hope of easing their return to life. At her feet was a jug of wine, life-giving to all who drained it to the dregs.

  I made no reply to Rosa. All the words gathered inside me, without emerging. It was she who talked, disturbing the silence in which thousands of years had passed, and filling it with an irrepressible liveliness, which dispelled the chill that pervaded the passageways. We concluded our tour, proceeding along the great corridor leading down from the temple gate, toward the Nile.

  “What a magnificent place,” she said. “But how do you endure such silence and solitude? You remind me of a story being put about in the American newspapers lately about a man who lived alone in the forest. The difference is that you live in the desert.”

  I pointed out to her the Theban Nile River plain extending before us. “This is no desert,” I said. “A civilization was born here.”

  In the beginning there was a beam of light, a gust of wind, and particles of dust. This valley was no more than a lake, its waters full of pondweed, reaching all the way to the horizon. Then came the goddess Hathor to set about drying it, but she quickly grew bored with this operation, creating nothing more than a small piece of dry land, upon which she laid the world, like an egg. To begin with she had
pictured it in her imagination, generating the first pulse beat of creation, and setting the cosmos upon its course. The sun emerged from a lotus flower, and into the silence the flamingo uttered its first cry. The first man was born from a bull’s semen and the first woman from a dewdrop.

  I didn’t say all that to her, of course, although the words I had stored up in my breast were on the point of bursting out. I went on listening to her talk. She said she had seen some books published in London that contained my depictions of the tombs at Beni Hassan and Deir al-Bahri. She knew more of me than I did of her. She was waiting for me to say more, but I couldn’t. The capacity for speech came to me only when I caught sight of the towering figure of Abdel Rasul astride a donkey, kicking his legs to make the beast go faster as he brought my daily food supplies.

  “Stay for lunch with me,” I said to Rosa.

  She realized then that the time had passed more quickly than she’d imagined. “Thank you,” she said, “but I promised Naville I would have lunch with him.”

  She went away, Abdel Rasul watching her from the back of his donkey. With an obscure smile on his face, he placed the food before me. I ate a little, then discovered I had no appetite for it. The silence in the tomb became more than I could bear, and I went to the edge of the river, where white birds dipping their bills in the water looked at me in surprise, and then flew away on lazily flapping wings. I found the reflection of my face in the surface of the water strange—I hadn’t seen it for so many days that I had forgotten its features: the untidy beard, dusty moustache, sunken eyes, and the whole covered with a mask-like suntan. This wasn’t me—it was as if a strange figure had taken me over. I took off my clothes and plunged into the river. The water embraced me and sent a shiver through my body. I searched among the plants along the shore until I found some stalks of wild basil, and I scrubbed myself with its green leaves. The sun went down faster than usual, darkness fell, and I was more alone than ever.

  She didn’t come the following day. She hadn’t made me any promises, and I didn’t want to sit about waiting for her, so I went ahead with my daily agenda. But in spite of myself I was watching for her arrival. I remembered the sparkle in her eyes when she looked at the paintings inside the temple, and I felt sure she would be unable to resist their magic, she would have to return to them. And yet she had, no doubt, been annoyed by my silence—she must have been disappointed in me.

  Two days later I went to the site of the excavations on which Naville was working. The place looked like a beehive, thronged with dozens of workers, ceaselessly digging and heaping up their finds. Naville employed more workers than anyone, and paid them better than anyone else did. He was famous among the fellahin of al-Qurna, who lived on the western shore, for paying workers three piasters a day, and they provided an inexhaustible workforce. I saw him standing by himself at the edge of a wide trench, watching the workers removing sand from potsherds. He was massive and bare-chested, robust as if he had drunk all the goats’ milk to be found in the Alps. His thick moustache curled up at the ends and his forehead shone with sweat. He wore no hat, and seemed untroubled by the blazing sun. I turned my back on him—I wanted to see her first of all, and make sure that whoever it was that had visited me at Deir al-Bahri wasn’t some will-o’-the-wisp. I made my way among the workers as they applied themselves to their digging, gathering into woven baskets whatever was left behind. I went down into the outermost trench, and spied her sitting on the ground, holding a small brush with which she was removing dirt from a little pot of red-tinged marble. I stood watching her slow movements as she revealed the details of a funerary urn. So she really did exist. She sat there absorbed in her work, clad in the same khaki garb, with the same short hair, and the same fine features. As I stood there all the pretexts I had prepared by way of explaining my presence at the excavation site flew out of my head. It seemed imperative to advance and say directly to her, “Why didn’t you come back to me?” But I didn’t.

  I felt a hand come to rest on my shoulder. When I turned, there behind me stood Naville, with his massive frame. “At last,” he cried, “you’ve come out of your hermitage! I dare say the Benedictine monks of the Middle Ages were not so cloistered as you.”

  Rosa looked up and glanced in our direction, the ghost of a smile upon her features, but she didn’t move from her position. I was at a loss, thinking Naville must have known the real reason I was there. He spoke again. “It’s for the best that you’ve come,” he said. “I was going to send for you in any case.”

  I was hoping he would leave me to gather my courage and approach Rosa, but he put his hand on my shoulder once more and drew me aside. “Have you not heard,” he asked, “that the dahabeah belonging to the American millionaire Theodore Davis has arrived? All Luxor is talking about him and the reception parties he’s been hosting. He has become the point upon which visiting dignitaries converge—the other day he entertained the crown prince of Austria. He wishes to invite you.”

  I had not heard anything about him, but this was not surprising, for winter was the high season for social activity in this remote city, and dozens of upper-class Europeans descended upon it every year. I would see them on their visits to the temple, as they passed by me in their wanderings about the site. Most of them didn’t see me, and for my part I grew accustomed to taking no notice of them, so it was quite natural for me to say to Naville that I was not interested, but Naville was not the sort of man to take no for an answer very readily.

  “You can’t refuse,” he said. “He wants to see some of your work. He’s mad about Egyptology and has donated a great many rare pieces to the Metropolitan Museum. Come—you’ll enjoy yourself . . . and Miss Paget shall be with us, of course.”

  I looked at Rosa, and she returned my glance, nodding her head. Was she inviting me to go with them? Or was she too distracted? I was annoyed, for Naville spoke in the manner of one who has his own way in everything. I hurried away without uttering a single word to Rosa, but the next day I shaved my face and changed my clothes. I was precisely on time, and we crossed by felucca to the eastern shore, where the three of us together boarded the dahabeah that was moored by the bank, flying the American flag.

  I had put on my best clothes and made meticulous use of European cologne, but I looked altogether like a beggar in this exalted milieu crowding the ship’s deck: men and women all wearing fine clothes in subtle colors, stepping lightly with their glasses of bubbling champagne. They laughed softly and spoke in low whispers. Feeling out of place, I began to cast about for a means of escape, but Rosa gave me a small encouraging smile—even though we had made the crossing together, it seemed as though now she was noting my presence for the first time. I would need a little something to drink, so as to acclimate myself to this environment. Theodore Davis approached, a towering figure clad in a jacket of brilliant white—the same shade as his moustache—with a straw hat on his head.

  “We’ll sit together,” he said, firmly shaking my hand, “and then I’ll look carefully at your paintings. In all this hubbub I can’t concentrate on anything.”

  Taking my arm, he led me away to a woman younger than he but of similar height. She wore a low-cut gown studded with pearls.

  “This is my assistant, Emilia Andrews,” he said. “I rely upon her for everything. She shall take charge of you this evening.”

  And in her turn, Emilia took me by the arm as if I was a small child. I turned to look for Rosa, but she had vanished from my sight. How had all these people so suddenly entered this world: scions of wealth, aristocrats, diplomats, so many great names? Some of them shook my hand, others settling for a nod of the head. I made a complete circuit of the ship’s deck. I saw Naville clutching a glass of champagne, in the laughing company of a small group of important people. Beside him stood Rosa, head cast down. I stood gazing at her in confusion—what was the mystery of this girl? Why did she seem so distant? I had eyes only for her, but did she actually see me?

  When it was time for lunch, we al
l sat down at a long table. Emilia took my hand and seated me beside her. Rosa sat across from me beside Naville, who drank and talked ceaselessly. Our eyes met and she smiled at me once more. There were many varieties of food, but everyone was sated already. They ate a little of each dish, scarcely tasting anything, before the plate was taken away and replaced by another in its stead. Dish after dish was set down and then removed.

  “My dear Howard,” said Emilia, “why is it that you seem so puzzled and distracted? I’ve been talking to you all this while!”

  After lunch, I was as eager as Davis was for him to take me to his stateroom in the bowels of the dahabeah. He gave himself over to attentive scrutiny of my paintings. I had brought him my own personal collection, the colored ones I kept well apart from the daily labor at which I was employed. These were my true self. He was avid to know the times and places in which I had devoted myself to their creation.

  “I shall buy them,” he said all at once.

  I had not imagined that deals could be made so easily, nor had I intended that these paintings, which had absorbed a part of my life, should be for sale. That they should be published in this man’s books was unthinkable—they would remain in my possession one way or another—that anyone else should take them over seemed not merely bizarre but altogether impossible. Davis looked astonished at my refusal—he was used to getting whatever he wanted. He stared at me, bewildered, and evidently embarrassed. But Emilia caressed his forehead, gave him a quick kiss on the lips, and asked him to leave us alone. I was tense, sensing that I had fallen into a trap, here in this swaying stateroom.