shisha outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.
Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.
‘Two hundred and fifty years.’
He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.
‘That’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?’
Neale shook his head. ‘But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so that’s like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?’
Lopez looked up from her smartphone. ‘Whoa! Racist much? You’re saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?’
At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. ‘OK. Guys. Let’s say America has been a political entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately –’ he paused, for effect – ‘ten times as long. Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200 BC.’
‘But half a billion mummies?’
‘I’m getting there! Remember, most ancient Egyptians would have sought some kind of mummification if they could, such was their obsession with making it to the afterlife. And of course mummification is not hard out here: the desert naturally mummifies bodies, it is so dry. That is probably, in fact, how the ritual began, in about 3200 BC, when the First Dynasty Egyptians realized that human corpses were curiously preserved by great aridity.’
Lopez was toying with her phone again. Or maybe she was checking his sums. He fought the desire to compare her feisty beauty to his wife’s, or even his dead daughter – would she have looked like this? He banished the thought and continued, ‘You don’t need a calculator to do the equations. Let’s say Egyptians died at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand a year, which is about right for a population of three million on average, with a life expectancy of twenty or so. Take a hundred and fifty thousand deaths a year and multiply it by more than three thousand years and you get … at least four hundred and fifty million dead. That is to say, half a billion mummies. Some estimates go even higher.’ He pointed at the western cliffs, behind which the sun was reluctantly declining. ‘Basically, when you walk on Egyptian soil, you are walking on the dust of the dead.’
Lopez looked up. ‘Eww.’
Harper laughed. ‘Yes. Maybe I won’t mention the way we have used human and animal mummies in the past: as fertiliser, medicine, machine oil, pigment and fuel.’
‘Medicine?’
‘OK, we’re done, guys.’ Harper liked to end the day with a question hanging in the air. Politely he dismissed the tiny study group, who seemed just a bit too keen to get back to their rented apartments and have a clandestine beer. But then he shrugged. So what? Good for them. They were young.
Ryan’s walk home was agreeable in the cooling twilight: this was his favourite hour of the day. Boys played football under ragged, sun-bleached posters of a long-deposed president. Little girls skipped happily next to their mothers, carrying wicker shopping baskets way too big for their tiny hands; their mothers were shrouded entirely in black niqabs.
And of course the old men with the white keffiyehs were smoking their shisha pipes outside the dusty tea-house. One or two raised a hand or an eyebrow in greeting, as Ryan keyed his latch. But then he saw an even more familiar face. It was Hassan, sitting outside on the terrace.
Ryan waved hello. ‘Hassan. Ahlan! I’ll be down in a minute.’
His apartment was welcomingly cool and dark. As he splashed water on his face, Ryan considered Hassan. Their revolving lives.
There was a time when Hassan Elgammal had been Ryan’s assistant: a keen young student aiding the rising young American Egyptologist. Now, fifteen years later, Hassan was in charge of all Egyptian antiquities in the Abydos region, and he was therefore, by a distance, Ryan’s superior.
Ryan didn’t much care about this inversion in their roles. Ambition had left him when his wife had died in childbirth. It had literally flown his soul, like the living spirit – the ka – that fled the corpse of an ancient Egyptian when they died. And when he had finally given up his Egyptological career altogether, and taken on the charity job, he had felt a sincere moral relief.
His employers – the Abydos Project – were dedicated to saving Egyptian antiquities, such as the Abydos temple complex, from flooding and decay. This meant that Ryan spent his days giving something back to Egyptians, rather than always taking stuff away, as Westerners had done for centuries. That was a good feeling.
And Ryan also enjoyed the sheer physical labour: he often spent entire days down there in the Oseirion with the Egyptian workers, rebuilding walls, shifting rubble, digging new drainage canals; toiling in the Egyptian sun, like a mindless slave building a pyramid. Then in the evening he quenched a mighty thirst with sweet hibiscus juice. And he slept soundly. And didn’t dream. And the days went by. And the years went by.
Towelling his hands dry, Ryan descended the stairs, opened the door, and took a seat besides Hassan. His friend’s affable face was grave, yet also excited. ‘They found him, Ryan.’
‘Sorry?’
‘A goatherd found the body yesterday. Your old tutor Sassoon. In the desert, north of Sohag.’
Ryan blinked. Emotion surged.
Hassan added, ‘And they say he was found with a bag. Of documents.’
Ryan resisted the idea, at first.
‘What has it got to do with me?’ He shook his head. ‘I work for you guys now, I’m not an Egyptologist. That was a decade ago.’
‘Please.’ Hassan gently raised a hand in protest. ‘You have done enough here. At least take some proper time off, a month at least, three months better.’
‘But—’
‘When did you last have a holiday?’
Ryan watched the café owner drop a glass of tea on their table. The smell of apple shisha hung in the frowzy air. ‘Six years ago.’
Hassan smiled. ‘Exactly. This is too much: you have done Egypt great service. We owe you money! And really –’ another languid gesture – ‘are you going to spend the rest of your life carrying bricks, like a peasant? Is this all that is left? Sassoon was your great friend.’
