Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

— How long have you been a shepherd then?

The question sounded foolish to me — incongruous with the time and place. Of course he had been a shepherd as long as he could remember, and his father before him, and so on. But to my surprise he answered eagerly.

— Ah. You see very well. I was not always a shepherd. I was son of a — how is it? — holy man, yes? A mullah, you understand? Not one of these ignorant dervishes that come from the east, no, or a bedouin madman with visions of the Prophet, none of these. He was an educated man. Was his mistake.

The robed arm swept off to the north, the sleeve breathing a dry odor of sheep. — We lived in a modern house in the city. Electric lights. Plumbing. There was a clock to tell the time for prayers: it knew the phases of the moon. The muezzin had a microphone. All of these things, and my family as well. My brothers and sisters. One mother.

He picked up a handful of sand, and let it slip between his fingers. The night breeze drew it out in a curtain, gauzy under the light of the stars. — My brothers, I do not know what became of them. My sisters and myself they put into the street. My mother — A long sigh escaped him, as if his robes were leaking, and I realized suddenly this was sadness I was hearing.

— They called her whore, you see. My father himself he cut off her head in the street. They took him away: it was not the modern thing to do. It did not matter. No man of our congregation would help us. And the women…

The face was a black shape behind the burnoose, a veiled motion, sweeping back and forth, back and forth. The day had been long: the voice and the swaying motion drew me down to sleep. I roused myself.

— What did you do?

— Do? The face turned up, and in the light from the sky the eyes glittered darkly: black pits, filmed with light. — Do? I did nothing. When a shepherd came into the city he took me back with him.

A loud spitting, a rasp of foot on shale.

— I became a shepherd. I learned a new life. I learned many things in the hills. Where the springs are. How to find the oases. And the quicksands. The season of the ewe, and the time of her bearing. I took a wife. She is a good woman. But now—

The figure leaned over, the eyes plain now in the dark face, a yard from my own. In my ear a voice was wailing.

— Now the lambs have come, and there is nothing to do. I come down to the Valley to find work. And I find you.

— What work do you do?

— I dig.

— Dig?

— Yes, dig, dig! Shovel and pick, or little brushes. Trenches this way and that. I have been a digger before. I have found many things. Valuable things. And nothing have I stolen. I have helped many digs to find.

— To find?

I was leaning forward, almost within the shadow of his robes.

He drew back, turned toward the gray band of the horizon, and shrugged.

— What they find.

The figure withdrew into his robes and a silence that enveloped us both in a circle cut off from the world. I looked up to reassure myself that the sky was still there: the roof of the world was hung with lamps shivering in the cooling night.

— What makes you think I’m here to find anything?

He spat again, but did not move.

— What do you think I’m here to find?

The figure leaned forward.

— I know you. I know your name.

I drew back as if from a snake.

— Your name is——, you come from——in United States. You are a professor-doctor. I worked for you, two years ago, down there.

The arm pointed now, a short straight thrust into the Valley of the Kings, where dim slopes slanted over deeper shadows. — You found a tomb. There was a man in it. I was there when you—

— When I what?

The face was inches from mine.

— When you took the bottle. You put it there.

The finger jabbed at my breastbone.

— You put it there, and went away, exactly like a thief. And now you are here.

— Here? My voice was weak.

His voice was low, murmuring, a thick haze. — Was it a map?

Murmuring deep in my skull, a pulsing darkness speaking — Yes.

— Of this place?

— Yes.

He mumbled something I could not catch.

— What? What about this place?

Teeth flashed, a finger held over them. — Shh. Shh. Shhhhhh.

— Sah. Breakfast is ready.

He had taken my powdered eggs, my Primus stove, and fixed for us a yellow mess that steamed, smelling of curry, from the plate he held under my nose.

— Sah. Come eat. We must work now before the sun.

I sat up tangled in my sleeping bag, trying to break free from it. Something else clung to me — a dream, a voice that murmured from the earth. Soft touches lingered about my skin.

There was light low in the east, hardening the Nile out of night. Beyond the river a suggestion of low, rugged hills.

Before the sun, he had said. Surely he could not think we would knock off work at noon? I had before me, with or without his help, weeks of bitter labor, and I would have put it off if I could. But having started I would finish it as quickly as strength would allow. I could not imagine an afternoon idling beside a pit half-dug and leading so suggestively down.

The rumbling of his voice rose behind me, a low drone like the one that had zoomed through my sleep in the night. What had I dreamed? I turned and saw him prostrate and cowled, his sandals beside him where he knelt face-down on a rug, the soles of his feet pink in the dawn, his arms stretched out to the east.

Orange light flooded the sand and rocks, brightening to white, and when I turned to the east the ragged hills were lost in glare. Halfway down the slope, a pool of shadow in a natural hollow in the scree, a pit opened. Beside it rubble was strewn down the slope, hurled as if a monstrous dog had dug there, dug all night in the frenzy of a scent, a scent that I too smelled now, on the hot breaths of dawn: dust, spice, bitumen and natron, the mummy of a god.

I shook my head. Foolishness, put there by this man’s chanting.

But this hole: what was I to make of this hole? For it was a hole, not a pit or trench or any of the ordinary excavations. It was a passageway, leading down. Too big, too wide, too deep for any one man’s one night’s work. The shepherd’s voice droned through my thoughts, distracting. Had he hypnotized me then? Had I slept weeks away? Surely I must be suggestible to anything by now.

I looked to the shepherd, who had risen from his rug, rolled it, and was now absorbed in picking pieces of egg from his beard. Haunted by the feeling of a void hovering somewhere in my memory — days taken out of my life — I walked with him to inspect his work.

The interior was dark, a meter high, perhaps — high enough to crouch in, if one bent almost double; it slanted down some fifteen meters or more, seeming to end in a flat, featureless mass.

How had he done it?

I ached to ask, but caution kept me still: if I asked, he might disappear, this fabulous passage might close, and I would awake on a barren hillside, weeks of heartbreaking labor still before me. The man crouched at my shoulder, his breath audible in my ear.

— Have you a torch, sah?

I had indeed: a six-cell indestructible pharos, bought expressly to illuminate the endless corridors of the King. By its light, the shepherd let me lead him down.

Scree tumbled beneath my feet, a cascade of stones preceding me down the tunnel. I heard them strike and lie still. In the passage, sound was magnified, my breath coming fast, panting thickly. Behind me, the shepherd padded noiselessly down, dislodging not a pebble. The light showed us the tunnel’s end, a smooth, seamless face of stone.