Nina Milton - The Tomb Builders' Tombs

Today's Words

The Tomb-Builders' Tombs

Nina Milton

You are cheated.

Ishmael swung round. He had barely entered the tomb, and already she was getting at him.

‘Who?’ Ishmael hissed. ‘Who is cheating me?’

There was no one behind him, of course. Just a wall washed in yellow ochre, a sunshine backdrop to the depictions of ancient gods worked with meticulous esteem from nature’s paints and sealed with a still glinting layer of egg white – Osiris, Maat, Ptah and Isis – each in totally unspoiled profile. You never saw the fullness of their faces. They were painted so they could gaze at each other, across the line of the wall. Ishmael knew this was because the Ancient Egyptians hadn’t grasped the concept of perspective, but knowing didn’t stop the secret longing that one day he’d find a tomb painting where the faces looked directly at him.

But here, in the tomb of Sennedjem the tomb builder, Isis was looking right at him. She had not moved her head, but he could tell that her eye was on him, that she was looking at him from above, because he’d just heard her voice. As Ishmael gazed at her image, the goddess curved the single corner of her profiled mouth and smiled.

A shudder moved from his ears to his feet, but he didn’t take his gaze from her. He was pulled into her image as lighting is pulled towards copper.

You are cheated, Ishmael.

A tourist brushed past him and the link was broken. Isis slid into the painting; still, silent, two-dimensional and over 3000 years old.

Ishmael knew her well, knew every line and turn of her image, her history in this place and the story of her origins. He saw it as his job to know her intimately, but now, rigid at the door of the tomb, he wondered if his obsession with the ancient history of his country was sending him mad. Or was it the hours he put in to each of his days? His schoolmates called him ‘plugger’ and ‘teacher-pleaser’, because they considered him too hard-working.

But Isis had called him ‘cheated’. Where had that come from? His own mind?

Ishmael put his hands over his ears. He turned his back on the goddess and stormed from the tomb, up the uneven steps carved millennia ago, past the guards who let him slip through to earn an honest piastre in the first place, into the sudden blaze of light, the heat of Egyptian summer.

No one looked at him. Tombs and temples were filled with unofficial guides, hopeful for a moment’s work. Ishmael sometimes got noticed because he was young and full of enthusiasm, but today was quiet, and everyone was arriving with their own guide. He sat outside and lit a cigarette.

A week or so ago, she’d winked at him. He’d been at full throttle at the time, information spurting from his lips, and the punters, a Japanese couple hardly taller than him, had begun to nod methodically. He’d been describing the tomb goods that had been found here. Discovered in eighteen eighty-six, he was telling them, and nothing missing, not a scarab, you can see it all in the Cairo Museum. At any moment, their hands would go to their pockets, and he would be rewarded. They were close to the door, on their way out, when Ishmael had glanced at Isis and seen her one eyelid move – up and down, just once. He’d stopped dead, his mouth gaping. After a few long seconds, the tourists had disappeared, muttering in their clipped language to each other, and Ishmael’s look of amazement turned to something close to anger. He’d lost a tip. No one’s fault but his own. He could hardly blame a wall painting.

Who was cheating him? He shook his head, blowing smoke in a waving arc. The punters, of course. Tourists were rich, every Egyptian knew that. They brought millions of dollars into this country and handed most of them over to the already rich…the tourist trade, the government. The voice had been his own head, telling him what he already knew. The poor always got the shitty deal.

Ishmael walked down the track a little, so that he could grind out his filter stub a decent distance away from the tomb. He thought about his uncles. They were cheating him, no doubt about that. But Ishmael could never quite put his finger on how. They had offered Ishmael and his two sisters a home when they lost their father. They made sure the girls went off to school just the same as he did. Uncle Alaa paid him a small sum to work in the camel stable after school. And Uncle Mahmoud let him pocket the extra money Ishmael made from haggling with tourists at his market stall. They were being fair. But he did feel cheated, all the same.

Ishmael took a final drag and ground the stub into the white dust of the path.

Below him, toiling up the hill from the houses of the tomb builders, were two women. Faces glowing with heat, one protected by a cheap market scarf of bright pink muslin, the other by a white floppy hat. Both around forty years of age, they carried litre water bottles and wore walking boots lined with woollen socks. With a practiced eye he judged them. Northern European – English speakers. But a rarity, for all that. They were independent travellers, which meant they were probably obsessed with Egypt’s wonders and possibly as poor as river rats – at least within the standards of tourists. None of them were ever as poor as the river rats of Egypt.

Ishmael positioned himself by the side of the path waiting for them to reach him. They were golden punters. They would pay well. Their obsession with all things Egyptian meant that they longed to talk to real Egyptians, and their poverty, in some perverse equation he’d never worked out, meant that they would pay him double, even triple what he usually earned at the tombs. He would not be cheated here.

‘Madams,’ he began, as they neared him. ‘Welcome to Deir El Medina. You will be glad to hear that the tombs of the tomb builders are cool and refreshing inside.’

The older one pulled off her white hat and wiped her face with it. ‘Thank God.’

British. With the accent that you heard on satellite TV. ‘Follow me, Madams.’ Ishmael turned up the track. ‘I will show you the glories of the tomb of Sennedjem.’

They followed slowly. People only came in the cheap season from ignorance or a tight budget. He could see that for these English women it was the latter. But the result was the same. Their faces were brick red and they puffed with every step. The one in the scarf called out, a word at a time.

‘Do you know – about the walls below us?’

Ishmael gave a little bow. ‘The homes of the tomb builders, madam. They were the only Ancient Egyptians to live on the west bank of the Nile, it being considered solely the place of the dead. Tomb builders had special dispensation from the Pharaoh. They lived here to give them more time to do their work.’

The woman shuddered. ‘They’re such tiny houses. Packed together.’

‘Four rooms to each house,’ said Ishmael. They stopped and looked back to the clear outline of the walls. ‘Living room, storeroom, bedroom and a place to worship. With space outside to cook and eat, and on the roof they had their gardens.’

‘And stone built, Maggie,’ said the woman in the white hat. ‘Think of that, so long ago.’

‘They were industrious, Madam.’ Ishmael had recently added this word to his English lexicon. He was proud of it, and fond of it. He considered himself industrious. Dutiful. Thoughtful of the future. ‘They worked for the Pharaohs. Each had their skill. Engineering, building, artwork, making the colours of the paints. But on their days off, what they liked best to do was work on their own tombs.’ He pointed. ‘Which you will see above.’

He took them in. He knew they would have already seen the Valley of the Kings and probably all the other Luxor wonders the tour guides wanted them to see. They’d have paid extra to go into Tutenkamun’s tomb, which was dark and bare, robbed of its glory. So he already knew how they would react. He watched their mouths form into O’s and their eyes take in the sharp colours of the paintings as they followed the stories along the walls.

‘Ordinary people, you can tell,’ he said, to remind them he was their guide. ‘Their pictures are the tasks of everyday life.’

‘Even so,’ said the one called Maggie. She was staring at the image of Isis

‘Look at her, Hen,’ she called to her friend. The woman in the white hat had moved on, her attention caught by a relief of musicians, celebrating the end of the harvest.

‘So simple, so effective, so long lasting,’ Ishmael said, getting into his stride. ‘They had all the time in the world, the tomb builders, because they knew their afterlives were secured by their hard work in this world.’

‘Hen!’ cried the woman, flapping her muslin scarf at her. ‘Look!’

Side by side, the English tourists stared as intently at Isis as if they too were waiting for her to speak.

‘The Goddess Isis,’ said Ishmael. ‘You can tell this by -’

‘I know,’ said Maggie. She did not take her eyes from the wall. ‘I know Isis when I am in her presence.’

Ishmael hardly blinked at the curt response. He didn’t bother to worry about the strangeness of foreigners, so long as they knew how to tip. The baksheesh was one of the reasons he cycled to the tombs when school finished early.

‘In this relief you can see the whole of Sennedjem’s family worshiping their gods,’ said Ishmael. ‘The colours are as vibrant as the day they were painted because…’

He trailed into silence. Foolishly, his heart bounded with something close to fear. The women had dropped down, onto their knees, before the wall painting. He would normally think that the heat had affected them, he’d be calling a guard and offering water, but the silence that surrounded the English women was too…full of wonderment…to interrupt. Had they seen what he’d seen?

After a moment or two, Hen turned to him. ‘You are so lucky.’

Ishmael didn’t respond. He knew the women had no idea he was an orphan, that he had two sisters who would have to be married yet had no dowry, that he had uncles who were considered to be fair, but were using him as a cheap labour source. You are cheated.

A thought came into his head. ‘Can you hear her?’ He was ashamed to whisper his foolish question, but felt impelled to ask it.

The woman called Maggie nodded. ‘And you?’

Ishmael barked a laugh. ‘She’s just a painting.’

They rose to their feet and turned back to him, their eyes melting with a joy that penetrated his concentration. There was an anticipation in the air he didn’t know how to fill. He felt himself floundering. To be in receipt of baksheesh, it was necessary to satisfy the expectations of the tourists. Usually, that was easy. They wanted colour, a few entertaining facts, they wanted to be a bit awed – it was what they paid their money for. He clung to this.

‘The ancient people who painted this tomb, this goddess. They would have felt such reverence! Isis fulfilled their most basic wishes. That is what they believed.’

‘I believe it, even today,’ said Maggie, looking back at the wall.

Ishmael flashed a grin at her, full of the glint of his still good teeth. ‘The people who built this tomb have been dead for thousands of years,’ he said. ‘Their gods died with them.’

‘Do gods die?’ asked Hen.

Ishmael thought about Allah. He couldn’t believe that Allah would ever be other than the Most Merciful. But, what if Muslims stopped believing in him? If all the Muslims in the world perished, would Allah perish alongside them? He couldn’t imagine that Allah would allow the State of Islam to just die out.

That was it. His brow unfurrowed and his voice deepened with confidence. ‘The Gods of the Pharaohs let their people disappear off the face of the earth. It is quite natural to think that they went with them.’

‘But they didn’t go,’ said Maggie. She raised an arm. ‘Surely, that was the whole point of the tombs.’

Ishmael couldn’t help but follow her gesture, even though he knew every brushstroke, every outline of the Isis on the wall. The horns of the crescent moon grew from her head and within them she balanced the red sun of life. The outline of her face was fixed and steady, she was not winking or smiling, but Ishmael felt her one eye transmit something directly into his mind. She had spoken to him, something vital, a warning he should heed. Cheating.

Everywhere he went, he suddenly realized, the goddess had been there with him, trying to alert him. In the shops she glowed from plates and t-shirts. In the market every third papyrus he sold to a customer was of Isis, her wings stretched fully along her arms, emerald, scarlet and gold. When he hung around the hotels, she was there, decorating the tiled walls with a powerful presence. He’d never thought before just how common her image was. And how it had penetrated his conscience.

His shoulders had become ridged, like the railings that lined the East bank of the Nile. He let them loosen, took a step away from the women. ‘Now, Madams, if you look in this direction, you will see people playing Senet, that was a board game they loved. And further along here, we have scenes of the dead entering the underworld…’

As he led the way up into the sunshine, the two women did what all tourists do. They put on their sunglasses.

He made a formal bow, which was his custom; it charmed tourists and left them in the position of having to thank him. ‘Madams have been kindness itself,’ he reminded them.

Maggie instantly handed him a note – fifty Egyptian pounds, which was five English. ‘What is your name?’ she asked, as if this was an exchange – the power of names as a trade for the power of money.

‘Ishmael.’

‘Well, Ishmael, you are a very good tomb guide,’ she said. She turned from him and began to carefully pick her way down the hill.

Hen took a little time to fix her scarf. She let it fall over her hair, passing it around her neck as his mother used to do. Maybe she was deliberately arranging it in this way, so that he would know she could be as deferential to his living religion as she’d been to one that was past. Then he realized that she was allowing Maggie to put some distance between them. She laid an Egyptian one hundred in his palm, plucking it from the pocket of her shorts as a conjuror plucks paper flowers.

Then she leaned into him, so that her mouth was close to his left ear. He felt her forty year-old breath on his neck. This didn’t perturb him. Well, it did, but only in that it didn’t seem to be perturbing her. Most tourists hated closeness, especially the English. There was only one single explanation to such an action. She was making a pass. A sadness for her crushed his heart. He’d had offers from women before, but he’d imagined this pair to be above such things. He knew many of the boys who worked in the market couldn’t wait to take advantage of subtle glances and squeezes of hands. The European and American ladies especially found Egyptian boys attractive, everyone knew that.

But he had never slept with one of these women. He had never as much as kissed a girl from his school. He had more important things to do. He had his goals, and they were what he kept his sights trained on. Two sisters married and settled. A university place on an Egyptology degree course. When those things were achieved, he would have all his needs and all his wishes. For now, everything in his life – school for the grades, the camels and the market for the money, the tourist trail for improvement of foreign languages – all this formed the path that led to the best of futures.

‘She does talk, you know,’ said Hen. ‘You should listen to her.’

She spun away, almost slipping on the loose stones that lay like marbles on the ground, as she scurried after her companion.

His attention moved to Maggie. She had stopped, not to let Hen catch up with her, but because her path was blocked by a tiny child. The girl was dressed in a black shawl over a shabby dress of bright colours. In her hand she carried a rag doll made from a knitted body. Bits of fabrics were plaited and wound around the legs and torso to form a semblance of clothing. The doll’s hair was made of wayside feathers, sown into the scalp. They gave the doll a slightly heathen, crazy look, but Ishmael could see how appealing Maggie and Hen might find the child and her toy. Ishmael saw it change hands. Maggie held the doll and stroked its hair. She was kneeling, as she had in the tomb, but this time it was to gain the trust of the little girl. He huffed with exasperation. Tourists were such fools. He raced down the track, past Hen, and pushed between Maggie and the child.

‘You are not welcome here.’ He spoke in Arabic so that Maggie would not understand. Close up, he could see the girl was too young for school, hardly more than a toddler. He looked about, at the rocks that littered the path. Someone had placed the child here deliberately. It was a begging ploy, used by the kids in the alabaster villages.

He snatched the doll from Maggie’s hands. ‘Don’t give her money,’ he said in English. He turned and thrust the doll into the little girl’s chest. Her face creased up and she began to cry.

From behind the sign that heralded the Tomb Builders’ Tombs, a young girl stepped. Her eyes blazed at Ishmael as she took the child in her arms and let her sob into the denim of her jeans.

‘Take her away,’ Ishmael snapped. ‘This is only a place for genuine guides. We have no begging here.’

‘And what are you doing, pray?’ the girl’s face was dusky with indignation. ‘You’re no official guide. Why should you make money out of strangers, and not us?’

Ishmael hesitated in his answer for a moment too long. Into that second’s pause his thoughts rushed… that he was not just here to make money, but to learn how to impart the history of the monuments…that his sisters had been not much different from the toddler a few years back – in a few year’s time, they would no doubt have all the belligerence and beauty of the older girl…and that he was sure he’d seen the black flash of this girl’s eyes before, when he’d taken tourists from the tombs to the alabaster villages to buy the hand-made goods. He’d seen her standing in a courtyard, her yellow hijab framing her face, a half smile of temptation directed at him, but utterly ignored.

The silence that grew as his thoughts teemed was of meagre seconds, but the English women seized it as if they had the right of judiciary.

‘Take this,’ said Maggie, and thrust a ten Egyptian note into the older girl’s hand. ‘You shouldn’t have treated her so roughly, Ishmael.’

She’d used his name, as if she’d bought it earlier. He didn’t respond, but his fingers curled around the hundred Egyptian in his own pocket. If they’d asked him he would have told them to give the child a few piastres, which was all she’d expected. Now, the girl’s face was round and glowing with smugness as if the note might buy her the world.

These people, from the alabaster villages, were robbers as well as beggars. They thought they owned these hills. Indeed, Ishmael knew that they lived perched on a plethora of unopened tombs of nobles, kings and queens. One day, the government and the universities would succeed in shifting them away from their settlements, and explore what lay hidden below. But Ishmael wondered what they would find when the stones were rolled away. The hills were rabbit warrens of tunnels and holes, through which the people from the alabaster villages extracted the grave goods, as they had for millennia. They well knew the value of the artefacts in the tombs – they replicated them every day, demonstrating the skills and technology of the ancients for the tourists.

Without another word, Maggie and Hen picked their way back down the path from the tomb. He could see their taxi waiting among the tourist buses. Ishmael was left with the girl and the toddler. He pulled himself up, so that he was an inch taller than the girl. Today, her hijab was a creamy white, like the dust of the path, pinned and gripped into place. She was as tidy and clean as her sister was messy and grimy.

‘You came to our village,’ she said. ‘With some Americans.’

‘What of it?’ He glared at her as she walked around him on the path, as if he were an object she was thinking of buying.

‘I remember how serious you were. I watched to see if you would smile. Not one! Not in all the time you were there. And your Americans bought well, I remember that. You should have smiled, at least.’

‘Life is a serious business. You alabaster people don’t seem to realize.’

The girl shrugged and came to a stop beside her sister. ‘That’s it. That’s what I thought. I was betting myself that you would not smile because I could see how seriously you took yourself.’

‘Not me!’ Ishmael growled. ‘Life!’

‘Okay,’ said the girl, shrugging her shoulders. ‘So, why d’you come here, anyway?’ You’d make a lot more tips in the Valley of the Kings.’

It was the first sensible thing she’d said. ‘I have my reasons.’ He was hardly going to tell her that a bas-relief goddess had been winking at him. Suddenly, he realized there was another reason. ‘I like the story that the tomb builders have left behind. They called this place Set Maat – place of truth. Their minds were fixed on two things – the beauty of their work and the place they would go when they died. Every spare moment they had to themselves, they spent preparing their own tombs. I admire that.’

‘Ha!’ The girl began to laugh, a false laugh, concocted to show him how she weighed life so very lightly. ‘Such rubbish! I know why you come here. You’ve been watching me, haven’t you?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you. I’m here to learn. I’m going to Cairo to study. One day, I will be a proper guide. You’ll see.’

‘Anyway, it is rubbish, what you say. The tomb builders liked to dance and sing and play games.’ The girl moved close towards him, closer than Hen had been, until her shoulder was touching his. ‘See?’ she said into his ear. ‘You’re not the only one who knows things.’ He felt a sharp sting on his backside and swung round, thinking he’d been bitten.

She’d pinched him. He gawped at her. Common little tart. His sisters would never be as cheap, he’d see to that.

‘I’ve been watching you, and you’ve been watching me,’ she repeated. ‘Come to the village?’ Her smile was as wide as the world, white and red and glistening with promise. ‘Just for a walk? Just for a laugh. I bet you really need a laugh.’

As if she’d embarrassed herself, she snatched her sister’s wrist and ran her down the hill, lifting the little girl into the air when her feet stumbled at the speed.

She was kidding herself, if she thought he’d waste an evening strolling with her. He hung around, kicking the dust with his trainer, until she had disappeared below the scrub. Then he raced back up the trail to the tomb.

Momentarily, the chamber was empty. Isis raised her chin as he entered. She gave him a strange little smile, as if she knew everything that had happened on the path – everything that was swirling in his mind now.

‘Who is it?’ he said, in a voice too loud for the tomb. ‘Who is cheating me?’

A single, perfect eyelid closed briefly over the carbon eye. I have told you already.

‘Is it the girl?’

The girl from the village? Ishmael, don’t you even know her name?

Ishmael found he was stamping a foot in irritation. ‘Tell me who is cheating me!’

Maybe the girl could tell. If you only knew her name.

Isis was teasing him. He stared hard, his hands gripped into tight fists, his jaw working with fury. As he stared, the goddess shifted. His locked mouth drooped and dangled open and his breathing stilled. He felt the very pupils of his eyes widen.

Isis swung round to face him. He saw her fully, all of her face, both her eyes, both her round, mother breasts. Slowly, with the control of the performer, she opened her arms, and there were her divine wings, which were no part of the wall painting at all. She spread them wide, the colours glowing bright. The pale afternoon light filtered down and illuminated her. She was glorious.

My dear boy. Can you not see? It is no one but yourself.

Ishmael tried to reply, but the words garbled in his throat - the gold and turquoise and lapis lazuli of her wings sucked at his breath and dazzled his eyes. There was no other thing he could do than drop to his knees and bow his head before her splendour, just as the women had done. Had they seen this wonder?

Kiss her, Ishmael, before darkness falls on your longing.

When he looked up at her again, Isis was her normal self, her face in profile, her eyes fixed in the world of the painting. Ishmael stumbled. He could feel nothing but the way his heart was pumping blood around his body. It pulsated in his ears blocking every sound.

He thrust his way past a group of Americans. His elbow knocked against the hard case of a camera swinging from a neck. If the man cried out for him to be careful, he did not hear. He stumbled out into the late afternoon heat and pelted down the hill to the tourist bus park, snatching at the handles of his bike. It picked up speed with its own momentum as he hauled his leg over the bar.

He was gasping now, a sound that trailed behind him as he careered downwards. Short grunts in rapid succession, as if terror was being pumped out of him.

The women had seen it too. He clung to that thought as the bike smacked its way over the pitted, dusty road.

Hen would tell him he was not crazy. He was not crazy. He felt a laugh rise up inside him, as full of scorn as the laugh of the girl.

Don’t you even know her name…

The wheels sped beneath him. As he passed the houses of the tomb builders, his bike turned from the road to the Nile with a will of its own, taking him away from Uncle Alaa’s piss-stained camels, bellowing to be hosed down; away from Uncle Mamoud’s van full of papyrus.

Ishmael gripped the handlebars and lifted his feet from the pedals. The air took away his breath and he laughed again, with a sudden joy of the ride that startled him, as he flew down the hill towards the alabaster villages.