Chapter Sixty-Four
LUXOR, EGYPT
Papa does not rise. The newspapers report that a curse has felled my father, not a lowly mosquito, as I’d explained to the hounding reporters.
The headlines conjecture that the ancients denounced him for disturbing their tombs.
It doesn’t help that the same journalists who’d been excluded from covering Tutankhamun’s excavation are the ones reporting this way on Papa’s illness.
But what does it matter when the truth is molded into whatever form best suits the story or the agenda?
Just as history is shaped—or erased—to fit the narrative its tellers want or need to share.
I stare down at my father, tucked into a cot with his eyes closed against the light of the breaking morning.
We await boarding onto the private dahabiya that will take us to Cairo and medical treatment.
He wouldn’t be able to tolerate the train journey.
There, Mama will join us, nursing hat on no doubt, and Brograve as well.
Once again, he and I will not have the Egyptian trip we’d promised each other, but it might be the last one we ever have.
I will not return again unless Egypt—healed from the wounds we have inflicted upon her, modern and ancient—invites me.
When and if that time comes, I have comfort that Brograve will be at my side, supporting whatever choices I make about the past, present, and future.
“Are you ready, Lady Evelyn?” Monsieur Gavreau asks, his men at the ready.
I glance down at my father. “I am if you are, Papa.”
“It’s time we leave, my dearest Eve,” he croaks, barely able to speak as he’s become weak from the infection.
We say our farewells to Howard, who cannot yet meet my eyes. I do not condemn him for the decisions he’s made; they were born of this strange time and place in history. But I cannot be a part of them.
As the men lift Papa’s cot and carry it down the dock, I remain alone on the riverbank for a moment.
I stare across the deep blue of the Nile, past the verdant green of its life-giving shore, to the arid desert beyond, now glowing pink in the dawn.
The outlines of Hatshepsut’s temple and the Valley of the Kings materialize.
How I have relished my time in those sandy arms, I think.
The desert is often described as spare and lonely, but I don’t find it desolate.
Nestled within the rocky hills of the Valley of the Kings and the arid majesty of Hatshepsut’s temple, I feel the presence of the many lives that have passed through those sacred places and the ones that remain deep in the earth.
It has been the fulfillment of my childhood dreams and my honor to spend these past seasons in their company.
Still, even though I shouldn’t, I wonder.
Is Hatshepsut’s tomb among those hills or in that soil, looking out at me?
Have I walked upon the sand beneath which she rested or stared up at her tomb?
Somehow, some way, I feel her eyes upon me.
Unpuzzling Hatshepsut—the location of her tomb, the nature of her rise, the mystery of her eradication—is what lured me to Egypt, but I’ve learned that it’s not my conundrum to solve.
Whether she was a malevolent usurper or a benevolent ruler of a people who weren’t ready for a woman leader, I’ll never know, no matter how I speculate on the narrative of her life I’ve been writing.
Not now. Not ever, really—until she’s ready or Egypt is.
I’ve seen how the greed for Egypt’s golden history corrupts those to whom it doesn’t belong, and I won’t be part of that deception.
But Madame Zaghloul’s words return to me as well, reminding me that the time for all women—including Hatshepsut’s reemergence—may be forthcoming: “like the desert sand … one day, women will sweep up into a mighty storm and transform the land.” I hope that day comes and the woman pharaoh I’ve long admired leads the charge.
But it won’t be me that brings the sandstorm forth.
A horn on the dahabiya sounds, signaling its readiness to depart.
There is just one last act I must take before I board and head to Cairo, and then hopefully, home with Papa to Highclere Castle, where the history of its women is as obscure as Hatshepsut’s.
I wonder: Could that be a narrative that I could change?
Certainly it would be my story to tell, unlike Hatshepsut’s.
Reaching into my pocket, I pull out Hatshepsut’s faience scarab that has been with me throughout. I walk to the edge of the Nile, where the river meets the land, and I dig into the soil, feeling Egypt’s sand between my fingers one last time. And I return to Egypt that which was never mine.
As I stride toward the dahabiya and put the Egyptian shore at my back, I have a final wish. Whenever, wherever, however the sandstorm unleashes, I hope it transforms the world into a place where no woman is ever erased.