IGTIYAL!
AMONG THE NAG HAMMADI texts—sometimes called the Gnostic gospels—was one purported to be written by Mary Magdalene, an actual disciple and possible lover of Jesus; another, the repressed Gospel of Thomas, had been construed as stressing the humanity rather than the divinity of Jesus. These religious texts took their name from the place on the Upper Nile—Nag Hammadi—where they had been found in 1945.
Considering myself to be fairly well informed as a teen—at least I wanted to be well informed, to know, to study, to see with my own eyes—I wondered why so few people seemed to have even heard anything about books excluded from the biblical canon, let alone considered their content. Since the revelation by neighbor Sylvia, I was amazed at how few religious people wanted to know how the canon had been formed. Held sacred by my evangelical parents and most of the people I knew, the Bible was inviolate, as though it had no history. But mere men had struggled for intellectual ascendancy in establishing what was sacred, and they had eliminated those books with alternative views. An array of gospels had been boiled down to the standard four included in the New Testament.
“Skepticism is a path,” my retired neighbor the dear old professor had cautioned, “not a destination.”
Of Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, written against the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam, Sylvia told me T. S. Eliot had said it was a great poem not for the quality of its faith but for the quality of its doubt.
Before I entered the information center at Nag Hammadi, I noticed an alabaster many-mouthed fountain, a large, bubbling jar positioned at the center of the entrance plaza. The fountain referenced the actual man-size jar containing the suppressed gospels that had been buried in the sand near Nag Hammadi, hidden for fifteen centuries. The bubbling fountain jar, fashioned from mottled alabaster, seemed both stately and droll. In response to its figure, I had a dizzy impulse to say, “How do you do?” Perhaps I did speak. I noticed a brown man wearing a loosely wrapped turban gazing curiously at me. His eyes were dark as dates, but menacing. Because of the heat, I hurried toward the information center.
The ferociously air-conditioned, beautifully modern structure provided a great relief from the Egyptian oven. From the bottom of a framed picture of the current president-dictator cascaded a ladder of translations of the word Welcome.
“Thank you,” I said out loud to the dictator and wondered if I were losing my mind.
From the place where I stood, thirteen spokes projected outward in a semicircle, one for each of the Nag Hammadi gospels, like rays from a half-risen sun. Each ray displayed along its walls a series of the individual pages with translations from that gospel. Even before I began to read, my feet protested the hard granite floors. No one likes to read standing up; even at the Louvre the short placards beside famous paintings are always read with impatience.
Dutifully, I explored the extensive display, starting with the Gospel of Philip, Nag Hammadi Codex II. I read, “God is a dyer,” that “good dyes, true dyes” dissolved into the fabrics dipped into them. So it is with heat, I thought: when I am plunged into heat, it becomes part of me and I of it.
The Gospel of Philip suggested that Adam and Eve were originally one androgynous figure. I wanted to drink to the idea. Let Adam and Eve absorb one another, I amended. But most of the Gospel of Philip was about the Christian era, not Genesis. I studied the Willis Barnstone English versification of Philip’s meditation on names:
Father, son, holy spirit, life, light, resurrection, church.
These words are not real. They are unreal
but refer to the real, and are heard in the world.
They fool us. If those names were in the eternal realm,
they would never be heard on earth.
They were not assigned to us here.
Their end dwells in the eternal realm.
I, too, believed in the ineffable. As an art therapist, I believed that the hand that draws inner realities is the friend of the anguished soul. A picture can evoke what cannot be said. But what would I myself do without language? Without Freud, without neighbor Sylvia? Without explanation? Philip in early Christian times had an answer, disregarding any shame at contradicting himself. He conceded, “Truth made names in the world; without words we cannot think.” I added, But to weigh any word as solid gold is a snare and delusion. Admire language as we admire pyrite, for its lovely glitter.
I walked on through the display to read a hilarious idea from the early days of Christendom: “Some people are afraid they will ascend from death naked.” This expression of anxious modesty had been written probably in the third century, in Greek, perhaps in the land of Syria, and, I read, it had come down as a Coptic translation found in Egypt. But had not certain sincere, God-drenched nineteenth-century American sects made for themselves ascension robes to avoid just that problem of nakedness? For how many centuries would people languish in their foolishness?
My globed and sagging grandmother had often emerged stark naked from our only bathroom looking like the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf as she shuffled her bare, lumpy flesh to her bedroom for clothes. “Too steamy to dress in there,” she sometimes explained. Thom had liked to sleep half nude in a thin T-shirt, but I had said, laughing, that if I slept entirely in the nude (the way he liked) then he had to, too. Yet, in the morning, he often was wearing a T-shirt, grinning like a bad boy. “Gray curls above, gray curls below,” I teased when he emerged from the sheets. I always added the exclamation, “Beautiful!” Had Thom ever said a cross or unkind word in his life? Not that I could remember. Not to me. Our life had been full of hard work, for both of us, but it had been paradise.
Perhaps because of its name, I felt most interested in the Gospel of Thomas and walked to that display. A good Jew, my own Thomas had regarded Jesus as a teacher, a prophet—as did the respectful Muslims who had created the Nag Hammadi exhibition.
While surveying the Swedish translation for familiar cognates, I realized that a man standing nearby was looking steadfastly at me. For a moment, I continued to consider the enlarged page exhibited before me—it was hand-lettered onto tawny “aged” papyrus. Then, because he still stared, I took a deep breath of the cooled, delicious air and turned to encounter the gaze of a middle-aged Arab with golden eyes. Though suspended between crutches, he took three quick steps toward me. I must have looked frightened, because he immediately not only turned away from me but also hobbled toward the exit and out of the building.
Half an hour later, I was ready to exit, but at the open door the heat of the desert drove me back. I retreated to a restroom and took off my bra and underpants and stuffed them in my small suitcase. My long skirt wrapped around me twice and fastened securely with a tie. I was perfectly decent. When I left the information center, the outdoor brightness of the Middle Eastern sun surprised me again—a sun more blinding than illuminating. But I felt freer and cooler. No one could really study the meaning of texts while standing before a display case, I grumbled to myself. I felt vaguely disappointed with my pilgrimage.
While I had been inside, protestors from the Christian religious right had convened to march in a tight, pointless circle around the jar fountain; their placards read: “Beware the Lies of the So-Called Gospels!” “Trust the True Bible,” “COUNTERFEIT!” “Beware the Snares of SATAN!” Though these Christian fundamentalists were marching peacefully, all the signs were printed in bloodred. They were like an inexorable clock in their circumambulation. I walked through their circle to approach the fountain. The bronze placard inset beside the jar fountain was inscribed in Arabic, German, and English, and it identified the sculptor as a woman. I was pleased.
The fountain was only a year old, installed in the year 2019. Water bubbled, sometimes seeped, from apertures piercing the alabaster of the fountain jar, one opening for each of the thirteen books the actual ancient jar had contained. The meticulous sculptor had gone to the trouble of examining the site of the discovered stone jar and had reproduced that slope here as the base for the fountain.
I envisioned the moment in 1945 when just the lip of the mouth of the original jar had made its way to the surface after having been buried for some fifteen hundred years. It was as though the jar had wanted to speak. Chasing a goat, perhaps, a peasant boy had stubbed his toe against the curved protrusion.
Beside me, someone female said, “It makes one wonder, doesn’t it, how many other stone jars lie buried in the sand and rocks, all of them with suppressed messages?”
Turning, I saw a young Middle Eastern woman; she had spoken confident English with an American accent. Her black hair—uncovered, tucked behind her ear on one side—hung loosely almost to her shoulders. She had perched her black-framed sunglasses on top of her dark hair, like a headband. The young woman—perhaps twenty-five—was tall and pretty, unpretentious.
“No,” I answered slowly. “I wasn’t thinking that. I was just admiring the fountain.”
“Do you like it?” she asked. “Aesthetically?” A smile still hovered around her lips, but instead of looking at me, she was gazing fondly at the fountain.
“Very much,” I answered.
“I’m glad,” she answered. “I made it.” She pointed to the bronze plaque. “I am Arielle Saad. I believe you know my father.”
“No,” I said again, but I suddenly felt better than I had for a long time—interested and eager. The circle of protestors had removed themselves to flank the entrance to the museum.
“My father’s name is Pierre Saad; he knew your husband.”
I realized that the Egyptian woman’s father had been the host for the symposium. “I’m sorry to have missed getting acquainted with your father,” I said.
“Perhaps you’d like to talk with him now?” Arielle Saad suggested. “I could take you to him. Only a three-minute walk from here.”
I took a breath. “So you are a sculptor?” I said evasively.
“Yes,” Arielle answered. “And a pilot, as you are.”
I drew back. How would this young woman know that fact about me?
Arielle laughed. Perfectly at ease, she added, “I’ve frightened you. I’m sorry. We have a favor to ask of you, but my father can explain it better than I can.”
“A favor? Couldn’t he come here?”
“Here we are watched. Soldiers with telescopic lenses—don’t look—are on the tops of all these buildings.”
“You think he would be shot?”
“They use the lens, binoculars, too, to read lips.”
“Perhaps they are reading our lips,” I suggested shrewdly.
“I made this fountain. Why shouldn’t I come here to admire my work?” she asked. “Notice I’m facing the desert.” She seemed not only composed but happy with our conversation. Yes, Arielle Saad stood with her back to the two brown-clad guards high up on the structure of the information center.
“Where is your father?”
“He is in the back part of a house that tourists visit, one that sells figures carved from camel bone and also essential oils, Egyptian-woven carpets, objects for tourists. Follow me.” She lowered her sunglasses and strode away.
For a moment I hesitated. Arielle Saad? She did not look back as she stepped into the deep shade of a narrow street. I looked around. Three soldiers were dispersing the sign-carrying protestors from the tourist attraction. I began to follow Arielle Saad.
It was not easy to keep the young woman in sight. Walking quickly, Arielle turned the stucco corner of a thick-walled building. A man with a donkey steered his onion cart to one side so she could pass. She had to skirt a large hairy lump of a camel sitting in the narrow street and chewing its cud. The smell of animal hair pervaded the passage. Glancing back, to try to memorize the return route, I saw soldiers arresting some Egyptian men in turbans. Veiled women looked at me curiously and quickly glanced away. After my next hurried turn, I looked back again. Ahead, Arielle had disappeared. I concluded the young woman must have turned down another narrow street. As I rounded a stuccoed corner, a film of sweat veiled my skin.
Ah! My guide had paused in the blue arched doorway of a white building. She had lowered her dark glasses, but she smiled slightly at me. Arielle looked a bit like old photos of Jackie Onassis, but younger, more confident, browner, of course. A man passed by, leading a billy goat, its horns tipped with red balls. While I hurried toward my guide, Arielle extended her hand, palm up, beckoning.
“Come speak with my father.”
I stepped inside. Though the floor was made of packed dirt, paradoxically it seemed clean; the room was painted a vibrant turquoise blue throughout. Its walls were lined with mud-brick benches, like buttresses, against the wall. The benches were wide enough to serve as beds and were covered in places with woven mats, orange and red. No one was inside the turquoise room.
“Back here,” Arielle encouraged.
Passing an open, waist-high square formed of white-painted mud bricks, I glanced down into it. The enclosure sank below the surface of the floor—a pit for small crocodiles, each about as long as my forearm. One baby croc stood up in a corner with an open pink mouth, full of sharp teeth.
“You can buy one.” Arielle tossed back the sentence over her shoulder.
“What for?”
“For dinner,” Arielle answered. She shrugged. “For a pet. For a wallet.”
We pushed aside a curtain into a room with chalk-white walls and ceiling. Under the high, vaulted ceiling a lone man with drooping head sat dozing at a wooden table. A wooden crutch, with a sponge-padded shoulder rest, slanted against the table, and on the rough table rested a book bound in black leather. Like so many objects I had seen in Egypt, the old-fashioned crutch suggested American items discarded many decades earlier.
The man lifted his sleepy eyes, but he did not rise. “Enchanté,” he said. His eyes were golden. “Je m’appelle Pierre Saad.” He seemed to be still asleep, speaking from a dream.
“I’m Lucy Bergmann,” I said firmly. “We spoke briefly in Cairo. I believe you knew my husband.”
“Only a little,” he answered. His accent was like a fragrance—sandal-wood; it had wafted my way before. “I knew of Thom Bergmann…. I knew his voice,” he murmured, his lips barely moving.
Suddenly he became fully awake. “Before Professor Bergmann’s unfortunate death, we had spoken several times on the telephone.”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t feel up to conversation in Cairo.” I remembered Pierre Saad’s concern, his kindness. Trying to be polite, I stammered, “I … I appreciate your sympathy.”
“But you are better now?” He smiled. “Your journey on the Nile has soothed you?”
I felt embarrassed. “You wanted to speak with me. A favor?”
“Yes.” He merely gazed at me. Now he was fully alert—a stranger, but my having watched him return by degrees to consciousness had enveloped us in an aura of intimacy. A hypnotic spell. His eyes were the color of wet sand, tawny like a lion’s eyes, and he was comely in a manner that seemed some mixture of French and Egyptian. His beard—gray at the edges—was trimmed in the typical Arabic manner. Without hurry, he returned my gaze.
Finally he opened the book before him, looked at me again, and recited: “‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ You know these words?”
“The first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, King James version.” I felt uncomfortable, but I remembered he was an anthropologist—surely not some sort of hybrid guru.
He asked, “And do you believe them? Do you believe these words of Genesis that give us Adam and Eve?”
“I’m not religious,” I answered. It was a relief to establish my footing with him.
“Who wrote those words?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Probably no one knows. Some ancient scribe.”
“I know who wrote them.”
A shudder ran through me. Was he mad? What kind of trap had I walked into? I looked to Arielle for connection. Off to one side, the young woman stood perfectly still, regarding her father with her luminous brown eyes flecked with gold. In spite of her physical presence, she had absented herself from our exchange.
“You wished to ask a favor of me,” I gently reminded him. I recognized my tone of voice: it was the neutral, nonthreatening, noncolluding voice I used when speaking to the mental patients who had come for art therapy.
“You came here to learn more about the Nag Hammadi texts,” he said. “But we have found a new text, here in Egypt, not about Jesus. A newly discovered text but older than the ones found in 1945. Our codex of 2020, these pages, place the book of Genesis in a new context. They refer to the genesis of Genesis. Malheureusement—unfortunately—their existence is known to certain religious fundamentalists who would like to destroy them.”
“Right-wing Christians,” I said, readily enough.
“Yes, and—”
“Literalist Jews,” I added.
“And?”
“Muslim extremists,” Arielle put in. “I myself am a Muslim, but not a fundamentalist.”
“And your father?” I asked her.
“Objective. An anthropologist.”
“And you want …?” I asked Pierre Saad.
Time seemed to be suspended in the cool silence of the white room under its high, vaulted ceiling while I waited to learn what he wanted of me. I felt defined by the walls, chalk white but bright. Blank. A fly lit on the sponge shoulder cushion of the crutch. Even our flies are here, I thought. Suddenly I felt very American—practical, normal.
“We hope that you will allow me to fly you back to Cairo,” Arielle said. “We have a little plane for you there—my father’s plane. Quite old but in good condition.”
“And then, from Cairo, we would like for you to smuggle this new manuscript, this precious, irreplaceable codex, out of Egypt,” Pierre Saad continued. “To fly safely, which means circuitously, ultimately to the south of France. To the area of the ancient cave paintings, between Lascaux and Chauvet. I am the resident cultural anthropologist there at the complex, and I will be waiting for you.”
“Egypt herself has been hospitable to ancient scrolls. Don’t they belong here?”
“The Nag Hammadi scrolls,” he explained, “impinge only on the question of the divinity of Jesus. They are old news—discovered in 1945; everyone who wishes to learn about them has had the opportunity to do so. Christianity continues virtually untouched by the implications of the Gnostic Gospels. On the other hand, the Genesis story is sacred to not just one but three major monotheistic religions. There is a small secret group, members of three religions, who want to destroy the codex. Perpetuity, they name themselves.”
“How do they know of the existence of this codex?”
“The Muslim wing watches me because I once wrote a book they found to be anathema. I thought I was careful when the codex fell into my hands, but somehow they know. I’m spied upon. My daughter and I were very thoroughly searched when we exited the country a year ago.”
“And Perpetuity?” I asked. “How do you know this name?”
I seemed to hear other people in the turquoise room, with the crocodiles. Pierre and Arielle were growing restless with my questions. But Pierre continued to speak in the same quiet way.
“I have an old friend. Someone I studied English with when I was a child. He is the friend of a friend who tried to recruit him for Perpetuity, but his friendship with me has the deeper root.” Pierre sighed. “As I said, the codex I have is about the genesis of Genesis. Only in the matter of annihilating this manuscript do the members of this small secret group cooperate with one another in any way. Usually they struggle for political power, but the perpetual war in the Middle East is only the beginning. The more reasonable, more imaginative leaders of each religion, but also their followers, even the uneducated, must be made to understand the common origins of the three religions. Their similarities.”
He paused, staring at me with his flat, tawny eyes, as though he would force his ideas into my mind. He thrust his body toward me as he continued, “If the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, learn nothing new about their own origins—the mutual origin of their religions—we will have another world war. There will not be enough humanists or people of simple reason to stop them. Each faith will call it a Holy War, and the carnage, the bloodshed, of the medieval Crusades and the more recent European Holocaust will pale in comparison.”
What memory gave me was the image of Thom’s spreading blood, the curled tips of his lifeless fingers extending from beneath the wreckage of the grand piano. Killed absurdly not by a terrorist bomb but by a musical instrument, a vehicle of beauty. I tasted dust in my mouth.
“And there are other factions.” Pierre Saad paused again. His eyes were like the eyes of a lazy African lion tracking a small female gazelle but waiting for the lioness to do the work. The lion’s mane fluttered in a slight breeze. Again, I felt mesmerized—and afraid. Strangely alive.
“Perhaps even within your country,” Pierre Saad continued in a calm, even voice, “those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible will rise up against the community of scientists. Scientist will become a more inflammatory term than communiste.”
“We know what you wear around your neck,” Arielle said.
I bunched my fingertips nervously against Thom’s memory stick.
Pierre continued. “There are as many who would like to block his work—the discovery of extraterrestrial life, sure to come in the near future—as those who would block my work, which is to illumine the origins of our beliefs. The enemies of this codex are those who would shroud the past, our origins, our art, our sacred poetry, with their ignorance. Perpetuity is the enemy of both science and history.”
Perhaps I had made the wrong decision not to give Thom’s flash drive to ELF or to Gabriel.
“Where is this manuscript?” I asked.
Pierre Saad threw back his head; his nose cut the air like a scimitar; he seemed to gaze into the distance, but he said with pure trust and friendliness, “Of course the manuscript is here.” He pointed to a dark, heavy case—a compact, misshapen squarish case of a musical instrument—near the wall.” ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’” he said, shrugging his shoulders in the Gallic manner.
“It’s not a pipe?” I asked, incredulous.
“Of course not. I was merely quoting Magritte about his painting of his tobacco pipe. I mean it is not a French horn, or even the case of a French horn. It only looks like a French horn case. It is a specially prepared case containing very ancient writing.”
“What is your hope for this manuscript?” I asked.
“That, once translated and made public, these words, the implications of these ancient words, will defuse the fanaticism, the literalism, of three religions.”
The man who had begun to seem impressively cosmopolitan and sophisticated now seemed astonishingly naive. But I liked him better.
“Can you trust me, Lucy?” he asked.
Too soon, I thought. You ask too soon.
“Will you help us?” Arielle asked.
“You have the eyes of a predator,” I said to him.
“No, no,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “It is not true.” Then he turned and looked directly into my eyes. “Look again,” he said. And he held my gaze. “Here in the East, often you must look twice—or more—to see the truth.”
There was candor in his expression. I saw the same kindness I had heard in his voice, outside the symposium room, when I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. And now, in his golden gaze, I saw hope—his faith in me—ardent hope.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I will help you.”
Why did I agree? Because they needed me? Because I liked them—father and daughter? Because like my parents I wanted to define myself with a mission? I did regard religious rigidity as a growing global danger.
As one, the three of us took a breath, then gently laughed away our tension. If the codex concealed in the retrofitted French horn case would cause people—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—to find unity in reading Genesis less literally, then I was all for it.
When I asked about the crutches, one leaning against the table, the other against the white wall, Pierre drew up his robe a bit and stuck out his foot, coffined in a heavy plaster cast. “A simple accident,” he said. He wiggled his brown toes sticking out from the cutaway end of the cast. I actually recognized the square cut of the nail on his big toe, now rather more dusty than in Cairo. “After we spoke in Cairo, you left, but I could not let you go, after all. I hurried to the stairwell—you had taken the elevator—and in my haste I tripped on my sandal and broke my leg.”
I expressed my regret at his mishap, but I wondered if the explanation was true. I asked suspiciously, “Why do you choose to ask me for help?”
“From your husband, I knew something of your temperament.”
“And you are a pilot,” Arielle said. “Perpetuity would like to have the flash drive as well as the codex.”
“And you are”—Pierre paused as though searching his mind for the whole truth—“available. You are at hand, as the English say.”
“As though sent to us by Allah,” Arielle added happily.
“Even your name,” her father hurried on, “is strangely appropriate for your role.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lucy is the name the paleontologists gave to the female fossil found at the Olduvai Gorge, south of us, in the heart of Africa. Actually, the gorge should be called the Oldupi—the scientists misheard the native pronunciation. In any case, for a long time Lucy was the oldest of all the fossils that had been found, the mother of us all. Lucy—your name—Lucy is the evolutionist’s Eve.”
“How old was she?” I felt suddenly diminished, shrunken.
“Lucy lived about two and a half million years ago.”
I smiled. “I believe she was named for a Beatles song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”
Arielle moved closer and asked, “Beatles?”
“You know,” I said gently. “Four pop musicians, from Liverpool. John Lennon?”
Instantly distressed, Arielle blurted, “John Lennon?” Then she covered her mouth with her hand and softly said something that sounded like “Igtiyal.” For just a moment, she looked frightened, but I asked for no explanation.
“We’ll meet again in France, God willing,” Pierre Saad said softly. He handed me a card that affirmed his affiliation with Lascaux.
“May we not open the instrument case?” I asked. “I’d like to see the codex.” Suppose he was asking me unwittingly to smuggle drugs—germs, a bomb?
“I alone have the key. I have already mailed it to myself in France.”
“You would not have us break the lock,” Arielle said. “It would be very difficult to do.”
During the pause that followed, I shifted my gaze back and forth between the father and daughter.
Finally Pierre said, “Either you trust, or you do not.”
Carrying the heavy French horn case, I walked with Arielle back into the turquoise anteroom, now filled with people examining wares displayed on the benchlike beds. How silently they had assembled! Their skin color, dress, and hair bespoke the far-flung fullness of the world. Tourists, like myself, whom chance had thrown together for a brief moment. It’s just a tour bus, I thought. Their presence just means a tour bus has arrived. Utterly silent, isolate, the unreal people examined small figures carved from bone. None of them gave the slightest attention to the truncated chimney full of crocodiles.
As we two women passed through the streets of the village, Arielle explained, “I will fly you to Cairo to an abandoned airfield and show you the old plane that belongs to my father. You will like the little plane. Of course you will fly east at low altitude to avoid the war and the radar. The plane has a medical symbol on its belly. No one will shoot at you from below.”
“I’m game,” I repeated, almost panting. Having shorter legs than Arielle, I had to hustle to keep up with her.
“Good,” Arielle replied. “Do you want me to carry the horn case?”
“No. I’ve got it.” I rather enjoyed feeling the weight of responsibility.
Like a bird suddenly spreading one wing, the young woman opened out an arm to enclose my shoulders. I had seen such a gesture on a temple wall at Abu Simbel: a guardian figure—Isis, her lifted wing carved into stone. As Arielle squeezed the cap of my shoulder, I felt a frightening strength in her grip.
I had seen such a gesture when the black piano lifted its wing.
Our flight from Luxor to Cairo provided little opportunity for extended conversation. Once seated in the Cessna, Arielle put on her headphones and said simply, “I must concentrate on the flying. I am not so experienced a pilot as you, and this is a rental.”
Despite my pilot’s disclaimer, I never felt the least doubt about the young woman’s competence. Her hands were quick and sure, and she was entirely focused on her work. Or was she simply a splendid actor, pretending to be focused on piloting to avoid conversation? Doubts and questions flooded my mind. It was comforting to follow the blue thread of the Nile, off to the left. As we began our descent, the river was lost in the smog-smudged sprawl of Cairo.
Arielle set the plane down with perfect grace. Removing her headphones, she said, “We need to hurry.”
While we walked rapidly over the tarmac of the small, almost deserted airport east of Cairo, I inquired of Arielle about her mother.
“Igtiyal!” Arielle replied. Her voice seemed tightly controlled.
“That word again!” I exclaimed. It roused me like a long-ignored alarm bell. “What does it mean?”
“Igtiyal is the Arabic word for murder. My mother was murdered by extremists who hated my father’s anthropological approach to Islam. I was a little girl then.”
“I’m sorry,” I answered. So Arielle, like myself, had known sudden loss. I put my arm around her and touched her shoulder.
“We have no time now,” she said. “Papa and I will tell you about her death when you bring the codex to Lascaux.”
My mind swung again to the image of Thom’s blood, red as horror. From beneath the shattered piano, the pool had enlarged steadily, its advancing edge a smooth curve. Before I had fainted, someone with a foreign accent—Egyptian, I now recognized—had said the word igtiyal. And now I knew: it meant murder. Someone had labeled Thom’s terrible accident, his death, as murder. My heart pumped fear and denial.
There was the promised plane—very old and small. Something left behind by Americans after World War II. From the PA series—Piper Aircraft—a PA-11.
“Ah!” I gasped as soon as I saw it. Not just satisfied, in a moment of recognition I felt shocked into happiness. I had learned to fly in just such an airplane.
I knew all about it.
Quickly Arielle said to me, “My father is so trusting, he did not think to tell you. The case is not only locked but also sealed against impact and water. An attempt to open the case might violate the integrity of the seal. Now hurry! Go!”
As quietly as I could, I said, “I need to run the flight check.”
“There’s no time. I did it myself. I did it this morning!”
Her eyes pleaded for trust; against all my training and better judgment, I gave in to her. So quickly she seemed a member of my family!