What Would Nefertari Do?

In a barely controlled plummet, Ella slides down the pebbled slope of Deir-el-Bahri into Valley of the Queens. Wetting parched lips, she ingests Egyptian dust. El braces into a stop as a pertinent thought surfaces. Could it be that an iota of Nefertari infuses this grit? Even in the desiccating heat, goose flesh rises along her neck and arms.

Of course, her husband calls such ideas 'cheeky', for Ella has become the queen of quip. After all, her husband insisted on embedding three children and his ex into the bedrock of their marriage. Ah, the joys of second wifedom. Thus El's sass often equates with survival. Her husband sends a harried look her way, his regard urging her onward. She complies, yet the notion of Nefertari's dust grips her still.

Once known as the most beautiful, in a blatant bait-and-switch, this queen serves as a mainstay for Egyptian tourism. For Nefertari has never been part of the country's exhibits. After all, thieves nicked her mummified body long before state-sanctified tomb robbers unearthed the crypt. The closest El might ever get to the great queen is by inhaling her molecules.

Irreverent laughter bubbles. Ella loses her balance, landing hard upon her backside. A cloud of white dust too fine to be called soil envelops her. Her bruised tailbone recalls its recent proximity to the spine of the skinniest donkey she has ever seen. The poor creature hauled her like so much freight to the ridge above this site. How its scrawny hindquarters managed her lanky body... Then her husband Stone grips her upper arms to tug her to her feet.

"You all right, El?" Shadowed by his bush hat, Stone's face tilts toward her.

"Right as rain on the Nile," she mutters. Her black boots appear to be as ancient as the Queens whose crypts line this valley. "Come on, we'd best hurry or we'll miss our tour."

Nefertari's Tomb. El would walk barefoot over the Sahara to experience this. In fact, she practically has done so if you discount a lengthy ride on the camel's back. Once they reached their Berber tents, she and Stone shucked their boots to race up the dunes for sunset...but that was Morocco. This is Egypt.

"I still can't believe we had to pay so much for a half hour jaunt through a dead woman's crypt," Stone says.

El rolls her eyes. "A Place of Beauty, Stone, that's what the ancients called it. You know the tomb's closed to regular tours. We're supremely lucky to have a chance to tour it at all."

"Thanks to your connections with local Egyptologists."

She agrees. Claiming archeological kinship has few benefits in this world, however viewing Nefertari's Tomb atones for multiple slurs against her profession. Their male guide meets them at the entryway. He is a distant cousin to the archeologist El has corresponded with for over twenty years. They exchange pleasantries, but the young man correctly interprets where her interest lies. He waves them in with a laugh.

Ella descends three-thousand years into the underworld. Assaulted by decay, earthquakes, looters, the evaporated sweat of tourists and, yes, greed and stupidity, this place speaks to her. The escort's heavy cologne finally dissipates, overwhelmed by history. El gives into the tugs along her spine and separates from the men. Let Stone enjoy the guide's chatter; she knows this tomb nearly as well she does herself. She came to internalize the experience.

Flanked by goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet, El embraces eternity. God of the underworld and all living, regal Osiris guides her, a reminder that no one dodges the final bullet. Osiris' skin looks even darker against his white garb. He holds flail and crook with a relaxed, but sure, grip.

"I'll bet you never sided with spiteful children against your wife." His stern aspect agrees.

Ella's gaze slides over eight columns of text: Chapter 94 of the Book of the Dead. There Nefertari reaches for a gameboard and plays for her soul. El nods in sympathy. "A woman's game for certain."

Men's voices along the corridor make her conscious of lapsed time. El glides down eighteen steps, then pauses by a Djad-pillar. Nefertari offers bowls of milk to Isis flanked by Maat and Nephthys--what El's students would identify as a 'fem thing'. Glyphs of protection, life, duration and fortune whirl around her. Power brushes her as she catches up with Stone and their escort.

Stone gives her a look. "You okay?"

"I'm among goddesses. What more could I want?" She watches as the attendant draws him away, then falls into study of Isis-blood figures.

In this form, Isis encompasses womanhood, fertility and creative strength. Without fecundity, there would be no civilization, no generations, no children. El rubs her flat belly, where her inadequate uterus resides. Dark as menstrual blood, Isis sustains the world no less than those phallic Djed-pillars.

She lingers with a heron on the banks of the Nile. The water bird acts as phoenix, rising from its ashes. Death and resurrection. The irony of a crumbling wall upon which protective symbols reside makes El smile. She fiddles with her wedding band, yet another symbol. Finally Ella reaches the goddess Neith, who aids Nefertari in her adjustment to death. Evidently wardrobe counts. El gets a potent sense of Neith's obvious concern for the queen.

"We all benefit from kindness now and again," she whispers.

It must have empowered Nefertari, too. She bears a cloth hieroglyph as a gift to Ptah, chief god of Memphis and designer of the male body. No slouch here, Nefertari takes obvious pleasure in her appearance, sporting a glorious headdress, eye shadow and earrings. El ruefully ponders her own dusty and much-worn travel gear. Kohl and mascara insist on melting off her face.

"Even Hathor and Isis can't keep me looking fresh," she murmurs. Then the two goddesses stand before her--love, humor and joie de vivre personified. El blinks and the goddesses recede into frescos. Hathor tenderly embraces Nefertari. Best friends.

El looks to where Stone waits, head bowed to hear the guide's words. Can a man, even a beloved husband, ever take the place of girlfriends? No. Still a husband should choose his wife over others, right?

With bittersweet nostalgia, she steps into the final chamber. Here, Isis dominates. Holding hands with Nefertari, the two cross into the next world. The dead queen inhales immortality in the form of an ankh. Ankhs swirl, filling Ella, too. Spirit. Life. Breath. She tilts her head to view starry, starry skies of immortality. Unexpectedly, her eyes blur with tears.

Stone's voice recalls her to the present. "El? Our guide needs us to vacate the premises. We're out of time."

Out of time. "Really? Because I feel I'm synchronous for the first moment of my life."

Still she follows the men into North African heat, which pummels her back into the present. After Stone proffers their escort a hefty portion of baksheesh, they set their sights on Hatshepsut's Temple. The edifice looms, a great Pharaoh come to naught due to a stepson's jealousy. Ella totally gets that. Covetous stepchildren can make life hell. She settles her floppy hat and tightens the drawstring. Looking down, she sees her tundra colored pants now matched the seared landscape. When Stone tries to dust her off, she stops him. "Never mind. Just consider it camouflage."

He shrugs and turns his golden gaze to the temple. "Wow. Impressive."

"I suppose. Although the boys' tombs one valley over definitely have ego aggrandizement down to an art." In fact, Ella finds all male Pharaohs to be egocentric and arrogant to the nth degree. Even Hatshepsut had to play at being a boy to get anything done. After her death, her stepson either flattened her works or overlaid them with his own heavy hand.

Boys! Only Nefertari gained ground when it came to equivalency. Her likeness in Abu Simba was the same size as her beloved Ramses. No other wife in Pharaonic history received such high praise. El admits to being charmed by this departure from the norm. Ramses' actions seem to personify his love for his wife--on the level of Solomon's song to his dark lover or the exquisite Taj Mahal in India. However El also recognizes the historical inaccuracies of such quaint interpretations. In this case, Nefertari was only one of five official wives and a glut of concubines. From El's perspective, just one meddling ex-wife can be disastrous. Imagine the plotting between four sanctioned, but scorned, wives and all those wannabes! It boggles the mind.

As they enter Hatshepsut's Temple, shivers raise her nape hairs despite the oppressive morning. "This is early March. Imagine summer here!" Stone complains.

Inadvertently, El's gaze searches the rocky floor for signs of massacre. Either the sun's brutal touch or locals have scrubbed the area clean. She guesses the former. The only modern Egyptians who exert themselves to clean public places are Coptic Christians, the equivalent of India's Untouchables, and they cannot keep up with the trash in Cairo. Still the aftermath of violence remains, a miasma of comprehension and memory. She steps closer to Stone.

"Doesn't have the grandeur of the King's Tombs, does it?" he says.

"How can it? She was only a woman. And Tuthmose III, her stepson, obliterated her from memory. Remember the red granite obelisks in Luxor?"

"The ones sheathed in masonry?"

"Yep. Those were hers until Tuthmose scrawled his hieroglyphs over them. She ruled well for twenty years, then he erased her."

"Yes, but the men's tombs..."

"I prefer open sky like this, don't you? It gives me a greater sense of connection than mountain tunnels." She cranes her neck and pivots.

"I don't know, El. The Pharaohs' paintings..."

"I know, I know. Grinding precious and semi-precious materials to paint onto rock lends glamour. But come on, Stone. Even you have to admit an eggplant-headed guardian doesn't exactly strike fear into your heart."

He laughs. The strong column of his neck triggers a purely sensual response even after a quarter century of marriage. "Leave it to you to notice the murky and truly odd."

"Just call me El the Obscure," she jibes. Bitterness colors her words.

"Too bad the kids couldn't join us," Stone continues.

Not. El thanks all the tomb guardians, the eggplant guy, too, that none of them made this trip. That El enticed their father to travel outside the United States, much less to a Muslim land, yielded months of references to her evil influence, their sly knives aimed at her back.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

Why Song of Solomon comes yet again to mind mystifies her. It strikes a heart chord--like Hatshepsut's Temple.

Long ago, as a young archeology student working two jobs while taking community college courses, El would have considered committing any number of crimes for this trip. Yet Stone has made it happen. His sons spurned his generosity, having imbibed racism at their mother's breast. Ah, Layla, Stone's adulterous wife of seven years. The woman's physique reminds El of mother archetypes--round and hung with breasts to feed the world. In other words, the opposite of El's efficient planes. Once again, she thanks the godesses for his sons' xenophobia.

"When we get back, we'll have to have the kids over. El, you can make ethnic dishes to set the mood." Stone is nothing if not magnanimous.

Molten rock presses her throat as she pictures her lovingly prepared meals gulped without thank-you or by your leave. Locusts would be more circumspect. "Or we can order pizza."

Her husband chuckles. "You're a real card, El."

She tilts her head to get a better view of Osiris, multiples of whom line Hatshesut's Temple as pillars. One winks in the dazzling sun. "Not really. You see, Stone, I'm done with them."

The sun beats the god's profile to a dull glow before her husband asks, "Done with whom?"

"Your sons and their meanness." She moves into the shadows for a closer look at the relief.

"What are you talking about?"

She meets his confused look. "Oh, you know. The dull jibes, the social cuts, their treatment of me as a second-class citizen. Those things. And I'm most certainly not cooking for them. Talk about casting pearls before swine."

"Now El, you know they're just being loyal to their mother..."

"You mean the unfaithful wife who made you question their paternity? Even as you slogged through the jungles of Viet Nam? The one who dropped her babies at our doorstep and only claimed them long enough to receive child support? Despite them living with us most of the time." Regardless of how much I loved them and wanted to be loved in return?

"Well, damn, El, what bee got under your bonnet?"

"Blame it on Ra, god of the sun, if you want. However, please don't dismiss this as another feminine aberration. You've sloughed off these grown men's spitefulness as boys-being-boys and loyalty-to-good-old-mom. I'm your wife, Stone, and have been for over twenty-five years. I've honored you and been faithful as an old hound. Now I'm telling you I'm done with being a scapegoat for your sons. And be warned, I'm not letting you off so easily anymore."

At his mystified look she shakes her head. "Look at where we are? Have you taken in nothing of Hatshepsut and her history? Her stepson mutilated her shrines, her statues and her reliefs, despite her ruling well and justly."

"So that's what this is about? An ancient tiff between a mother and stepson?"

"No. You've heard nothing I've said. This is about love, Stone. And the loyalty of a husband to his loving wife. I'm tired of being treated as a Pharaoh's wife, half-sized and never equal. I want what Nefertari had. No more being stoic."

Looking askance, he says, "Okay."

She dips her head and absorbs not Hatshepsut, but Nefertari. Serene, brilliant strategist, and to her husband, pleasing above all others. Of course, Nefertari passionately loved Ramses, too. El lifts her head and catches Stone's quizzical look, then steps toward him. Slipping her arms around his muscular torso, she rises onto her toes to plant a lingering kiss on his lips. After the briefest of hesitations, he brings her closer.

When he comes up for air, Stone asks, "How much more do we need to see before heading back to the hotel?"

In answer, she offers an enigmatic smile and leads him deeper into the temple. Of course, he follows.