Golden Sands The party was on the hotel terrace, and the terrace was full of people who had money and people who wanted their money and people who were pretending to have money when they didn't but were very good at pretending, which in 1924 was essentially the same thing as having money. Jack Calloway was in the corner. He was not playing music -- he was not anyone's idea of a musician, not anymore. After the Somme, after the mud and the gas and the men who had been standing next to you ten seconds ago and were now pieces of history, the idea of sitting in a corner at a party and watching was not unpleasant. It was, in fact, exactly what a soldier does. Watch. Assess. Survive. He was twenty-five years old and had survived the Somme by what he could only describe as an accident of geography. A shell had landed three feet to his left instead of three feet to his right. Three feet. That was the difference between being a dead man and being a man who stood in corners at parties in Cairo and watched other people dance. Eleanor Vance was at the center of the party. She was twenty-two and wearing a dress that cost more than Jack's annual salary and a smile that cost more than that too. She had been to every party in Newport and Palm Beach and Manhattan. She had danced the Charleston until her feet bled and smoked cigarettes until her eyes were red and laughed at jokes she didn't find funny because that is what young women did in 1924 when they were surrounded by men who only wanted two things from them: their laughter or their body. She came to Egypt because her mother said it would do her good to see something old, and because the alternative was another season of being paraded at country club luncheons like a prize thoroughbred. She saw Jack in the corner. He was not dancing. He was not drinking. He was just watching, with the quiet intensity of someone who has seen too much to be impressed by too little. She walked over to him. The terrace was loud -- music from the string quartet, laughter from the dancers, the clink of glasses and the murmur of people saying things they didn't mean. "You're not dancing," she said. "I don't dance at other people's parties." "Why not?" "Because dancing at other people's parties is like saluting someone else's flag. It's fine if you believe in the cause." She considered this. "Do you believe in this cause?" She nodded at the party, at the Egyptian expatriate community, at the whole Egyptomania craze that had swept through high society like a fever since the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. "No," he said. "But I'm here, so I guess I'm fighting for it." "What do you do here, if you don't dance?" "I work for Dr. Pemberton. Cambridge archaeologist. I carry supplies and take photographs and pretend that I understand what he's doing." "Are you an archaeologist?" "I'm an assistant. There's a difference. An archaeologist gets to dig. An assistant gets to hold the brush while the archaeologist digs." She looked at him for a long time. "Can I hire you?" He raised his eyebrow. "To do what?" "To show me the real Egypt. Not the one that exists in cocktail-party conversations about mummies and curses. The one that's actually there." He looked at her. Really looked at her. Beneath the dress and the smile and the perfume, he saw something that reminded him of the men he had served with -- not in the way that men who have been through war look at each other, but in the way that people who are pretending to be something they're not look at other people who are pretending to be something they're not. "What's in it for me?" he said. "I'll pay you." "Everyone pays me. Dr. Pemberton pays me. The British Museum pays me. I want to know what's in it for you." She smiled. It was not the party smile. It was smaller, quieter, more real. "I want to see things that are older than all of this." She nodded at the party. "And I want someone to read the hieroglyphs aloud so I can hear what they sound like in a young American woman's mouth." He almost laughed. Almost. "You can read hieroglyphs?" "I'm studying. My father said women who can read hieroglyphs are unpleasantly intellectual. So I've been studying in secret." Jack felt something shift in his chest. It was a small shift, not dramatic or cinematic, just a small realignment, like a gear slipping into place in a machine that had been grinding improperly for a long time. "Okay," he said. "I'll show you the real Egypt." They spent the next week exploring together. She read the hieroglyphs aloud as he photographed the walls. Her voice was not perfect -- she was still learning, and some of the sounds were awkward in her American accent -- but there was something about the way ancient words sounded in a young woman's mouth that made Jack think, for the first time since the war, that maybe beauty was not just something that existed before the world ended. At the Pyramids, she read the inscription on one of the older tombs. Her voice was steady and clear, and the words fell from her mouth like stones into a well, each one dropping into silence and making a sound that Jack could feel in his chest. When she finished, he said: "You know, most people come to Egypt to see what the dead built. You come to make the dead speak." She looked at him. "Is that wrong?" "No. It's -- it's the only thing that's not wrong." At a dinner party hosted by the British Ambassador, the heating system broke. The Egyptian night was cold, and Eleanor was wearing a dress of thin silk that was beautiful and utterly unsuited to the temperature. She was shivering, and nobody at the party seemed to notice, which is what happens when a woman shivers in 1924 -- people assume it's part of the performance. Jack removed his tweed jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. The Ambassador's wife watched with disapproval. In 1924, an unmarried man giving his jacket to an unmarried woman was not quite scandalous but close enough to make everyone uncomfortable. Eleanor pulled the jacket tighter and said nothing, but her hand stayed on the wool for a long time, and when Jack looked at her, she was looking at him with an expression that was not gratitude and was not coquettish and was not any of the things that women were supposed to look at men with when men did small kindnesses for them. It was recognition. In Luxor, an Egyptian merchant sold them scarves. He called Jack the explorer and Eleanor the lady of the Nile, and Jack bought two. Eleanor said he didn't have to. He said: "I realized something." She said: "What?" He said: "That I want you to remember this place." She wrapped the scarf around her neck and looked at her reflection in a bronze mirror and saw, for the first time in a long time, someone she liked. Tommy, Jack's former soldier comrade, showed up claiming he needed a change of scenery. He was loud and irrepressible and turned every quiet moment between Jack and Eleanor into a comedy routine. But even Tommy, in his obnoxious way, could see that something was happening between them -- something that was not dramatic or cinematic but was, in its own small and steady way, more dangerous than any shell. Eleanor received a letter from her father. The family fortune was in trouble. The stock market was shifting. They might need to cut her off completely. She could marry a wealthy suitor and save them all, but it would be a marriage of convenience, not choice. Jack had been offered a permanent position with Dr. Pemberton's excavation team. He would stay in Egypt for years, buried in dirt and hieroglyphs, rich only in meaning. They stood in the newly discovered tomb, and the torchlight made the walls glow with colors that had not been seen in three thousand years. Eleanor read the inscription aloud, and the archaeologists gathered around gasped, because she was reading it not just correctly but beautifully, and the ancient words in her American mouth made the tomb feel alive, as if the men who had painted it three thousand years ago had been waiting for someone to speak their words back to them. Jack watched her and realized that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen -- not because of her face or her dress, but because she was willing to be herself in a world that wanted her to be an ornament. On the boat to the next site, at dawn, Eleanor was reading the scarf Jack had bought her. Jack was writing a letter to Tommy, telling him that he was going to stay in Egypt, that he was not coming back to America, that he had found something here that was worth staying for. He did not tell Tommy what that thing was. He didn't need to. Eleanor looked up from her reading and smiled. He looked up from his letter and smiled back. The Nile moved beneath them, slow and indifferent and beautiful, and the desert stretched out on both sides, and the sun came up over a country that had seen more civilization than either of them and did not care about either of them at all, and for a moment, just a moment, that was enough. ======================================================================