The Winter Vault Read Online Free PDF

his hand from the hole (like the boy at the dyke) and felt an intense power released, as if a great furnace of sacredness had been opened and the heat of belief was pouring out. An intensity utterly unfamiliar, frightening. Later he remembered what the explorer Johann Burckhardt had said to him – “We have so long forgotten how to be intimate with immensity.” He felt as if the black heat had burned right through him, a wound where now the chill desert wind was rushing – and indeed, when he recovered himself a little, he realized that the air coming from inside the temple was insufferably hot, hotter than a steambath, so hot that later the sweat would run down his arm and through his fingers onto his notebook and Belzoni would have to stop drawing. But now he knew he would have to wait for morning. When he pulled out his upper body, the night wind doused him; instantly, shockingly, the heat froze on his skin.
    He squatted in the sand and looked out toward the river that was becoming almost visible, the sun beginning to crack open on the rim of the hills. It was dawn, August 1, 1817.
    Soon the sun would enter the great painted hall of Abu Simbel for the first time in more than a thousand years.
    From the small hole behind him, the immense roar of silence.

    One day, a blind man appeared in the desert. His dark skin was smooth over his bones, and however old one guessed him to be, he was most certainly older. He wore European trousers and singlet but spoke no European language, only a whispered Arabic, as if he were afraid to be woken by his own voice.
    At the blind man's request, the labourers carefully guided him up the contours of Ramses' powerful calves to the king's thick knees, each the size of a boulder. The old man would not be carried and took his time memorizing the way. After several ascents and descents, he knew his route perfectly, and they let him climb unaided to sit on Ramses' knee. So steady and interested was his blind gaze, a stranger might assume the old man was looking for something in the river, or keeping watch. It made all the imported engineers nervous to see a blind man at that height, but, after the first day, the labourers took no notice.
    The blind man fascinated the stonecutters. The marmisti watched his fingers follow the clues in the rock with professional appreciation. They saw that he never faltered, that he moved with intense slowness and precision. If he moved, he was sure. When Jean first saw him in Ramses' lap, she gasped. How still he sat, how sculpted his face; he looked like a living Horus, the god with the head of a bird. One night she saw him, his singlet shining white, and he was singing. The machinery was loud; he could not be heard, his mouth open in silence. But Jean could tell the blind man was singing because he had closed his eyes.

    Each river has its own distinct recipe for water, its own chemical intimacies. Silt, animal waste, paint from the hulls of boats, soil carried on skin and clothes and feathers, human spit, human hair … Looking out at the river, which at first had astonished Avery with its smallness – the great Nile seemed to him as slender as a woman's arm, incontestably female – Avery was pained to imagine the force with which it would soon be bound, its submission. Each year, for thousands of years, swollen with the waters from Ethiopia, the Nile offered her intense fertility to the desert. But now this ancient cycle would abruptly end. And end, too, the centuries-old celebrations of that inundation, inseparable from gods and civilization and rebirth, an abundance that gave meaning to the very rotation of the earth.
    Instead there would be a massive reservoir reshaping the land – a lake “as large as England” – so large that the estimated rate of evaporation would prove a serious misjudgment. Enough water would disappear into the air to have made fertile for farming more than two million acres. The precious, nutrient-saturated silt that had given