Jane Louise Curry, Children's Books Author
  A Margaret K. McElderry Book, Simon & Schuster On Saturday afternoon, Tee tracks down her father and brother at The Downstairs Attic, and learns that they and Mr. Witt actually have found a treasure room of sorts in the basement, and identified an old Chinese chest there as the "Chin. Box" mentioned in Great-uncle Sebastian's will In it are newspaper-wrapped gifts, those for some relatives comical (to anyone but the recipient), the rest odd but welcome—except for Tee's. Hers, labeled For Leticia, my Shabti Box, is an odd painted box which contains the painted wooden figure of a girl or young woman with her arms crossed on her chest, and wrapped like a mummy from the waist down. Tee judges it a rotten gift for someone too old for dolls. School begins, and since Tee has already decided to hate it, she does. She uses every ploy she can think of to avoid expending effort—better to fail for not trying than to show she can't do well. Worst of all is P.E. class, where she is (as always) either last or nearly last chosen for teams. One night, for a history assignment on ancient Egypt, Tee'syounger brother, Charles, asks to borrow her shabti box for his special report on hieroglyphics. Comparing the inscription with the list of phonetic hieroglyphics he tracks down, he can spell out the sound of the original, even though he has no idea what it means. He reads the inscription out for Tee, but she is not interested. Not then... But odd things begin to happen. When after supper she vanishes upstairs, her father calls to remind her that it is her turn to dry the supper dishes, too. Coming," Tee calls, but she takes her time. Then, from the downstairs hall, she sees her parents and Charles in the living room, but is puzzled to hear the clink and rattle of dishes and cutlery from the kitchen. On peering in, she is astonished to see a chunky figure in a long skirt and strange but oddly familiar hairdo and busy at the sink... The shabti? When Tee returns to her bedroom, the shabti is there before her, back on the shelf and definitely only a small wooden figure, but with that same distinctive hairdo and ornament. With the help of an encyclopedia, Tee learns a bit more than Charles has told her, and tries a small experiment. "Here I am," is the shabti's answer ( but in ancient Egyptian). Beginning the next day, Tee explores ways to exploit her magical windfall... "It's a classic kids' fantasy.... an intriguing story that works on several levels. There's plenty of suspense and mystery for action fans, as well as facts for budding Egyptologists." --BOOKLIST Reader Review: "I enjoyed this fast-paced book. The author puts you inside the head of Tee Woodie so you can grasp what she thinks and feels. The book has a wonderful ending that leaves readers satisfied. --Sixth-grader Claire F., in the GRAND RAPIDS PRESS  (plus a short bit to set the scene) ...Even before she pulled off the last layer of newspaper, she could tell that it was a box, and probably made of wood. “Let us see,” Charles said eagerly. “Hold it up.” Held up in the flashlight’s beam, the box glowed with color: red and white, black, yellow, green and blue. It was about eleven inches tall and five inches square—with longer corner pieces painted to represent columns. The feet of the columns were feet for the box, and their tops were painted to look like palm trees. On three sides, stiff figures of big-eyed women in pleated skirts stood with one leg planted ahead of the other. On the fourth was a woman with a cat’s head. A curved lid with a small knob fitted between the column tops. “Look at that!” Mr. Woodie was surprised. “It’s Egyptian. Isn’t it?” Mr. Witt bent close to peer at it. “It’s not only Egyptian,” he said. “It looks old. Really old. It just might be the real thousands-of-years-old McCoy.” Tee gave a scornful sniff. “It looks like a fancy pencil box to me,” she said. Charles was excited. “Open it up, Tee. See what’s inside.” “Yes, yes, open it,” their father and Mr. Witt echoed. Tee sniffed. “It’s probably empty.” But she wiggled the lid free. A little puff of wood dust rose up to glitter in the dimming beam from the flashlight. “There’s something,” she said, and tilted the opening to the light to make sure the something wasn’t a spider’s web. “Oh boy, it’s a wooden doll,” she said flatly as she pulled out a figure rolled in a square of plastic bubbled wrap. “Oh-wow-oh, how great, how dorkish. Exactly what I wanted.” The doll in her hand was the carved figure of a wide-eyed black-haired girl or young woman. Her stiff, black hairdo was topped by a yellow cap with wings down the sides and a peak at the front like a bird’s beak. Her arms were crossed on her chest. From the waist down to her feet she was carved all in one piece, with painted-on white mummy wrappings. Peculiar squiggles and odd little figures of birds and men were drawn in black ink across the white wrappings in rows. The wide, black-rimmed eyes stared up at Tee like an unblinking cat’s. Mr. Witt rubbed his chin. “She may be a tomb figure, part of some woman’s coffin furniture. Buried with her.” “Ee-yew!” Tee wrinkled her nose and thrust the figure back into the shabti box. “A dead doll.” The flashlight gave one last tremble of light and winked out into pitch darkness. “Can we go home now?” Tee demanded. CHAPTER THREE On Tuesday, three weeks and three days later, Tee sat on a bench at the side of the athletic field with other girls in her class. She held her breath. Mrs. Amery’s whistle had shrilled, and names began flying through the air the moment the P.E. teacher barked out, “Red and Blue team captains, choose teams—quick time!” “Robles! “Tayler!” “Purdy!” “Salvatierra!” The names shot out, rapid-fire, then slowed as the lineup on the benches dwindled to eight, and then seven. The first week, because Tee was new, the captains chose her fifth or sixth, but by the second week she was down to next-to-next-to-next-to last. If she didn’t get called soon—this very minute—she probably would be stuck in The Awkward Squad for good. That was what loud, cheerful Mrs. Amery called the three usual last-chosens, Audra Penny, Anjali Gupta, and Katie Schumacher. Audra, the math whiz, wore thick-lensed glasses and peered through them like a nearsighted mole. Anjali Gupta was the prettiest and probably the nicest girl in school, but the clumsiest, too. Katie could play the piano better than any of the teachers, but she was too timid to kick a dust bunny, let alone a soccer ball. “Boyce!” “Simmons!” “Um—Penny.” Tee’s heart sank as Audra fastened on safety glasses and ran out onto the field. Welcome to the Awkward Squad, she told herself. Her cheeks burned. “O.K.—Gupta.” “Tee Woodie, then.” “C’mon, Schumacher, you’re a Blue,” Mrs. Amery yelled. At least it was the last period of the day. And not the worst one, Tee thought. At home, after school, Tee sat at the table that was her bedroom desk and banged her head up and down on her social studies book. If only it could be Friday! If only it were time for Christmas vacation! If only it were next June already. June, and not hot. The shabti box sat forgotten in the closet behind her, at the back of the top shelf. Tee had wanted to give it to the auction-house experts from Phoenix who came to value Great-uncle Bass’s treasures. Her parents had been firm. “You can show it to them, but no, you can’t sell Uncle Bass’s gift. You’re going to keep it,” they said. The man and woman from the auction house, when they came, offered to take the entire contents of the treasure room to sell at auction. They told an astonished Mr. Woodie that such a sale might bring well over a hundred thousand dollars. Charles showed them his odd machine. To his delight, it turned out to be a kind of hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old calculator called a De Colmar Arithmometer. “Sort of a prehistoric computer,” Charles had explained happily. Right then and there he decided to switch from collecting beetles to collecting calculators. “Besides,” he said, “there are just too many kinds of beetles. Did you know there are five thousand kinds of cockroaches? I would’ve liked to have a Hissing Cockroach from Madagascar, but the dead ones can’t hiss. This is better.” Tee was determined to dislike the shabti and its box, and decided at the last minute to return it to her closet without showing it to the experts. If she couldn’t sell it, knowing that it was worth a hundred dollars or so would be like having a fancy box of fudge you weren’t allowed to eat. Better not to know. That was weeks ago, soon after school started, and Tee was every bit as miserable at the Oasis Wells Middle School as she had feared. First, she had found herself sentenced to beady-eyed Mrs. Chatto’s homeroom. Worse than that, Charles had been allowed to skip a year—for the second time since second grade—so that now he and Tee were in the same grade. He didn’t gloat, and he was in a different homeroom and different classes, but it was still humiliating. In the hallway, Tee pretended that she didn’t know him. She was dark-eyed and dark-haired, and darker-skinned, and he had their Grandma Smitz’s light brown hair and greeny-brown eyes, so ignoring him worked, but only for a week or two. Then everyone caught on. To make Tee even more bad-tempered, Charles, in spite of being a new student and class peewee, was elected to the student council. Tee decided that she was cursed. She had Mrs. Raymond, better known as “The Spider Woman,” for math. Mrs. Raymond dressed all in black and was almost skeleton-thin, but the nickname came because of her way of gliding up behind and pouncing on students who doodled on their papers or wrote down wrong answers. “HAH!” she said, and tapped a long, purple fingernail on the guilty paper. At least once every math class, it seemed, her unexpected “HAH!” sounded in Tee’s ear. Having nice, good-looking Mr. Duran for history wasn’t any better. Every single time he asked her a question in class—every single time—she gave the wrong answer or had to say, “I don’t know.” It was a curse. So was Mr. Duran’s homework assignment for Thursday. Tee lifted her head to stare at the sheet of paper. (1) Read Chapters 5 through 7, it read. She had done that, but the only fact that stuck in her head was that Ancient Egypt had lasted for five thousand years. Part (2) was Write a half-page report in your own words to answer and to explain one of the following questions: (a) Why Did the Ancient Egyptians Want the River Nile to Flood Every Year? (b) What are Hieroglyphics? (c) Did the Egyptians worship many gods, or just one? (d) Were all of the pharaohs of Egypt Egyptians? A whole half page? She looked at what she had written: “The ancient Egyptians wanted the Nile River to flood so that they could grow crops on the river banks.” What else was there to say? That was it. Period. She chewed on her pencil for a while and then began again on a new sheet of paper. “The ancient Egyptians lived in ancient Egypt, where it hardly ever rained. They wanted the Nile River to flood up over the river banks so that they could plant their crops on the river banks that were flooded.” It was longer, but still was nowhere near half a page. Even if she stretched out her handwriting, it wouldn’t be close. A knock at the door made her jump. Charles stuck his head in without waiting for an answer. “Tee? Can you help with my history report?” Tee dropped her pencil in surprise, and bent to pick it up. Charles? Asking for help? She straightened and shrugged, hiding her pleasure. “Sure, I guess.” “I’ve decided to write about hieroglyphics,” Charles announced as if it were the News of the Day. He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I found a whole book on the Egyptian language in Great-uncle Bass’s library, but I need some hieroglyphics to look up in it. Can I borrow the doll in your Shabby Tiddlywinks box?” “Oh.” Tee’s cheeks turned pink. She might have known he wouldn’t be asking for help-help. “I guess so. It’s up on the closet shelf. Behind the shoeboxes with my china shoes.” The little china shoes were a collection Grandma Smitz had started for her and added to every birthday and Christmas. Tee secretly liked them even though they were so “girly” that they crossed the line into dorky. She only put them out when Grandma came to visit. “Are you going to take it in to class?” she asked Charles in a nastily sugary voice. “That’s so sweet. Just like first-grade show and tell. But what if the writing only says something dumb like, ‘I’m Dolly and I belong to Whosis, and we live at Number Two Pyramid Street?’ Bo-ring.” Charles shrugged. “I’d make it into a joke, then. It’d still tell how hieroglyphics work.” He hesitated. “Maybe I’ll just copy them down. I don’t need to take the box and the doll to class.” He leaned over to look at her paper. “Um—can I use your other chair for a step stool?” “Oh, go ahead,” Tee grumbled. “Get the silly box, and let me finish my report.” Charles’s glasses slipped down again as he straightened. “You could say why they couldn’t grow stuff on the riverbanks unless they had a flood every year,” he suggested. He dragged the chair into the closet and climbed up onto it. “You could say what they grew. And you could tell about the canals for irrigation and all that. That’s in Great-uncle Bass’s old encyclopedia.” “I know. I was going to. I only just started, Mister Know-it-all.” Tee snatched the chair back after he jumped down with the painted box, and followed to bang the door shut behind him. “I was going to,” she grumbled as she sat down and turned back to the beginning of Chapter Five. After school on Wednesday, Tee walked the three blocks to the Public Library. At a little after five o’clock she checked out three creepy-sounding titles, then walked the block and a half to Look and Listen! to catch a ride home with her father when the shop closed. At home, she headed straight for her room, sat down at the table, and tried again to think about the River Nile. She chewed on her pencil. Thinking was hard with The Ghost and Ginger Nye and Jessica Jackson and the Ruby Mirror of Rahjastan and The World Under the Windy Mountains beaming “Readme!readme!readme!” messages from her backpack. The temptation was hard to resist, but her Nile paragraph was due tomorrow, and she had math and English homework, too. She put in a bit about the farmers growing grain, and flax for making linen, on the riverbanks. What were the other things Charles told her to put in? He had named two things, and she needed just two more sentences—if she rewrote the paragraph and slanted her writing far enough sideways. Two more sentences ought to bring it right to the middle of the page. An hour later, Charles bounced back in with the shabti box. He flapped some papers at Tee. “Tee-sha? Here’s your dolly back, and I found them all!” “All what?” She slipped The Ghost and Ginger Nye under her social studies book as she straightened. “All the hieroglyphs. What else? Some are like pictures that mean words, but the others are sounds. Sort of an alphabet without any real vowels, but there are sounds like—” He looked at the first paper. “Like yeh and wd or whatever. I’ll read you what I think the writing on the doll says, O.K.?” “No,” Tee said. “I’m trying to work. Just put the stupid box back and go away.” “No, look, it’s really cool writing.” Charles spread the paper out in front of her and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Look. These are all signs that stand for letters. These letters right below are what the writing on your shabti says.” Tee sighed and barely glanced at the alphabet sheet. On the second sheet, what she saw was:  "Ee-oo shabti pen, irry pistoo mer Ast sat perah Tiye, rekkat is neb mertim netter something-er iment makoo ketty ten. Si petten renoo neb something mertim makoo ketty ten." “Great. So, what does it mean?” Charles shrugged. “How should I know? I only have to explain how hieroglyphics work to make Egyptian words. I don’t need to look them up in English.” He set the box on top of the bookshelves, and left. Tee hardly noticed. She had gone back to staring at her own paragraph. Two more sentences. She would never ask Charles, that was sure. With a groan, she gathered up her book and notebook and pencil and went along the hall to Great-uncle Bass’s library to find the encyclopedia. Unless Charles had highjacked it into his own room, it was somewhere among the dusty books on the dusty library shelves. To Tee’s surprise, the dust was gone. Charles’s work, probably. Their mother hadn’t had time to tackle the library. The house was so large, and Great-uncle Bass had fired his housekeeper months before he died, so there was a lot to clean. Disgustingly perfect Charles could be a mega-pain in the behind, but every once in a while he was useful. The family’s new computer was set up on the long table, and the volumes of Great-uncle Bass’s old Blackett’s Encyclopedia stood beside it in their own low bookcase on wheels. Tee was wading through the small print of the encyclopedia entry under Nile, River when her father’s call rang up from the front hall. “Princess? Tee? Your mother says to remind you you’re the kitchen helper today. Time to come down and set the table!” “Coming!” Tee called absentmindedly. At what sounded like a mumbled echo of her answer, she looked up, startled. “Coming,” she called again, and listened, but heard nothing. She shrugged, and started reading again from The inundation brought rich, black silt, where her finger marked the place. On a piece of scrap paper she wrote down "rich, black silt" and "irrigation channels," enough to give her two or three more sentences. When she returned the [M-O] volume to its bookcase, her hand hesitated for a moment over the [S-T-U] volume and then pulled it out. Not that she really cared (she told herself), but since she was there and the encyclopedia was there, she might as well look up the word shabti. The short entry under Shabti read: The shabti (or shawabti or ushabti is a half-mummy figure of wood, stone, or faience, usually five to eight inches tall, that was placed in a tomb to accompany and serve the deceased into the Afterlife. The custom of providing a shabti for the pharaoh originated during the period of the Middle Kingdom, and later they came to be used in the tombs of nobles and commoners. In life, even the nobles and the wealthy were required by Pharaoh to contribute their labor to such projects as plowing the fields or maintaining the irrigation systems, and they sent servants in their places. It was expected that the same sort of labor would be needed in the Afterlife. Some shabtis are shown holding the tools for specific jobs; others may have been meant as all-purpose substitutes for their masters or mistresses. The shabti spell, written either on the shabti or the coffin, when spoken orders the magical figure to perform the labors as required. The next thing Tee knew, the old dinner gong that hung in the front hallway went bong-bong-bong! She jumped up in alarm. The table—she hadn’t set the table! Flinging the door open into the hallway, she raced out and down the wide stairs. If there wasn’t time even to get the napkins out—well, her mother never got angry, only disappointed, but somehow that was worse. Tee dashed through the old-fashioned double-wide doorway to the dining room, and saw to her surprise that the table was set already. Her father was filling the water glasses. Her mother came in from the kitchen with a steaming baking dish of what looked like lasagne, to set it down on the brass trivet beside her place. Charles—surprise, surprise--was already seated, and rearranging his knife and spoon. Mrs. Woodie reached for a serving spoon. “Thanks for setting the table, Tee, honey, even if you did forget the forks. I like the flowers, and it’s nice to use Great-uncle’s good silverware once in a while.” Tee stared, baffled, first at her mother, and then at the table. A knife and spoon lay crosswise on each plate. A spray of white yarrow and a small cluster of pink spider flowers from the long-neglected garden lay on each side. More blossoms floated in a bowl in the middle of the table. Tee slid a suspicious look at Charles first, and then her father, but both wore innocent smiles. “I’ll—I’ll get the forks,” Tee said. She wondered which of them had played Good Fairy. The forks, when she found them, were still badly tarnished, but no one seemed to mind. The lasagne was so good though, and the apple pie that followed it, that she forgot to ask who really had done her job. She forgot about more than that. She was in her bedroom, erasing her third try at solving the nastiest of the math problems the Spider Woman had assigned, when her mother’s call floated up the stairs. “Tee? Haven’t you forgotten the other half of your job? These dishes aren’t going to wash and dry themselves.” Tee sighed, closed her eyes, and dropped her forehead onto the math book. Raising it again, she groaned out loudly, “I’m co-o-oming!” In the same instant, behind her, a strange, distant voice said, “Maku keti ten.” Tee froze, then snapped, “Charles, you cut that out!” She turned. No one was there. No one was there, and the bedroom door was closed. When she snatched it open to look out, the upstairs hall was empty. The old house was not cold, but Tee shivered. It was the house, she told herself. Anyone would start imagining things in a big old stone house with corner turrets like a castle and creaking floors and spiders spinning new webs as fast as you knocked the old ones down, and with two-or-three-hundred-year-old paintings of beady-eyed people as spooky as ghosts watching you from dark corners. Charles wasn’t in his room. His books and schoolwork were already packed neatly into his backpack ready for tomorrow, so he was probably downstairs watching Mastermind, or something even brainier, with their parents. Tee had five math problems left to do, but even dishwashing sounded better than being upstairs alone. She pushed the question sheet away and went down. From the hallway, Tee took a quick look through the living room’s open double doors. Three heads were silhouetted above the back of the sofa and an armchair. The television flickered and chattered away. Tee headed down the hall toward the kitchen door behind the stairs, but stopped with her hand on the door. The clink-clink of silverware, the tink-tink of glasses and clatter of dishes sounded busily on the other side. If her mother was washing up the dishes, who was the third person in the living room? Tee opened the door a crack, and peered through it. The figure standing at the sink with her back to Tee, was a stranger. Her movements were oddly jerky, so that the plates and glasses clinked and clattered against each other. She was dressed in a short-sleeved white midriff blouse and a long, pleated white skirt, and she wore leather sandals, and bracelets of bright beads on her upper arms. A cap shaped like a golden bird with bright wings covered the top of a mass of black hair so big that it looked like a wig. A small square of plastic bubbled wrap stuck to the back of her skirt.  A J'ai Lu publication. Illustration: Olivier Tossan   Many times when I've been in the British Museum in London, I've made a detour through the Egyptian mummy rooms, both to see the mummies in their brightly decorated coffins, and to enjoy the crowds of schoolchildren buzzing around them in fascination. Then, a few years ago, the rooms were closed and later re-opened with new glass cases and newly-arranged displays. I had seen the posters announcing this, but it was weeks later when I suddenly thought, in the middle of doing something else, "I must go take a look at the new Egyptian Rooms." The very first thing 'new' that I spied was a wall case full of familiar-looking shabtis, with an explanation of the magical powers they were supposed to have-- something I hadn't known before. I knew at once that the seed for a story had been planted, and when I saw the brightly-colored shabti boxes, I knew that the title was going to be The Egyptian Box. So I set out to learn more...   An offering figurine from an Egyptian tomb. Private magicians were paid to use magic to ward off illness, drowning, man-eating lions or crocodiles, hunger, enemies—anything their clients feared. They would have used magical spells (and common sense). Magic was important to doctors, too. When the cause of a sickness was not clear from the patient’s symptoms, ancient Egyptians blamed other causes: punishment by the gods, revenge by the dead, or the hatred of enemies. Illnesses like these they treated by spells, and perhaps also by private rituals complete with dancing, music, wine and incense. King or noble or worker, in death each Egyptian was seen on his or her way to the Afterlife with the help of magic. It might be only a magical amulet on the body and a friend’s ritual prayer. The send-off was more elaborate for foremen, teachers, scribes, government officials, or priests, and most elaborate of all for nobles, princes and princesses, and kings and queens, whose tombs bore magical scenes and spells on the walls. Their coffins were painted inside with guides to the Underworld and spells to help them on their way. Spells were painted on the sarcophagus inside the coffin, too, and an amulet was placed on the mummy’s chest before it was wrapped. For pharoahs and others who were rich and powerful, help would be provided for the Afterlife in the form of small models which would come to life when they were needed: models of fishing or funeral ships with their crews, bakeries with bakers, a brewery with brewers brewing beer, grain storehouses, and scenes with butchers, carpenters, brickmakers, or weavers. Many tombs contained a pair of female offering-carriers with baskets on their heads who may be carrying magical food to the dead. Most interesting of all the magical tomb servants are the shabtis. You can read about them below. Egyptians saw magic everywhere. They chose colors and jewels for their good-luck powers. Judges sometimes used oracles to discover the truth in court cases. The ancient Egyptians believed that anything in this life or the Afterlife could be changed—or acquired, or kept from changing—if you could use the right sort of magic.   At first, beginning in the time of the Middle Kingdom, shabtis were provided only for the pharaohs, but in time the fashion of having shabtis became popular, and they were placed in the tombs of nobles and commoners as well. In his time in this world, every Egyptian, even the noble and the rich were required by Pharaoh’s law to provide their labor for such yearly duties as plowing and sowing the fields or keeping the irrigation systems in good repair, and they sent their laborers to do the work in their places. Since they believed that the Afterlife was much like this life, they expected that the same demand for labor would be required of them there. Some shabtis hold the tools for a specific job; others without such tools may have been meant as substitutes for any and every task required of their masters or mistresses. (I used a computer program to remove the Petrie shabti's tools from the hands on the image above, in order to show the cover artist what she would look like, but she was my very first try at doing computer graphics, which is why she is so messy!)  The shabti spell was written either on the shabti’s mummy wrappings or on an inner wall of the coffin and it was meant, when spoken aloud, to “activate” the magical shabti-servant—to order it to perform all of the tasks assigned to to its master. The shabti which Tee Woodie finds in her shabti box has its spell written on its mummy wrappings, and that spell translates as: Oh, this shabti, If Princess Tiye is detailed for any work that is to be done yonder in the netherworld, or an unpleasant task is imposed upon her there, Here I am, you shall say. If you are detailed at any time to serve there, Here I am, you shall say. Tee’s shabti, from the tomb of an Eighteenth Dynasty Princess Tiye, is, so to speak, “switched on” by Charles's recitation of the spell.  In THE EGYPTIAN BOX, an ancient Egyptian fairy tale named “The Green Stone Fish” is mentioned briefly. Here is the story itself, retold from the tale written in hieroglyphics in Ancient Egypt: “The Magician and the Malachite Fish”  Egyptian Hair Ornament When the chief reader was brought him into the king’s presence, Pharoah said to him, “Good Tchatcha-em-ankh, not a one of all these others of my royal household can think of an amusement that will soothe my sorrows and cheer my heavy heart. Can you?” And Tchatcha-em-ankh answered the king, “Indeed, sire, I can, if the Lord of the Two Egypts will go to Pharaoh’s Lake where his royal barge is moored, and order that twenty of the most beautiful young women in his palace be his oarsmen. They should wear garments of beaded network, and their oars be made of ebony wood and banded with gold. The heart of Pharaoh will be filled with gladness at their beauty as they row, and when the leafy thickets of springtime that line the shore and the rich green that blushes across the new-planted fields, will fill his heart with joy at the beauties of his kingdom.” So Pharaoh gave orders that it should be done, and his servants made it so. The royal barge was made ready, Pharaoh and the young women went aboard, the beautiful rowers bent to their work, the sun shone, and the heart of Pharaoh lifted in joy. Then, though he did not see it, the handle of the oar of one of the rowers lifted too high, and caught in her hair. As it did so, it struck the gleaming green stone fish which was tied in her hair for an ornament, and knocked it into the water. The young woman stopped rowing, and all of the others on the rowing benches stopped, too. The barge slowed, and Pharaoh called out from his high seat, “Why are you not rowing?” “Our companion is weeping, and cannot row,” answered the others. So Pharaoh said to the girl who wept, “Why are you weeping and not rowing?” and she answered, “O, great Pharaoh, it is my fish. My new green malachite fish fell into the water.” “Do not weep,” Pharaoh said. “Take up your rowing again, and I will give you another green malachite fish.” But she hung her head and said, “It is my own I want, and not another that looks like it.” Pharaoh thought for a moment, then said to a servant, “Have Chief Reader Tchatcha-em-ankh brought to me.” At once, the chief reader was brought from his seat at the back of the barge, and Pharaoh said to him, “Tchatcha-em-ankh, my friend, I have done as you advised, and my heart has lifted as you said it would. But now, behold, the new ornament, a malachite fish, which hung in the hair of one young woman has fallen into the water. She has stopped rowing to weep for it, and now all have stopped. I asked why she did not row, and when she told me, I said, ‘Row on, and I will give you another,’ but her answer was, ‘It is my own I want, and not another that looks like it’.” Then Chief Reader Tchatcha-em-ankh spoke out secret incantations from his Book of Magic. With them he raised up all the water which was on one side of Pharaoh’s lake and carefully placed it on top of the water on the other side. The lake was twenty feet deep, and after the one half of it had been piled atop the other half, it became forty feet deep. The royal barge dropped foot by foot until it sat on the mud at the bottom of the lake. When Tchatcha-em-ankh the chief reader looked out upon the mud, he spied the malachite fish lying on a potsherd. Leaning out, he picked it up and returned it to its owner. When he had done so, he intoned new incantations from his Book of Magic, and with them lifted the first half of the lake’s water and placed it gently in its former bed so that the water in the lake was everywhere twenty feet deep, as it had been before. And everyone rejoiced. On their return to the palace, Pharaoh made a feast for all his royal household, and he rewarded Tchatcha-em-ankh, his chief reader, with gifts of jeweled ornaments and beautiful cloth. In truth, this is the wonder that happened in the time of the Pharaoh Seneferu, the truth-speaker, and it is only one of the marvels that the chief reader performed. Book excerpt, copyright 2002 by Jane Louise Curry, and cover art copyright 2002 by Robert Crawford, used by permission of Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division. Page text copyright 2003 by Jane Louise Curry. |
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