The Dig at Wadi Anqa

The map arrived on Mara's desk at the Survey of Egypt on a Tuesday morning in September 1933, rolled in a cardboard tube, with a label on the end in Ibrahim Fikri's small square hand: Gilf Kebir, reconnaissance sheet, 1932. A. Bassett. For checking.

The Survey of Egypt lived in a long, cool, high-ceilinged building at Giza, on the west bank of the Nile, a mile from the pyramids, which on clear mornings could be seen from the drawing-office windows, standing up out of the haze like three folded sheets of brown paper. Inside, the building smelled of ink and dust and pencil shavings and the sweet, faintly sour smell of the ammonia used for copying plans. There were rooms full of long sloping drawing tables, where draughtsmen in shirtsleeves and tarbooshes bent over sheets of linen with ruling pens; rooms full of instruments in glass cases, theodolites and levels and chronometers and plane tables, polished and labelled like museum pieces; rooms full of maps in wide shallow drawers, every inch of Egypt that had ever been measured, from the Delta, where every field and canal was drawn to the yard, out to the Western Desert, where the sheets grew emptier and emptier until they were nothing but white paper with a few dotted lines across them and the words, in careful capitals, UNSURVEYED.

Mara was twenty, and had been at the Survey for a year and a half, first at the training school and then in the computing office, working out other people's observations: long columns of angles and logarithms and corrections that ended, if you had done them properly, in a single pair of numbers that said exactly where on the earth a man with a theodolite had once stood. Mara was good at it. Mara liked the moment when the columns came out, when all the small errors cancelled and the numbers clicked into place like a key in a lock. But Mara had never once been to the places the numbers described. The farthest Mara had been into the desert was a picnic at Saqqara.

Ibrahim Fikri came in at ten, as he always did, in his grey suit and his tarboosh, with his spectacles in his breast pocket and a cup of coffee in his hand. He was the senior surveyor of the Desert Survey office, forty-one years old, small, neat, quiet, with a dry voice and a way of looking at a column of figures as if it had told him a joke only he could hear. He had mapped more of the Western Desert than any man alive except two, and he had trained Mara at the school, and he was the only person in the building Mara was slightly afraid of.

The Desert office was a small room at the end of the corridor, with one window facing west, and on its wall hung the great mosaic map of the Western Desert, a hundred sheets pasted together on linen, three yards wide, that every surveyor in the building stopped to look at when he passed. Most of it was blank. Down in the far southwestern corner, where Egypt met the Sudan and Libya, near a mountain called Uweinat, there was a large irregular shape drawn in pencil, not ink, because nobody was yet sure of it, with a question mark beside it. That was the Gilf Kebir: the Great Barrier, a plateau the size of Switzerland, which no European had seen until seven years ago, and which no one had yet properly mapped. The old men in the oases said there were valleys in it where the hunters' grandfathers had found water and wild sheep, and some said there was more: a white city, a lost oasis, Zerzura, the place of little birds.

He put down his coffee and unrolled the map on Mara's desk, and weighted the corners with an inkwell, a stapler, a brass protractor and his own spectacles case, and stood back.

"Look at it," he said. "Tell me what you see."

Mara looked at the margins first, because that was where the truth of a map lived.

There was a title block, in the lower right, in the same neat hand: Gilf Kebir, eastern side. Reconnaissance traverse, October 1932. Sun compass and odometer, controlled by astronomical fixes. Scale 1:500,000. A. Bassett, Capt. There was a table of the fixes: three of them, at three points along the route, each with a latitude and longitude given to the second of arc, and a note that each had been observed with a theodolite on stars. There was a scale bar. There was a north arrow, beautifully drawn, with a little feathered tail. And there was a note, in pencil, at the very bottom, that was not in Bassett's hand at all, but in Fikri's small square one:

Traverse closes suspiciously well. Check.

It was underlined twice, which for Ibrahim Fikri, who never underlined anything, was the same as shouting.

Mara looked up.

"Suspiciously well?"

"Three fixes," said Fikri, "on a car traverse of seven hundred kilometers, in country nobody has ever measured. And the dead reckoning agrees with every one of them to within half a kilometer." He took a sip of his coffee. "I have been doing this for twenty years. When a junior brings me a traverse that closes perfectly, I do not congratulate him. I ask him which numbers he changed. Mine never agree to within half a kilometer. Nobody's do. The desert is not so kind."

"The expedition leaves from Dakhla in five weeks," said Fikri. "Dr. Edith Rawdon, of the university in London, is leading it; she is looking for the camps of the people who lived on the Gilf seven thousand years ago, when there was grass there, and lakes, and cattle. Captain Bassett will come, because he knows the way. The Survey is sending me, to begin the proper triangulation of the eastern side." He paused. "And the Survey is sending one junior surveyor, to carry the instruments, and keep the field books, and work out the fixes at night, and check this sheet against the ground, line by line, point by point, every day."

Mara stared at him.

"Me?"

"You have the best computing in the office," said Fikri. "And you have never been to the desert, so you have no bad habits yet." He began to roll up the map. "It will be hot in the day and cold at night. There will be sand in everything you own, including your teeth. You will see places no surveyor has ever seen. And you will learn, I hope, the most important thing a surveyor ever learns."

"What's that?"

Fikri slid the map into its tube, and capped it, and handed it to Mara.

"That the ground is always right," he said. "The map is only somebody's opinion of it."

Mara carried the tube home that evening on the tram across the river, through the crowds and the noise and the dust of Cairo, with the call to prayer going up from a hundred minarets as the sun set red behind the pyramids, and the lights coming on along the Nile. That night, by the lamp in her room, Mara unrolled the sheet on the floor and knelt over it for a long time, tracing the dotted line of the cars with a fingertip, across the empty white, to the great hand of the plateau, and along its edge to the valley the Captain had named Wadi Anqa, after the phoenix of the old stories.

Somewhere out there, past the last lights of Cairo, past the oases, past the dunes, the ground was waiting, exactly as it had always been, not caring in the least what anybody had drawn. Fikri's words went round and round in Mara's head. The ground is always right. Mara found her slide rule and a pad of paper, and began, without quite meaning to, to check the three fixes in the margin against the dead reckoning, out of habit, the way Mara checked everything.

They agreed. Perfectly.

It was such a careful map. Such a beautiful one. Every line in its place.

It never occurred to Mara, that first night, that a map could be beautiful and careful and wrong. Or that somebody might have drawn it that way on purpose.