Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund Read Free Book Online

over
b
squared equals one,” he said, as I watched his lips speak the notation describing the orbit. Then he leaned forward, kissed me lightly on the mouth, and named a tour agency I could contact.
    In the morning I made arrangements to travel and felt glad to escape the scientists. I told Gabriel good-bye in the lobby of the Marriott, though he offered to accompany me to the Cairo airport. When I saw that he wanted to kiss me farewell, I averted my eyes. I’d had enough of kissing. When I looked at him again, he had resumed an expression of friendly amusement. That afternoon I flew to Luxor, as Gabriel suggested, to take a cruise on the Upper Nile. I was glad to be traveling into the mythic past.
    When I settled into the gray, wooden-slat lounging chair on the top deck of the cruise boat, I felt my entire body relax. Beyond the banks of the Nile, the landscape blazed like a mirror. I found it more comfortable to gaze down into the flowing river.
    In my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the Lower Mississippi lay to the south, while the Upper Mississippi had its headwaters in Minnesota, but in Egypt the Lower Nile fanned out in a delta to the north before emptying its waters into the Mediterranean, and the Upper Nile had its roots deep in theheart of Africa. My gaze followed a north-flowing bubble on the river. “Where are you going, and where have you been?” I muttered to the waters of the Nile surrounding the boat. Hadn’t I learned to ask those questions from a nursery rhyme while sitting in my grandmother’s lap? Unlike the muddy Mississippi, the Nile was a ribbon of glorious blue.
    The water seemed to reply to me with a question I both wanted and needed to hear:
Where are
you
going?
it asked. And my answer:
Nag Hammadi,
though I knew it was not a stop on the tour itinerary.
    It was at Nag Hammadi that the outcast books of the New Testament had been found in 1945. Learning of the existence of those rejected gospels had broken the spine of my belief in the Bible as a canon of sacred texts. Sylvia, an elderly neighbor who was also a professor of comparative religions, had enlightened me. “Robbed you!” my mother had said. “Buddha! Enlightenment! You’re nine years old! What can you possibly know of enlightenment? ‘I am the Light of the World.’ Who said that? Do you know who said that?” My skepticism about a God defined as both good and all-powerful began with my grandfather’s cancer and death and my grandmother’s heartrending grief, though it did not break her faith.
    “The name Lucy derives from the word for light,” neighbor Sylvia had said. She kissed me on the forehead. “Even a child can pursue enlightenment.”
    To ensure the safety of tourists from fundamentalist Muslim terrorist attacks on busloads of Western foreigners, heavily armed military guards stood at the perimeter of every attraction: at the Great Pyramids of Giza, at the Sphinx, at the Valley of the Kings, at the High Dam. At one of the attractions, I looked up, saw the ubiquitous soldier with a machine gun at the highest point, and remarked to a fellow traveler that his presence was reassuring. “Not entirely,” the man replied. “The government obviously considers us to be at risk.”
    I rather liked the idea of being at risk. It made me feel more alert.

    The first night we camped, I stretched my body so that it completely filled the cot. That night I enjoyed something like a sense of largesse—maybe it was just my body’s response to the smooth clean sheet below and the pleasant soft whiteness above. I smoothed the sheets with open palms. Egyptian long-staple cotton, I thought happily, and a space that was all mine. In Memphis, beside the Mississippi, farmers had grown huge fields of cotton.
    And when was the last time I had felt exceptionally brave and strong? Independent? In my friendship with other girls, especially Janet Stimson when we were about eleven and rode the city bus to the public library. The crown of childhood