Pharai
The smell of damp earth, crushed lotus blossoms, and rich Nile silt was the first clue that I was no longer in the back of the armored vehicle, nor was I lying on the starch-crisp sheets of our hotel suite in Zagros.
I opened my eyes to a sweeping sky painted in bruised purple, burnished gold, and twilight copper. Beneath my bare feet, cool, dark river mud oozed between my toes, and the rhythmic, ancient lap of water against towering papyrus reeds hummed in the quiet air. The Nile stretched out before me—not the modern, heavily dammed, trash-strewn river I had surveyed with ground-penetrating radar equipment and measuring tapes, but the pristine, untamed artery of life as it had existed three thousand years ago under the god-kings.
I'm dreaming, I thought, the sharp, relentless edge of my academic mind asserting itself even through the haze of sleep. A lucid vision. A divine intrusion.
