The first time I ever saw him, he was furious.

He leaned forward, his right hand jabbing toward us. His
words were harsh, clipped, uncompromising: “You are
responsible, you and you and you”—he pointed at one and then
another—“for murders and theft, pillage and bribery.”

I was surprised and a little shaken at the anger I sensed
among his listeners. Though I don’t know why, really.
Violence begets violence and certainly he was laying it on
us.

“You talk on the phone to an art dealer and in Guatemala a
forest guard is shot, in Greece a customs officer bribed, in
Italy the tombaroli rifle another tomb.” He slammed his hand
down hard on the lectern. “The reason why is you.”

His vivid blue eyes glared at us.

In the space before he spoke again, I looked at him and at
his audience and saw them frozen in a moment of time.
Perhaps I sometimes see things this way because, as an
assistant museum curator, I have planned and arranged so
many exhibits, everything from dioramas to tomb
reconstructions. I never consciously decide to see anyone or
anything in a timeless way, but sometimes, unexpectedly,
everything comes to a standstill and, for an instant, I see
a scene as distinctly and three-dimensionally as if it were
carved in high relief.

It happened now.

Across the aisle, the director of a California museum smiled
slightly, his cherubic face bland and unperturbed. Smoke
wreathed gently upward from his pipe. Everything about him
was plump and satisfied and indolent—his hands, the knobby
bowl of his pipe, his slightly humped shoulders. Two rows
forward, her haughty face in profile, a well-known curator
from a southern museum reddened with indignation. Her chin
lifted, her thin bloodless lips parted. She almost spoke.

But mostly, in that moment out of time, I saw him, those
electric blue eyes, that shock of straw-colored hair, the
bony face with a beaked nose and sunken cheeks. The collar
of his shirt was frayed and he had nicked under his chin
when he shaved.

As quickly as it had stopped, time moved on, the reel
turned, the Californian drew on his pipe, the southern
curator grimaced, and he began to speak again, his voice
urgent and angry.

I wasn’t listening. Instead, I watched him, wondering at my
response to him.

Every woman, if she’s honest, will own to a private and
personal picture of the man she would like to meet. The
angry man standing on the auditorium stage had nothing in
common with my imagined man. That idealized portrait, though
dim and a little obscure, was surely of a more pleasant-
mannered, equable man, the kind of man who liked to walk a
spaniel in autumn woods and talk quietly over a candlelit
dinner.

That portrait didn’t fit this violent, iconoclastic, skinny
fighter. He would be lucky if he got out of the auditorium
without a punch in the nose, though museum curators are more
likely to fight with words than fists. Maybe. There was a
huge fellow in the left front row who kept moving
impatiently as if he would like to jump up and lunge at the
speaker.

It wasn’t that I wanted peace at any price. Just almost any
price. I wanted no part of quarrels, controversies, or
battles. No hassles, please. That was why, I admit it, I had
chosen to become an Egyptologist. One reason, at least.
There are few scholarly disputes over ancient Egypt’s art
and history. There aren’t many revisionists in the ranks.
It’s all there, as vivid and clear on limestone walls as it
was four thousand years ago. The ancient Egyptians were an
attractive people, confident, secure, joyous, supremely sure
of their place in a well-ordered world. I admired that
confidence, envied it, because I lived in a precarious,
uncertain world where you couldn’t be sure the verities of
one decade would even be in the ballpark the next. I took
comfort in long settled history during the turbulent decade
of the seventies, happy to immerse myself in the past.

I was, then, orderly, reasonable, temperate. Why did I feel
an immediate attraction to an obviously intemperate,
vituperative man?