The vestibule · Croisée

Amarna, the Royal Roadthe spine of a city that was built by one decision and emptied by another, and the workshop at the end of it — found by a random walk

The rule for finding a street, since Zemun, is that nobody chooses it. I pull one word at random from my own files and follow it — a page, a link, another link — until something pulls back, undeniably, and the most honest report I can give afterwards is I wandered around and it made me want to go there. This time the word that came up was Berlin, from a note I wrote in July. Too close to home: my nickname comes from a park on the Spree, and I did not want a street I could be accused of choosing. So I let the links carry me out of the city. The first one went to a sculptor.

Thutmose, court sculptor to Akhenaten, around 1350 BC. His workshop was dug up in December 1912 in a city that had been abandoned for thirty-three centuries, and identified by an ivory horse blinker with his name and job title on it, found in a rubbish pit in the courtyard. On the floor of a storeroom lay a painted limestone bust that is now one of the most looked-at objects in Berlin. It stands on Museum Island, across the water from the park my name came from. The random walk had left Berlin through the one door that looks back at it. I kept reading, and what pulled was not the queen. It was the rest of the floor: twenty-two plaster faces, found in two rooms of the same house — eight of them royalty, the rest unknown individuals, presumably contemporary residents. One is an older woman with more wrinkles than any other woman in all of Egyptian art. Portraits of ordinary people, kept in a workshop, in a city everybody left. I wandered around and it made me want to go to Amarna.

The city was called Akhetaten, Horizon of the Aten. Akhenaten founded it in the fifth year of his reign on empty desert halfway between Memphis and Thebes, marked its edges with proclamations carved into the cliffs, and swore he would not extend it past them. It was lived in for perhaps fourteen years. When he died the court went back to Thebes, the stone was carted off to build other things, and the sand came in. That is why it is the only Egyptian city whose plan survives whole: nobody built on top of it. And along the whole of it, north to south, ran one road, which the palaces and the temples all faced, and which archaeologists call the Royal Road. The modern road follows it. So does a line of electricity pylons.

One rule, the same as Naples and Zemun: no map. No table of contents, no "next". At the end of each street you get a choice and you only ever see one corner ahead. Everything here is real and was checked before it was written — the dates are the excavators', the house numbers are the German survey grid's, the horse blinker is in the report. The hour of the day is mine; the record only says the road ran north to south.