C

by Tom McCarthy

  “Pacorie,” Alby mutters to Serge. “Heaven knows what he’s got with him.”

  “No magnets, I hope!” Falkiner barks, walking over to inspect the rival boxes.

  “Only minuscule ones,” whines Pacorie, casting a hurt look back at him.

  “Magnets play havoc with my compasses,” Falkiner snaps.

  “So: I leave behind the magnets, and you tell this clown to sign the other boîtes for embarkation; is okay?”

  Negotiations rumble on for the next hour or so. Serge introduces himself to the girl. She’s called Laura and must be about twenty-three or -four, like him. She’s been working for Falkiner for six months, she informs him, both in London and here “in the field.”

  “Field?” asks Serge.

  “Desert, delta, bank, whatever,” she corrects herself. “Territory.”

  “You’re heading towards some tomb or other, right?” Serge asks her.

  “Not just one,” she tells him, rubbing her palm against her forehead as she speaks. “Sedment’s an enormous burial site. There are thousands of tombs, all stacked on top of one another. Professor Falkiner’s one of the men who first excavated there. I studied his work at university.”

  “So why’s he going back again?”

  “The layers are-”

  She doesn’t get to finish: Alby’s wandered over and is asking Serge if he’s brought picaridine with him.

  “No: he came on his own. He’s a chemist or something-”

  “No, picaridine: insect repellent. You’ll be needing plenty of it.”

  “Aren’t those mosquito nets?” Serge asks, pointing to a pile of fine-mesh webs folded up on the quayside next to an assortment of mattresses, carpets, blankets, sheets, towels and pillows.

  “Nets don’t catch everything,” Alby tuts in the same ominous tone he used earlier.

  “Oh, look: the boat’s rising again,” Laura says.

  The men turn round once more, and see the white hulk break the surface like some wood-and-metal Aphrodite. Muddy water gushes from her every orifice.

  “Won’t it take a while to dry out?” Serge asks.

  “We don’t leave until tomorrow,” answers Alby.

  “I was told today.”

  “Today’s loading. Where’s your stuff?”

  “I’ve just got this,” Serge says, pointing at the small suitcase by his feet.

  “May as well go home, then; get a last night’s sleep on solid ground.”

  Serge does this. Back in his flat, he shuffles aimlessly through a stack of papers and finds, wedged among them, the small, unused pocket notebook he bought back in Alexandria. He slips this into his jacket: it’ll be where he sets down his thoughts about the suitability or otherwise of Sedment as a site for the parallel mast. Beneath it lies the sheet of paper with “PUDENDUM ADDENDUM” typed across it. It occurs to him that he should send the third and final copy of his détaché dispatch to Widsun: since it seems that no one else is going to read it, it will, indeed, be-as requested-just for him. He digs this out: its print is weak and carbon-smudges cloud the paper’s surface, but it’s legible. He slips the thing into an envelope that he addresses and is just about to seal when he changes his mind. He slides the report out again and, in its place, inserts the Horticultural Society’s illustrated menu-card: the “Metamorphosibus Insectorum,” the sick palisade, the hungry and rapacious grubs and moths that scrape and prod at words and world alike with their blunt carapaces and sharp antennae. Then he seals it and leaves it in his post out-basket, to be picked up and sent tomorrow.

  The dahabia, whose name, Serge learns when he arrives the following morning and sees it painted on the hull, is Ani, casts off just before noon. The tug-pilot who tows it from the quay into mid-river wears a look of blank indifference; the Ani’s crew, too, perform their duties with the same disinterested expression: hoisting the sails, cleating ropes, plying the tiller. They progress at a slight diagonal across the river’s surface-not tacking, since the wind’s behind them, but not following its course directly either: every so often, as they near first one bank, then another, the boom swings languidly across the foredeck as the helmsman brings the boat about. The wind may be behind them, but the current’s not: it runs backwards past the bobbing prow, shunting them constantly to leeward.

  “It’s counter-intuitif,” says Pacorie, noticing Serge watching the flow.

  “What is?” Serge asks.

  “Appellation: Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt.”

  “You’re right,” says Alby, who’s sitting beside them on the deck. “I always wondered why the northern part’s called ‘Lower’ and the lower ‘Upper.’ ”

  “Altitude,” Pacorie explains. “The terrain rises as the country descends from the sea. The river flows from south to north. One time each year it débords, and deposits black silt over the fields. That’s why the land is black-but only in a narrow corridor along the Nile.”

  “A strip,” says Serge.

  “Précisement,” nods Pacorie, approvingly. “Only this strip is cultivated. The silt allows lush marécages with fish and birds on either side the river, and soil that is oxygène-isated, and so good for food. The villages are just above the line of débordage. Then comes hills and desert: no fertile terrain there; no habitations either.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” murmurs Alby. “You’re forgetting the dwellings of the dead.”

  Pacorie thrusts his lower lip out and rolls his forearms upwards in acknowledgement. Steamers chug past them, following the river’s line directly and at more than twice their speed. Watching them go by, Serge is struck by the strange and slightly dizzying sensation that, in their anachronistic sailing boat, they’re somehow drifting leeward in time, too: slipping back-or, more precisely, sideways-in it, losing traction on the present.

  “Heading for Luxor,” Falkiner calls out from midship, pointing at the steamers. “Place is a giant dummy chamber.”

  “What’s a dummy chamber?” Serge asks.

  “It’s a trick,” says Laura, rubbing her forehead again, “used by the pharaohs to fool the plunderers they knew would one day come and disinter their funerary complexes. They’d have a second burial chamber, not the real one, built in a part of the structure that was relatively easy to find, and fill it with a few half-precious things. The thieves, thinking they’d hit the jackpot, would stop digging when they came across it, and the real chamber and its treasures would stay undiscovered.”

  She looks over at Falkiner expectantly, as though awaiting some sign of approval for her annotation. He neither gives nor withholds this, but continues:

  “Draws the tourists to it like so many flies to shit.” Raising his fist at the parasoled and safari-hatted passengers who lean across the steamer’s railings facing their way, he shouts: “Buzz, flies, buzz!” These people, for their part, wave back excitedly, mistaking his hostility for friendliness.

  Falkiner looks like an old sea-dog with his beard. He holds a sextant and a compass, which complete the look. Between bouts of checking the ship’s position against these-or, perhaps, since this act is quite redundant in the circumstances, vice versa-he rails intermittently against the Concession system:

  “Worse than taxi licences in London! Most archaeologists would sooner die than relinquish theirs-and when they do, they’re snapped up by the EES, the Philadelphia Museum or the Institut Français. Your people have a lot to answer for!”

  He points an accusatory finger at the prow-a finger that, due to the boat’s motion, wavers between designating Pacorie and Alby.

  “Whose people?” Pacorie asks. “Mine, or his?”

  “Both of yours!” Falkiner barks back. “Department of Antiquities has consistently favoured the French since Lacau’s headed it.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Alby responds. “Look who’s digging right now: Winlock’s at El-Kurneh; Fisher’s at Asasif; and Carter and Carnarvon-English as you or I, it must be said-are up at Thebes.”

  “Won’t find a single scarab there,” s
coffs Falkiner. “And even if they did, your man has signed away our rights to anything we turn up!”

  “It’s not that simple, as you’re well aware,” says Alby. “The permittee must notify the Chief Inspector of all finds, and the Antiquities Service assume overall jurisdiction of each dig, while still-”

  “Overall jurisdiction? They confiscate the whole lot, and hand it over to the Museum in Cairo, who decide what paltry scraps to toss back to the finder’s national collections.”

  “Isn’t that fair?” Alby asks.

  “Hell, no! The home of Egyptology is London – Berlin too. What’s Cairo got to do with any of this?”

  “Could it not be argued-” Alby starts; but Falkiner roars back at him:

  “Appeasers! Turncoats! Cowards!”

  Towards Serge, Falkiner’s attitude is softer-not that he bothers to learn his name: he calls him “Pylon Man” each time he addresses him:

  “You an engineer then, Pylon Man?”

  “Not at all,” Serge replies. “I studied architecture.”

  “AA?” Falkiner asks.

  Serge nods, squinting against the light reflecting off the water. “Old Theo Lyle still there?”

  “I went to his lectures every morning-well, most mornings.”

  “Theo! We studied together at Cambridge. He still banging on about metopes?”

  “Metopes and triglyphs-absolutely.” Serge tries to recall the other terms that Lyle used in his lectures, but loses these beneath the buzz of half-remembered conversations in Mrs. Fox’s Café, titles of West End musicals, narcotic code-words… “How did you become an archaeologist, then?” he asks Falkiner after a pause.

  “Grew up in Greenwich: used to ride my tricycle across the Prime Meridian, beneath the Royal Observatory. Gave me a sense of measurement and time, I suppose. I’d go around Kent as a teenager, looking for Roman villas, temples, bathhouses, what have you-little knowing there was one two hundred yards from the observatory.”

  “Oh yes,” Serge says. “I was meant to visit that with my class once. Were you involved in excavating it?”

  “I was consulted,” Falkiner replies. “Didn’t like their method, though. More vandalism than curation: coins, vases, tablets and the like were being hauled out as though the place were a house on fire. Wrong way to go about it: you should brush it down inch by inch, notating everything-positions, state of degradation, the lot. Like police detectives going through the scene of a catastrophe.”

  “It is like a house on fire, then,” Serge says.

  “Yes-but the fire’s already happened. Everyone’s dead; the evidence alone is to be salvaged. Same mistake was being made here when I arrived: explorers ripping stuff out of tombs willy-nilly, plundering as fast as they could, rendering artefacts illegible and therefore meaningless. A real disaster!”

  “A disaster that the catastrophe was lost, rubbed out?” Serge makes the frotting motion that the man from the Ministry of Finance made in the Savoy Palace.

  “Exactly,” Falkiner replies. “Pylon Man, you get it. Only here, it’s much more complex: there’ve been generations upon generations of excavation, which you have to disinter and notate too.”

  “Egyptology’s a hundred years old, right?”

  “A hundred? Three thousand, more like. These tombs were being dug up from the moment they were made. Romans, Arabs, the pharaohs themselves would delve into and disinter them-and the artefacts they took from them would themselves be re-located and re-used for their own ends. This is part of what we’re studying, or should be studying: you have to look at all of this, at all these histories of looking. The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they’re the first-or, even when it’s clear they’re not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter…”

  He turns away from Serge towards Laura, and the two of them spend the next few hours planning the elaborate trigonometry according to which their Sedment excavations will proceed in light of the new instruments they’re bringing with them:

  “If we plot it all in three-point,” Falkiner says, “reading by verniers to three seconds… What’s the average error with that?”

  “Four-fifths of one second,” Laura answers, counting off her fingers.

  “Fine. We take the first triangle from here-” he marks the map that’s laid out on the deck in front of them-“the second here-” a second mark-“the third here, and so on. We lay down rock-drilled station-posts, and work out the relative value of each station by taking observations from those. If a shift’s proved, we treat the observations as two independent sets, not one…”

  Serge listens to them for a while, thinking of clock codes, zone calls, houses and batteries on fire. Gazing towards the Ani’s sails, he lets the rhombi and trinomials of their conversation run across the surfaces of these, their intersecting angles. Beyond the sails, just past the shoreline, irrigated fields form neat-edged planes; beyond these, the desert is, once more, ungeometric. Birds wheel occasionally above it, homing in on prey, or maybe simply signalling to other birds the whereabouts of decaying carcasses. At some point, the boat drifts past oxen yoked to a water-hoisting mechanism, turning its lever in slow, plodding circles.

  “Same méthode they are using since antiquity,” Pacorie says, noticing Serge looking at them. “Greatest achèvement of technologie in all the history.”

  “What: ploughs?”

  “No: making the water to flow upwards. Once this was realised, the automobile and flight mécanisé were no more than a small step away.”

  “Still took a while, didn’t it?” Serge asks.

  Pacorie rolls his lip and forearms outwards again, although this time it’s less in agreement than in contestation: Did it really? Then, turning away from Serge, he sets about unpacking the boxes that he’s been allowed to bring on board. Each one seems to contain a larger, more sophisticated version of the old chemistry set that Serge, The Boy’s Playbook of Science in hand, used to fool around with. Throughout the afternoon he busies himself taking readings from the river, dangling a test tube on a piece of string from the boat’s deck, reeling it back in and emptying its contents into beakers into which he then dips various reactive bands. The water’s murky, full of the silt with which it’s been fertilising fields and smothering transcendent, Hellenistic dreams since time immemorial. While waiting for the bands to give him readings, he watches Serge, as though keeping track of what Serge is looking at. Each time he does this, Serge looks away, usually at Alby, who himself seems to be observing Pacorie and making the odd entry in a notebook: suspicion, like a yoke of oxen, seems to move in a closed circle. Serge, prompted by Alby’s scribbling, takes his notebook out as well, but finds he can’t think of anything to write in it. The only words that come to him are Méfie-toi; he jots them down. After wondering for half an hour or so what Pacorie and Alby are really on this expedition for, or what their respective agencies think the other might be here for, or want the rival agency to think that they themselves are here for, it strikes him that he should be asking that same question of himself: why has he really been sent, through endless counterflows of animated sediment, to Sedment? Could he himself be-to his own insu, as Pacorie would say-some kind of decoy: a dummy chamber, and a moving one at that, being slowly dragged across the surface of events? If so, by whom, and for whose benefit, or detriment? Dizzy again, he looks back at the two words in his notebook and underlines the second: Méfie-toi…

  Later, as mint tea and biscuits are served, he chats with Laura, who tells him that she studied history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford:

  “I did a dissertation on Osiris,” she announces. She goes on to outline the well-known myth: the god’s dismemberment, his sister Isis’s search for his parts, her conception of Horus from the one part of him that she couldn’t find and so was forced to remake for herself, and Osiris’s subsequent adoption as the deity of death and resurrection by the people of the Nile, who’d
depict him in their art with a large phallus, rising to inseminate each day.

  “A res-erection,” Serge quips. Laura looks back at him through her glasses without laughing. He pictures the girls he’d see emerging from St. Hilda’s gates during his stint in Oxford -riding bicycles, chatting with friends or clutching books as they headed to lectures: maybe one of them was her. SOMA: the School of Military Aeronautics’ buildings merge in his mind with the funerary complex Petrou pointed out to him from the Circular tram on the way back from Ramleh, the Royal Tombs-and Alexander, a young Macedonian soldier, morphs into an ankh-bearing, hook-bearded god.

  “The sun itself entered the body of Osiris,” Laura’s saying. “He’d swallow and pass it, bringing about the repetition of creation, the timeless present of eternity. The ancient Egyptian cosmology had no apocalypse, no end: time just went round and round…”

  Her little lecture fades out, and there’s silence for a while on deck, broken only by the regular plash of the bow and the creaking of the tiller. The man holding this smokes a black, wooden chibouk; another river-man sits cross-legged at the prow, staring at the water like a mesmerised Narcissus. The crew’s completed by two more Egyptians: one of them lounges at a fixed spot on the cabin’s roof, reaching up to casually pass the front sail’s boom above his head each time they go about; the other lurks inside, preparing food. The landscape slips by indifferently. Like the crew, it looks bored, weary of being stared at. At sunset, it turns a chemical shade of pink, then green, then changes, via white, to the same dark blue tone as the sky. As they drop anchor they’re besieged by insects: grasshoppers, cicadas, moths, mosquitoes. They look like flocks of birds, congesting the whole air and covering cabin, deck, sails, crew and expedition members alike in a twitching and vibrating coat.

  “Maybe we’re the shit,” Serge says to Falkiner.

  “Get the nets up,” Falkiner instructs the helmsman, who seems quite unbothered by the insects-perhaps because his chibouk’s smoke is keeping them away from him. The helmsman murmurs something at his crew, who slowly haul mosquito-netting around the deck’s rear, from the roof above the cabin’s entrance to the helm beside the rudder, wedging two vertical poles between it and the boards so as to form a tent. They then pick some of the larger insects from the netting’s outer surface, fry them over a stove and eat them with dourah paste. The Europeans, meanwhile, dine on a stew of dates, figs and pigeons. They drink wine too: Serge, Laura, Alby and Pacorie in moderation, Falkiner to excess. He spends a good hour after supper issuing invocations to the night air: