by Tom McCarthy
“Hail, ye gods, whose scent is sweet,” he chants, arms pressed to his side like they were when he assumed the same declamatory tone on the quayside in Boulaq. “I am a swallow; I am a swallow. O stretch out unto me thy hand so that I can… so that I can… so that I may be-may be!-may be able to pass my days in the Pool of Double Fire, and let me advance with my message, for I have come with words to tell…”
“What is that stuff he’s saying?” Serge asks Laura.
“It’s from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” she replies, hand pressed to her forehead as though this action alone allowed her to think. “ ‘The Book of Stepping Forth by Daylight,’ in fact, if I recognise this passage rightly.”
“First thing ever written for a dead readership,” mutters Alby.
“Who then is this?” asks Falkiner. Not waiting for an answer, he continues: “It is Ra, the creator of the names of his limbs. Who then is this? It is Tem the dweller in his disk. I am yesterday; I know today. Who then is this? It is Osiris; or (as others say), it is his dead body; or (as others say), it is his filth. I gather together the charm from every place where it is, and from every man with whom, with whom it is… and though… Hang on… Ah! yes: And though I be in the mighty innermost part of heaven, let me stay-remain!-remain upon the earth…”
Serge turns his head towards the river bank, but can’t make it out anymore. Water and sky have disappeared too: there’s no moon. Only the glow of the helmsman’s chibouk lights the scene at all, intermittently revealing, etched across the faces of the crew, looks of bemused indifference to the bearded interloper’s drunken incantations.
He wakes just after dawn to a landscape that seems utterly synthetic. The sun, rising behind hills, is tearing the mist into gauzy shreds. The sky’s a worn, scratched kind of red, spliced with orange streaks; the desert’s laced with purple. The soil beneath the floodline is, as Pacorie pointed out yesterday, black-a painted-on, superficial kind of black, as though some giant inkpot had been knocked over and stained its surface. The Nile water looks synthetic too: grained and oily, like film. It runs past the boat’s prow at an obtuse angle; again there’s that slight leeward slippage. Again Pacorie observes Serge studying the flow and shunt. As they drift past a village (Falkiner’s forbidden any stops, citing reports of plague) from whose tower a muezzin’s chant spills, the Frenchman says to him, reprising yesterday’s conversation as though no time had passed between it and the present moment:
“It’s counter-intuitif in more ways than one.”
“What?”
“ ‘Upper,’ ‘Lower.’ ‘Upper’ should be newer, but it’s older. Its formations were made sooner, when the continent was first construit.”
“Civilisation and culture too,” Alby joins in. “This is where it all began.”
“I thought it all began in Alexandria,” says Serge.
“ Alexandria is where it ended,” Alby corrects him. “The Christianity and reason that took root there were a re-modelling of dead pharaonic fable. Beneath the cross, the ankh; behind monotheism, a plethora of older deities…”
The boom of the foresail sweeps slowly through the air above them, guided by the languid crewman’s forearm. Pulleys whirr, teeth click. Serge is so used to the boat’s rhythms by now that they colour everything around him: he has the impression of being not in nature but in some giant mechanism, like a clock, sextant or theodolite. The stalks and herons that strut and peck their way through marshes look mechanical; the marshes themselves, the fields, settlements and stretches of desert beyond them look mechanical as well, alternating and repeating like a flat panorama that’s wound round and round by a dull, clockwork motor. Passages of desert suggest epochs-present, Napoleonic, ancient-which loom into focus like so many photographic slides, one following the other with an automated regularity; sometimes several epochs appear simultaneously, as though two or three slides had been overlaid. Even the movements of humans take on a mechanical aspect: chibouk-stuffing, tiller-plying, boom-guiding, forehead-rubbing, test-tube-lowering and hoisting, spying. Events follow the same sequence as they did yesterday: Alby and Pacorie and Serge conduct their three-way stand-off; tea and biscuits are served; Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth-constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise. This time she describes to him the festivals performed at Abydos:
“People descended with lanterns and statuettes, awaiting his funerary barge. When it arrived they’d shout: ‘Osiris has been found!’ A priest wearing a jackal mask would lead the cortege to the cemetery, carrying a chest, and people-”
“A chest?” Serge asks.
“A wooden chest containing silt and seeds: his body, which Isis, through her various travails, had recombined. The statuettes-of corn, earth and vegetable paste-were buried in the ground, and the whole ceremony culminated three days later with the building of a pillar in the temple court-”
Serge, listening to her, his thoughts mechanically tinted, pictures the priest’s chest as a wireless set, filled with black metal filings. The image forms so clearly in his mind that he interrupts her to announce:
“ Isis was a coherer.”
“What’s that?” she asks.
“The old sets operated through coherence,” he explains. “The signal made the particles all jump together and conduct the current, in bursts either short or long. That’s how dots and dashes were-”
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
“Radio,” he tells her. “It’s a gathering-together too.”
Falkiner, eavesdropping, grunts in amusement, then calls Laura over to assist him further with his plotting. In the evening, after the insects have descended and the nets have gone up, they eat pigeon and date again. Falkiner gets drunk again. This time he declaims, in Serge’s honour, from “The Book of the Pylons”:
“Homage to thee, saith Horus, O thou first pylon of the Still-Heart. I have made my way. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee…”
“I recognise this bit,” Serge comments.
“Lady of tremblings,” Falkiner intones, “with lofty walls, the sovereign lady, mistress of destruction, who-wait-who sets-setteth-setteth in order the words which drive back the whirlwind and the storm… Saith the pylon: Pass on, thou art pure…”
“Pylons?” Serge asks Laura. “Is he making this bit up?”
“No,” she resumes her role as annotator. “Pylons were gateways-to both temples and the underworld.”
“Homage to thee, saith Horus,” Falkiner continues, “O thou second pylon of the Still-Heart. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee: Lady of heaven, mistress of the world, who terrifieth the earth from the place of thy body…”
“The deceased, who was himself awaiting recombination, had to pass them all,” Laura explains, “naming the guardian of each.”
And name them Falkiner does. By the sixteenth pylon it’s Terrible One, Lady of the Rainstorm, who planteth ruin in the souls of men, Devourer of dead bodies; by the twentieth it’s Goddess with face turned backwards, Unknown One, Overthrower of him that draweth nigh to her flame… The twenty-first speaks of her secret plots and counsels. Then comes a long list of the names of all the pylons’ secondary guards:
“Tchen of At is the name of the one at the door; Hetepmes is the name of the second; Mes-sep is the name of the third; Utch-re is the name of the fourth…”
The crew, again, look on indifferently. Eventually the recitation fades out, but Serge hears its loops and repetitions in the chafing of the anchor-chain against the Ani’s side, the clicks and beeps of insects, long into the night.
By the third day, the landscape has grown more hilly and less fertile; now the desert extends all the way to the Nile ’s banks. Its formlessness seems to have overrun not only the feebl
e effort to contain it within field-boundaries but also any attempt to box it temporally: today, it’s no longer epochs that stare back at Serge from it, but time’s basic units themselves, its material particles, freed of their hourglass-walls and multiplied to infinity. He still has the impression of being held in a machine, but now it’s one whose operator has abandoned it-or, perhaps, died inside it, at its very core-leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore. Actions are reduced to their own remnants: Pacorie’s arm flops and reels over the side like a decrepit lever or gear-handle; he, Alby and Serge spy on one another so half-heartedly it’s almost comic, their circular choreography of jottings, sideways glances and averted gazes no more than a set of empty and incomplete gestures. After tea Laura, purely out of habit, lectures him, half-heartedly as well, on the more secret ceremonies to Osiris:
“They were held in underground spots,” she says slowly, hand resting languidly across her forehead. “We don’t know what was said because the contents were never divulged. They could have been tied in with Thoth…”
“Why do you say the word in German?” Pacorie asks in a similarly disinterested tone.
“What word?”
“Tod. Mort. The death.”
“No, Thoth,” Laura explains. “The god of secret writing, whose cult centre was Hermopolis.”
“Little round Thoth again,” Serge murmurs.
“He carried cryptographic hymns and spells.” Laura, if she heard his words, ignores them. “Moses, with his stammer and his tablets of the law, grew out of him. He had his own book: with it, it was said, you could enchant the sky and understand the language of the birds, and other animals as well-even the little ones, right down to microbes. But it was lost…”
Nobody takes her up on this, and so the conversation ends. When the insects come, Serge watches one caught in the netting and, turning again to Laura, asks:
“What is it with scarabs?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why are there models of them everywhere, all patterned and inscribed and so on?”
“On the underside, for printing,” she says, even more slowly: her apparatus, too, seems to be voiding itself. “On the upper side, to represent Khepera, god of both the rising sun and matter-matter that’s on the point of passing from inertness into life. His emblem is a beetle.”
“Hail, Khepera, in thy boat,” Falkiner slurs, already drunk, “the three-fold company of gods is thy body…”
“Khepera was part of the solar trinity Khepri-Ra-Atum,” Laura barely manages to add. “He was a writer too. And a judge. These attributes were important in Egyptian cosmogony; that’s why scarabs are common…”
“Secret writing,” Falkiner announces. “Isis and Horus, the Department of… Department of… that shineth… doest homage… I am… I am all that is, was and will be and no mortal has ever lifted my veil… and so saith Isis…”
He continues, like a distant and plague-ridden muezzin, to slur out half-remembered snatches of his scripture. When he runs out of phrases to recite, he repeats the single word “ Isis,” pronouncing it over and over again, more and more slowly each time, before his voice, too, breaks down into grains and runs away.
ii
They arrive at Sedment the next morning. It’s an upland of desert, exposed and windy. Qufti, drawn from nearby villages, form a chain from the main site towards a light railway, just like they did at Abu Zabal-only here they don’t seem to be carrying stuff in, but taking it away. There are holes everywhere, funnel-shaped pits riddling the ground: some are cordoned off with rope and neatly cleaned-out; others gape in disarray like ruined mine-shafts or natural craters. At the base of some Serge can see hatches, most of which are splintered, giving him a glimpse of lower holes beneath the holes, leading to more splintered hatches which, in turn, lead to lower shafts.
“Most of these top ones are mastabas,” Laura says as they walk past one pit after another.
“Masturwhat?” asks Serge.
“Mastabas: low-lying tombs of the early dynastic period. They had rectangular mud-brick superstructures and hollow substructures of four or five chambers. Below these, there are later tombs.”
“Below them?”
“Yes: later dynasties buried their dead lower. Then still-later ones built beside, around, through and all over these earlier-later ones, and so on almost endlessly. This place is a giant warren.”
“Looks more like a giant dump,” Serge says, pointing to the mounds of debris all around them. Shards of broken pottery protrude from these, alongside scraps of paper that he can’t, in passing, make out as either old papyri or contemporary news-pages, plus short lengths of what looks like copper. Beetles scurry up and down the surface of these mounds like mountaineers negotiating faces and approaches. He and Laura come to the spot where Falkiner seems to have established his headquarters: a gully or ravine that cuts a gash into the landscape, in which tent-poles support a canvas canopy that extends a more conventionally front-door-like tomb-entrance into a kind of covered porch.
“We’ve got to get on top of pilfering,” are Falkiner’s first words to her. “It’s become endemic: tools, food, everything. The Qufti say it’s Sebbakhîn and Arabs, but their word’s not to be trusted. We must let them know that the cost of anything in their charge that goes missing will be docked from their own salaries.”
“Where shall I put my things?” she asks him.
“In the tomb behind me,” he says. “Second chamber.”
She moves past him; Serge starts walking with her.
“Whoa! Where do you think you’re going, Pylon Man?” Falkiner barks.
“I thought-” Serge mumbles.
“Well, don’t,” the archaeologist growls back. “You’re in a tent in sector K.”
He jerks his thumb off to the left. Serge makes his way over the uneven ground in the direction the thumb indicates and eventually finds his tent, pitched in an uncordoned and neglected crater. The crater’s shallow; the wind rushing across the upland swirls down into it, throwing handfuls of sand against the canvas in a way that seems intentional, malicious. Sitting inside, he wonders what to do. Unpack? There are no shelves or cupboards here; nothing but a thin and dirty mattress on the floor. Attend to his brief? He takes his notebook out and reads the two words written in it so far: Méfie-toi. Not much to go on. Slipping it back into his breast pocket, he leaves the tent and wanders the site for a while. He climbs to a high spot and gazes down over the excavations. The Qufti-chain, viewed from above, looks like a tail or ribbon lightly fluttering beneath a kite whose main frame is suggested by the posts and strings being laid out on the ground in intersecting triangles, the triangles’ overlap allotting to each of the site’s mounds and craters its own sector, or sub-sector. Falkiner’s directing this pegging-out of station-marks, standing with the instruments he’s brought down on the Ani and has lost no time in having unpacked. His body’s shrunk by height and distance. His voice, too: Serge can see from the movements of his arms and shoulders that he’s barking orders at the men who scurry around shifting the posts and paying out string, but these are silenced by the wind. If Falkiner’s surveying, Serge wonders what he’s doing. Über-surveying: is that what Petrou would call it, after Alexander’s über-Hellenism? Flat, unencumbered, plain, Macauley told him. He looks away from the site: to the north, the landscape flattens; to the south, it rises in ridges, plateaus, hillocks. Any of these spots could house a pylon. Taking his notebook out again, he writes, below the first two hyphenated words, a third one: Arenow.
That evening, a pot of stew is brought to his tent. After eating it, he wonders where the latrines are. Wandering around in search of them, he bumps into Alby.
“You in sector K?” the Antiquities man asks. “I’m in F. Windy, isn’t it?”
“Where are the toilets?” Serge asks.
“Use a pot,” Alby shrugs back. “They’re everywhere.”
The next morning Serge wanders around some more. He wanders dow
n to the jetty. It looks firm enough to land the segments of a radio mast. Should he write that down? He’ll remember it. He wanders back to the main site again, and follows the paths trodden between one hole and another, the lines made by the strings. It’s an aimless wandering: he has to wait another day before the Ani sets back off to Cairo. Sometimes the paths split, or end, or double back on themselves; sometimes the strings angle him back to an intersection that he crossed ten minutes or a half-hour earlier, but he doesn’t mind: it helps him pass the time. At around noon he finds himself descending into the long gash where Falkiner’s tents are. Falkiner himself is absent; Serge passes unhindered through a tent-porchway to a chamber of tomb proper that’s been turned into a living room: a desk, sofa and deckchair have been set up in it, and a carpet has been spread across the floor, its pattern strangely offset by the decorations on the walls.
“Found your way here after all?” asks Laura, appearing in a doorway that leads further in. For the first time since he’s met her, she’s smiling-in a way that makes Serge feel embarrassed, as though found out, although what for he can’t quite think. He tries to smile back.
“Come in,” she says, rubbing her forehead again.
Her chamber has been turned into a kind of warehouse. All kinds of numbered objects lie around it-some crated, as though ready for dispatch, some open, still awaiting processing. Some, like two wooden coffins covered on both outside and inside with inscriptions, are large, occupying a pallet each; others, like a set of headbands, necklaces and bracelets laid out on the floor in rows, are tiny; yet all seem to be accorded the same meticulous attention. This indiscriminate assiduousness has been applied regardless of age as well. Not all the objects are old: some, like a sardine-can with German writing on it, a scrap of newsprint, a wristwatch with a snapped strap and a leather boot with rusty cleats and a frayed lace, are clearly relatively modern-yet they, too, have been dusted down, laid out and numbered.