by Tom McCarthy
“I have to inventorise it all,” says Laura, nodding towards two large ledgers lying face-open on her table.
“So it was newspapers I saw in those mounds,” Serge says, “and not papyri.”
“Could have been,” she replies; “could equally have been papyri. It’s an eclectic mish-mash around here. The newspaper that page came from is eighty-two years old, while other scraps we’ve found have headlines from six months ago. It’s like that across all periods: the chambers have been gone through so many times that you get Fifth Dynasty, Late Kingdom, Napoleonic and modern objects lying side by side. By noting where you found each you can date the various interventions, right back to the outset. Watch out.”
Serge is running his hand over one of the two coffins.
“Why? Are they infectious?” he asks.
“No, delicate. The wood’s rotting away, and the ink’s fading. I have to copy the writing.”
Serge lowers his face into the coffin: the texts are written in deep, blue-black ink that disappears in places into the dark mahogany, which, in turn, is full of holes.
“Ants,” she explains. “It’s funny: ‘sarcophagus’ means ‘flesh-eating’-and now it’s being eaten itself. Some of the objects we’ve found are in too delicate a state to be examined here. Pacorie takes a swab off them; then they get sealed and shipped back up to Cairo for examination.”
“What are these flies made of?” Serge asks, pointing to a necklace that’s composed of several plastic-looking insects all threaded together.
“Flies,” she answers. “They are flies, preserved in resin. Necklaces of this type were fairly common. This one beside it’s a mixture of ivory, carnelian and glaze.”
She passes her hand over a set of beads strung in repeating sequences of white, gold and blue, with a red spacer-bar between them. Circular and domed, they look like tiny insulators made of porcelain or coloured glass.
“Look at all these scarabs!” Serge exclaims excitedly. There must be twenty or more of them. Their shapes, sizes and patterns are as varied as those of the ones he came across in the museum or the market-on top of which there’s a detail that he hasn’t seen before: two or three have, carved into their underside, not images or patterns, but whole sequences of words.
“Secrets of the heart,” says Laura, noticing him peering in bemusement at the hieroglyphic phrases. “In New Kingdom burials, the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience were confided to these things.”
“And that’s what’s written on them, to be printed out after his death?” he asks.
“It’s more complex than that,” she answers. “What’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgement and weigh down the heart. It had to weigh less than a feather, or the soul was doomed.”
“So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints?”
“Exactly. They were often placed in the heart-cavity. This one,” she continues, picking up a sparkling grey scarab carefully, “is made of basalt. And the one beside it is rough quartz.”
“But it’s got copper wound around it,” Serge says, pointing with his little finger to a band circling the beetle’s waist. “Why would some grave-robber or archaeologist wind copper round it, then leave it behind?”
“The copper would have been there from the start,” she says. “The ancient Egyptians used it a lot. This bowl’s copper; so’s this ewer.”
She flicks the latter with her finger; it rings out tight and clearly, like a tuning fork. Serge follows its vibrations round the chamber with his eye. The place looks less like a warehouse to him now, and more like the backstage area of the Empire Theatre where he visited Audrey. The anachronous medley of objects, their jumbled juxtaposition, seems as incongruous as the faux restaurant interiors, modern cars and Amazonian horse-heads. One of the objects in the room looks quite familiar: a shallow, open box in which a kind of circuit-board is fixed.
“Is that Isis ’s cohering set?” he asks, nodding at the thing. Straight metal strips divide its wood at regular intervals; above these, cut into the box’s side, are notches, every fifth of which is larger than the four on either side.
“Professor Falkiner thinks that it’s some kind of game,” she answers. “You move up one side and down another, with the players starting at opposite ends. The notches are for counting. You can see the tenth and twenty-sixth lines are connected, which suggests that you could jump from one spot to another, like in Snakes and Ladders.”
“So where are the dice?” he asks.
“They probably used knuckle-bones. A pair of these were found a few feet from the board-I think…” She steps back to the table and flips through the ledgers till she comes across a diagram. “Yes: right beside it.”
“Wow, you really are forensic,” Serge says, looking at a photograph pasted beside the diagram, confirming the positions, indicated by the latter, in which objects have been found. Beside each object in the photo there’s a little stand-up card bearing a number-presumably the same one with which it’s been labelled in its new location here in Laura’s props-room.
“Oh, this is nothing,” she replies. “You want to see forensics? Come with me.”
She leads him through another doorway to a chamber to the side of hers. Pacorie’s in here, chemistry set fully unpacked, tubes, slides and beakers laid out all around him.
“L’Homme Pylon,” he says by way of greeting, “bienvenue.” He has a ledger too, in which he’s entering readings.
“He’s scraped, scratched or rubbed at virtually all the objects in my room,” Laura tells Serge. “The earth around them too; the walls, the floor, the lot.”
Pacorie, faced with this accusation, shrugs. “Is necessary.”
“And what have you found?” asks Serge.
“Gypsum, limestone, manganese, copper, calcite, the garnet, amethyst, red jasper-or, to state it in a mode more scientifique: Mn, SiO2, Cu, CaCO3, CaSO4. Surtout, the C: the C is everywhere.”
“The sea?” asks Serge.
“The letter: C.”
“What’s C?”
“Carbon: basic element of life.”
Laura tugs at his sleeve, in a way that’s familiar to him, though not from her. He follows her back to her chamber. At the back of this is a third opening, the only one he hasn’t been through yet.
“What’s behind there?” he asks.
“The part where all this stuff came from.”
“Can we go in there?” he asks.
“No,” she tells him. “Falkiner will be back soon.” It’s the first time she hasn’t used the word Professor when talking about him-as though, inside the tomb, and perhaps only here, her allegiance and complicity were gravitating away from him and towards Serge. She’s still holding his sleeve. Releasing it eventually, she says: “Come back in two hours, after lunch. He’ll be out again then.”
Serge returns to his tent, where he’s served some more stew in a pot that looks just like the one he’s using as a commode. He dozes after this, then wanders the site again, this time keenly aware of the plethora of buried objects it contains: he pictures coffins, boots, board-games and sardine tins lurking beneath him, particles shaken from the sand and plaster by each footstep trickling down across their surfaces. A rat scurries across the path in front of him, then disappears into a hole. Some of the tomb-openings have wasps’ nests growing, mould-like, on their splintered hatches. He has to detour round a hovering cluster of them on his way back to see Laura.
He finds her busily transcribing lines of text from the coffins into one of her ledgers. The lines run in strips, like flypaper or film, each frame a single picture: bird, scythe, foot, ankh, eye, a pair of hands…
“What does it say?” he asks, peering over her shoulder.
“They’re spells, for executing functions: opening the mouth so the deceased can eat, warding off crocodiles who want to devour his heart, things like that. All surfaces ha
d these things written on them: amulets, masks, even bandages.”
On the page facing the one onto which she’s copying the strips are tables noting where these strips have come from: outer coffin, right… outer coffin, left… ditto, foot… head… inner coffin, right… inner coffin, left… ditto, foot… Below this, there’s a register of objects, with columns for grave, body, vases, coffin, beads. The entries in this read like doctors’ notes: cut-up body… copper borer in bone… XLIII, 2 rolls of bandage… linen over left leg, head on box… linen… lion scarab… jasper scarab… linen… linen… linen…
“You found bodies, then?” he asks.
“Mainly loose bones: these are everywhere, hundreds of them. Most of the intact bodies have been plundered or removed by expeditions. Royal and noble tombs get cleared out early on, due to the value of the objects in them. Middle-class ones are better: they tend to get passed over, and so end up less contaminated. I prefer them anyway.”
“Why?”
“They’re more interesting, more varied. From the Fourth Dynasty onwards, with the downsizing of the pharaohs’ tombs, pools of skilled craftsmen were available to decorate the private monuments of anyone who could afford it…”
She’s streaming information again-but the languor’s gone, and the excitement’s back. It excites Serge as well: not only what she’s saying but how she’s saying it, its strip-procession from her. He looks at her mouth. Its lips, coated by dust, are brown. Watching them move, he has the strange sensation that he’s closing in on something: not just her, or information, but what lies behind these… Laura senses his excitement: her lips pinken beneath their dust-coat and quicken their pace:
“The decorators-artists, scribes-had greater freedom, more leeway to mix and match old texts, thereby creating new ones. A greater choice of subject matter, too. Look at this stele over here.”
She leads him to a large, flat slab propped up against the wall. On it, a coloured vignette shows a man seated, in profile, at a table piled high with food. At his feet a dog lounges; musicians, acrobats and dancers entertain him; beneath him servants and craftsmen labour-bakers, perhaps, retrieving loaves from ovens, or perhaps carpenters sawing at waist-high beams, masons chipping and hammering at stone or butchers hacking away at meat; around them, further from the picture’s central hearth, men work the fields and fish the marshes. All these figures-entertainers, tradesmen, farmers, pet-are drawn, like the main character, in profile. They interact with one another, and seem to be exchanging words-but in a silent, gestural language only.
“It’s beautiful,” says Serge.
“The colours?”
“No: the flatness.”
“It’s the autobiography of one of the people buried in the complex,” she tells him. “His life, the characters in it, the world around them. Literature in its infancy. Here the scribe has put himself in, in the bottom corner. See that figure writing?”
“Yes,” Serge answers. “What did you call this?”
“A stele. We found it just over here.”
Pinching his sleeve again, she leads him through the doorway that she wouldn’t let him go through earlier and, crouching down beside a large, square gap in the new chamber’s wall through which a small, plastic-coated wire runs downwards into darkness, tells him:
“Stelae were placed one level up from the grave proper, as a kind of visual portal to it. They carried pictures of the deceased’s old life to the underworld, and conveyed back up from there ones of the new life he was living-which, of course, was a better, more refined version of the old one.”
“Two-way Crookes tubes,” Serge murmurs; “death around the world.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Where’s the grave itself, then?”
“Down here,” she says-and, like a rat, she’s disappearing through the hole. She lowers herself feet-first, taking hold of Serge’s arm to steady her descent. When she lets go, he climbs in too, and makes his way down a long, slanting shaft into whose lower surface footholds have been cut. The sides are moist, oily; the wire runs all the way down, unsecured. When Serge emerges from the bottom into a large room illuminated by electric lamps, he sees that it’s the wire that’s powering these; also, that his hands are blackened.
“Bitumen,” says Laura, holding her black hands up too. “I hope you brought a change of clothes.”
He looks around. The numbered markers that he saw in the photographs are still here, standing beside vacant spots. Others guard objects that haven’t yet been hoisted to the upper chamber: alabaster dishes, copper pans, fragments of broken pottery.
“Don’t move anything,” she tells him.
“What are those?” he asks, pointing to three ebony statuettes.
“They’re figures for the ka-the soul-to dwell in.”
“They look like the same person, done in different sizes.”
“They are: if one gets broken, the ka moves on to another; plus, they show the dead man in three periods of life-childhood, youth, age-so that he himself can relive all three, enjoying them simultaneously.”
“And what’s through there?” he asks her, nodding at another slab-shaped gap.
“Another chamber that we haven’t processed yet. You want to see?”
“Yes,” he says.
She picks up a zinc-carbon flashlight and disappears, rat-like again, into the new hole. This one leads to another downward-slanting shaft. He helps her steady herself, then follows her again. There’s no electricity in this shaft, nor in the chamber onto which it opens. Laura’s flashlight picks out random objects: more broken pottery, parts of a coffin, a tea-box with Lipton written on it…
“We’ll do this tomb after we’ve cleared the one above,” she says.
“Look: it goes on further!” Serge gasps, catching sight of yet another opening in the wall. The excitement’s spreading in him, spurred on by the darkness, or the depth, or both.
“They all do: they continue endlessly. Which way do you want to go?”
She jumps her light from one wall to the next; each has a hole in it. Serge looks at one after another, then announces:
“This way.”
They descend a little further, then the shaft turns sharply up. They climb it, then descend again. Sometimes the shaft runs flat. It feels like a sewer: slippery, with sides the texture of molasses. It smells like one too.
“Bat-dung,” she tells him, holding his hand for balance.
“This one’s a bordello,” he says as the corridor opens up onto another chamber. Several coffins lie about here, overturned and empty; all around them are smashed pots and shreds of linen. An old metal lamp lies on the floor beside a pile of rubble.
“Looks like the one above has fallen into it,” says Laura.
They press on, through chambers neither Falkiner and Laura nor, in most probability, anyone else will ever process, treading constantly over linen and ceramic fragments. Bones too: Serge steps on what feel like knee-joints, knuckles, shin-bones. Sometimes the corridor becomes so shallow that they have to crawl, dragging themselves forwards against whatever pitch-coated surfaces present themselves to their touch. Everything’s written on: pottery, bandages, even the walls themselves. At one point, out of breath, they rest, still on their knees, inside a chamber so cluttered with piled-up objects that it makes the previous ones look like neatly kept households.
“Whose tomb is this?” Serge asks after a while.
“Who knows?” she says, pointing the light around. “It looks like twenty people’s all collapsed together. Here’s another stele.”
This one, or what remains of it, shows two central figures, one male and one female, seated one behind the other, the woman whispering something into the man’s ear.
“ ‘Ra-something, master of…’ ” reads Laura, narrowing her eyes; “ ‘his sister, his beloved, in his heart… words spoken by… do not…’ ”
“There’s that scarab-god again,” says Serge, pointing his finger at the image, just below the seated c
ouple, of a man kneeling, arms raised, before a giant beetle mounted on a catafalque or platform.
“ ‘… my heart of transformations,’ ” she continues reading, “ ‘who comes forth… who came forth from himself…’ ”
Her forehead’s got black stains all over it. Her cheek too. Serge moves round behind her and, kneeling upright like her, watches as her flashlight moves across the stone, bringing its images and inscriptions into view, as though the metal object were itself projecting them.
“ ‘Meret-something,’ ” she reads slowly, “ ‘she who loves… who loves silence… he who is… who dies… who rests upon… upon his…’ ”
Her breath’s getting shorter and shorter. So is his. Serge knows, and knows that Laura knows, and that she knows he knows, that it’s not the lack of air that’s causing it, nor the fragmentary nature of the inscriptions she’s reading: he can smell, above the dung and bitumen, excitement emanating from her flesh too. His chest is almost touching her back. He leans slightly forwards, and makes contact. She tenses, then tilts her head back, towards his face; her lips continue moving in short bursts, but no more words come from them. He kisses her neck; she wraps her hand around his head, and pulls it down across her shoulders. He starts taking off her clothes, then his. Peeling away his sock, he’s aware of a small tickling sensation on his ankle. Then he’s in her, his hands sliding down her back while hers grab hold of debris, bitumen and bones. His knee slips on some object, whether organic or not he can’t tell; then his hands, too, fall to the floor and find there other hands, not only hers. It feels like an orgy: as though the two of them, their bodies, had become multiplied into a mass of limbs, discarded wrappings and excreta of a thousand couplings, a thousand deaths. She drops the flashlight at some point; it flickers against the wall, then, just before their final gasps spill out and echo round the rooms and corridors, goes off. They crawl around on hands and knees afterwards feeling for it, for their clothes, each other…