The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  CABLE. LUXOR TO MARGARET FINNERAN,

  BOSTON, 20 DEC. 1922, 11.21 A.M.

  HAVE FOUND YOUR RALPH. ALL MISUNDERSTANDINGS SETTLED, PLEASE DO NOT WORRY, HE IS A FINE FELLA. WILL STAY FOR A SPELL TO WORK ON EXPEDITION UNDER HIS MAGNIFICENT TUTELAGE. YOUR FATHER, CCF.

  WALL PANEL K, CONTINUED: “THE BETRAYAL OF ATUM-HADU”

  Text: “You have betrayed me,” King Atum-hadu said, calm despite his anger and pain, confronting at last the Master of Largesse in the royal palace. “I am abandoned by you whom I trusted. You would turn the queen against her lord and master, turn her heart from righteousness. You have weakened my force and my armies until we cannot do battle.” The king hesitated. His pity and his love and his meek nature restrained his justified violence.

  But the Master of Largesse raged, revealed ambitions, the power he craved, the envy he felt for Atum-hadu. He cried out with mischief, conflated truth and falsehood. The Master of Largesse revealed himself to be no second father to the king, but a most treacherous asp in the rush bed of an innocent child.

  And in his madness, the Master of Largesse swung fists at the king and pulled a flaming torch from the wall, and swung it with fire and smoke at the earthly incarnation of Atum. “Stop, fool!” cried Atum-hadu, retreating into the shadows of the empty palace. Still the king did not wish violence against his former friend and adviser. “You do not comprehend the harm you do. You have no idea what you risk. There is still time to save all of this,” the king called from the darkness. But still the Master of Largesse sought him out and attacked like a wounded lion, and so Atum-hadu had no choice, despite his wounds from fighting the Hyksos, despite the nest of cobras gnawing at his insides, spitting hot venom out behind him.

  He had no choice. This greatest of all kings lifted his war hammer, and the Master of Largesse bumped against a pillar, and the flame of his torch faltered; the king brought down his weapon only once upon his enemy’s head, and not with much force, and the Master of Largesse, taller and broader than the king, stood surprised as hot, red blood began to stream from his fat, bald temple. The king offered peace even now, but the villain swung at his king, and so Atum-hadu brought down his war hammer again and the Master of Largesse dropped the torch and Atum-hadu collected it and rained down blows upon the villain, alternating his hammer and the torch, and the heat of the torch blistered the villain’s skin and then the hammer came down and the hot blood bubbled in the heat, and the blows fell again and again on the softening head of the traitor, blow after blow upon the deflated head and the spread limbs and the sopping clothes. Atum-hadu sat on the fallen man’s stomach, one leg to each side like a woman who sits upon her lover as a hen. Atum-hadu rained down blows for many minutes until his arms failed and his eyes stuck shut from the blood. And then Atum-hadu saw that he was very alone and his stomach boiled with a pain he had not yet known.

  All at once, Atum-hadu understood that the end of everything had arrived. Nothing that he loved would survive. All would be forgotten or misunderstood.

  He ran outside into the light of the palace courtyard, saw the blood on his robes and on his hammer and on the torch, and he fell to the ground and struck the ground and wept at the course of all things.

  Illustration: The long text beginning at the ceiling leaves little space for illustration. Copying and translating this text into these notes has taken most of the day. Explaining the hieroglyphic system and grammar to CCF as I proceeded slowed me down, but the effort was rewarded as he begins to grasp the depth of our discovery.

  Then Chester and I cleaned up some of the mess in the tomb. I attended to Wall Panel K and hurried to restore some of the damaged, smeared, or stained illustrations or text that had suffered from Chester’s foolishness last night. I walked a bit down the path to try to relieve my throbbing belly for a hopeless half an hour, my thoughts wandering, so many tasks clamouring for priority. Return to the tomb. Burn a few things in the first chamber, watch the smoke sucked out the front door into the evening sky. CCF is very intrigued by how all this is done. He is a great help. He is very paternal. I have not slept more than a half-hour of last forty-eight. Really must sleep now though tormented I forgetting leaving something undone needs immed att’n. CCF, am I forgetting someth? No, go to sleep. Fine. Lie down but then right up again because I hear voices in the front chamber, but its noth

  Thursday, 21 December, 1922

  Journal: Reader, my fiancée’s father has arrived in Egypt to help with the expedition at the site, and this morning I assign him simple tasks I can trust him to perform correctly inside Atum-hadu’s tomb while I have business elsewhere.

  I find Carter’s site has new facets. True to their word, the Metropolitan expedition has given him everyone and everything he needs. Miles of bandages and calico and wadding to wrap his finds as they emerge from underground. A motorcar. He is swimming in attention and help, native workers, admirers and friends (though one wonders, with sympathy, how he can distinguish the sycophants from the sincere). And there are the thronged tourists again, even dear Len and Sonia Nordquist right there in the front row, I am ashamed to write, cooing and snapping photographs side by side with the great man himself. Carter is swaddled in the trappings of a success beyond measure, but he himself is quite unchanged. He still holds over all our heads that Carter manner, that special secret knowledge that mists up your eyes when you try to look at him directly. He speaks Arabic with a local accent, no must or mould of dusty academia on him. And even in a foreign tongue his manner is unchanged. How he carries this success! “You there. Run ask Mr. Lucas if he has everything he needs,” he orders me in Arabic, the moment I place my head in his command tent to say hello. I bow and do his bidding—what else can one do? Lucas is easy to find. He is the chemical specialist on loan from the Egyptian Government, yet another expert bowing down before the great leader, feeding the insatiable furnace of Carter’s ego. “Yes, thanks, all set,” Lucas answers after I find him setting up his laboratories a few hundred yards away in Tomb 15, emptied out for King Howard’s convenience. And there, more excess: the paraffin and preservative sprays in labelled and numbered red cans, adhesives and solvents, the endless and hyphenated names of chemicals, incomprehensible in their various combinations, skulls on labels as if Lucas were a magician or an Overseer of the Secrets, the wax, the excess, the horrific excess in all things: row after row of the simplest products, tool after duplicate numbered tool, identical backup replacement extras in every direction, a vomit of gluttony, as if by merely closing his eyes and imagining his desire, Carter is serviced by some snivelling jinn. “Careful not to get that one on your skin, boy,” calls Lucas in poor Arabic, handing me bottles to tote back to his master. Even Carter’s minions have it, you see, this inner knowledge he cannot be bothered to share as he knows you could never understand its complexity. The sooner he can stop thinking of you the better, the sooner he can return to the altitude where his thoughts spin in patterns you will never grasp.

  Friday, 22 December, 1922

  Slept on the ridge in the open air and let CCF keep the cot. Prefer to give him some privacy down there. Quarters too close to share.

  Today Carter opened his wretched hole to the Press, and I do not know why I do this to myself, the sight of the gawking tourists, the sound of all that blather for a minor king, I should just walk away, but it acts on me like a siren’s lethal warble, and I went in to have a look at Carter’s tomb again, escorting a sarcastic American journalist who called me Mohammed. It really is too awful: Tut displays quite the same excess as his dapper little acolyte. And to see the Nordquists, back yet again for more sugary excess, looking impressed out of politeness, I could not even bring myself to talk to them, and that room, that storage chamber of the little upstart’s tomb, it is a grotesque display, this waste pile, the leopard-skin robes, clothing crusted in gold sequins, statues, rush and papyrus sandals, that couch with the carved footboards, boomerangs, lunch boxes carved to resemble trussed ducks, perfume jars, toilet tables, bin aft
er bin of unused underwear, candleholders shaped like little ankh-people, ornate this, oviform that, lotiform the other, golden whatnot, flails and crooks and sceptres, furniture depicting the king in lion form trampling his enemies, riding a chariot with his own ancestors, thousands of beads to string, just one of these items would have justified all of Carter’s years, Carnarvon’s money, let alone flinty Finneran’s. All for this nobody, it is enough to make one literally sick, the messy confusion, it is enough to make one feel crushed under it, as if one could imagine all of that wealth and furniture just pressing down on top of one in one’s own mummy wraps, crushed like a pellet of clay under the wheels of that god-awful war chariot, nauseating. The American journalist quite agreed.

  Saturday, 23 December, 1922

  Carter really is a megalomaniac, CCF and I agree on this. Oh no, he simply will not be satisfied until everyone admires him and everyone works for him and he makes dramas out of everything. You can imagine my surprise to find a police constable striding up the path toward my tomb when I came down from my cliff-top bed this morning. Mr. Carter had sent him to “make sure everything was all right up here.” Yes, thanks, as if I needed Carter to keep my tomb all right. “Mr. Carter had some thefts and wanted to know if you have suffered, too?” Of course! Carter is clumsy and loses something in his unwieldy inventory and the police must be called in on the assumption that some crafty burglar is troubling all of Egypt’s rational archaeologists as well. I laughed and waved off the officer, but he wanted to tell me all about a burglar in Carter’s home and missing this and that, and stains on Carter’s bedsheets. “Is everything all right here, sir?” Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course it is, ducks. “Might I have a look-see at your dig? I’m something of an amateur of archaeology myself.” It is all I can do to bar the great idiot’s dust-kicking steps towards Door A. “Are you hurt, sir? Is there something you want to tell me?” and other daft questions of the novice Egyptian constabulary acting as Carter’s spy.

  I finally see off my rival’s little agent, and CCF and I debate which of our myriad tasks to take on next, much work still to be done to stabilise the interior of the tomb, correctly map it and its objects, apply the preservatives to the untreated paintings, finish transcribing the walls. CCF is a marvellous help.

  I landed at Alexandria late on the 24th, Macy, and made Cairo by train the next day, Christmas, though you hardly notice in Egypt. I worked fast: our man had indeed been at the Hotel of the Sphinx and had left it on the 26th of October, holding his suite open for his return, so his reports to Boston had been truthful to that date at least. The deskman also said Finneran had been at the hotel as well, stayed the night nine days before me. I, in my turn, spent the night of the 25th, space at the inn Christmas night. No talking donkeys, though.

  Sunday, 24 December, 1922

  Work. Miserable bowels. The gramophone does not help. The work is hard. It makes one think about immortality. To the average man, I suppose, the Egyptian notion of immortality is the most foolish superstition. But that is only because our idea of eternal life has changed, whether we are Christians or not. Though we agree with our Nile ancestors that immortality is still man’s most important accomplishment (more important than love, or a mild reputation for virtue, more pressing by far than friendship), we are not so mad as to think that our bodies are transported into an afterlife. We use a different vocabulary, salvation of souls, lasting fame. Call it what you will, but to make one’s name ring out after the names of your inferiors and tormentors are snuffed out, that is something all of us still hope for. (And, most delicious of all, to have this happen before their physical lives end, so they can feel the last wisp of their names vanish while they still breathe and know—know, ter Breuggen—that when their mouldering carcass is discovered and tossed into the ground, it will already be anonymous hair and skin, on its merry way to becoming anonymous carbon ash, while others of us will become stars and suns.) I do not know of anyone who does not aspire to this permanence, even if they claim not to. The world is littered with the arcs de triomphe and such-and-such juniors, the chattering artists nervous to know their work will last, poets committing suicide to assure their fame, last wills and testaments trying to control heirs, names annually read out in churches and synagogues, ornate tombstones and deathbed I-love-yous, bequests and named donations, money left to political parties and charities. We are all plenty Egyptian still and no debate.

  I am not an idiot. When the time comes, I know that I will be dead. I will not be strumming a winged stringed thing, or even (as I planned as a boy) be savouring the hot, fleshy delectations of a palm-lined, Anubis-guarded, Isis-assisted Egyptian underworld. I speak of something lighter, finer, more intellectually and spiritually unassailable and inexhaustible. Immortality for us, though it will be bodiless, is not without consciousness: the consciousness at the precise moment of the expiration of our bodies that our name will carry on.

  CCF agrees.

  Monday, 25 December, 1922

  Journal: Belly protests as if I have swallowed sharpened knives, but CCF and I continue our work into the late afternoon. Then clear out rubbish, empty pails, burn this and that.

  Margaret: I have just had a visitor. It has been rather a while since I have spoken to anyone. Besides your chatterbox father, I mean.

  She came to see me, the sweet old girl. I had just emptied the pails. She caught me rather tired, quite at the end of my resources, sitting outside the tomb, massaging my aching thigh.

  “Dear boy, they said I’d find you up here.”

  I thought perhaps I was hallucinating—the sudden appearance of one of the people one would most like to see. She was so kind to me on that boat. She shielded her eyes from the glare and climbed the last steps, lifting her old-fashioned dress to scramble over a rock with surprising ease.

  “Dear Ralph, you look unwell. Whatever has happened to you up here?”

  “Nothing. Searching. Hard at work. Made an extraordinary find.”

  She sat beside me on the rock, caught her breath, took my hand. Had she been you, I would have fallen into her arms. “Poor boy, look at yourself. You’re much thinner.”

  “But tell me about you, Sonia, what you have seen on the trip of a lifetime. The Rameses tombs? That circus down there at the Carter hole?”

  “Oh dear, a bit jealous, are you? There’s no need, believe me. I see these things so clearly. It doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  “All that. I’ve seen more than I care to of this country. It’s cold and hard here.” And then it was she crying in my arms, shaking, and then just as quickly she had had enough and was sitting up, dabbing her face. “I’ve lost my Len, you see, just two days ago. So very fast here.” She looked west, at the bluffs softening into the open desert. “People seem very temporary here, all this space and history. I’m taking him home tomorrow. You look like how I feel. He liked you, you know. Oh, very much. He said so that first night on the boat. I hope those spirits haven’t sent you off in the wrong direction. You mustn’t take them too, too seriously. They’ll have their little fun, you know. They were human once, too, and dying doesn’t make you smart, I shouldn’t think. Or honest. Or even interesting, now that I think of the dull conversations Len and I used to have with them. I’m done with ghosts now.”

  “Poor Len. Poor Sonia.”

  “You could come back with me, you know. I could so use the help. All the difficult work ahead. My children live too far away, too busy.” Help? “To get Len home. You could see our home, and our summer house on the lake. It’s very peaceful there. In the winter, you know, there’s so much snow to shovel away from the front of the house. Len used to do it, but I can’t ask the kids to help. Oh, dear Ralph, do come and rescue me from all that. We’ll get you cleaned up at my hotel, some clothes, have a doctor take a look at that leg, and then you’ll rescue this old woman who needs you so much.”

  Margaret. Just a few days ago, I would have gone, just a few days earlier. And I c
ould have cabled for you to join us there. You and I taking care of her in her rambling house, summers on the lake, gardening. The newlywed caretakers down in the other house, going to the market, cooking. Fixing this and that. Plenty of time for reading, playing tennis, taking you out on her sailboat. Would have answered everything.

  “I am too close to the finish, Sonia, to my find. So terribly close.”

  “Of course. Of course, dear boy.”

  “Perhaps I might join you later, when I am done here.”

  “That would be fine. I’d like that very much. If you won’t consider again and simply come now, right now, just walk away with me . . .”

  She picked her way back down the rocky path. I sat in front of my tomb door, too exhausted to stand. She would turn and wave as she descended the winding path. When high rocks hid her, I could imagine her thinking she had seen the last of me, but then the path would turn and she would appear again, smaller, and surprised to still have me in view, she would wave again. Just once more she stopped, quite small, waved her white handkerchief, a tiny figure far beneath me. Shovelling snow.

  Tuesday, 26 December, 1922

  CCF and I spend the day cleaning, analysing Chamber 8, reading wall inscriptions and illustrations. Make measurements of furnishings, et cetera.

  Wednesday, 27 December, 1922

  Today Carter began to lift into the light what only the chosen few have seen underground, but he is bringing them up to the waiting crowds and cameras in the most gruesome fashion, as if he has become the prince of death. The stretchers, the bandage wraps: it is a vision of the War itself. I suspect from the shape that the wrapped figure now arising under Carter’s command is the spear-bearing statue I saw down there, but all bandaged over, as if the ancient soldier’s lungs bubbled with mustard gas and his eyes wept those brown, gritty tears. The overwrought display: the tiniest boxes emerge carried by three men on a march to Lucas’s cave, every beaded slipper to be sprayed and glued and restored in this massive factory of antiquities, monument to one man’s vanity, this violation of a poor boy-king’s last hopes for peace.