The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Meanwhile, Macy, you’re reading all the documents you can get from Oxford’s old man of records, and while there’s absolutely no trace of Ralph Trilipush, there’s an extensive trail of the capers of Marlowe and Quint. Marlowe was a student of Egypt under a don, now deceased, named Clement Wexler. Quint read French literature, so his reference to Greek seems to have been a lie, which should cast all his testimony in a certain light. Further interviews that day at the Bodleian and Ashmolean libraries, where they keep the Egyptian stuff, reveal the regular presence of Marlowe but not a whisper of Trilipush, until you’re interviewing a librarian in one of these hushed temples of unnecessary education as you’re growing convinced that Trilipush was never at Oxford, and an excessively delicate young man behind you says, “Excuse me for interrupting. I couldn’t help hearing, did you say Trilipush? Are you a friend of Trilipush’s? I wouldn’t have thought—”

  “Do you know him?” you say, much too eagerly, but you’re inexperienced, Macy.

  “But of course. But, do you? Surely not—”

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure.” Another mistake, Macy, you should’ve lied and said you were old friends. “Did you study with him?”

  “Oh, yes, Egypt in all its exotic delights, but I really shouldn’t tell tales if you don’t know him.” And the young man walks off, quite unwilling to speak another word but corroborating at least Trilipush’s unofficial presence at Oxford, so not bad, young Macy. The odd thing, though, is that this undergraduate in 1922, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, wouldn’t’ve been old enough to have attended Oxford with Marlowe, Quint, and Trilipush back in 1914. Mysteries upon mysteries. As you walk into the Oxford rain, puzzled by your discoveries, I’m still sitting in the glowing, dust-freckled drawing room, refusing another plate of Turkish Delight and sipping the thick, strange coffee offered by Mr. Quint, who’s smoking a long and peculiar cigarette in a holder and trying to make my interview most difficult, though I see much more than he’d have me see.

  “Why didn’t you serve in the Army, Mr. Quint?”

  “Various weaknesses,” claims my strapping interviewee.

  “Were you conscripted?”

  “Mmmm, I should think I would remember that—it sounds delicious.”

  “Did you correspond with Captain Marlowe when he was at war?”

  “Bien sûr. I fretted dreadfully for him, but I knew he had Trilipush there to look after him. Ralph and Hugo were based near those dreadfully grim pyramids they so adored, fighting the Boche or the wogs or whomever merited a sound English thrashing, the lucky devils, until poor Ralph went off to fight in Turkey. We thought we’d lost him, you know, but he’s the sort who always pulls through.”

  All well and good, this tale, but there you sit, Macy, back at Tailor HQ, scratching your head at the official letter, just arrived, saying that His Majesty’s War Office, just like old Oxford, has no record whatsoever for anyone named Ralph Trilipush.

  “And what do you suppose became of Captain Marlowe, Mr. Quint?”

  “What do I suppose? You Australians are terrible cynics. Just what the Army said is what I suppose. I am not the sort who doubts the official version of anything. He trotted off on leave to look at some dusty queen’s tomb or another and was probably set upon by swarthy, bearded bandits or desperately rugged, whiskered Germans who treacherously but manfully refused to accept the Armistice. They devoured him, belching at their good fortune. What do you suppose became of him, feral Ferrell?”

  “You didn’t happen to save any letters from Captain Marlowe, did you?”

  “Of course I did, and it would give me a warm and damp pleasure to deliver them to you this very instant if they hadn’t been ruined when I had some plumbing problems a few months ago.”

  “Did Marlowe ever mention a Paul Caldwell in his correspondence?”

  “I don’t recall the name, no.”

  “Australian? Possibly involved with Captain Marlowe in archaeological matters? Or personal matters?”

  “Speaking as one who knew Hugo’s tastes,” says this specimen of English manhood, “I should be very surprised if he were too personally involved with an Australian. Pioneer types not at all suited to his palate.”

  I hurry back to you, Macy, and we meet at Tailor HQ to exchange notes. “What does it all mean?” you ask me, not without frustration. “It’s too early to say, Macy. Patience, old fellow, keep your mind open.” And I send you off to book our passage to the United States of America, expenses paid by our clients, Hector and Regina Marlowe and Barnabas Davies. Oh, yes, indeed, America: where we must certainly speak to our Mr. Trilipush, professor at Harvard University.

  And what does it all mean? Trilipush, a man who apparently did not go to Oxford and did not serve in the War, apparently did go to Oxford and did serve in the War. A man who did not know Marlowe’s parents pretended or believed that he did know them, and so confidently that he pretended it to them. Or he did know them, and they lied to me to hide their embarrassing nicknames and the scandalous behaviour that must have earned them. Further, Quint, who would know, seemed to say Marlowe and Trilipush shared a shameful variety of intimacy. Meanwhile Quint and the men who served under Marlowe had never heard of Caldwell, but the War Office and Marlowe’s soldiers had never heard of Trilipush. What could be clearer?

  And with that, Macy, I post the latest chapter of our adventures to you.

  Yrs,

  Ferrell

  (Thursday, 12 October 1922, continued)

  Book notes: To be placed after Author’s Introduction and before Journal Entries: Egypt at the time of Atum-hadu: King Atum-hadu, to whom I owe my academic reputation and relatively small fortune (dwindling, with ten days still until first financial reinforcements arrive), reigned at

  Journal: Visit bank to introduce myself to manager, confirm establishment of account, preparedness to receive credits from abroad. Advise of my whereabouts for immediate notification when first wire, due 22 October, arrives from Hand-of-Atum, Ltd. Explain the need to arrange a smooth transition to the Luxor branch of the bank as soon as I make my move south to the site. The modern explorer, Reader, needs to secure firmly his financial lifeline.

  Having been well received at my bank, I then spend the rest of 12 October wrestling not with heavy tomb doors or incalcitrant work crews or fading hieroglyphs suddenly and fearfully exposed to bleaching sunlight, but with Franco-Egyptian bureaucracy. To what they submit an explorer nowadays! It was not always like this; there was once a glorious golden age when men went into the desert with no one’s permission and no one’s help. Wit and curiosity were the requisites. Once, not even academic degrees were required: Belzoni was an Italian circus strongman, Howard Vyse a demolition expert, but Egypt drew them both into her embrace, and richly rewarded their manly love. Belzoni simply carried off sarcophagi on his own knob-muscled back; Ferlini knocked the tops off virgin pyramids, like a bear batting at a beehive, and descended upon the sweet treasures nestled inside. The tennis professional F. P. Mayer, in a possibly misguided effort to understand how the pyramids were built, hired a team of native workers and closely monitored their work habits, exhaustion, and attrition as they dismantled a small VIth-Dynasty pyramid stone by stone, wheeled the heavy blocks through the desert on primitive rollers, cut the pyramid’s perfect blocks into rough, random, “natural” shapes, and buried them in a quarry several miles away. The whole experience proved very little but did reveal at the nearly empty pyramid’s central chamber an extremely small gold-flake figurine of Anubis, which I believe was melted down by Mayer’s children, after the explorer died quite mad, certain that there was anagrammatic significance to be found in the name of the Vth-Dynasty king Shepseka’are. At any rate, these explorers were men. They came, they dug, they took risks, they walked off with their finds, and their names have entered the pantheon. And while I cannot always endorse the scientific value of their methods or results, they did not wait while an application for an “Archaeological Concession” was pondered by sleepy Frenc
hmen in a Cairo office, which in exchange for mummifying explorers in red tape, extorts 50 percent of their discoveries to toss into the insatiable maw of the Egyptian state museums.

  In short, my visit to the office of the Director-General of the Egyptian Antiquities Service was a grave disappointment. Instead of the ready assistance I could reasonably have expected, I was told that the application letter I had sent several weeks earlier from Boston “wandered, it is possible to say?”

  “No,” I instructed the secretary, a pale Frenchman who claimed never to have heard of me or my application, “it is not possible to say that my application wandered.” He tarried a few minutes behind his boss’s evidently soundproofed door, then emerged with the news that my application was once again under consideration and would I please return to the office in eleven days’ time. Eleven days! 24 October is now my earliest departure date for the site. I had intended to be under way in two days, and budgeted accordingly. This is my error, of course, an error of overestimating the efficiency of others, and now, under this infantilising regime, I have no choice but to postpone. I report to the tourist agency and book first-class passage to Luxor on the Luxor Princess for the 24th, return to the hotel and extend my stay in the Pharaoh Suite, an expense I had not foreseen in my planning sessions with the Partners. The wire on the 22nd will be, it seems, more urgent than any of us had intended.

  My concession application is cannily modest. Unlike those who would excavate vast stretches of the country on whimsical suspicions, I have applied for the exclusive licence to explore only a very small strip of cliff wall on the Nile’s west bank, a secluded stretch of Deir el Bahari. While Professor Winlock burns the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s money, throwing dust and earth about the open expanses of Deir el Bahari, he has found nothing of significance in more than a year and, predictably, has shown no interest in the spot a few hills away that I intend to explore. I should be absolutely flabbergasted if he or the Antiquities Service hesitate in allotting me my portion of the ground. The Government does collect half of the results, after all.

  Visit post to see if any news from Partners/Margaret in the poste restante. Assure myself that the postal workers have the correct spelling of my name. Cable CCF to assure my bank information is accurately relayed to the Partnership’s bank in Boston, and inform him of my delay.

  Begin looking for estate agents for rental of villa near the excavation site in the south, see drawings and photographs of some exquisite and suitable properties. Howard Carter himself used one of these agents, the agent informs me. An impressive credential: the man will know the sort of thing I shall need. Visit bazaar—find a light scarf for Margaret as well as a small boy’s hand reaching into my pocket. Nearly snap the little thug in two before a hammy actress playing his weeping mother appears to plead for his life.

  Sit at an ahwa and have a coffee to calm my nerves. Note the day’s frustrating events in journal. Back to the hotel to bathe.

  Friday, 13 October, 1922

  Evidence pointing to the location of the tomb of Atum-hadu: The dillydallying at Antiquities allows me to address an implied question: how does one know where to look for a tomb? To answer, I must begin some years ago, when I cut my teeth as an Egyptologist alongside and under the heady influence of Hugo St. John Marlowe, who would by now have been one of the most celebrated members of our dusty fraternity had he not been cut down in the mad slaughter of the War.

  Before that tragic day, we were both young captains, working for our great cause side by side right here in Egypt (before I headed off in ’15 to fight in the Bosporus campaign). We had been at Oxford together, Hugo Marlowe and I, and both of us spoke modern Arabic fluently, as well as knowing our way around ancient Egyptian. Our linguistic gifts were duly noted by His Majesty’s Army, our posting to the Near East theatre merely logical. With our linguistic and cultural expertise, we were based in a Cairo suburb, responsible for prisoner interrogations (the occasional suspicious Arab tribesman bearing a German or Turkish weapon or document) and counterintelligence operations (trying to convince Arab tribesmen to carry Turkish weapons but not mean it).

  I know it is hardly fashionable to say this about the War, but I had the most marvellous time, until I was asked to advise the ANZACs in that jolly trip to scrap with Johnny Turk and catch bullets at Gallipoli. For in the months before that sad exploit, Marlowe and I took advantage of our happy posting in our beloved Egypt, scouring the sands whenever passes could be acquired and, when the opportunity arose, making ourselves known to some of the old hands of archaeology still trying to do their work, uncovering the past even as the present collapsed around them.

  My dearest friend and I spent our free moments (more than you might guess in what was for me, to tell the truth, a theatre of war with a very light repertory schedule) on motorcycles, finding official justifications for visits to the pyramids, the Sphinx, even making excursions of several days to the south in order to see the Valley of the Kings and Hat-shep-sut’s temple at Deir el Bahari—all of the fantastical places of my childhood and varsity days, suddenly there before me in the most extraordinary reality. To long for something, from the age at which the very first foundation stones of one’s personality are laid and cemented, to long for something from the best part of one’s heart simply because it is more beautiful than anything else in one’s entire life, to study it, aching to trap it and master it, to spend years in pursuit of it, and then, all at once, through the miraculous intercession of a modern, nonsense war, to have it all delivered up to one’s fingertips . . . and then to realise with shock and rapture that all one has learnt in one’s years of amorous study are mere surfaces, that the luminous object of one’s adoration is so vast that one might spend one’s life and every life one may yet receive straining to sound its depths and make oneself as one with it, to make it acknowledge one’s love and presence, knowing all along that one will never taste even a fraction of what she hides—all of this I felt in my first weeks and months serving King and country in my promised land.

  When military duties prevented me and Marlowe from leaving our base to ramble amongst the pyramids and colossi and cliff tombs and temples, we would instead, from our tents and offices, explore—as we had done at Oxford—the holes of Egyptian history, those thrilling moments when for all the world’s scholarship and speculation, we simply squint into darkness and we do not know. Peering into the shadows where parenthetical question marks pursue every date and reference like vengeful cobras unfurled to devour any stray, careless certainties—as in “Atum-hadu (?) reigned (?) circa 1650 B.C. (?) at the tail end of the XIIIth Dynasty (?), of which he was (?) the final king (?)”—the scholar must strain to make out the silhouettes of the kings and queens whose very existence is in doubt. These once-great men and women now cling to their hard-won immortality by the thinnest of filaments (half their name on a crumbling papyrus written a thousand years after their hypothetical death) while, across that chasm of time from them, historians and excavators struggle to build a rickety bridge of educated guesses for those nearly vanished heroes to cross.

  At Oxford, even as Marlowe and I mocked those reckless historians who too freely plant ancient papyrus in their own fertile imaginations and chronicle the resulting growths of fantasy with loving care, we were nevertheless drawn to the halo of uncertainties surrounding the purported XIIIth-Dynasty hero-poet-king Atum-hadu. Marlowe and I spent long nights in the Balliol Junior Common Room toiling over the photographic or sketched reproductions of the first two Atum-haduan Fragments. We debated the possibilities, charted the chronological implications, interpreted the verses’ hidden meanings, and of course laughed at those first two efforts to translate the Fragments: the skittish evasions of prim Harriman and the perfumed seductions of Vassal.

  Reader, would you know and understand me, as a man and an explorer? Then pay no attention to my childhood; despite my father’s influence and our family’s ease, it truly does not matter. Rather, if you would know my passions and under
stand how I came to be searching for Atum-hadu’s tomb, focus your vision intently on Oxford; these searing sessions of impassioned scholarship formed me, almost literally made me, it seems now. They gave me historical heft, a third and most crucial dimension, while the feeble light of an Oxford winter’s dawn crept unnoticed through the leaded glass and we pored over Lepsius and Mariette and the other classic texts of Egyptology. Marlowe and I—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—fiercely debated the mysteries of ancient Egypt, especially the possibility of Atum-hadu. Our devilish advocacy proceeded with rigour but without rigidity; we debated as a relay, readily passing back and forth the baton of doubt, all in a race to illuminate some shadowed crevice of evidence, an unnoticed nook of possibility. Where, if he existed, might Atum-hadu fit in the chronologies, as his name did not definitively appear in the (tantalisingly incomplete) king lists discovered in the preceding decades?

  And in these days and nights, you would have witnessed something more: the emergence of a certain voice, the blazing red dawn of vocation, of effortlessness: Marlowe had these without question. More than just memorised knowledge or facility with the language or a hand at drawing the ’glyphs: Marlowe had a manner of mastery that one sees in the élite field men, at a deep sepulchral place, far beneath their control or even their consciousness. Even if you draw their attention to their power, such men do not believe it, they do not understand what you mean, they do not seem even to care. For the others, the strivers, there is—no matter how much trivia or technique they scrape together—something missing. They lack and can never acquire, no matter how hard they exert themselves, a certain ability to sniff out likelihood, a certain unconscious grace, a lack of doubt or worry, a complete and thoughtless fulfilment of the role. You see lesser men, even acclaimed, accomplished journeymen, shake their heads in admiring frustration when the true masters are at work.