The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Of course, I did not fool myself that you were taken with me, precisely. No, I could see that another twentieth-century woman had found the words of the XIIIth-Dynasty king to be an overwhelming eau de cologne.

  My darling, I am stuck in Cairo, awaiting my licence to proceed from the Antiquities Service, and I wonder what you are doing this very instant. Here it is 17 October, at 11.36 P.M. How I wish I had a device that allowed me to peer at you right now, a telescope of the most powerful kind. I would watch you ceaselessly, my love.

  Wednesday, 18 October, 1922

  Journal: Nothing at the post. Four days before my Master of Largesse and the backers will wire and refill my coffers, I set off to continue purchasing supplies in the markets and speciality stores dedicated to men in my position. A full day, and the activity eases the boredom I was feeling from my forced delay. Paints, brushes, pencils, chisels, carving knife, electric torch, camp bed: my list is slowly being filled when, on a quiet side street, I note the storefront of a tailor. I will need several more suits, for working and socialising, and something formal for an official Tomb Opening (an event usually involving high officials of the English, French, and Egyptians, possibly General Allenby, et cetera).

  I pushed through hanging beads and into a well-lit little space where a tall Egyptian was prematurely stooped from spending years under this low ceiling, and I was soon in a padded, wicker armchair, sipping cardamom coffee with the proprietor while two young boys wheeled in gold-painted cart after cart of fabrics. The tailor and I fingered this and that, discussed the merits of certain cloths for resisting the heat while still catching the eye. I was impressed enough by ten of the samples to order suits of them (CCF would have paid ten times as much in Boston) and stood for my measurements. The triple mirrors offered me left- and right-handed versions of myself to play with, profiles in only my undershorts with my bare feet aligned heel to toe, while below me a crouching servant measured my legs and called out the numbers to a scribe cross-legged on a cushion, his sleeves rolled up to reveal hairless arms with embossed veins like relief maps of river deltas, and somewhere behind a curtain out of sight, I heard female whispers and subdued tittering.

  A small deposit and the suits will be ready in one week’s time, the 25th. Go to tourist agency to postpone departure, booking on the Cheops.

  And then, as I was strolling along, pleased with my purchase, thinking of my fiancée, I came upon an inspirational sight on a street corner: a wooden easel with two folding stools where tourists could pay to have their likeness painted on a convincingly broken piece of pottery, dressed in Pharaonic garb, surrounded by a hodgepodge of ’glyphs. A fat Egyptian was painting the profile of an American boy while his parents watched, laughing, trading audible asides at the artist’s expense.

  Well, I certainly shall not pose for a tourist’s knickknack, but an official portrait, begun prior to the opening of Atum-hadu’s tomb and completed after it, would have a certain timeliness to it, a marker in my career, admired on a wall in Boston or London or Cairo. With a week’s delay still, I have the time. Upon my return to the hotel, I ask the concierge to arrange for the best portraitist he can find to come to my rooms. I begin my sittings tomorrow.

  An evening at the cinema. In the darkened hall, chewing dates and figs, the natives and I are equally astounded by the moving picture: an Englishman wrestles a lion, then enters a tent where a beautiful woman with almond eyes awaits him. Later he battles bandits and enters a Pharaonic tomb, where he runs his hands through mountains of loose gold and jewellery. A mummy stands as if alive and attacks the Englishman, but he dispatches the ghoul with a pistol shot.

  Thursday, 19 October, 1922

  Journal: Today’s activities included two hours of meditation while the artist pencilled his rough plans onto the canvas. I also found an excellent craftsman of valises, an unadulterated delight, which I know my brother Atum-hadu would have savoured in preparing for his travels, too—the soft scale of the crocodile, the glistening brass of the hasps, the burnt-black monogram (A being only 1/3 the cost of RMT, of course, but that is one of the perquisites of kinghood). Nothing at the bank today, though of course the wire is not officially due for three days yet.

  Tonight, I toil in the clamour of a little cabaret where the chicha smoke forms jinn who embrace their puff-cheeked masters with massaging fingers. I watch the smoker by the door: a nest slowly coils around his head, the faint echo of an ancestor’s mummy wraps, but each time the door opens to his right, all at once the smoke rushes out, away, up into the star-flecked, plum-coloured sky. The door closes and he begins again, shrouding himself top to bottom with smoke; the door opens and invisible plunderers again unravel his work.

  On immortality and “The Tomb Paradox”: Immortality is, of course, the central issue under the sands. The ancient kings, I would remind my lay readers, all shared a healthy desire to live forever in a well-equipped eternity. To achieve this personal permanence, two elements were necessary:

  • The preservation of their physical remains, eternally secure

  • The preservation of their names, spoken forever by the living.

  Margaret: M., a memory forms like smoke gathering around my head: that village vicar who would appear when I wandered away from Father and the Hall. “Tell me, child. Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?” Aside from him, I do not remember fear in my childhood, but in the case of this vicar, I can conjure today the varieties and intensities of childish terror I felt at the mention of his name, at the sight of his face across a street (calibrated before and after he caught sight of me), the sound of his voice, the feel of his massive, speckled hand on my shoulder, the smell of his breath, the harsh, changeable weather of his moods, and that tingling dread, most intense, when he would present me with some gift.

  “Yes,” I mumbled, nearly choking on the proffered sweet.

  “And what are the requirements for the soul’s immortality in everlasting paradise?” He leaned in close to hear my answer, placed his ear directly before my mouth, where he must have heard the slurping and crunching of the candy, and I saw deep into that bristled conch shell, red and flaking from winter cold.

  I was not trying to mock him, not at that age, Margaret. No, I was relieved, for I knew the answer to his question! I had happened to read it that very day, absorbed until well after dark by Bendix’s Nile Kings (a work I can no longer endorse for scholars). I was relieved, relieved, and I spoke before I heard a faint stammering voice in my brain telling me to stop: “The survival of your remains and your name. Your name in chronicles, your body in the mummy wrap, and your heart, lungs, intestines, and liver in canopic jars. Figurines of serving girls to arouse you for the act of re-creation . . .” My voice was slowing down at the same speed his ghastly ear withdrew and was replaced by the smoothly shaven face (with a red-brown sliver of dried blood) and the so-blue eyes, and the shards of skin speared and quivering in his eyebrow.

  And yet from here the beating that followed seems not to have been administered to me; I can instead (in this Oriental music here that may be scarcely changed from that of 3500 years ago) see that beating delivered to the boy Atum-hadu, still a commoner in the increasing turmoil of his times, realising slowly but with delight that he was endowed with gifts that none around him possessed, that his ascent to the very pinnacle of his world (though that world was crumbling even as he scaled it) seemed inevitable. If in his ascent he offended or was forced to abandon those around him, the cruel vicars of his world, that was to be expected, even enjoyed, enjoyed even in the beatings themselves (“What are you laughing at, wretch?” I recall my own clergyman asking, as the ex-boxer-turned-man-of-God’s blows rained down harder on the little boy, somehow already the stronger of the two).

  But immortality—that is the central issue, and the basis for what I term “The Tomb Paradox,” which, I notice now, is as good a title for this book as any other. The Tomb Paradox: Atum-hadu, Ralph Trilipush, and the Solution to the Puzzle That Has Lasted Three Mill
ennia.

  On immortality and the Tomb Paradox: The ancient kings required a fair amount of luggage for a successful journey to the afterlife, and as much of that luggage appeared to the average man-on-the-Nile to be gold, jewellery, and luxury furnishings, the temporarily dead king was certain to attract unwanted visitors into his private tomb whilst he was in the awkward middle period between dying and rebirth. The honey of his trappings would draw enough ants to destroy his eternal picnic and perhaps even his corpse. (And potential tomb-robbers significantly outnumbered potential tomb residents, as not even ancient Egypt promised immortality to just any farmer or washerwoman.) Thus, the kings were torn between building, on the one hand, showy but impenetrable tombs and, on the other, completely hidden tombs.

  The problem with the former: impenetrability over eternity does not exist. Even if the royal tomb architects outthought the wiliest tomb-robbers for 500 years . . . that is only 500 years, a drop in the ocean. The problem with the latter solution: even if the king swallows hard and accepts the humiliation of being buried in an unmarked tomb, far from the temples built to perform the rituals which would speed him into the underworld, even if he would surrender being seen as the sort of king who knows how to throw a funeral and stock a good-looking tomb, all in order to keep his tomb location a secret (surrendering one sort of immortality for another), he then faces a malignant question: just how secret is secret enough?

  For, now, observe: your tomb architect certainly knows where your richly appointed temporary resting place is and how to enter it. He in turn will use a few hundred workers and slaves, at least, to build, decorate, and stock it. Well, we can solve that, you and I: use prisoners of war, and then, when the tomb is ready for occupancy, simply slaughter the men who made it. Of course now we have to bury them somewhere far from the tomb site: how to transport them there, dead or alive? Now who else knows, who told their cousins to expect them back from work late tonight, work in Deir el Bahari? And the men who, at your orders, slaughtered the prisoners—do they suspect why they did it? Did one squeal to a brother-in-law who needs money? Loose ends proliferate. As for the architect, the man who knows all your secrets: reward him! Shut his mouth with treasure, pleasure, and immortality of his own! Palaces and gold and a fine tomb just for him, to discourage him from emptying yours the day after you take up residence in it. You breathe easy, for a moment, and then you recall the plundered tombs of your ancestors, all of whom thought they had pulled the wool over the eyes of eternity. Their emptied pits are there for you to consider whenever you feel like taking a walk out from your capital in Thebes, to stroll the bluffs and valleys in the moonlight, to see just where their tombs were ransacked and the authorities, in a panic, dumped the remnants of their bodies and goods into hastily constructed caches, group sites where once powerful men and women now lie on top of each other in crumpled, unravelling heaps, hoping that when the day comes Osiris will figure out whose intestines are whose.

  So, making a display of yourself fails. Working in secret fails. The natural next notion is to endow a state-run and protected necropolis, the Valley of the Kings, in which no one attempts secrecy but instead the mummies rely on the well-paid living to protect the crowded, enclosed city of the dead. “We will stick together,” say the kings for an optimistic period. “We will build openly, with immortal displays of our wealth and power, and we will lie mummified cheek by mouldering jowl, and make an institution, a governmental ministry of tomb management and protection. The kings who come after us will see that the maintenance of a secure necropolis is in their own future interest; each king will trust his successor, because each king will know that his successor must, in turn, trust his successor to return the favour.” A golden rule to protect all that underground gold. “You, too, will need the fallible living someday, oh yes you will, so do this for me today and the future will protect us both.” Ah, except! Except it does not take long for the present to find the pious claims of the past and the hypothetical necessities of a distant future to be, both, of little weight when pressing, present needs appear. Observe: to a government in need of money for wars or monuments, the immortality insurance glinting under the sand begins to look not unlike a well-located treasury, and the past seems to be volunteering to finance the present, and the future immortality problems of the current spendthrift king seem comfortably far away.

  Suddenly, your immortality, which matters more to you than anything else in the entire universe, seems horribly tenuous, as you grow every day older and your enemies approach. How to bring everything that you need for an uncertain future without losing anything or drawing unwanted attention to yourself? Every traveller’s dilemma, mine heading south, the king’s heading to the underworld: what to pack?

  Three days until the wire.

  The dancers on the narrow stage here remind one of a verse of Atum-hadu’s:

  Atum-hadu admires two sisters.

  He takes them to his chambers.

  Too late they realise the dangers

  Of a king whose love produces blisters.

  —(Quatrain 9, Fragments A & C, from Desire and Deceit

  in Ancient Egypt by Ralph M. Trilipush)

  The strenuous contortions poor Harriman performed to navigate even that relatively mild passage! “Two sisters’ unfortunate behaviour comes to the king’s attention,” and “Atoom-Hadoo’s chamber of justice,” and “the heat of royal wrath,” and so forth, the injured prude taking shelter in jurisprudence.

  19 Oct.

  Cairo, a cabaret, late at night

  My darling Queen-to-be,

  I have just reread your letter of 22 September, as I have done over and over for three days now, and I see your face everywhere I look, even in this Oriental stage show. The women on the stage remove their silken scarves to the sound of the tambourines and moaning violins, and the veils drift down like perfume. They seem practically naked when they step onto the stage, but then even after removing veil after veil after veil for minutes, strewing them in heaps on the stage and my table, they leave not much nuder than they arrived, though the silken skins they have shed form a pile as large as a desert bluff hiding a royal tomb.

  Cairo teems with reminders of you. The palm trees at night resemble quite precisely a giant wilted bouquet, like the one I held out for you last spring, as you stepped down from the cab, a distant look in your eye, scarcely recognising me, as I had just spent two hours in the driving rain waiting for you. I was just now recalling the evening in May you and I rode the swan boats in the Public Garden and I recited Atum-hadu’s verse to you and you laughed at us:

  Atum-hadu sees his newest queen for the first time.

  His heart and body swell and inflame.

  He will go mad, will commit some crime,

  If she is not brought to him at once, naked, without shame.

  There you were, smiling up at me in such calm amusement. You saw me, saw past the shock of the poetry and of the king’s appetites, and saw the real me, as I am. I knew that instant what an extraordinary find I had made, knew it as if I had opened a tomb full of jewels and flashing gold. You looked at me, and saw what was valuable and worthy of your love there. There is nothing buried under any sand that compares to last spring with you, finding you, falling in love with you, winning you. You are such a marvellous girl, Margaret. You are everything I have ever wanted in a wife.

  And soon nothing will stand in the way of our wedding. I beg of you to wait, be patient, stay strong and healthy, and wait, wait for me, wait. I will be home before you know it, sweeping you away, covering you in treasure, setting you down in a home beyond your wildest dreams, filling your days with entertainments and rest in whatever proportion you desire. In your letter you asked where we shall live. Why, we shall be in a palace, you and I, in a palace, by a river, under palms, wanting for nothing.

  Your king,

  RMT.

  P.S.—I hope you will take this expression of my concern in the proper light: it seems to me your father is relying too he
avily on Inge to cure you. Whatever the diagnosis, your fatigues and spells should be curable by a proper doctor and medicine that gives you more energy, but judging by the fragment of a letter you posted to me in a medicated delirium, it appears she is administering substances that exacerbate your symptoms. Allow me to say that no one knows you better than I, especially when you are fully healthy and vibrant, and when you are my wife, we will spare no expense to have you seen by the best specialists in these matters. You have all my love. You are my Queen.

  Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home

  Sydney, Australia

  December 24, 1954

  Still here, Macy, still here. Though I must’ve left you wondering. Another week on my back. Christmas upon us. Cheery season, I’m told.

  I wonder, Macy, if you’re a religious man. I’m not in the slightest, not I, it’s patent foolishness. But there’s an old woman here, quite out of her mind, like most of them, hasn’t spoken in ages, just stares at the telly, but she said to me this morning—first time she’s said word one to me—she said people are judged in the next world by all the animals who’d seen them in this one. Not just the cows you ate up or the fish you caught, she isn’t a “vegetarian,” I don’t think, just the nice animals that watch you as you go about your business, if you see what I mean. The cats that watched you when you were otherwise alone. The dogs lying in the heat across the street from you. Birds outside your window. Goldfish in a bowl. They all report on what they’ve seen you do, she says, they all parliament themselves and then they decide if you fly or if you fry. What do you think of that idea? I think about all those sad-eyed animals I’ve been alone with, figure they’re napping, not understanding anything even when they’re awake. Very strange notion, very unsettling. Can’t be true, but you ever heard anyone say it before?