The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Nine words drawn at random from a hat, some obscure parlour game of the Boston rich? What does your father mean, my love? He is confused about Oxford and needs clarification. Of its existence? Its function? What is a ferrell and in what conceivable manner can it question my accuracy? One point is unquestionable: much does depend. Sunday the 22nd, I shall walk into the bank here to find my account fattened by the prearranged credit which is to be wired from Boston the 22nd of every month as long as the expedition progresses. Oh yes, much depends indeed. This is no time for parlour games.

  I am relying—it is this morning clearer than ever—on men far below the calibre I would have hoped for. Not your father, of course, my darling, but his evidently jumpy partners who have prompted this oddity. I accepted his money as a gesture to him, because I love you, M. I will not claim I was blind to the effect I have on him; English snobs and Irish mobs seem to thrill our CCF equally, but I could have found my backers in more respectable, traditional circles. You knew that, and that is why you suggested this as a gift to your father. I sincerely hope our favour to him—mine to you—will not be one I live to regret.

  Enough. If I am anxious now, it is because I find myself running out of funds, expecting your father’s help to arrive in forty-eight hours, and instead he sends me riddles. I shall not show you any of this. It will resolve itself.

  But I will someday be able to hold you, in our own home, and remind you of the moment I knew I would marry you: May, only three or four weeks after my talk at the Historical Society. You are in excellent health, and as lovely as anything imaginable in this life. We walk along the banks of the Charles, with giant Inge gliding a constant ten yards behind us, first to our left and then to our right, as if she were a dinghy. The sky rolls and the clouds wring their knotted fingers, nervous to rain on your beauty. You float forward away from me as I bend to tie my shoe (and Inge stops the same respectable margin behind me, pretending to sniff a spray of blue flowers), and one ray of sun emerges and paints a patch of river and your white dress with a single brushstroke, and while I fumble with my bootlace, I watch you bend to pat the head of a small tan-and-white hound with a wonderfully wrinkled, smiling face. He has just run through a picnic, collecting a string of sausage without breaking stride, dodging all avengers, leaving chaos in his wake, but at the sight of Margaret, he stops, drops his prize at your feet, and allows you to scratch his chin, while he tips back his head and stretches his neck to savour the affection. That was it, my love: I decide at that instant to make you my consort in this world and the next (for you will be mentioned in my every written work, assuring your immortality, too). And at that instant, I imagined you sculpted by the great artist Thothmes, bent over the banks of the Nile, placing a long-fingered hand upon the soft head of a canine envoy of Anubis. “I have something urgent to ask you,” I shouted as I stood. “What did you say?” you cried, the rising wind bringing your voice to me. “I have something urgent to ask you!” and I began to run towards you. My excitement agitated the little dog, who began to run in circles, howling the most melodious song, leaving his sausage in the grass as if he had stolen it not from any hunger but from sheer joy of mischief. “You must be my queen, you must, you must.”

  “You will be the one to rescue me?” you asked as I took you in my arms.

  “Of course I will. That is why I’m here with you.”

  It was days later when you suggested your father’s investment club, eroded my doubts and arguments, and some weeks after that when I asked him for your hand. And yet today I am forced to sit as a python squeezes my belly, and I scratch my head and puzzle over his cryptic cable, running through a dozen styluses for the WC gramophone, and in short losing a day to worry. I suppose all of this agony is somehow a tribute to your beauty and love, my troublesome darling who brought us all to this point, but I trust you are already setting your father straight.

  Journal: Find, with much trouble, an open cable office, and cable Boston to confirm certain details necessary for the Partnership’s first scheduled wire, as preliminary resources are dwindling, and we are only beginning.

  Bank closed. No one responds to knocking.

  Call for portraitist to return; nothing else to be done on a Friday in a Mohammedan city.

  CABLE. CAIRO TO C. C. FINNERAN,

  BOSTON, 20 OCT. 1922, 3.18 P.M.

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY IS IN ENGLAND. NO FURTHER CLARIFICATION OF MY ACCURACY NEEDED. KNOW NO FERRELL. 22ND APPROACHES. MUCH DEPENDS. Q3: IN ALL ATUM-HADU’S REALM, THERE IS NO MAN MORE TRUSTED/THAN HIS MASTER OF LARGESSE, WHOSE EVERY MOVEMENT IS DIVINE./I SHALL REPLACE WITH GOLD ANYTHING OF HIS WHICH IS RUSTED/AND I SHALL ASSURE HE CAN AT HIS WHIM SWIM IN WINE. DADIAE, CAL, 1920. RMT.

  Saturday, 21 October, 1922

  Journal: Today, with time nipping at my heels and still no word from the Antiquities Service, I paid them a call. For last night, in troubled pre-sleep clarity, it occurred to me that I have been fooled into worshipping a slip of paper. Such fragile fetishes, an archaeologist knows better than anyone, are not carved in stone. There is no use making a god of before-the-fact permission, as Marlowe used to say in the matter of applying for leaves. A man-to-man chat with the Director-General, perhaps a gift and a candid negotiation over terms, even an expression of willingness on behalf of Hand-of-Atum, Ltd, to offer him an honourary share in our discovery, and with that, we should at last be under way.

  I presented the D-G’s secretary with a signed first edition of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt. He was duly impressed, grateful, muttered some French. I requested an urgent audience with the D-G himself, to share my latest thinking about the tomb of Atum-hadu.

  “You are wanting to make change of your application?” asks dubious DuBois.

  “No, I am wanting to enhance my application, ducks.” Which is true: I am willing to make one last goodwill gesture to their rules.

  As DuBois apparently could not blink without clearance, he duly retreated into the D-G’s chambers and left me standing at his desk. The trappings these office-officers feel they need! “From the desk of the Director-General of the Antiquities Service.” “From the Desk of the Chief Secretary to the Director-General of the Antiquities Service.” Wax and seals, presigned, prepaid blank telegraph forms. Frippery.

  I waited my turn in one of the overstuffed leather chairs, withdrew my papers from my bulging briefcase, and have now updated my Journal to the present moment. And I wait, hopeful that my visible willingness to submit myself to their corrupt rules will unclog the constipated system.

  And now it is later this same evening and I am back in the hotel, and it is with pride and excitement that I write these words: today I met and befriended one of my great heroes, a man whose professionalism and dedication I respect above all others, even though he is now reduced to chasing shifting shadows in the Valley of the Kings.

  Sitting, waiting the word of the D-G, and having finished my updating of the Journal, and still with no sight of the toadying Frog, I felt the shaking-jelly preamble of a medium-grade gut attack, and so I retreated to the gilded facilities of the Antiquities Service’s gentlemen’s lounge. Though it may strike you as indelicate, I must invite you, Reader, to join me there, as I wash my hands and watch in the mirror as the colour returns slowly to my damp, exhausted face.

  I had recognised—from the sounds of unhappiness in harmony with my own that had risen from the next closet over—a fellow member of the digestively damned, a brother of the beastly bowel. And then at the sinks and mirror, as I rose from the basin with my face dripping lukewarm water and cursed the native towel-boy who took his sweet time drying me before my shirt collar was soaked, I examined next to my blinking reflection that of a moustachioed older man studiously soaping his hands. I recognised him at once: my indigestive colleague had been none other than the great Howard Carter, former Inspector of Antiquities, discoverer of countless tombs and treasures, including Thothmes IV and Mentuhotep I, currently the well-endowed beneficiary of the Earl of Carnarvon’s aristocra
tic interest in Egypt, painter, authority, and great genius of digging, now on the verge of (it is hardly credible even as I write it), his sixth long season seeking and failing to find a minor XVIIIth-Dynasty king’s tomb on the scantiest evidence. Six years, wasting Milord’s money! One could hardly be surprised that the poor fellow’s stomach was in open rebellion.

  I studied him in the mirror, the grace with which he moved, the bearing, the air of masterful indifference. He wore a light twill suit. I was fascinated to see, even in his dotage, the obvious relationship between his manner and his expertise. Like Marlowe, he is one of those for whom his work is his destined calling, and so it is visible even in how he washes his hands, how he bears up under the banal but omnipresent burdens of his body. I introduced myself.

  “Trilipush?” he repeated. “Trilipush?” He washed his hands and peered into my reflected eyes, all of Egyptology nestled in his memory, organised and comfortably accessible. “ ‘The pornographer’? ”

  His sympathy at the pain I have suffered at that idiotic epithet applied by small minds to my work was evident in his compassionately humorous “quoting” tone of voice; we both knew that even one more word on the topic would be lending the ignorant too much of our time. His ironic question was a welcome “how-d’ye-do” from a peer who knew all too well what sort of envy and stupidity we sometimes meet in this treacherous world.

  “Ah, yes, quite so! And a fellow slave to wicked Intestinus the Large, if I may be so bold. Local food doesn’t agree with you, old boy? Or are you a chronic victim, diet aside? This is no continent for the incontinent.”

  As the towel-boy dried my hands, I noted with interest that Carter chose to take his towel himself. As if he knew that an explorer, accustomed to the rough ways of the site, cannot allow himself to grow used to the city’s soft luxuries.

  We sat and smoked in the D-G’s waiting room (even the great Carter has to wait his turn for the attentions of the desk-wallahs), and he accepted and placed in his portfolio my gift to him, Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt, which I inscribed, “To my dear friend, a fellow sufferer of both imbeciles and irritable innards, and a great archaeologist, truly the passing generation’s greatest Egypt-man. With fondness on 21 October, 1922, in the waiting annex of the D-G’s office at the Antiquities Service, Cairo. Ralph M. Trilipush.”

  Carter’s renowned quietness, combined with—let us just imagine—some exhaustion at the prospect of pursuing his minor but elusive prey for another season, having burdened himself with the concession for the obviously drained Valley of the Kings, was remarkably stylish. His manner was of the insightful monosyllable, the expressive eyebrow, the breath that could be tuned to the most precise gradations of meaning, practically the sculpting of exhaled cigarette smoke into hieroglyphs which, translated into English, would fill pages. His repose (especially after those internal barrages that would have reduced lesser men than us to outright sobbing) spoke volumes.

  We conversed for several minutes about explorer’s gut, my discovery of Fragment C, my prospects for finding Atum-hadu’s tomb, his own prospects for success in the Valley. We discussed Oxford, my childhood in Kent, my military career, Atum-hadu. “Gardiner had some rather choice words about your rhyming translations,” Carter teased, shaking his head at the dishonest and dim-witted philologist who had reviewed Desire and Deceit in Chronicles of Egyptology as “embarrassing for laymen and painful for scholars.”

  “Amusing, wasn’t it? That reminds me: I must ask you, Howard, what you make of those who even at this late date still harbour doubts that Atum-hadu—”

  “Oh! Meestair Cartair! We are apologising for your waiting with all of our most sincere hearts!” And out of the D-G’s office rolls the little secretary, burbling over with admiration and excuses. “You are back from your villa in Gurna? You were not expected, but what complete happiness to be seeing you!” And similar sycophancy, at which Carter and I rolled our eyes at each other.

  “What! Is Carter out there, too? Send him right in!” booms a voice from the D-G’s office, neatly illustrating the bureaucrat’s typical preference for dealing with the unthreatening embers of past success rather than the burning fire of present-day promise. Carter’s bearing, even in the few steps from his chair to the D-G’s door, was highly impressive. Were I still young and malleable, I would have sought to emulate him: his unspoken but unmistakable conviction that everything important was somehow more complicated than the layman could understand, but that the only necessity was a clear intention, and that a relaxed simplicity would always yield results. Although perhaps even results are not the point (sixth season, after all) and to conduct oneself as if results were the point is to strive for something illegitimate or grubby. Rather, his bearing implies that one should conduct oneself as if acknowledging that success is often out of one’s control, and—I seem to be having trouble pinpointing the exact effect Carter has—he made one feel smallish, I have heard others say, as if he knew more than you but felt neither superior nor apologetic for that, only wanted, as long as you were in his presence, that you would feel neither inferior nor sorry, but strive, as he did, not for petty things, but only for some unnameable greatness, and to do that with precisely his same sort of unexcitable but stylish calm. And never to mention any of this aloud.

  Nodding to me to acknowledge the unfairness of his welcome over my own, Carter took his leave. Before he entered the D-G’s office we made plans to dine often, later, upriver at Thebes during the digging season, and he complimented Desire and Deceit again.

  DuBois informed me that the D-G was busy for the rest of the day and to make my “retour in other weather.”

  Sunday, 22 October, 1922

  Journal. Logistical planning: Visit bank, which is open, but Sunday, of course, is a bank holiday in America. So, tomorrow, as soon as credit is established, first task will be to settle rental of villa in the south, ideally near Gurna. Make appointment for lunch tomorrow with agent. Prepare schedules, begin packing. Hard to know which gramophones to bring south for the villa, and for on-site at the excavation. On the one hand, the Victrola XVII is an excellent salon unit and fills a room well. The Edison Audiogram 3 is very small, fine in a bedroom to help one sleep. Depending on the ease of transport between the villa and Atum-hadu’s tomb, I could bring the Columbia Favorite. But the XVII’s power and volume would be ideal for inspirational music for the men and myself. Popular songs. Old Army favourites.

  But, as Carter reminded me yesterday, the great delight on excavation is hearing the men’s work songs, the simple melodies these simple people chant to keep their minds occupied as they burrow away, uninterested in the search itself, and the sweetest sound of all is the sudden silence that falls magically everywhere and all at once when one of them unearths something. Carter spoke of that silence with nostalgic rapture in his eyes.

  Monday, 23 October, 1922

  Journal: Bank first thing, but there is a delay of some sort. Bank manager asks me if I am “quite certain about the details of my financial arrangements?” I am ready to strike him as he peers up at me from behind his ludicrous spectacles, one of those Englishmen who in the heat of the tropics does not bronze or blossom, does not sweat through with passion, but instead shrivels, a sun-dried little fruit, desiccated and clinging to his figures and protocols, the only things that can save him from total disintegration.

  No matter. The delays of the modern financial system are one of the unavoidable obstacles thrown in our path. Were our task easy, anyone could accomplish it, and immortality would be a cheap honour.

  Lunched at the Explorers’ Club in Cairo, and I must admit I found it rather overwhelming to see the company I hope one day to keep. The building was an officers’ club in the War. I had heard of its transformation and I had vaguely expected some rather crass or amusing tribute to the fathers of Egyptology and excavation, perhaps something to lure American tourists, or more practically, a well-decorated house of assignation wherein impoverished archaeologists could discreetly pai
r off with cash-heavy would-be patrons, whether the representatives of skimpily stocked but well-endowed American museums or bored and daffy English lords, ideally shell-shocked and narcoleptic, fanning themselves with signed cheques.

  But no, I found something else entirely, a little vanity of the French and British Consuls-General perhaps, but one which had quite an effect on me, as if a panorama of my future were laid out glistening before me. In the pillared, sandstone building—a bank at first glance—one entered a dark wood hall on bloodred carpets as gaslights cobra-hissed behind globes of lapis and crystal. Floating fezzes unburdened me of my things, and then I stood quite alone, straightening my cuffs and tie in the dim light under the watchful eyes of a portrait gallery of the men who came before me, each leaving his large, ineffaceable footprints in the sand. To the left of the mirror where I examined my own face hung old Henry Salt, whose memoirs I devoured as a boy. Next was Salt’s muscleman, Belzoni, the former circus strongman who opened Abu Simbel’s temple. Then, the half-mad, hypnotic gaze of Fouéré, who was reputed to have kept a harem with the full blessing of the French Government, as it kept him more productive in the accepted Golden Age pursuit of unwrapping mummies for their golden rings. Next in oils was Champollion, white-collared, stiff-necked, and a bit cross-eyed, as if the effort of decoding the Rosetta stone had twisted his eyesight and reason into a coiled snake. And a dozen others hung there, too, nearly all of them retiring or dying with the warning to the world that there was nothing left under the sands of Egypt; they had found the very last of it themselves. And each being proven wrong by the bold fellow who followed him, who in turn said he had been the last, who in turn . . . and so on.

  I stood amidst these pictures, my own mirrored face hanging equal amongst them. I could see the reflection of Carter’s face over my shoulder. “Hullo, Trilipush,” said the painting, so audibly that if I had not been alone I would have asked a companion if he had not heard it, too. A foolish phantasm, but I understood at once the meaning of this mad vision, this excess of imagination too long trapped in the city and the corruptions of hotels and clubs: I could hear the pantheon welcoming me into its ranks.