In old Pharaoh’s Egypt,
The Hebrews came to stay,
Until old Moses rose up
To lead his folks away.
“Let my people go,” said Moses.
And Pharaoh said, “No, sir!”
And then gave baby Jesus
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Quite so. That and the oily churn behind the boat do give one a sense of peculiar disorientation that the gin cannot quite overcome.
Margaret: Tonight on the boat to Luxor, my dinner companions at the small table set for three were an old American couple, who I assumed were on their first travels abroad, the spicy reward for a life of bland savings, children and grandchildren seeing them off for their whirling adventure, their last but one. But, no, they turned out to be something much more substantial, difficult to explain as I lie now in my cabin, trying to capture their charms as sleep gnaws at me and the recollections of what they showed me tonight fog my thinking. They were not like anyone I have ever known. Such a softness to them.
They hail from Minneapolis, or some such outlandish hamlet in the corn-blanketed depths of your America. There, Len and Sonia Nordquist are pillars of society, such as it is. He is an executive in a grain-milling concern of some sort and is fascinated by how the Egyptians harvest and process their flax and millet. She is on the board of the little city’s museum, its theatre, its school for deaf-mutes, all manner of thing. Of course they did not appear as grandees. In their travel kit (he in light Scotch hunting tweeds, she in a stylised pith helmet with some symbolic mosquito netting tied under her chin), the two grey birds were peculiarly American in their friendliness. They sat hand in hand whenever possible, but she would often take my hand in her old fingers, or Len would pat me on the back paternally. When one of them irritated the other, they would snap with much rolling of eyes and headshaking wonder at their mate’s stupidity, and then, a moment later, they were holding hands again, or stroking their partner’s sagging cheek. Len suffers terribly from the climate or the dust; he was an almost constant source of noise, but Sonia would hand him a handkerchief without even looking up or dropping a line of conversation. Taking care of him seemed to have become like breathing for her. It was quite a sight, M., quite magnetic, and I thought of you and me as old folk.
They asked about Oxford and you, and my explorations and hypotheses. They bubbled with enthusiasm to hear about Atum-hadu, even asked me to recite a quatrain or two. “Oh, you must give us absolutely the most scandalous one,” Sonia pleaded, and Len concurred, sneezing. “Yes please. Don’t spare our sensibilities.” I started them on something mild, your favourite, Quatrain 35 (“She will be mine”), but when I reached the end, the dear little lady looked rather blank: “Is that it? Really? I can hardly see what the fuss is about. Surely they get spicier than that?” “Positively Scandinavian,” Len concurred. “Was your Atum-hadu a Lutheran?” “Very well, then,” I said, “let’s try 57: Roused from sleep, the hooded cobra.” After this quieter recitation (the jazz band was resting and some of the younger ladies in the dining room seemed to be looking our way, leaning towards earshot), the ancients only stuck out their lower lips and wagged their heads from side to side, the identical gesture in them both. “Yessss,” said Len, dubiously, “I suppose some might find that a little off-colour, the snake image, but from your description of the man, I imagined something more.” “Right then, folks, we’ll have 48.” I leaned far in and whispered, as the room’s other diners had stopped talking entirely. Now Sonia was convinced, her hand over her mouth, and Len was nodding quietly. “Oh, my, oh, yes,” sighs Sonia. “You must find this fellow’s tomb! He’s enchanting!” “I’ll have to recite that at the next meeting of my lodge,” says the old man, and Sonia agrees: “Please do write it down. I belong to a poetry club in Minneapolis, and the other ladies will think me quite clever to have found this.” I promised them copies of Desire and Deceit before they disembarked; their pleasure and gratitude at the gift was quite overwhelming. Soon there were endearing invitations to explore Thebes and the Valley of the Kings together, and to visit them in Minneapolis, spend a summer at their house on some lake with an enormous Red Indian name.
We ate lamb and couscous and drank quite a good claret, and over dessert (a sticky native pastry of honey and sesame and orange flower water), Sonia passed Len a clean handkerchief, waited until he had honked his nose again, then asked him, “Well, shall we propose it to our new friend?” and Len said, “By all means. I think Ralph will jump at the chance. Besides, I want to meet the old lech.” And Sonia turned to me and petted the back of my hand and stared into my eyes with a mischievous little grin and sweetly asked if I would like to know anything more about my Atum-hadu, or my prospects of finding him, perhaps even to learn where he was that very instant?
Oh, what a pity, I thought with real sadness to have so quickly lost something of value, the old things are daft. “You have access to such information?” I asked, masking my horror as best I could.
“Perhaps, yes,” said Sonia, and she smiled with such broad joy and excitement, while Len nodded sternly and repeated, “Oh, yes, that we do, dear friend.” Could they have some scholarly background? One of the younger Nordquists perhaps an Egyptologist at Minneapolis’s agricultural university? “Patience, Ralphie, patience,” Sonia said slyly as I followed them, spry for their aggregate centuries, out of the dining room, down the hall, up the main stairs, and along a vibrating passage to their door.
They had taken a cabin easily six times the size of my own, and I had splurged (still confident in your father and the Partnership, as I still am, no question at all). Near an upright piano, on a round table with a fringed green baize cloth reaching nearly to the floor, sat a silver candelabra with three intertwining arms, each with a zebra-striped taper, which Len lit before extinguishing the overhead electric lights and covering the porthole. “Sit, dear boy,” said Sonia, wheeling three small chairs to the table.
Len joined us, and my hands were taken by my neighbours. “Oh, it feels lovely tonight, doesn’t it, bear?” she asked, and Len replied, “It does, dearest, the air quite hums.”
“Please state your name and your purpose, dear heart,” she said and squeezed my fingers with surprising strength. “For all to hear.”
“My name is Ralph M. Trilipush, associate adjunct instructor of Egyptology, Harvard University, author of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt, Collins Amorous Literature, 1920, new edition projected from Harvard’s press next year. I am the leading scholar of King Atum-hadu of Egypt’s XIIIth Dynasty. I have come—”
And with that the candles extinguished themselves. Neither Len nor Sonia blew them out. And, Margaret, they did not snuff out as if blown, the flame leaning first to the side opposite the source of the wind. No, they turned themselves off, darkened from the top down, with no scent of smoke. I was stunned, as anyone would have been, and assumed some trick, though I cannot say what or how.
“Oh, that’s remarkably good!” said Sonia, pinching off the circulation in my fingers. “You’ve been heard very fast indeed!”
“Is that Your Majesty, great King Atoom-hadoo?” intoned the chief salesman of Minnesota’s largest food manufacturer. And, Margaret, the table jumped slightly off the floor. A trick, of course, Margaret, of course, and yet, the effect, then, was really astonishing. And they are very old to be lifting tables with their knees.
“Do you have a message for our dear friend the professor?” she asked, and the table bumped the floor again.
“Do you wish to be found by the professor?” Bump.
“Do you wish to tell him where he can find you?” Bump.
“Will he succeed in finding you?” Bump.
“Will anyone help him?” Bump.
“Someone on this boat?” Bump.
“Do you wish to speak through the board?” Bump.
“Your wish is our command, great king,” said Len, very much the polished courtier.
“Please just wait one second ther
e,” said Sonia, asking His Majesty King Atum-hadu the Engorged to hold the line while she fetched a piece of paper to take a message. She released my hand and stepped away from the vibrating table, rummaged in the dark of the room for a moment or two. She relit one of the candles and laid on the table a board of some sort, I can hardly describe it, this oddity. It was a folding piece of wood painted with an ornate alphabet and numbers. On top of the board she placed a kind of lens with crosshairs in its centre, large enough to point at one of the painted letters at a time. The glass was set into an ivory disk on tiny rolling wheels, with delicate indentations to hold in velvet-lined luxury the tips of your fingers. Sonia placed my hands on the disk, and in the dim light of the one black-and-white-striped candle, their four ancient hands seemed very pale and soft on the peculiar device, as if made of the same ivory.
“So ask, ask, dear boy. He’s waiting for your question.” I did not understand what I was meant to do.
“Oh, I’ll get the ball rolling,” says Len. “Great King Atoom-hadoo, who will be of the greatest help to our friend Ralph in his quest for you?” And the glass and ivory absolutely begins to skitter across the table under our hands, stopping here and there, very precisely cent-ring its crosshairs over the letters A H A H R T N W.
“Ah, well,” chided Len. “His Majesty seems to be having a bit of fun at our expense.”
“Majesty, we’re not here for your amusement. Perhaps you don’t know just how we view kings in our day (no offence intended to you and yours, Ralphie). If you don’t wish to speak to us, so be it, but we won’t stand for any—” and Sonia positively scolded the spirit of the last king of the XIIIth Dynasty for engaging in “immature shenanigans.” There was a moment of silence and calm, and then the disk flew again, nearly throwing my fingers from it in its haste: A H A H R T N W.
“Maybe he just wants to stay with yes and no,” suggested Len.
“No, no,” I finally found my voice. “Let me try. Lord of the Nile, Master of Two Kingdoms, where shall I find you?”
R X K S T.
“Oh, this is really too much,” exclaimed Sonia, removing her hands from the ivory, which then tipped onto its side under the unbalanced weight of my and Len’s fingers. “I really must apologise, dear Ralph,” she said as she switched on the electric light and we all squinted in the glare of the 1920s. “I had hoped, you know.”
“Please, I found it all fascinating,” I said. “I am rather more scientific on these matters, so I cannot say that I sat with you as much of a believer.”
“Of course not, dear, of course not,” said Sonia, and she smiled precisely as one wants one’s mother to smile when she allows your lie to traipse by unharassed.
I bade them good night, left them waving to me from their doorway, hand in hand, made plans for breakfast tomorrow, and I lie now in my vibrating cabin (irritatingly Spartan after what I now know is available on the ship—I have half a mind to go back to Cairo to take it up with the man at the ticketing agency).
I do not wish to encourage quackery, Margaret, but these lovely, lovely people must have been rather well-practised, well-synchronised confidence artists and helpful amateur Egyptologists both, and eager to see me succeed, for how else to explain that A H A H R T N W, plus a few spaces, yields “aHA Hr Tnw,” which means “a fighter for honour” in the standard Roman-alphabet transliteration of hieroglyphs, and “rx-k st” translates, to the letter, as a very encouraging “you know the place”? What can I write here, Margaret? I saw what I saw. I do not believe it any more than you. It cannot have happened. It happened.
I have just awoken, 4.15 in the morning by my watch. In my dream just now, the engine-buzz of my wooden walls became the murmur of an impatient audience in a full lecture hall, like the room where I met you, but infinitely larger. Thousands of people are awaiting my remarks. I sit at a table on the stage with my lecture in front of me, several sheets in a hand I recognise as my own boyhood efforts to write demotic script. I am a little uncomfortable due to the weight of my headpiece, burdened as it is with golden figurines on the brow representing a vulture, a sphinx, a cobra, you, your father, Inge, and the Nordquists. Next to me on the dais sits Carter, very chatty, though in the rising ululating coming from the far, far back of the Boston audience, it is increasingly difficult to concentrate on his flattery: “Of the utmost importance, of course, we must always maintain, the manner in which we proceed from chamber to chamber within the tomb, my admiration extends far beyond your discoveries and encompasses also your heart.” The ululating grows louder and sweeps forward over the crowd, row after row of Boston ladies suddenly standing to shriek with contorted faces, flinging their arms and programmes towards me in pleading. “How do you maintain your calm in the face of such pressures?” asks a visibly nervous Carter. Half the crowd is ululating now, tearing at their collars and belts, the throaty howling, a noise as old as Egypt, echoing from the Boston ladies, Dean Warren, Professor ter Breuggen, all of Finneran’s flunky and criminal partners. Inge has torn her dress away from her magnificent body, and even you stand now, shaking off the groggy murk of painkillers to wail as everyone is wailing, and I stand up from the table and stride forward, naked and powerfully tripodal, holding my lecture in one hand and Carter’s still beating heart in my other.
I am tired. My eyes are heavy but I feel so very strong, strangely strong.
Friday, 27 October, 1922
I awoke late this morning and heard the news from one of the native pursers that last night a brawl erupted between two members of the kitchen staff and that one of the devils cut the other with a bread knife before two waiters could restrain him. I learnt also that the combat had begun over an insult by one of the blacks to an American tourist, and that the other Egyptian was moved to fight because he could not bear rudeness to Westerners. He defended the insulted American against his own countryman. A fighter for honour.
I finally convinced the purser to take me to where the poor fellow was lying, bandaged up, recuperating from the slashes to his arms and back. His English was not bad, but we spoke mostly in Arabic. I introduced myself, explained a fraction of my plans, presented him with a copy of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt (inscribed to a “fighter for honour”), and described the merest sliver of what I expected to find in my king’s tomb. I asked him a few questions, and the answers were highly satisfying: a native of Luxor, he knew the paths and byways of the areas west of the Nile like the back of his hairy hand. Did he have strong friends that he trusted? He did. Did he wish to make more money than he had ever seen? He did. Did he wish to participate in a venture more important than emptying ashtrays on a riverboat? Not much of a talker or a smiler, for all his fire to defend insulted Westerners, Ahmed looked me up and down and insolently agreed (for all the world like a sergeant-major I once knew, short-cropped hair and snarling silences). Either way, my expedition now has a headman, though it took some negotiating to convince him he would work for salary and baksheesh, not for “a share of the treasure.” And while he did not leap to his feet, bow down, take my salt, pledge his lifeblood, well, he was wounded only a few hours earlier.
I gave him the address of my villa and instructions for preliminary purchases and hiring. Discretion was stressed. He nodded his replies. He asked for and received two days to recover, attend to personal affairs onshore. And our meeting was over. I waited a bit for a burst of gratitude or childish pleasure, but received only that unblinking stare.
Breakfast with the Nordquists, fond farewells, give them address of my villa, invite them to come often, visit my site when we are up and running with a public operation. They are justifiably thrilled.
Journal: Alight in Luxor! Rental agent’s representative awaits with cart and donkeys to carry my luggage to the villa, takes payment through November 30. Banking concerns a matter of some urgency now. Banks closed until Sunday.
My luggage installed and key in hand, I take the ferry across the Nile, hire a donkey, and ride out to walk the sacred land I have not seen in
seven years, since 1915, soil holy to the ancients and myself in equal measure. The emotion is difficult to express as I trot past unimaginable changes, tourists filing past sights that, in 1915, had been nothing at all, mere sand dunes still sheltering hidden mysteries; Antiquities Service guards making their scheduled rounds; the complex of Hat-shep-sut’s temple at Deir el Bahari; and the roped-off land where Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum will be digging again in a few days’ time. I passed all of this, trotted up and on behind Winlock’s site, over hill after hill, one after another, the gentle rising and falling land along the cliff face, until at last I recognised the landmarks Marlowe and I left behind seven years ago, the day we discovered Fragment C and fled with it in such a swashbuckling hurry.
This preliminary tour of the ground gives the experienced eye an idea of the challenge ahead, the scope of the problem: how many possible places to break ground, how many men will be needed, how long we can expect to work, what sort of specialised equipment we shall need. I draw a pen-and-ink survey of the cliff face, noting every possible cleft on its façade, plotting a strategy, ranking by likelihood of success all the areas I can cover, setting priorities, as time and money demand.
Assuming my financial backing is secure, I think a team of ten men will suffice for early explorations, this number quickly growing as the digging becomes more intense. I do not think, if Marlowe’s and my guesses are correct, that this will become a case of several hundred men moving vast amounts of earth. I know where my king should be, at least I think I do. Assuming the financial backing is secure. Sunday’s issue.
The Egyptologist Page 19
