The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  My heart still beats with the knowledge of our victory, the strenuous and delicious effort to taste every instant—where do I begin? I cast aside the moon and haul back to the sky the solar chariot and replay our day from its glorious dawn:

  The morning was spent swinging in and out of two of my very last clefts. I was practically forced to crawl when atop the cliff wall so as not to be seen from the Valley below, now a hive of wasteful, aimless trenching. I had left Ahmed to secure the ropes above and had two men out in the basin beginning to poke at the soft ground, leaving the two other men still scouring with slow diligence the cliff wall alongside the path. My instincts were infallible.

  After lunch I was halfway down to the third cleft of the day, sensing that my nearly complete inventory was doomed to futility. Worse, I had misjudged the length of rope I would need to reach the floor of the crack for which I was aiming, and I realised in frustration that I would need to climb to the top and buy longer rope for tomorrow to reach this last array of lowest ridges. I was halfway back up the cliff face, cursing my ill-preparedness, when I heard shouting from below, my idiots who had been told to keep quiet at all costs. At the same moment, two blisters opened up on my hands, making climbing viciously painful. I called up to Ahmed for assistance, with predictable results. I looked down and saw the four men all gathered in the same place, perhaps 200 feet below me. It took me twenty minutes more to reach the top, flaying the skin off my palms as I rose, looking up for the persistently invisible Ahmed, looking down at the shrinking cluster of my men, doing apparently nothing. I rested and swung. I climbed and stung. At last I reached the top, found no Ahmed, and crawled along the path. Ahmed, it turns out, was already on his way down to look into the men’s excitement, and by the time I reached the bottom, at least three-quarters of an hour had passed.

  Which is to say, no time at all, considering how long my friend has been waiting for me under the earth! What had we found? By God, what had we not? One of the men—name escapes me, cannot regularly tell two of them apart, perhaps brothers—had in his scraping noticed on the cliff wall at eye level a very small patch of smooth, whitish rock, sunk a few inches back into the dirt and stone of the cliff face, not 100 feet from where Marlowe and I found Fragment C. The aberration was, when they found it, the size and shape of a thumb, an oblong and perfectly flat rock where all around it was irregular brown dust and stone, packed hard, crumbling only when hit with force. It was exactly the sort of thing that had led to a dozen false alarms in our work so far, and by the time I arrived they had taken it upon themselves to try to confirm their discovery, hacking at the brown wall, levering against the white stone with a metal bar, managing to scratch its surface, triple its size, and enrage me for violating my instructions to touch nothing in my absence.

  I told Ahmed to explain the rules to the men again; there would be no baksheesh for damaged finds. I examined the stone under a magnifying glass and found on it what appeared to be regular patterns, though it was hard to be sure, considering the scraping the men’s levers had caused. The white rock was without question an entirely different surface than the stone even a foot above it, so if it was large it extended downward only, but it did not display the texture of erosion. I sent the men to fetch shovels and brushes from the donkeys, and I set to work myself with painstaking care. “This is it, then? We are close?” says Ahmed, his first sign of real enthusiasm yet.

  Neither supper nor nightfall slowed me in my cautious work. And, to their credit, Ahmed and the men showed no interest in leaving the site even as the sun set, though it was hard to know for sure, as their Arabic has grown increasingly incomprehensible over the past week; private slang and slurring seem to be replacing proper diction. Using a variety of specially crafted small chisels and brushes, ranging in size from a half-inch to more than a foot, I worked steadily, a surgeon conducting the most delicate of operations. Tempting as it was to use battering rams and dynamite (as the early fellows did decades ago), our responsibility is not only to preserve the item inside (rushing it off to a museum or private collector) but to see everything in its original context, and to map and re-create that context for posterity. For observe: we never know the range of our ignorance. We do not know what significance we fail to see by hurriedly smashing a wall that seems blank and meaningless. Preserve every stone and fragment, note each brick’s relation to every other brick before removing anything: this is the care that separates the professional from the tomb-plunderer. And so, if I delay in the description of this unsurpassed day, it is only to give you, eager Reader, a sense of both the building excitement and the strange passage of Time.

  For at the moment of discovery, Time goes all agog, flows in every direction at once and at every imaginable speed until the sun flies through the sky even as you feel you have just begun; your work will never end; you can count your every breath; you can imagine what you are going to see, behind this door, in the greatest detail (for it was a door, oh yes, I will reveal that much); you can picture every golden bracelet, majestic throne, jewel-studded garment, alabaster sarcophagus, calcite head atop a canopic jar of royal organs. And, more: one can see the change that will overtake one’s life in that instant, the dress your beloved will wear at your wedding, the glimmer of gold on the sash around your sovereign’s neck as he asks you to rise. One knows, too, what one will feel a mere foot farther on, though how long it will require to penetrate that single foot one does not know: which shall be the instant? The shard of shattering crystal time that will embed itself into eternity, bridging now and the soon-to-be-clarified past and the fixed, inevitable future? Will 12 November at 10.14 A.M. be the moment? Will it delay until 4.16 P.M., that instant when one’s friends shout with joy and love?

  Who will peer after me into this gold-reflecting murk? What poets, scribes, tourists? Let the schoolboys practise Atum-hadu’s pretty cartouche on their drawing tablets, and begin the school day in compulsory recitation of our king’s inspirational Quatrain 7 (Fragment C only):

  When we triumph over our enemies or fate, we call for a dozen girls

  Who come to us in haste, and Atum-hadu’s robe unfurls.

  And they dance and bare themselves for us, their breasts so high

  That Atum-hadu’s hooded cobra leaps as if to fly.

  While I would happily celebrate with my king tonight in his preferred manner, I cannot, as my queen-to-be awaits me in her pure beauty far away, and my jealous mistress, Science, demands that I recline on this service cot, under sheets emblazoned with cobra, vulture, and sphinx, and guard my discovery from the bandits and jealous peers certain to arrive when word escapes, as it surely will, or I do not know the modern Egyptian labourer’s natural threshold of discretion. But when they come, they will find me with my service Webley (for bandits) or a smiling silence (for Carter). Ah, that will be tasty. The Carter way is not the only way; my hale and hearty nature served ten thousand times as well as his hauteur.

  I have got ahead of the story. Time, as I said, will play its tricks.

  So, the first glimpse by the men was thus:

  (FIG. A: VIEW OF ATUM-HADU TOMB DOOR A AS FIRST SEEN BY ANONYMOUS WORKMAN, 11 NOVEMBER, 1922, AS WORK SONGS ARE REPLACED WITH A SUDDEN, HAUNTING, AND BEAUTIFUL SILENCE)

  The covering earth was at some places a foot thick or more, often rock hard. But at the end of several hours of chiselling, brushing, and sifting, we had a door, approximately five and a half feet high and three feet across (must send Ahmed to buy a ruler). It was found approximately two-thirds above the level of the cliffside path, and one-third below it. After spadework, we had revealed:

  (FIG. B: RALPH M. TRILIPUSH NEXT TOATUM-HADU TOMB DOOR A, 11 NOVEMBER, 1922)

  Must arrange for photographic equipment after the wire.

  The portal is absolutely intact, absolutely unpenetrated. No robbers ever broke through it and no later authorities ever replaced an inch of it. It has not been seen in 3500 years. Further and significantly, it was not “sealed.” That is to say, there wer
e no impressions on the stone door of any royal cartouches or symbols, no marking of any kind implying the presence of a professional tomb guardian. This would be somewhat strange in times of peace, but given what we know of Atum-hadu’s last days, the door’s pristine purity is further evidence of its identity. Whoever closed this door had been instructed not to mark its exterior with anything to identify its occupant (thus identifying him to me, with unmistakable clarity).

  Of course, if (as I am absolutely certain) I write tonight outside the tomb of Atum-hadu, he was laid to rest at the end of the XIIIth Dynasty, at the end of all culture, religion, life, Egypt, hope, time. For though a mere hundred years later, the XVIIIth Dynasty would rise from the XIIIth’s ashes and restore Egypt in a glossy, refurbished glory (a bourgeois restoration, the kitsch New Kingdom, imitative, luxurious but false, the prancing ground of pudgy-bellied androgynes and the research pool of equally soft scholars), at the time of Atum-hadu’s death, with Hyksos invaders declaring themselves the kings of a country they could never hope to understand, barbarians playing dress-up games, defiling the temples with their efforts to worship gods who despised them, there was no reason to stamp official seals onto the tomb of Atum-hadu, the last of Egypt’s kings, no reason to boast of his presence. While Carter’s tomb, should he find it, will be stamped liberally with the hieroglyphic equivalent of “Tut Slept Here,” Atum-hadu’s door was left blank, covered in fast-drying mud, and off the king hurried to the underworld with not a moment to waste.

  I probed the perimeter of the door, found it securely wedged into the rock of the cliff. The door seems to be at least a foot thick and should come out as a solid block, a task for tomorrow, or as long as necessary to do it correctly, as Carter would do it, to give the old, unlucky fellow his due.

  Meantime, Ahmed and the men have been sent home to perform a series of crucial tasks while I sleep guard under Atum-hadu’s sky. I wish I could imitate the ancient kings and cut out the men’s tongues, then count on their likely illiteracy, but tasks do need to be performed, and I cannot do them all. Tomorrow they will return with ropes and harnesses, metal cylinders to roll the door out, a cart with padding, and a canvas to get it back to my villa unseen.

  Under traditional protocol, I would now contact the Antiquities Service for an Inspector of Antiquities to be sent out to participate in and oversee a correct opening, excavation, clearance, and cataloguing of the tomb located within the area specified by my concession. However, due to my continued gavotte with Lacau, I am at a bit of a loss, and see no other way than to continue for the time being on my own, until I know what help I will actually need from them. When that time comes, I will return to Cairo and tell them in person what treasures I have found. I will complete their paperwork, pay gentle fines, play along as they snicker and delicately slap my wrist, watch them lick their lips to hear where the tomb is, and listen closely to the slicing sound of Winlock’s concession being trimmed to accommodate the hauling and laboratory needs of the Trilipush Expedition.

  Tomorrow we open our tomb!

  CABLE. LUXOR TO C. C. FINNERAN, BOSTON, 11 NOV. 1922, 5.58 P.M. MASTER OF LARGESSE. VICTORY! THE GLITTER OF DISCOVERY IS MINE AND YOURS. ASSURE CREDIT FOR THE 22ND. DELAYS OVER PENNIES RISK MOUNTAINS OF GOLD. RMT.

  I’d been buying gifts for your aunt, truth to tell. The usual sort of thing. Billable, of course, since she was a key source of information. And she accepted all my gifts, you know, no hesitation at all; I wasn’t a fool. And the day came when I decided to tip my hand, declare myself a little. That same morning, before I could even decide on my technique, I was summoned to the royal court, for Finneran had news from Egypt. “Look at this, Ferrell,” he says to me, pushing me into a chair. “Looks like we were both wrong about my boy, and that’s good news.” He showed me a cable from Trilipush: the devil had found his tomb, or so he claimed, and his team was opening it up, glitter and mountains of gold. “You should’ve seen Maggie’s face when I showed her this,” Finneran said, waving the cable about, too excited to sit down, capering about his study, offering me a drink from beneath his desk. He’d never shared any of his concerns with Margaret—no mention of Oxford—and he begged me—no, he commanded me, and you could see what a tough old bastard he really was when he felt strong about something—commanded me to follow his lead, now that his decision was “vindicated.”

  Finneran was so delighted, he was going to restart the money supply that he’d halted when the Oxford news had come in. “Are you sure that’s wise?” I asked. “If Trilipush is a liar, and we do have some reason to think so, surely this cable doesn’t prove anything.” Do you blame me, Macy? He’d asked me to look after his daughter. And I really spoke not out of any self-interest, but just because that was my honest advice. My mistake. I proved my very first opinion of Finneran’s appetite: honest advice was not what he hungered for. He stopped in the middle of lighting his cigar and he turned on me. It came absolutely from out of a clear blue sky: Finneran displayed a temper I hadn’t yet seen, though I should’ve guessed it was there, and I fled his study and the house, delighted never to see him or his opium-gobbling daughter again. This client was a lost cause. I was for Egypt at once.

  Such are the resolutions of foolish men in love, Macy, even detectives who should know better. When she appeared at my hotel that same evening, laughing at her effortless escape from the house and her Great Dane guard dog, I eagerly escorted her to jazz club after jazz club, into quarters of Boston where we were the only white faces to be seen in a sea of dark ones, then into a district with no one but Chinamen for street after street, and finally back to JP’s, where she raised every glass to her fiancé’s triumph. Oh, yes, she was cheerful that night, and didn’t touch the opium, never stopped singing her Trilipush’s praises. Clear as clear water I hadn’t made the slightest impression on her despite it all. She drank and I paid (or the immortal estate of Mr. Davies paid, to be fair). A necklace sat bunched up in my pocket.

  That was also the night I met the mysterious J. P. O’Toole, if I recall right. I’m sure you’ve heard O’Toole’s name, Macy, rather infamous after the gangland shootings at the end of the ’20s. Back then, he operated this club among other lurks, fed opium to your aunt, and was one of the investors in the Egypt expedition. When he descended to our couch (probably to see why Margaret wasn’t coming up for her drug that evening), he gave me two fingers of his hand to shake, affected a sort of French royalty attitude to anyone who dared speak to him, though he took Margaret on his lap and bounced her on his knee, calling her his wicked goddaughter, a freedom that made my blood boil. Still, I won’t say he was a bad fellow, since he does turn up again as one of our clients just a ways down the road, Macy.

  I helped her home that morning, just before dawn. We stopped in the public gardens near her home, and I was ready to tell her everything. I was going to tell her that Trilipush had used her for her money, that he’d never been to Oxford, though plenty of his perverted friends had and had forged his diplomas for him. I was only deciding where to start the whole tale: the dissipated English gent, sodomist, murderer of his male lover and an innocent Aussie digger. I was going to tell her for her own good, you see. And I hoped—I knew—that when I told her the truth, she’d be grateful, would thank me, would finally see me in a new light, a light I hadn’t been able to turn on by myself because she was blinded by Trilipush’s lies. She said, “Good night, Harry.” I didn’t speak. She turned towards the gate of her home, not caring if she was caught coming in or not. Then she looked back at me and said, “Can you even believe it? My hero found his treasure! Ain’t it grand?” And off she went. And now I called her name, but too quietly, and then the gate clinked shut. I can hear it still, that sound. There’s a gate here at the nursing home, between the so-called garden and where the rubbish bins stand in a sort of shed outside, waiting for collection, and when the orderlies carry things out there and the window is open in certain weather and when there’s a certain smell in the air, that gate latch makes its little
clinking sound, and I remember your aunt so clear I could cry. Surely she told you about it.

  Sunday, 12 November, 1922

  Book notes: Yesterday was Armistice Day, a moment to recall our brothers fallen in the Great War, and to be thankful for the blessings of peace that the rest of us now enjoy, eternally, one hopes. Include something here about Marlowe and me saying farewell before my departure to Turkey, Marlowe promising to hold Fragment C until my return, recalling in that moment our green and happy days at Oxford, him blessing me before battle, my optimism for our eternal partnership when I left, my sorrow upon my return from Turkey, et cetera.

  Journal: It is a new Ahmed today, smiles and bowing, and the men follow his lead. Most gratifying. They arrived at dawn, cables sent and cats fed, and with an impressive train of new gear, though before this adventure is done I will have to go to Cairo myself for some of the more critical scientific equipment. Also, tonight I must send him for mosquito netting if I am to sleep outdoors again—my arms resemble one of my father’s relief maps of the Himalayas.

  We began at once, driving wedges under the door, digging as we went along its top and sides. The work is painstaking, and by lunch we have dug a space around the door’s perimeter about a foot deep but still have not loosened it. We have concluded our only choice is to run ropes behind and around it and then with all twelve of our arms control its descent onto its outside face, onto padding to protect any microscopic inscriptions invisible to my lenses, on top of rollers we can tie directly to the donkeys’ harnesses. Back to it.

  5.00—I am now able to discern a seam where the top surface of the door abuts something, probably the ceiling enclosing the space behind the door. I am able to place the first wedges into this seam, hammering bars into the slim resulting space, and gently prying the block of the door away from its frame until one of the first wedges falls out of view, behind the seam, and we all hold our breath as we hear it click against stone. We are nearly there. I insert a testing rod into the space where the wedge fell (a space we would already be in, curse the Metropolitan Museum of New York, if we had enough men and were not forced to lurk in the shadows like criminals). I perform a candle test to assure no poisonous gases leak from the crevice. There is not enough space to see into or to insert a torch so, eager as I am for a look, I call a break for the men to rest. They chew jujubes, say nothing, grin at me whenever they catch my eye.