The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  And I did see her a few more evenings: once she turned up, and all evening didn’t mention his name even once, just fell asleep on JP’s sofa with her head on my lap and her hand in mine, abusing me cruelly, and I watched her breathe for hours and hours. She’d appear at my hotel these last nights, and each time I had my little speech ready; maybe this was the night she would fall into my arms and I would save her. But the time was never right. She’d be vicious, call me a crybaby or a bore if I ever stopped making her laugh or refused to dance. On the way to the club she’d be telling me about Trilipush’s latest news (always good, always vague), and no sooner were we inside JP’s than she was climbing the stairs looking for the man himself and her drug. I’d sit there stroking her head, and then, when she was able, I’d walk her home, struggle, in the grey dawn light, for the words, for even the opportunity of words. I vowed again to end this.

  Monday, 20 November, 1922

  Withdraw pay for the men, though the account audibly creaks at the disbursement. It hardly matters. I will go without before they will; I will never abandon my men. And I am off to the site.

  I arrived at just the right moment to prevent a cataclysm: I found the dark bastards setting at Door C with a sledgehammer. I was as affected as if they were striking me. Ahmed was sitting there, smoking one of CCF’s cigars, looking on at the mauling. I shouted for them to stop, but at least one more slamming crunch was heard before the noise ended. We stared at each other in mutual incomprehension.

  I have clearly left them alone too long, counted at least on their ability to follow orders if not respect the precision and passion of my work. My disciplinary financial penalties were understood at last. I distributed their pay accordingly reduced. Now I noticed the injured man has never returned. And Ahmed was a silent, glowering beast.

  Only then did I hobble over and examine the damage they had done to my Door C. My own fault. I should never have left them on guard so long near the hypnotising wealth hidden behind this last foot of rock. The loss of the inscription on Door C is nothing less than tragic, and the Antiquities Service will be right to chastise me for not having brought in an Inspector, though I can hardly do so now, with the evidence that this is Atum-hadu’s tomb again lying in a fine dust at my feet. I should have marked down the inscription back on the 17th, but my injury prevented me at the time. How could I have known this would have happened? I should have known. Now I must re-create the inscription from memory:

  ATUM-HADU, LAST KING OF THE BLACK LAND, AUTHOR OF THE GLORIOUS ADMONITIONS, SAILS TO THE UNDERWORLD, ACCOMPANIED ONLY BY THE WEALTH OF HIS MUCH-RAPED LAND.

  I explain to the men that their brutality has delayed our discovery, not hastened it, and that the mountains of gold on the other side of this door must now wait, as I cannot risk opening Door C without first stabilising the fissures caused by their savage pounding, or I will lose the artwork I am sure to find on the door’s opposite side. Which means plastering will be necessary. (This will also give me the curatorial opportunity of reinscribing onto the restored door a facsimile of the hieroglyphs lost to the idiot hammers, simply to give a sense of the original inscription’s size and placement.) I send two men for plaster, water, trowels; Ahmed to Carter’s site to see how he is now filling his days; and a third man to Winlock’s end of Deir el Bahari. Reports of inaction there will be useful for renegotiating a concession.

  The report from Winlock’s camp: nothing of interest, random digging, brushing things they have had out of the ground since last year. At Carter’s camp, they are clearing land desperately to the south and west, digging feverishly in search of their buried reputations, though Carter himself has fled to Cairo. Six hours later, they are definitively idiots: the plaster is all wrong. Despite hours of different mixtures trying to make do with what they brought me, all I do is splash Door C with white water. Send them back to town for proper plaster.

  It is early evening before I get another try. Fill the main fissures and allow it to dry, which it does. Slowly.

  Tuesday, 21 November, 1922

  This morning I find that the first coat of plaster dried well in the door’s fissures, but also in the bucket. When my men finally deign to appear, I send them back to town for more plaster and a new bucket. It is evening before they arrive, this time without water, which one of them finally brings after nightfall, nearly ten o’clock. Time is haemorrhaging and probably my support in Boston as well. I am tempted to sleep in Villa Trilipush tonight, but the foot is on fire and I no longer trust these hammering apes to be left on guard.

  Margaret: You will ignore Ferrell and keep your father on track, won’t you? You already are, I am sure. You are my protectress and inspiration, as I stare at your photograph by lamplight and desert starlight outside His Majesty’s tomb. I can see you across a desert continent and a sea as you prepare for bed high above the moon-frosted snow of the Garden.

  In this photo, the light was behind you, making you a silhouette against white, a near perfect profile, bending forward to look at something on the table (if I recall, it was the necklace with the cameo I gave you), and your beauty reproduces itself in the smallest detail: your eyelashes just protruding over the profile of your nose, making a bird’s wing of black, the thinnest of fine lines.

  I remember the night you were gently crying in my arms, troubled by your illness and your anxiety for my departure, and I touched my finger to the corner of your eye, caught a fugitive tear under the tip of my finger, and pulled it and your streaking eye makeup to your temple, just to dry your tears, but I produced in that gesture the perfect face of a pharaoh’s queen, the malachite stripe of the eye of Horus.

  The twenty-three-year-old daughter of the department store pharaoh is stately in profile, alluring in three-quarters, overwhelming head-on. The thin nose with its expressive nostrils, as if controlled by a dozen dedicated strings at the hands of a thousand-fingered puppeteer of unsurpassed sensitivity and haughty pride. The slightest upward motion of her eyebrow and we commoners know her will and shall serve it. The pouting, heavy lower lip, under the cresting wave of the upper, carved from smoothest yellow stone, the single, loving chisel stroke that cleft the heavenly valley below her nose. The arching neck, a bit of swan, a bit of swelled sail on a Nile felucca. The majestic curve of her fine figure, her treasures, her mysteries of line and texture, that dress slit directly in the centre-back, as if merely the continuation of her magnificent crevice, and she turns from the throne to consider the slave who kneels at her sandalled, beaded feet, and she raises her hand to strike with naked blade the miscreant who brought her the wrong drinking vessel, when her king appears behind her and stills her tensed hand.

  Wednesday, 22 November, 1922

  The men return early, and I am finally equipped to plaster the damaged door, while Ahmed sits, cobra-silent, smoking another of CCF’s cigars and crunching fresh dates. But by late afternoon, the door is still damp. Time is killing me. I have no choice but to leave them on guard with Ahmed’s solemn word he will watch them and enforce my will, so that I can go to the bank for news of the letter of credit due today, the wire of the 16th being too small to consider as anything but a bonus from CCF personally.

  The bank clerk shows solicitude for my injury but regrets to inform me that as of yet, et cetera. Return to the site.

  It is early evening before I am able to recarve the lost inscription into the plaster, and then give the go-ahead to start placing wedges. The men set to the work with all the pent-up energy of young boys recovered from a long illness, and their enthusiasm is catching. Ropes, wedges, cylinders are in place by midnight, and everyone readily agrees to stay the night if necessary.

  Their childish moods ought not to surprise me. I blame myself for any problems we have encountered, for the men do not stand to gain what I do, nor do they have my passion. They need a firm hand and a guiding voice. I explain myself to them, and we understand each other again. We renew a brotherhood that forms in only a few experiences in a man’s life.

 
; Thursday, 23 November, 1922

  Earliest hours after midnight. I write by lantern light now as the men share a meal, and stretch their legs and aching backs before we return to this final door, this Door C. Behind it lie a tomb, a treasury, a history, a genius now black and crumbling under his linen wraps. The explorer must pause here, to acknowledge the responsibility, the vast expanse of time about to be breached.

  The men are ready. It is now . . .

  Later. Dawn rises on Deir el Bahari, but the sun is too faint to illuminate a mystery unlike anything in this mystery-wrapped land. The Pillar Chamber joins our map, and Atum-hadu’s humour is unmistakably in play:

  (FIG. F: THE FIRST SIX CHAMBERS, 23 NOVEMBER, 1922)

  How my map has sprouted in the sleepy sunlight of 23 November! The new team will arrive with Ahmed tomorrow, and now I have the day to myself at the site to rest, make measurements, take notes, clean up our debris, and prepare for our assault on Door G, “the Great Portal.” Carter’s face at this discovery, I can scarcely imagine. He would cross his arms, keep his silence, reveal nothing.

  But first, I must relate the events of the past eight hours, the horrible and the wonderful, the betrayals and the triumphs. I must remember to sleep today.

  Door C required our muscles and our hearts, but she finally yielded to us more easily than her violent predecessor. We were able to lower her until such time as I can manage her trip out of the tomb to a laboratory for careful preservation and examination, before her final journey to a permanent home in a central gallery at the Cairo Museum. By our electric torches, the inside face of Door C (its top surface now) seemed disappointingly blank, and I had to block the new opening and shout at the men to stop their griping about how I had wasted their time when the sledgehammer would have served. I ordered them all outside. I entered the next room alone, my heart pounding, my foot and ankle nicely numb. What I found, I must admit, baffled me: a narrow niche, quite empty at first glance (a more thorough investigation will have to wait—first I must commit to paper my accurate recollection of the order of events). And no more than three feet in front of me, directly across from Door C, another of Atum-hadu’s maddening doors (Door D). A bare, thin room—perhaps a granary, I thought, though without grain. A room for statues to guard the tomb? But then where were the statues? I heard the men back in the Chamber of Confusion, debating something in their private dialect. I continued examining Door D and the walls of this niche, trying to comprehend Atum-hadu’s bizarre sense of mortuary security, trying to unravel his Tomb Paradox alongside him. A burial place for wives? Servants? Animals? Storage for weaponry? Or clothing since turned to dust? Food? I stood still in my deep consideration, I cannot say for how long. I felt a tug on my sleeve. “Lord Trilipush,” said Ahmed. “Please, sir, come outside. Let us break bread, take some air. Let me tend to His Lordship’s unfortunate foot while His Lordship determines our next step.” Ahmed’s kindness, all the more impressive for being so damned rare, moved me. I hobbled out of the baffling tomb, leaning on my cane. He led me down the cliff path in the purple darkness and set me on a rock, brought me a meal and hot coffee, asked me what we had found and what it meant. He changed my bandage with a nurse’s touch, though he need not have bothered being gentle, as the reeking, blue-black injury is entirely without sensation. We chatted for half an hour, perhaps longer, and the first streaks of pearl appeared in the east. It was something of a college tutorial for him, and a chance for me to expose my cramped thoughts to the air. I tried several hypotheses, explained to him the complexity of every Tomb Paradox, and the fiendish complications of this one in particular. He understood, and I was pleased to see an intelligence in his eyes. After this respite, though, I was eager to work. But Ahmed was hungry for learning, and his questions about excavation and preservation, about my attempt to restore the inscription on the front of Door C for curatorial purposes, about the likely wealth of an end-of-dynasty tomb were all insightful. We chatted on.

  It was only when they reappeared that I realised I had not seen the three other men for some time. They came down the path towards us, shimmering out of the murky light, white with dust, spitting, and they hurled their beastly hammers to the ground. “Nothing!” they shouted to Ahmed in suddenly distinct Arabic. “Nothing. Pillars and nothing at all.” And they mounted three of the donkeys and trotted off into the rising sun, not caring what path they took.

  “What have those swine done?” I cried and hopped back to the tomb. Oh, what had they not done? The dust and rubble bore grim, stony witness: my men had been overwhelmed with greed. They had destroyed Door D, revealing a second narrow room and Door E, which they destroyed, revealing a third narrow room and Door F, which they destroyed, revealing the haunting Pillar Chamber.

  The rage I felt is difficult to describe here. I have nothing in my life to compare it to. Even as I write now, hours later, my eyes fill with tears, my pen shakes. I can only ask myself, and not without scorn, Why was I surprised? When in my life have people not proven themselves to be precisely like this? No one can be trusted, except those rare ones we love, the wives and fathers.

  The betrayal of me, of science, of their own heritage, of Ahmed, the man who had honoured them with this work! He stood next to me, shaking his head, and his anger was plain. For observe: I cannot say what information had been pounded to dust. I cannot say what small treasures were lifted off the floor and wound in the criminals’ head wraps or in their gowns as they left, protesting too loudly in clear Arabic that they had found “nothing.” When the time comes, I see now, I will have no choice but to tell the Antiquities Inspector that there never were Doors D, E, and F. My hands are tied. Their crime has forced me.

  I sent Ahmed away, though the loyal man wished to stay by my side, explore the damage and the new rooms right with me. But his orders were clear: fire those men, hire honest replacements who will be paid at the end of every three weeks, rather than weekly. Off he went, muttering in our shared dismay.

  I turned back to my tomb, howling at her violation, but still a triumph. The three “Royal Storage Chambers”—identical, symmetrical, of the most brilliant design in their simplicity and solidity, their elegant proportions and mystical purity—were undoubtedly designed to hold paraphernalia specifically necessary for the king’s voyage to the underworld. And, with no question at all, the three chambers held, in this order: food (long since decomposed); incense (lit at the time of burial and now vaporised, though the 3500-year-old, sealed-in smell of it was still faintly but unmistakably present and astoundingly like one of Margaret’s perfumes, the one in the little beaded carafe shaped like an ancient amphora); and gold coins or small jewellery, something shiny, of medium value, but just small enough to be grabbed by donkey-thieving ingrates whose names I do not even know.

  But, ah! The Pillar Chamber! Here Atum-hadu has left us an enigma to tickle us a bit longer before all is revealed behind Door G (which the vandals apparently did not see in their dust clouds, too eager to stomp off with their burgled baubles and showy protests of disappointment).

  I have just spent several hours of the afternoon and evening thirstily measuring and conducting an inch-by-inch survey of each and every surface of the Pillar Chamber. The Pillar Chamber is approximately twenty-five feet long and contains twelve identical floor-to-ceiling stone pillars, round, brilliantly white and unmarked, their perfect cylindrical shape a mathematical accomplishment of such internal significance that any further ornamentation to the room would have been vulgar or perhaps even counterproductive to Atum-hadu’s pious requirements. The spacing of the pillars is regular, four rows of three—each pillar is about twelve feet in circumference—never very good at maths—so that means about three feet in diameter—their placement makes it difficult to walk across the room quickly, so any ancient tomb-robber would have had difficulty making a speedy entrance or escape—their proportions are almost certainly mathematically precise and significant, and if one takes the proportion of the total space in the room, as in 25 × 15 fe
et = 375 square feet, of which 12 pillars × pr2 where r = 1.5

  1.5

  1.5

  75

  150

  2.25

  3.14

  900

  2250

  67500

  7.0650

  12

  141300

  706500

  84.7800

  so then 84.78 square feet of the room are pillars, meaning a proportion of 84.78/375, or precisely the proportion used in— There were, of course, twelve dynasties preceding Atum-hadu’s own, so the pillars represent without question the twelve previous dynasties, which he viewed himself as protecting, symbolically, in his burial—zodiacally, the placement of the pillars represents the placement astronomically of the constellation we call Sirius, which the Egyptians took as the celestial incarnation of Isis, and to thank her for her assistance guiding Atum-hadu to—we must seriously consider the likelihood that the pillars contain valuable material cached within their hollow forms, and must somehow be stabilised and opened—the ancient robbers whom Atum-hadu feared more than anything would have found their progress through the tomb stymied by fine threads running between all twelve pillars, making the Pillar Chamber nothing less than a deadly spider’s web entrapping the fat flies in filaments laced with a lethal poison known only to the ancient magicians of— Twelve tribes of israel twelve months in the year twelve provinces of canada twelve days of christmas—what would Carter do faced with such a room? He would look and measure and say little, just nod, hold his cards close to his chest. “It is too soon to say,” he would say, but his manner would imply that he knew far more, that glimmer of arrogance shrouded in humble quiet.