The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Back from the post just now, and my barber being as good as his word, I found squatting outside my front door his cousin, Amr, my new second-in-command. A boy of sixteen, Amr will be an excellent headman, though he has much to learn. “Lord Carter,” he says to me, “I hope I am worthy.” We shall see, young Amr. [Correct opening epigraph and dedication to “Amr.”] I told him not to call me that, and I told him that the ancient Egyptians valued discretion highly, as would I, but that the ancient kings also dealt with indiscretion with the most unspeakable rigour. Arrange to meet tomorrow, and as a symbolic preliminary baksheesh, I give him a charming jack-in-the-box mummy.

  The 29th of November, before I set off for Egypt to catch Paul Caldwell’s murderer, I practised my best speech and went to the house to say my farewells to the woman who was breaking my heart for sport. But Finneran answered the door. “Good,” he said to my great surprise. “I could use an ear.” Margaret was nowhere to be seen as her father walked me down the hall. He pushed me into his study and apologised gruffly for our previous meeting, when he’d shrieked at me in his nervousness.

  “Now give me your advice, Ferrell. I wonder if you’ve seen more than I have,” he said, cracking his fingers, a sort of admission and apology and invitation to tell all, you’ll admit. Four days before, it seemed, Finneran had received a cable from Trilipush: the finds in the tomb were extraordinary, beyond wildest dreams, rooms and rooms, and Trilipush needed money to complete his work and pay his team, but otherwise victory was theirs. Up until this cable, Finneran had still been withholding payments except, he admitted, for one small sum he’d sent in a burst of hopefulness. But with this cable on the 25th he’d been ready to renew the money definitively and in full. And, sure enough, Finneran said, on the 26th, the newspapers were shouting of an incredible find in Egypt. Now, you can look that up yourself, Macy: the Press was bashing on and on about King Tutankhamun and an Englishman named Howard Carter, who was the chief of that expedition; it had nothing at all to do with Trilipush, but the coincidence was so strong (Trilipush’s cable had just come the day before), and Finneran (I later learnt) was in so much danger, that he just pathetically assumed and hoped that Tutankhamun was somehow related to his investment and Howard Carter was one of Trilipush’s men, some subforeman. “Honestly,” Finneran said, “all those pharaohs’ names sound alike, don’t they?” Finneran cabled on the 26th congratulating Trilipush and informing him that the wires of money were going to start up again. He also informed the other investors that everything was on track, and they’d made a spectacular investment. He was decided: Trilipush was on the up and up, Oxford was a misunderstanding, not worth talking about, Margaret was pleased, and so Finneran was planning to release the investors’ monthly payments, funds he’d been holding in his own accounts. But on the 27th, he realised his mistake—Carter and Trilipush were working on different projects—and Finneran hesitated again. On the 28th, he received another cable from his man. Finneran threw it at me. It read, SEND ME NO MORE MONEY. HAVE FOUND NEW, RELIABLE SUPPORT. CARTER’S BACKERS HAVE PLEADED WITH ME TO ACCEPT THEIR INVESTMENT. I can’t say I was surprised by this: Trilipush had used Finneran to find his desert hole full of gold, and now, having found it, why would he need the Finnerans ever again? He’d moved up in the world to a better sort of people, cutting off his Boston crowd. I told Finneran this in no uncertain terms. He goggled at me. “You think he’s not coming back? But I needed that money,” he stammered. How much had he sent? Not so much, just that one small credit, because the original protection for the investors had been that Trilipush agreed to spend his own money in the opening weeks, as a proof of his confidence. “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “You’ve lost hardly a penny.” No, he wasn’t upset about the money he’d spent, Macy, he was actually worried about his share of the purported treasure, if I understood him correctly, which he was now going to lose. “What am I going to tell—” he began, but I interrupted him, told him to relax, said I’d tell Margaret, not to worry. He looked at me amazed. “You idiot. O’Toole and Kovacs, O’Toole and Kovacs—what am I going to tell them?”

  I looked at Finneran’s face, and now, Macy, now I finally understood. I’d seen that face before and I’ve seen it since, the twisted mouth of the man who realises he won’t be able to pay his dangerous creditors.

  “That I don’t know, Finneran, but I know this. Cable Trilipush over Margaret’s signature, breaking the engagement. Trilipush is washing his hands of you fast, so save Margaret first. Do that for her good name as soon as possible: she has to break with him before he does it to her. You owe her that. And if he has any feeling for her, which I doubt, she’s your only hope to keep any control over him, now that he doesn’t need your purse.”

  The doorbell rang. Julius Padraig O’Toole entered and nodded to me coldly. I was dismissed while Finneran welcomed O’Toole into the study with an expert display of boot licking. I waited in the parlour. There was no shouting, no guns went off. The study door opened a quarter of an hour later, and O’Toole strode calmly down the hall and out of the house. Finneran sat at his desk, thumping his humidor with his fingertips. I asked him what O’Toole had wanted. “Shut the goddamn door,” he replied. I left. Margaret was nowhere to be found then or that night.

  Mr. Trilish. I am needing rent money for the next six months, right this moment, yes surely a necessity minor on you. Quick quick! And here also an issue of bony contention. For if it is different, yes, than we discussed through the agent, this is necessary now to increase times 5× the amount for each month of renting the house. And this is obvious, yes, because of the interest in the Tut things. So many people all influxing! Happy circumstances! Thank you heroic Mr. Carter! And with a house beautiful like this one! Ho boy! So at least ten people have asked the agent if my house is available and it is unless rent is paid by you now for six months more at once, on this new price. Yours very seriously, Mr. Gamil.

  Wednesday, 29 November, 1922

  Journal: A message was slipped under my door during the night that puts the expedition’s finances under new strain. Heroic concentration on the issues at hand is now the key. Feed the cats and set off into the rising dawn, to work.

  Amr meets me on the Nile’s west bank with plaster, and with the sun rising behind us I show him the correct route to the site. He has his own donkey, which is excellent. He follows me to my tomb and says not a word. I order him to clear the makeshift screen away from the opening of the tomb, and I allow him to walk in behind me. He is duly awed. I owe this boy an education in exchange for his muscles, and I mean to do it well. “Archaeology, Amr, is not only digging, but an approach to our surroundings and our labourers (you, for now) that expresses our unselfish, unself-conscious appreciation of the historical surroundings to which we are the heirs.”

  He is a brave boy, a proud example of the modern Egyptian, fast to understand. I have him begin hammering boards together and plastering them a uniform white to make a better screen for the tomb’s opening.

  In the meantime, I reenter my tomb and reorient myself to the work left to be done in this vast and extraordinary space, which maps for now as

  (FIG. F: THE FIRST SIX CHAMBERS, 29 NOVEMBER, 1922)

  Plainly, the treasures to date are not so much material as historical, the clues that we are on the right track, tauntingly leading us to the more palpable findings, which are soon to appear and soon to outdazzle by a wide margin this season’s other finds. As an example of the historical prizes I mean, the unmistakable bloody footprints all over the Chamber of the Injured Workman should be noted briefly, as they are quite unique in the history of Egyptology. The likely explanation—and one readily admits that it is for now merely a hypothesis—is that a workman was injured, perhaps closing and sealing Door B.

  I mallet in wedges and chisel away at the outline of the Great Portal. I begin trying to fit a crowbar in the spaces, but it is absurd to think that the boy and I can do this by ourselves. I could wait until Lord Carnarvon’s decision opens this an
d any number of other doors for me. I could hope that Margaret will finally exert herself to tease her father and his flunkies back into line. I could go ask my barber to lend some muscle. Carter shoved through his tomb very fast, and if hammering is the method down there, I can hardly be expected to preserve every blank rock stuck in my path. What might be behind Door C? I keep asking myself. Yet more definitive proof of Atum-hadu, as well as, at last, the treasury? How close I am and how abandoned, how completely left to my own wits.

  I have much work to do at the site, and time is running out, if CCF’s will has withered as badly as I fear. But Carter’s site is magnetic, and I do not wish to offend the old-timer by skipping his big moment with the crowds and Press today, so at noon I order Amr to finish his carpentry and stand guard until later this afternoon, while I set off on his donkey to the Valley and Howard Carter’s celebration in the sands.

  Margaret: My darling. I am sitting above the Valley of the Kings, about to attend a luncheon and the official opening of one of my colleague’s tombs. I am in a fix here, your father’s stubbornness having glued my hands together. I am reassured at least to know that there is no stronger solvent than your love. I know you are, even as I write this, pushing your father back to the correct path.

  My love, it is a bit later now and I have returned to this same secluded spot to jot down my thoughts of what I just saw, before I head back to Deir el Bahari and my own pressing work, though I do move slowly on my injury. It is worth noting these events simply to show you, one day, when all of this is cleared up, the sort of people that so confused your father’s loyalty and judgement. Nothing! There is nothing in this find of Carter’s that should give a man even a minute’s envy or confusion. Your father’s bumbling is positively comical now that I have seen the “splendour” of Tut-ankh-Amen.

  Besides Merton of the Times and other journalists grubbing for a free luncheon, there was Carter, the Earl and his daughter, a passel of pashas, Lady Allenby, Engelbach from Antiquities, the Commandant of the local police, Effendi the Antiquities Inspector for Luxor, and a veritable Burke’s of English fops and their women, one of whom, a Lady Prattlemuddle, as far as I could hear, brought her Yorkshire terrier with her to the event (a sweet but unmanned, silky thing with a black leather collar) and then bleated like a birthing cow when the dog inevitably pranced off somewhere, no doubt to find a lunch more appetising than what we were offered on the long tables out at the head of the Valley.

  The chatter at lunch was unbearable as the ladies all challenged each other for touristic dominance. Behind their scarab brooches of diamond and onyx and under their straw headpieces, they spat pit names at each other, waging battle for supremacy with tales of authentic sights of unspoilt beauty, witnessed in only the most privileged circumstances.

  “Well of course you’ve seen Rameses VI’s hole, and not bad accommodations if you must die in Egypt,” one lady scolds another who dared admit she was impressed by R6’s tomb, “but the Rameses II colossi down at Abu Simbel are vastly superior, if you can be bothered to make the trek to see real art.”

  “Not bad, true,” sighs a third. “I cast an eye over them. Cheeky fellow he was, having himself done up in that gaudy dimension. And the sculptor a regular Michael Angelo. But there is something about seeing only the expert-acknowledged masterpieces, you must agree, that deadens one’s palate. Surely the discovery of a new piece with your own eyes and taste is as important as mere passive appreciation? Surely that is why we are here, the very first to see this Tut chappy, though I doubt we can expect anything as magical as the first time I stumbled, really, into the work at Tuna el-Gebel, the glasswork carvings . . .”

  “Done by an overeager student. The hidden masterpieces are down at Nuri and El-Kurru.”

  “Maestrosities, I’d call those. Really, you must get to the Sudan, though you’ll have to know the right people to be allowed in, I could drop them a line for you . . .”

  “. . . that site where King What’s-His-Name just up and slapped his cartouche on the previous chap’s monuments? Hardly fair play . . .”

  “. . . a six-day trip to reach it, but the sunrise there is unlike anything . . .”

  “. . . sunrise? Astronomy is not art, dear girl.”

  “You should see what they are finding up at Atum-hadu’s tomb,” someone added, and everyone was quite curious, as they always are when the great king’s name is mentioned.

  Finally Carter muttered his remarks, and then we were all paraded, three at a time, down the sixteen magic stairs and into little Tut’s hole for a hunched walk down a bare corridor and our precious glimpse of a haphazard storage room with this and that tossed any which way inside it. I heard it compared to the property room of an ancient opera, and for a moment the thought occurred to me that perhaps wee King Tut had ransacked a preexisting tomb, erased Atum-hadu’s name and written his own on it. It was often done.

  “What’s that dreadful aroma?” asks some civil servant’s wife, and Carter tries to explain that the tomb’s air is 3200 years old, but I also realise that my bandages need changing and I can do without this display anyhow. I stride out.

  Margaret, poor Carter has foolishly made his discoveries in full public eye and now must pay the price: a carnival of twits twittering around him while he works. He spends his days hauling amateurs through a tomb where every single placement of your foot must be carefully considered, where every breath you exhale adds deadly humidity to the air, pollutes the delicate gesso of a painted box or the inscription on a wall, where some great lady’s stray sleeve might brush against an item which, until preservatives are applied, can literally disintegrate at the touch, and one of these ladies today was even wearing a dangling silver and sapphire necklace, which could have fallen or brushed something when she bent over to look closely at an item in this storage room of Tut’s. Tours of clumsy, uninformed, admiring fans! Poor Carter!

  This storage chamber, this Tut’s tomb, one does grow tired of hearing about it. Seeing it, after all the chatter of the natives and the papers, was none too impressive. Yes, the Press have told the truth in nouns but not in adjectives. I heard the Times called the chariot wheels “haunting” and the gold “blinding” and the statues “magnificent” and the tomb itself “unlike anything ever seen in this land.” It is not true, it is simply not true, Margaret, it is just a room stuffed without logic or story, just a room of eye-catching mishmash, and of course, the untrained tourist oohs and aahs and practically drops her own jewels at the sight of these semiprecious relics, but for an expert eye, I really feel a certain amount of pity for Carter and a general sense of disgust, as if I had just been forced to eat sweets and sweets and sweets in the most sweltering weather. There was one piece in particular, this huge bed with carved lion-head footboards, and I could just hear dear Hugo Marlowe’s voice crackling with laughter at the gaudiness of the thing. The throne with a backrest in gold bas-relief, these jars of carved calcite and alabaster in this grotesque XVIIIth-Dynasty, decadent, sagging belly, overwrought, neurotic androgyny. Of course I was kind to poor Carter, complimenting him, but I saw in his eye a bashfulness that was new to him: my friend was a little ashamed of the whole production, that he had the public’s attention but for all the wrong reasons.

  I am off to my own site now, Margaret, my work, my puzzle, my glorious discovery. All for you, my love.

  Journal: To achieve despite your conditions, not thanks to your conditions, you see. That is something Atum-hadu understood, and there comes a point where it is comic, more than tragic, where the indelible character of the self-powered man is so much stronger than any challenge Fate can fling at him, that it becomes exhilarating and humorous to see him overcome all that.

  To wit: Amr was gone when I returned from the Carter show, though the boy had done a fair job on my temporary door. I called for him, but out of the tomb emerged instead an angry Ahmed. He had sent Amr home, told me not to expect his return, so I can only imagine the threats this brute made to the poor boy. There rema
ined this issue of back salary for Ahmed, for which I do have a certain amount of sympathy, and so I spent my valuable working time trying to explain the situation, gently reminding him of his failures in our bargain, and of the difficulty in handing him all of his cash today.

  Ahmed boasted of his patience. Ahmed raged. Ahmed threatened. But there was no cash, so threats did not avail. So then Ahmed offered another solution: he handed me a sledgehammer. I would have done anything to escape this, would have paid him anything, but I had no choice. At his forceful insistence, I opened Door C, and every stinging blow vibrated mercilessly down my leg and up to my head by way of my breaking heart. Ahmed ran in ahead of me—I cannot believe I am even writing down this sorry fact. He emerged shaking his head. I will never forget: “My disappointment is keen, Englishman.” Unsatisfied, he expressed his rage in the primitive’s usual fashion. Most of his assault consisted of kicks to my wounded leg, but also blows to the face, and kicks to my back when I was prone. But he did not proceed any farther in his destruction, thank God, than the one door. Greed blinds, you see, so he could not be bothered to open the Great Portal, which still awaits my care and love, and which will reward my sacrifices.

  So be it. I wash my injuries as best I can, bandage where necessary. The swine stole Amr’s donkey and one of my gramophones as he left—the Columbia Favorite.

  Circumstances aside, I have today opened the seventh chamber of the tomb of Atum-hadu.

  (FIG. G: THE FIRST SEVEN CHAMBERS, 29 NOVEMBER, 1922)

  The rest must wait until tomorrow, the description of this new chamber, which is remarkable in a dozen different ways. Wedge Amr’s door in the front hole.

  Bank is disappointing. Post yields an incomprehensible cable, like a joke. It is a joke, or at least some fool’s game.