Journal: Hobble down to ferry, post, bank, feed the cats. Post.
Margaret, no silence now, I beg you. You should be cabling, writing, somehow telling me all is well again. I will tell you someday of the anxiety in my belly every day that I did not hear from you, during every minute of December that you silently toyed with me, refusing to ease my pain with a word. Why are you doing this to me?
WALL PANEL E: “ATUM-HADU AND THE DAUGHTEROF THE MASTER OF LARGESSE”
Text: After ten floodings of the Nile [1632 B.C.?—RMT], Atum-hadu saw the most beautiful of all women. She bewitched him, and he saw in her the spirit of Ma’at in the forms of Isis, the kindness of the sweetest mother wrapped in the bright shining raiments of Hathor [the moon and love goddess—RMT]. He asked for her name and was told she was the daughter of the Master of Largesse. She approached him. She asked for nothing, but in her magic she calmed the king, soothed his belly, made him sleep, despite Hyksos and the memories of priests.
She enchanted his eyes so that he could look at none but her, and all his other queens and all the women of the court wept at his absence from their chambers and grottoes. Those women whom he no longer needed found other men in the court, and together the men and women who loved Atum-hadu formed a group to rival the official priests, and they called Atum their only god, and pleasure their only practise.
Atum-hadu took the Master of Largesse’s daughter as his leading queen. That night he saw the colour of her limbs, and when her moment came she cried his name so loudly that silence fell everywhere in the court, and she cried his name again, and again, and again, and soon all those who had fallen silent took up the new queen’s cry and the halls of the palace echoed with a hundred throats crying his name in the voice of pleasure, Atum-hadu, Atum-hadu, Atum-hadu, until the walls of the palace trembled, and the hunting dogs howled in unison.
Monday, 4 December, 1922
WALL PANEL F: “ATUM-HADU IGNORES SETH’S WARNINGS”
Text: While Atum-hadu slept, troubles multiplied. The Hyksos approached. Time was not infinite, nor was the royal gold, and the Master of Largesse had nothing to offer. Seth appeared and spoke: “Her father is not a Master of Largesse but a Master of Betrayal. Are there not other women who would be your queens? Look, they are littered about, more numerous than flies on the droppings of a hippopotamus, surely another is ready to stand, bright-skinned with the neck of a white goose and heavy buttocks. Troubled Majesty, why do you resist?” Atum-hadu wept at Seth’s words. He should destroy the love that bound him. He turned in their bed, lifted a knife to her white neck, and she slept in peace, and he looked at her face, and he sheathed his knife. He would not believe mischievous Seth.
Illustration: Most intriguing in this section of the wall, amidst the scenes of conjugal life tenderly depicted, is the recurring image of the Master of Largesse, a porcine figure forever lurking just out of the king’s view. While Atum-hadu takes his queen’s hand, her father hides behind a curtain and spies on them, his tongue wetting his lips. While Atum-hadu takes his queen to their bed and embraces her, her father hides under that same bed with carved lion-head footboards, his robes apart, and makes of himself a grotesque (and amusingly miniature) impersonator of Atum. While Atum-hadu sobs at his sleeping queen’s side, his dropped knife on the floor at his feet, her father conspires behind his back, speaking to an unidentified but ominous figure. Far in the distance, the Hyksos soldiers mass.
This was not always the case, of course, and Quatrain 45 (Fragments A & C) describes Atum-hadu’s trust in his adviser in earlier days, even when war with the Hyksos was pressing:
When two Egypts are torn apart,
Twins pulled from a dying mother’s cooling womb,
Atum-hadu sobs and writhes at the pain in his heart,
But his Master remains steadfast in the gloom.
Journal: Post, bank. Would CCF stoop so low as to prevent the other partners from funding me? Cats, post. Have no more pre-paid cable forms, and can afford only an extremely brief cable to Margaret. The temporary abandonment of the villa is no great loss, except on days like today, when my stomach is raging against Fate and I am the innocent bystander who suffers most of all.
CABLE. LUXOR TO MARGARET FINNERAN, BOSTON,
4 APR. 1922, 4.13 P.M. PLSACKLVRMT.
Margaret: You are killing me with your barbed silence. Today I cabled you simply asking that you please acknowledge my love. Will there come a day when you and I compare our contemporaneous journals and I read aloud to you that on the 4th of December I was fearing that I had lost you forever, and you will laugh at my silliness because on the 4th you were simply asleep? Or heading by train to warmer climates? Or there was a concerted effort at heartrending chaos by the love-hating telegraph boys of Boston, all riled up by Communist agitators, viciously delivering my cable to an elderly lady while you received orders for a million pounds of chocolate?
But if you are not waiting for me, there is nothing for me in Boston.
(UNSENT, FOUND IN MARGARET FINNERAN MACY’S PRIVATE PAPERS AFTER HER DEATH)
Dec. 4
Dear Ralph,
There are things I should tell you. Daddy told me things about you, and he made me write you to break our engagement, and so I did. And then I slept. And then Ferrell came into my room, and he was so happy he had done all this, had split us apart. And he said the most horrible things about you, said you killed this boy Paul and your friend Marlowe, all of this horrible nonsense that I knew wasn’t true, and that’s when I knew that none of it had been true, you stealing Daddy’s money and lying about Oxford. Oh, Ralph, Ferrell had been lying to Daddy and me all along and caused all this trouble between you and me and Daddy, and I didn’t know how to make it right again, all the damage he had done, and I screamed at him and told him what I thought of him. I was still sleepy, you see, from what Inge had given me to calm me down after Daddy told me that you only pretended to love me for his money. I should have laughed at them both, but I believed them, at first. I am so sorry.
I should have told you what makes me ill, but I haven’t. It’s not me, it’s only stronger than me right now, but I am afraid that if you knew
Dear Ralph,
Would you love me less because there are things that are stronger than me?
Ferrell was very angry with me, at the end, when he came into my room and shook me awake. I enjoyed making him angry, letting myself do what I am good at, which is making people angry and then making them laugh about it, I can do that when I want to. Everyone always says so. I could always make it OK again.
Ferrell has ruined everything, hasn’t he? And I don’t know how to repair any of it, especially now that he did what he did to me. What he did to me, Ralph. What will you think about it? I tried to make him stop, I swear. We were alone in the house. Daddy was gone, and Inge, too. He sent Inge away, Ralph, and then came upstairs.
I cannot find all your letters to me. I think he took some.
It is my fault, I made him angry and could not make him stop. It is my fault. You will not want me now.
I was wrong and I am so sorry. I am sorry I ever believed them about you. If I hadn’t believed even a little, this wouldn’t have happened. I am so sorry. He said such terrible things about you, and I only wanted to tell him he was wrong. Antony and Cleopatra just sat there the whole time, they didn’t bark or try to help me, they just watched, and then, when he left, they just looked at me, like they knew it was my fault.
Dear Ralph, I am writing to you bec
Dear Ralph, please forgive me for
Tuesday, 5 December, 1922
Silence at post and bank. The cats are fine and fond in our new feeding place out of view of the villa. I am sure they no longer bother visiting the villa at all, now that I meet them here instead.
Take mint tea in an ahwa where the waiters do not recognise me, though I have been there two dozen times before. Back to my labours.
WALL PANEL G: “THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE THIRD BIRTH OF ATUM-HADU”
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br /> Note: The text here seems closely related to, perhaps an intentional expansion on, Quatrain 56 (Fragments A & B only):
A feast and dancing and pleasures abound.
Can they distract the king from pressing matters of state?
The agony of his ailments, the death of a hound,
This war that laps at the shore and never abates.
Text: In the eleventh year of his reign, Atum-hadu’s palace glowed with another feast night, beauty to be carried into eternity. The main hall was open to the air and covered with billowing linen. The high torches shed their light on the edges of the linens, and the roof seemed to burn red with a fire that never consumed. Peacocks roasted over columns filled with fire of many colours. The columns were covered with spells against the torments of the king’s stomach, but to no avail. The smell of the birds brought cats and dogs into the court. Amongst them was the cat Atum-hadu loved most dearly, and she leapt into his lap.
Atum-hadu lay across his throne and stroked the cat. With his other hand he held a long spear, thin and flimsy, used only by the women in their combats where they would fight and die when Atum-hadu tired of them. He pierced a peacock and drew from its flesh a stream of juice. He pierced a bound Hyksos prisoner and drew from its flesh the Hyksos commander’s plans.
Atum-hadu’s calm questions belied his fury and the boiling in his belly. The wrath of his internal cobras was visible on the surface of the king’s abdomen and in the map of cataracted Nile on his bronze temple. Despite the lavish rewards he had dispensed to magicians of medicine, still he suffered. There was no reason for his pain, and there was no relief.
Until this night. Ma’at herself appeared, glowed as hot and bright as the sundisk, so that none in the court might gaze at her. All pressed their faces to the floor, all but Atum-hadu, Ma’at’s ferocious lover. Atum-hadu rose from his throne and his stomach released him. Ma’at embraced him in softness, and she spoke to him in the soft language of a cobra, as she and Atum-hadu rose into the sky and conversed.
Ma’at spoke: “O Atum-hadu, beloved of the gods and of the people, you suffer because in your belly, rotting and bubbling, is your mortal past, your first childhood, the mere thought of which boils your insides. Inside you too, grows the future which must come, as the old king predicted. Great son of Atum, the end of the land will accompany the end of your second life. Your final birth approaches. You must clean your past away.”
Ma’at kissed the king and disappeared. Atum-hadu descended to his throne; the dancers, cooks, and priests rose. The sounds of the court returned: twin acrobats praising Atum, women soothing their infants, small boys demanding that their fathers play with them, an old man calming his shaking son, soldiers drinking beer. The body of the prisoner drew the attention of Atum-hadu’s hounds, and the cat, the king’s favourite friend, lapped at the pool of Hyksos blood spreading across the floor like a map being constantly redrawn. Even in death, this display of Hyksos expansion was not lost on the king.
Soldiers entered bearing another Hyksos spy. “Atum-hadu would like them to understand,” the king announced, and called for the keeper of the royal menagerie to bring a young serpent, one that carried no venom. Soldiers held the boy, and Atum-hadu seized a knife and cut a small hole in the boy’s side, opened the intestine, and inserted the snake tail-first into the gap. He called for priests to sew the hole so that only the serpent’s head emerged, then instructed his soldiers to carry the boy back where his own people could find him, to leave him with plenty of food and drink. “He must be found alive with Atum-hadu’s sign in him,” said Atum-hadu.
Illustration: Of the extensive and marvellous illustration covering the whole wall from floor to ceiling to the right of the opening into the Second Empty Chamber, some elements are particularly worthy of our immediate praise. As elsewhere, the animals are brilliantly rendered (the roasting peacock, the purring cat), as are the furnishings of what was certainly a richly but not tastelessly decorated court, where the accent was on pleasures of the bed and table. The court scenes boast oviform jars and lotiform cups and alabaster bowls, the leopard skins, the couch and chariots, the gauzy women’s clothes, the king’s skirt, and his ornately carved weapons and magnificent throne, the back of which bears what appears to be bas-relief in gold, showing the king in the form of a lion trampling his tiny enemies.
Journal: Post, bank, cats.
Wednesday, 6 December, 1922
Journal: Post, bank, cats.
WALL PANEL H: “THE HYKSOS RENEW THEIR OFFENSIVE”
Text: Despite Ma’at’s visit, vicious beasts still caroused in the king’s belly. The Hyksos chief was a quiet man but arrogant, dressed in gold. Word reached the Hyksos chief that the great Atum-hadu was weakened by his infirmity and that the better half of the country was now vulnerable again after a decade of bold defence. The Hyksos swept into the [Upper Kingdom]. The battles were fierce, and Atum-hadu led his troops when he was able. He fought like a lion, except he was often cut down by the pain in his belly or forced to turn his back and squat.
Even now, Atum-hadu could still have conquered the Hyksos. But in this time of most desperate need, the king was unable to find his Master of Largesse, that vulva of a whore. The king’s enemy had vanished, stealing the queen away with him.
And soon the Hyksos victory would be assured.
Illustrations: Most affecting to the viewer is the sight of the Master of Largesse, pulling the queen by her hair, imprisoning her as Atum-hadu hunts for her in vain.
Journal: I have worked on translating and transcribing the inscriptions all day again. Remarkable what Budge’s unwieldy dictionary does not include, and to recall that he had the gall to criticise my translations in Desire and Deceit. Post, bank, cats.
Thursday, 7 December, 1922
Journal: Cats, bank, post.
WALL PANEL I: “THE APPROACHING END OF THE BLACK LAND”
Text: The capital was silent. The people kept their heads on their knees. Desires were weak. And still Atum-hadu demanded music, joy, women. Often he returned from battle, his armour dripping red on the floors, and he strode into the palace and had two slave girls as other men have a drink of water, then demanded a brush to compose verse. He inspired those of the court who had decided to carry pleasure to the end of time, and again the court sang with desperate happiness. Hyksos spies returned to their little king and told him that the enemy would never surrender. If the army fought as his court loved, perhaps this would have been true.
“The end of everything is coming,” Atum-hadu told them, and the word was passed all over the court, and there was weeping and fear and also the sound of acrobats and lovers and music. “The end of everything is coming.”
Illustration: The king in battle is a magnificent sight. He stands in a war chariot. Typical of Egyptian illustrations, he is shown much larger than his enemies, who barely reach his knee, while in the background, the dapper leader of the Hyksos shivers with fear and consternation. Also typical of Egyptian war-art, Atum-hadu is shown accompanied in his chariot by his forebears, previous kings of Egypt, all of whom (though smaller than he) urge him on.
Journal: Cats. Bank, post: nothing and nothing.
My father’s friends were all military men, generals and high officers, soldiers retired and active. I did not know it as a boy, of course, since I knew them merely as Uncle Bunny or Old Lloyd, and only later would I learn that Uncle Bunny had crushed such-and-such Khan in the Afghan fighting. But when I knew him, he was just a fine old fellow in hunting tweeds who thought nothing of letting me paint his face all black so I could be Pharaoh and he my African enemy. Biographies immortalise all these old warriors as lamb-gentle (despite being bloodied in Victoria’s wars all over the globe, serving as her stern viceroys, holding restive natives in their place with a firm English hand). But at Trilipush Hall the biographers were accurate. I remember one or another eye-patched hero of the Empire on his knees in the mud with me, bandaging the paw of one of the hounds injured in a hunt. It was as
if I had a dozen fathers in those happy years.
Friday, 8 December, 1922
Journal: Cats. Bank and post closed.
WALL PANEL J: “ATUM-HADU CONSIDERS HIS APPROACHING IMMORTALITY”
Text: The Hyksos had become like a swollen river and could not be kept from overflowing the banks. In one respite, Atum-hadu walked alone in the night, high upon a cliff across the Nile. There would be no king after him; Horus would not reside in the palace. How to preserve the writings recorded for eleven floodings, and his goods to stock his boat? Where is his queen? Where is the Master of Largesse? Seth appeared, and twelve vultures carried the king down the cliff to the ground. With bursts of fire from the vultures’ mouths, Seth cut the rock. “Here, my son, you shall make your crossing in safety, and this land shall be remembered for a million million years.”
Illustrations: In a series of pictures, Atum-hadu is shown standing atop a ridge of earth that is unmistakably the cliff wall separating what is now the Valley of the Kings from Deir el Bahari. The king is alone, it is night (the goddess Nut, covered in stars, stands beside him). He is lost in thought. Here he looks down on the Valley, there on Deir el Bahari, as if debating where to start his tomb and hide his immortality. In the distance, battles rage. Seth, his mythical father whose mysterious head now resembles an anteater’s, and twelve magic vultures appear to the king and hoist him down to what appears to be the very path outside this very tomb. And here the vultures, spitting fire, cut an opening into the stone of Egypt itself. Seth leads Atum-hadu into the passage, unmistakably Door A and the Empty Chamber. The final drawing is of Atum-hadu standing back outside, a floor map of the tomb glowing magically on the cliff face. It is, as far as we have so far opened this tomb, unmistakably a map of the complex I am standing in at this very moment.
The Egyptologist Page 33
