The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  The only ornament on the cat’s mummy is a beautiful collar in pristine condition, black leather with a silver-and-sapphire pendant centred on the poor beast’s wrapped chest. A tribute to the goddess Bastet, yes, but perhaps also a very human, very earthly desire to show a faithful animal that it was loved, that its presence and dignity and affection were appreciated, to thank her for her service in this world and the next. To let her know she was significant, that tears fell for her.

  The ancients believed that at the moment the tomb was sealed, it became a hive of activity. Statues and figurines came to life, pictures on the wall grew real and three-dimensional, symbolic illustrations expanded to fulfil their meanings, and mummies (the king’s, most importantly) woke from their temporary sleep, reconceived and reborn for their journey to immortality. Statues of warriors (such as those that Carter stumbled into) would have come to life to guard the king. Pictures of money, food, arms, serving girls, celebrations, concubines—all of this would have served the king. And this being the case, human or animal sacrifice, whilst not unheard of, was generally unnecessary and thus very rare in Egypt. Given that, the presence of this very real cat likely means that an actual cat died, most likely a cat that Atum-hadu would have known and loved. This was probably his very cat, described in the History Chamber. Knowing what we do, we can speculate that he would have insisted that this being, which he adored and which adored him, must of course sit on his lap purring for all eternity. He raised her to immortality, promoted her from cat to cat-goddess.

  It is late. I am tired.

  Monday, 18 December, 1922

  WALL PANEL K: “ATUM-HADU WITHDRAWS FROM COURT”

  Text: Defeat followed on defeat. Atum-hadu prepared. Under protection of Nut, he carried goods from his palace across the Nile, and a friend illustrated his life upon these walls. He returned to court. The palace was lively, the people fornicated and drank. “Flee!” Atum-hadu ordered, but they laughed. “Do you know what is coming?” he demanded. “We do, and this is how we will wait,” they replied, and he loved them. The master of musicians bowed to him. “Here everything is magical.” Atum-hadu loved this gentle man. He embraced him in brotherly farewell.

  Atum-hadu found one of his cats choked on a fish bone. The king’s sorrow devoured him, as if he were an old woman. The king wept at the implacable enemy that had chosen Atum-hadu at birth, wept like a child until sleep came.

  Journal: When Carnarvon sees the twenty chambers still to come in this vast subterranean complex—even if they contain no further art or treasure—such a mysterious maze in itself will justify a second, fully funded expedition back to Deir el Bahari. Marlowe and I were unquestionably right: the tomb is here or near, quite close, perhaps only one hill away from this temple of history, or I am doubting too much, and the full tomb is here, behind one more door. Enough.

  I take the sledgehammer to Door C, though I can hardly stand on my burning leg, and my gut is full of fire and smoke. My arms are puny. Two hours of hammering, and all I have is dust and pebbles throughout the Bastet Shrine, powdering the cat-goddess. I fell asleep just now. I will try the door again.

  Evening, I believe, and now I have this:

  (FIG. I: THE FIRST EIGHT CHAMBERS, 18 DEC., 1922)

  Extraordinary find, beyond wildest dreams. The Chamber, the Hall of . The Chamber of Mysteries. The Hall of the Magician. The

  Tuesday, 19 December, 1922

  Journal: Fell asleep last night on the floor, exhausted from work, and this morning I am stiff in leg and neck. It was only from the hallooing that I realised I had been woken by Carter of all people. I was just able to reach Door A before he entered the tomb uninvited. He should know better, the old fool. I hobbled outside to greet the grand lord taking time out from his garish pit to visit the working man. He had me at a disadvantage in his efforts to sneak past me, as I was blinking, nearly blind in the sunshine.

  “Hard to find you over here. So, it’s true what Carnarvon said? Uncovered something quick-quick, have you?” he asked. “My God, man, are you all right?” Carter was, as always, unnaturally obsessed with my health.

  “Woke me from a dead sleep, old man, is all.”

  “Well, congratulations to you, Trilipush. The gods seem to be smiling on us all this season.”

  “Quite.”

  “I take it you’ve notified Lacau, for an Inspector’s visit. What do you think you have in there?”

  “In good time, Carter.”

  He gazed at the opening of Door A in that nasty manner of his, no praise or criticism, just a calm and disinterested Eye floating disembodied, judging. “You know, I’ve found more dry holes in my time than I care to recall.”

  “Even the mighty ones guess, Carter!” I could not stop laughing at his nervous speculations. “Do just try and wait, old boy. You will have a tour with the rest of the swells.”

  “Of course. Well, do have the Inspector in, Trilipush. Glad to know where to find you if we need you. Do let me know if I can be of any assistance.” He turned away, then came back at once, reaching into his pocket; I suspected a weapon, and cursed myself for having left my Webley inside. “Nearly forgot why I came. This arrived at my camp, mixed up with our post.” He handed me a letter from my fiancée and pottered off in his superior way, not looking back to see if his arrows had landed. God alone knows how long he has been intercepting my mail, which letters he has kept.

  Nov. 29

  So everything is clear to me now. Daddy has just explained it and asked me to sign a cable and write you a letter. So here it is: I release you. I must be a joke to you, Ralph. I suppose I disgust you, just a rich girl too stupid to see what’s going on. So now you are free. I must even thank you, to be fair, because for all the time I thought you loved me, I was happy. And even if Daddy tells me now it wasn’t true, that you wanted only his money from me, that is still not so terrible, because for a while I was going to marry an English Lord and explorer. I hate you. I hate you and I don’t know why I ever didn’t hate you. Ferrell and you and Daddy are all hateful. I hope you enjoy our money and your precious treasure and the hell with you all.

  Margaret Finneran

  (Tuesday, 19 December, 1922, continued)

  Carter’s little missile was nothing at all, just an expanded version of your cable of the 29th, and no less a forgery, though it appears to be your handwriting. They must have medicated you thoroughly before that conjuror’s trick. But now the best antidote to such venom is work.

  The hammer blows might as well have been delivered directly to my weeping leg, Margaret. I ran through the ninth chamber and pounded against its next door until a crack appeared, and I looked, and then I wept, I think, for hours. I confess it to you. More than I have wept since I was a young boy, before I had yet learnt that tears are the most useless, most unquenching liquid there is.

  A sliver of moon is enough to conjure you up, confess to you.

  What might I still accomplish, if I begin again, back home. Home? Could I argue you back to me? You need success. Your father, too. Without it, I would bore you. I sparkled for you, once, I think. And with this find? The forged cable will become real after the fact. A neat trick, that.

  What would she feel if I were something else? I have any number of possibilities within me. Would she be troubled if I were someone else? Of course she would: we respect the well-born, well-raised conquerors. Me.

  It does not matter. I am who I am and you love that man and so he will come home to you. I will start again, take you away with me, away from your father and everything else that poisons you. I will burn all these papers, and we will start again from nothing, far away. I will sleep now, and when I wake I will throw all this away. A failed expedition is not the end of anything, does not even prove that I am wrong. The actual tomb may be hidden mere yards from here. I can return, with Carnarvon or some other rich man. Margaret, you will not turn me away simply for being the man I was when I left, and for not yet becoming even more. Enough. I have only to earn some money
to pay my way home and we will begin again. Tomorrow, the 20th, we begin again. I am decided. Are we agreed? Tomorrow I will leave all of this behind me and I will be off at first light, trekking home to you, as I once trekked all the way from Turkey to Egypt. I will cable you that I am coming home, I will beg you only to wait, wait, make no rash decisions. Are you brave? Be brave, my sweet girl, for me. We will sleep now, your statuette come to life next to me. Close your eyes, as I am about to close mine, can barely hopen themhold eys morrow

  Wednesday, 20 December, 1922

  Good morning, darling! And what wondrous, wild, mad adventures we are having here! My discovery of Atum-hadu’s fabulous tomb has become a marvellous comic farce, quite exhilarating! Wherever shall I begin this zany tale?

  A half-hour’s sleep was all I was granted last night after writing to you and all at once dreaming of you, and then a blink later I looked at my watch before I understood what had woken me, a man shouting my name, footsteps growing louder as he tramped through Atum-hadu’s rich and holy tomb. My heavy eyes could scarcely open, but each angry phrase stung me to wakefulness: “Sweet Jesus’ salty tears! Where’s my ‘mountains of gold’? What the hell is all this? Did a child paint these?” (I must teach your father to shed that typical philistine’s urge: blaming the artist when art is not to one’s taste!) I hobbled into the History Chamber, and there was our CCF, gnawing his unlit cigar, waving his electric torch around, a sword of yellow dust he brought down on my face. “You there,” he yelled. “Mister Carter said I’d find Trilipush here. Where’s Trilipush, eh? You speak English? Speak up, boy!” Very funny, M., no? He thought I was a native, in the dark room, with my beard and the robe I have been working in! I could have held my tongue, shook my head, but that would not have brought about an understanding, which is what your father and I needed most, what we enjoy now, a renewal of our partnership, stronger than ever from our trials.

  When CCF left Boston some weeks ago, he was probably—and this is funny to us both right now, he and I, we are both laughing, he is looking over my shoulder making sure I capture all of this in my journal just the way it happened—he was probably angry at me, and you would have known that, wouldn’t you?

  Of course, I would prefer (as would CCF) not to mention any of this, but there is a need (CCF agrees) to clarify for anyone who may have brought CCF here, or knew he was coming. Yes, before we could renew our friendship, this ridiculous but cleansing scene had to be enacted, which it is possible someone may have heard and misunderstood, as CCF did have directions from Carter to look for me here, so I will do my best to reconstruct this quite daffy misunderstanding, precisely like one of those film comedies you so love!

  “Finneran? How did you find me?”

  “Holy mother of Jesus a-weeping! You? What’s happened to you?”

  “All manner of good news.”

  “Lord, that Carter. Should have invested in him.”

  “Would have been a terrible mistake, Chester. He has not accomplished a fraction of what you and I have managed here on much less.”

  “What’s that infernal smell?”

  “Well, the leg, you see, not a major injury, but—”

  “Holy saints and torments, what the devil is—” Your father’s light was off my face and over my shoulder now. He walked past me, following his light into the Bastet Shrine. “What was done to that cat?” he shrieked, sensitive soul.

  “These are complex questions, Chester. The ancients’ respect for felines, you see, was religious and—”

  “You little vermin. You treacherous, gold-digging little cad. Those poisonous cables—”

  “Cables?” I was baffled. He was, to be historically accurate—and he is nodding sheepishly as I write this—he was simply raving from the pressures he had put himself under. Apparently, Margaret, he has some financial problems. You knew that, but perhaps not their extent. And you should have told me much earlier. At any rate, such pressures can make a man believe anything, jump at shadows, see sharp conspiracy where there is only dull coincidence, and so it has been with your poor father: he began on some absurd tale of slanderous cables sent from Luxor. He even dropped them on the floor, one at a time, in great overwrought drama, and while he and I examine them again now, I certainly am as horrified as anyone. I only mention them as you probably already heard about them in Boston, quite terrible things, anonymous notes to church and press and police and our own partners. CCF and I will burn the nasty things now, be done with them, although there is good reason to believe—CCF and I agree—that these shots were fired by someone here trying to disrupt our success by simultaneously attacking CCF in Boston and me on the ground. That Carter is our prime suspect, with Ferrell his secret agent abroad, CCF and I are in complete agreement.

  Your father was angry, as I know you know, but he had truly come here—whether or not his pride allowed him to confess it—to see our discovery in situ, and to put much-needed physical muscle behind his financial muscle to make this excavation a family triumph. “Some genius! You English fairy, I shoulda steered clear of you, but Margaret said you were just what she wanted, you windbag, and then you do this to me.”

  “Is that why you forced her to break with me?”

  “Forced? Are you insane? It took no doing at all. She’s got suitors by the dozen. Christ, even that little detective wants her, she’s got no end of boys chasing her, and you think giving you up was any sacrifice?” Of course, your father was only trying to anger me, a natural response for the poor fellow, the pressure he was under, Ferrell’s and ter Breuggen’s lies confusing him. “Oh, heck, please don’t write that part down, Pushy!” he has just said to me, the old devil trying to fudge the official record! He is apologising to you now for having said all that about you, and is demanding I write that down right now, too.

  “Didn’t you find anything for my collection?” he asked. “I had hoped you had at least managed that! And those,” he yelled, waving his light behind me, again back into the History Chamber, shoving me against a wall, doing incalculable damage to the ancient masterworks, “did a drunken ape paint those? Is that supposed to be an orgy?” I believe he was referring to Pillar Five. “Don’t make me laugh—why would he be petting a giraffe when he could have those two girls there? Blessed Mother, are the walls wet? My God, they’re bloody dripping! What have you done with my money? Painting basement walls? Are you insane?” Now, if anyone had led Finneran here and was still lingering about outside and had heard that! An onlistener would have been most puzzled, to say the very least. But it is all the simplest thing, and CCF was learning about tomb preservation the hard way. You see, the paintings are glossy, of course, from the preservative celluloid sprays I have been applying to them, and the fresh, modern preservatives under CCF’s electric torchlight made the ancient paintings appear to be damp, which is a lovely but misleading effect.

  And CCF, in his confusion at what he thought he saw, was reaching out his hand to touch the fragile, ancient paintings on the surface of one of the pillars, and I gently, very gently, pushed his hand away with my cane, hardly at all, slightly, just enough to prevent him from touching the surface, which being desiccated and 3500 years old, would have disintegrated at the slightest touch, because while I have been copying into my notes the magnificent workmanship of the tomb, I still have not had an opportunity to complete the scientific methods of preservation that would allow even a stray warm breath on these masterpieces, let alone the mauling of a giant’s paw, and that reminds me: CCF and I should be off to fetch more preserving materials today.

  I had some sleep to catch up on, but that was not possible just then as there was quite a bit of tidying up to perform, on the floors and walls and whatnot, and just talking to your father was such a pleasure, as I have been toiling without company for some time. As some of the paintings had been slightly damaged by his clumsiness, he and I have agreed to restore those and deal with preservation issues next. He is eager to understand the tomb and to help me complete our work. Quite a bi
t to teach him, obviously, but he is a remarkably adept student of archaeology.

  We finally fell asleep after that tidying up, and we were late in rising this morning, he exhausted from his travels, I from work, and we woke still laughing at our awkward reunion yesterday, and celebrating his renewed support (financial, moral, and material) of our great expedition. We certainly did work hard into the night. “Right, my boy, but hard work is good for us!” exclaimed my Master of Largesse, and sent me off to town with his petty cash for food and water, and to check the post.

  CABLE. BOSTON TO RALPH TRILIPUSH, LUXOR, 12/19/22, 9:02 A.M. LEARNED FROM JP THAT DADDY IS COMING TO SEE YOU.

  HE MAY BE ANGRY. PLEASE FORGIVE YOUR MF.

  There, sure enough, I found your cable of yesterday. Funny! Oh, my dear, if only you had been a few days more prompt, I would not have had such a surprise last night. I was right: you did think he would still be angry.

  Well, you can set your mind at rest. He and I will come back to Boston together at the end of this expedition, unless he goes off to travel a bit on his own, or he decides to stay in Egypt for a spell of tourism, or meets a lady, any number of places he would want to see. No, of course, he and I must come home together, you are expecting us both, now that we are here together. And you ask my forgiveness, my darling.

  CABLE. LUXOR TO MARGARET FINNERAN,

  BOSTON, 20 DEC. 1922, 11.17 A.M.

  YOUR FATHER ARRIVED SAFELY. WE ARE WELL AND BOTH SEND YOU ALL LOVE. HE IS IN AWE OF OUR FIND, WILL STAY TO HELP ME FOR A WHILE. HE ASKS YOU NOT TO WORRY. YOUR MOST LOVING RALPH LOVES YOU BEYOND ALL MEASURE.