The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  (Saturday, 30 December, 1922, continued)

  I am back from my errands in town, my Margaret, and for the life of me I cannot understand why you and CCF did not show this lunatic the door at once. Thanks to his dust kicking, immediate clarification is now in order.

  It happened thus: I hobbled over to the post, where nothing awaited me, but as I left, at least a half dozen little boys followed me out, their number growing as I walked down the street. Some of them pretended to hide and follow me secretly, but these were hardly serious efforts. Whenever I looked at them over my shoulder, they would giggle and stare at the sky or their feet. I wandered aimlessly for a while, and never with fewer than six or eight of the monkeys trailing behind. (They tried to follow me back to the tomb tonight, just now, but I simply gave them some of your father’s money to go away, imshee igaree, which they happily did, waving good-bye to me when I stepped onto the ferry. I hired one of them, however, to come back tomorrow to run last-minute errands for me and your father before our departure, post my papers to you for safekeeping, carry away a few things we do not need anymore.)

  Finally, I stopped to rest and take a tea at my ahwa. The children retreated across the street, and a few minutes later I was assaulted at last by the great sleuth Ferrell. Something of a relief to see the dullard in the flesh, to put an end to this hovering phantom secreting a slimy ectoplasm of lies wherever he drifts. You know him: a small, orange man, peculiarly excited, unable to sit still, feverishly scribbling my every word, though I can read upside-down, and I often spoke slowly for him when he fell behind. In truth, I tried to help him with his various tasks. As you know, he is looking for a missing Australian soldier, this amateur archaeologist you mentioned, and he also had some vague business with your father. I tried my best to calm him down and help him. I told him CCF and I will meet him on the riverboat on Monday. And I told him again and again that I never knew this Aussie boy. But still he sat there, poking at me, nibbling his raw, red lips, and generally being disagreeable.

  He is obsessed with the strangest, unrelated things, events having nothing to do with Atum-hadu, or even with me, as if, at this great moment in Egyptology, when I am on the verge of revealing my work to the world, I have suddenly been saddled with a deranged, babbling child spouting nonsense questions: Where is Marlowe? Missing, presumed dead. Where is Paul Caldwell? The same, though I did not know the name at first. Where were you when they vanished at Deir el Bahari? Stumbling back to Egypt from Turkey. Round and round he circled these simple facts. He was a bore, utterly without imagination, as most critics are. For make no mistake, he is a critic of the Trilipushian project, properly to be ignored. It is almost a dictate from heaven: ignore this man, Margaret, lest he confuse you, lest he confuse us all, lest he distract from what great accomplishment has been granted us here in the desert. Can we not all simply agree amongst ourselves, as rational people, to ignore him?

  Ferrell had become confused, you see, Margaret, by three documents: two missing and one incomplete. This often happens with people new to interpreting texts. They take any one document much too seriously, when of course nothing can be understood from a single document. When it comes to incomplete history, one needs to encircle the truth, not bound at it like an amorous kangaroo. But for men like Ferrell, if the first thing they happen to read says x, they believe x forever, and if a second document should say the opposite, they grow confused and begin shouting, “Conspiracy!” When they cannot find something, they assume it is because it never existed. Why is there no record of my career at Oxford? he demanded, as if the answer was not patently obvious: because someone misplaced the file or misspelled my name. For this, a detective has sailed across the globe and I have lost my job and my money and perhaps even your love? It does not matter, not anymore: I will have my discovery.

  A small scrap of words can yield as many interpretations as there are interpreters. I tried to explain this to him. He is in a line of work not dissimilar to my own, except that he is incompetent. He has a scrap of “papyrus,” an official scribe’s notation—in his case a little synopsis of British Army records, telling the moth-eaten story of Marlowe’s disappearance, a lacy collection of loose ends and outright admissions of ignorance. Fertile ground, in other words, for the assumptions of asses, for the annunciation of inanities. As I explained to the slothful sleuth, in the face of such spotty knowledge, how many images come to the mind of an imaginative archaeologist? A dozen or more. And with a dozen minds at work, a dozen dozen possible explanations, a hogshead of possibilities.

  This is a valuable lesson in textual veracity for us all, courtesy of the doltish detective. It is only a few years since the tragic death of my friend, and it is already damned difficult to say just what happened. Now, cast our vision back three and a half millennia, and from a few such documents let us determine with 100 percent certainty what was happening in Thebes, amongst a people we scarcely understand whose language remains so much a mystery we do not even know how to pronounce it. (Gramophones! If the ancients had had gramophones—those great guarantors of immortality for countless singers today—then we could have heard them speak to us, and we would have known everything. A scandal, in a way: the gramophone has rearranged the nature of immortality in our degraded times: we may never really know how to pronounce Atum-hadu, but the world will remember forever the names of Daisy Montgomery, Victor Edwards and His Tuxedoed Chums, Will Wrentham and the Wellington Warblers.)

  Inevitably, horrified by blunderers like Ferrell, one wonders about one’s own archaeologists, certain to be drawn buzzing to our posthumous fame. What if it were me being sought, now or a thousand years in the future, by a china-shopping bull like Ferrell? What will be misconstrued or simply lost in the record I will have left behind, either knowingly or inadvertently? May the gods protect us all from excavators like Mr. Ferrell! Perhaps, like him, my future chronicler will find it significant that the War Office, in its infinite clumsiness, lost my dossier whilst stamping returned over missing. Thus are false lives stacked upon the crumbling foundations of real ones.

  And you, my darling? Where would we be if I believed everything I heard today about you from Mr. Ferrell? Do you need the whole pathetic scene? It went like this, as best I can reconstruct it, though it makes me choke or laugh, I can hardly say which: “You and Finneran are going back to Boston? Really?” The demonic detective looked peakish at the prospect. He could not bear the thought of me returning to you, and tried several tactics to dissuade me.

  “Of course,” I said. “Why not?”

  “But she abandoned you. Rejected you.”

  “No, no, not at all. You are confused.”

  “She told me to throw this in your face.” Ferrell showed me the last cable I sent you, urging you to remain calm, telling you I did not believe the break between us was your will. He had several letters I had written you. Why did you give them to him, Margaret?

  CABLE. LUXOR TO MARGARET FINNERAN,

  BOSTON, 30 NOV. 1922, 9.33 A.M. RECEIVED YOUR LETTER OF 15 NOV. WILL DISREGARD FALSE CABLE OF 29 NOV. FERRELL LIAR. ALL WILL BE WELL. ETERNALLY YOURS IN ANY AND ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, NO MATTER.

  YOUR RMT.

  “She is a marvellous woman,” he mused, leered, implied personal knowledge of you. “Tragic, though, her sickness.”

  “Curable,” I said, disgusted at his intrusion into our life.

  “Curable? I don’t know. Opium’s a difficult burden to shake, and when I saw her last, she—”

  “Opium?” I admit he startled me with the vast enormity of some of his lies, and so he stuck to this one. “Don’t make me laugh, Trilipush. I know men like you. I’m surprised to hear you’re going back, going through with the wedding. Why bother? You have your treasure, you got Finneran and his friends to pay your way here, you’re done. Why marry her now? Or is that something you need? You like her fuzzed up with opium, I’m sure, easy camouflage for your depravity. A pity. She’s a beautiful woman. I left her sighing my name in her bed, you know, and I
can tell you it’s a waste to drug her and turn her into camouflage for you and your boys. I say, Trilipush, you look jealous. Now why’s that, I wonder? Did you think the drugs alone would keep her satisfied? How little you know of women, of course.”

  Margaret, he described you as lovers, embracing in your room on Commonwealth Avenue, described you in great detail, your moan and sigh, your shape, the colour of your limbs. I choose not to believe this tale—how could I do otherwise? It makes no sense to me, even if, as he insisted, you have been taken prisoner by narcotics. That, too, makes no sense to me. No, I know enough about policemen and their ways. If they think you are hiding something, they will buffet you with painful lies until you dislodge what they seek. “Harry,” you cried out, he said, leaning back in his seat and pressing his fingertips together, rolling his eyes and licking his dry lips at me. “Harry, you are my one and only handsome man.”

  I kept my dignity, though in better health I would have thrashed him for you. I could have shot him, I suppose, but we were in public, and I have not fired my Webley in years. Still, the prospect of my return to Boston—to you—brought out the devil in him: “I can have you killed, Trilipush. If I tell O’Toole you stole his money, your life is through. Stay away from her, and I’ll let you live.” And he tried bribery: “Pity, Trilipush. Caldwell is owed a great deal of money. If you tell me how to find his remains, we could share that money.”

  And so we must leave Ferrell behind. He is threatening to turn up at my work site with policemen and dogs, for reasons beyond any logic. It does not matter. I am sorry that he has bothered you, has tried to pollute the limpid truth of our lives. I will not think another moment of what he said of you. I beg of you to dispel him with a wave of your lovely hand.

  But why did he have that cable? Did you really give it to him, rejecting it with a laugh, as he claims? Did you give him my letters? It hardly matters now. Once it would have. Forget it, love. Forget Ferrell’s muddy footprints. This journal is the only letter you need from me.

  For, observe: after all his fuss, what did this grimy archaeologist of divorce and insurance fraud want from me? My confirmation of fairy tales of murdered men and your father fleeing debts. All madness, the fantasies of fabulist Ferrell. He must be ignored, dearest, or everything will be blurred, the truth, the tomb, my immortal accomplishment.

  At the end of it all, my little tête-à-tête with the detective almost made me happy. Having waited so long for his arrival in some anxiety, and then to find at the end that one is pursued for something having absolutely nothing to do with one is something of a relief. One had worried it was all going to be about something real, but of course it was not. “Wait a moment—you believe I killed Paul Caldwell?” I asked, absolutely tickled when his ravings finally sputtered to their lunatic conclusion.

  But ironically, that turned out to be the single pleasure in the detective’s repellent company, the one element of interest in his mad tale: the tale of the missing boy. I heard quite a lot from Ferrell, and the entire business surprisingly touched me, the history of that marvellous boy and his Father Rowley. I am only repeating what I heard from Ferrell, but there is something I would ask you.

  I know that you love me. I know that our misunderstandings will be cleared up. I know all this. But what if I were not all you had dreamed of? I have a confession: I was born to this role. I did not have to fight to win it. And I confess, I am ashamed.

  For, from what I have been told (perhaps Ferrell told you the same), this boy scratched his way out of poverty and mistreatment. No love, money, simple kindness, encouragement. He was born with nothing, and yet from that nothingness, he created himself. Were you to drop Hugo Marlowe or Ralph Trilipush or some other wealthy, well-educated, well-bred fellow into Paul Caldwell’s youth, what would they do? Drop them in the slums of Sydney, and be sure to take their money from them. Strip them of their fine manners. Deny them everything that was not in their heads and hearts the day they were born, and what would they become? I am afraid that, without their received gifts, their internal strength would not suffice. Men like that (like me, it is a shameful fact) can never know with certainty what parts of themselves are truly their own. They are confused their whole lives, befogged by what they inherited. When they accomplish something (a degree, a job, a wife), they do not really know if they did it alone, if it was not the result of their fathers’ example, their mothers’ advice, their professors’ pricey teachings, all the undigested bits of other people that the rich man calls his personality. But Paul Caldwell educated himself, had no family, took advantage of minuscule opportunities hardly worthy of the name, which no one else could even see, and what did he do with them? He turned them to greater advantage than you could imagine, I am led to understand, a story of self-creation worthy of Atum-hadu.

  “What became of Paul Caldwell?” Ferrell demanded again and again. I do not know, but if he had not been killed in the War, what might he have become? In better circumstances, a fellow like that might have risen to become my assistant. Would the world have allowed him to shine in his self-made glory, and admired him for it? Or would the world require him to cover himself, lest his inferiors be blinded and confused by the glow they could never produce?

  Surely, he would have done anything to impress a beautiful and sophisticated woman. And would you have been as impressed by him as he would have been by you? Could you have loved someone like him, Margaret? Or did you, too, require someone more like me—polished, proven, endorsed? I long to know this about you.

  Ferrell tells me the boy discovered Egypt in a library. Did we feel the same, he and I, as boys in love with this land? I remember the urgency I felt when waiting for new books or the next number of Chronicles of Egyptology and Annals of Modern Egyptology and Archaeology to arrive at the Hall. The excitement was unbearable certain days, imagining the covers, hoping for colour plates, the feel of the transparent paper over the frontispiece engravings.

  From Ferrell’s cold data, the inspired thinker can invest the story with warmth: early 1917, Caldwell arrives in Egypt, the land that had beckoned him since he was a boy of eight. He is tireless in his efforts to see everything. He learns Arabic, visits the pyramids, tours whenever he can win passes. After a while, he sneaks off-base when he is not given leave, as Egypt is too powerful for him, too real when compared to the unreality of his service in a colonial army, doing his bit in a war that has not the slightest bearing on him. Imagine him, Margaret, so obsessed with this land that he loses all interest in potential punishments. He knows the penalty for his repeated illicit absences, but this war seems every day less real. Perhaps in a muddy trench in Luxembourg he would have been more attentive (or dead). But in the presence of his desert, the spitting bray of camels for hire, each of them calling him to trot into the dark and touch the noseless beauty of the Sphinx, to sit at the foot of Cheops’s great pyramid and consider where in this vast desert he would meet his destiny—it would have been impossible for him to fear some slow-moving, slow-thinking sergeant (losing, throughout the late watch, hand after hand of patience by the cone of lamplight in the guardhouse).

  And then one day when I am injured and lost in Turkey, Paul Caldwell probably learns that a British officer visiting the Australian camp is, in civilian life, a rising Egyptological expert, even now conducting expeditions when the War allows. I knew Hugo Marlowe’s manner all too well. I have no doubt that Caldwell approached him over and over, trying vainly to win his attention. And failing that, I can well imagine that he simply began to follow Marlowe (stationed fully forty miles away) out of sheer fascination with his work, but also because Marlowe knew everything. Caldwell must at last have won Marlowe’s attention and trust, it hardly matters how. I can imagine Marlowe taking the boy under his wing, and the thrill with which Caldwell heard details, methods of scholarship and exploration, the latest research, and what topic more gripping than the latest thinking about Atum-hadu?

  But of course. Of course Marlowe would have discussed Atum-had
u with Caldwell. Marlowe had Fragment C in his tent, waiting for my return. He would have told Caldwell all about Atum-hadu, and everything in that story would have made beautiful sense to the poor boy: a civilisation where a man of genius could make and remake himself every day until he was king. Perhaps Harriman had already been part of Paul’s childhood reading, and Atum-hadu’s fire, pale as it was in that version, had already singed him. And now Marlowe introduced them.

  If he had survived the War, he would have been allowed to become, perhaps, a librarian, maybe a teacher in a provincial boys’ school. He could have been as intelligent as I, as charming as I, as well-made as I, but without credentials and wealth and all the rest, he would have been an oddity, a circus freak, a poor boy who so amusingly knew some trivia of Egypt for inscrutable reasons of his own. Would you love me if I were that, if that were me? No, how could you. No one will remember Paul Caldwell, and no one should.

  The final days of Egypt. There must have been such a day, the final day. The final hour. The final instant. There was in every cataclysm precisely such a single last moment, incredible, but true: a last casualty in the Great War, a final victim ravished by the Black Death, one last Neanderthal to parent a first Homo sapiens. And there must have been a last man to worship Atum and, at his death, to take with him all the mysteries of his cult. There was a last man who knew how to pronounce ancient Egyptian; a whole language died with him and all we can do now is strain to hear its echoes by leaning very close to books and wishing hard.

  And for Atum-hadu there was this day when all was inarguably lost, when no escape remained, walking in an empty palace, stepping over a man with his face bludgeoned to pudding. How did the king feel that afternoon? Sleepy, so terribly tired. Wishing it could be some other way. Longing for his queen and a peaceful place they could rest together.