There was this day; this day came and then ended, snatching the whole universe with it. There was this last sunrise over pig-faced hordes at the gate under the command of foreigners and the temples burnt and the histories all burnt and the ways and the words and the stories and the aspirations and the certainty of an endless future in which honours and love are your due—merely because you live in a time of peace—all vanished. There was instead this last day, and Atum-hadu stood still for a moment, looked around him and said his farewells, though no one heard them. He was trapped by circumstances beyond the control of any man, even the embodiment of Atum the great creator. No servants, no army, no bearers, no women, no money, no time.
The “end of everything.” This is the adult’s bogeyman, the only ghoul that survives the nursery to rise before us from time to time and give us quaky guts. This is more than the fear of death, for at one’s own demise, one clutches to the condolence that at least something else lives on that represents us or matters to us, somehow preserving us, if only it is the knowledge of the things and people that we love surviving us and enduring. Our children’s lives continue, so ours do not really end: this is modern man’s pathetic scrap of Egyptian immortality. Some, of course, will cling to their subdued Christian heaven or sternly orgiastic Allah’s paradise, but for most, there is something simpler in the wings: kids, grandkids, the family business, the life’s work, or just the trappings of one’s humdrum affairs: the pub and the high street continue on, the football club, the Government and the Constitution and the old regiment. If one is not depressed by these institutions ploughing on heartlessly, celestially unmoved by one’s death, then one is conversely heartened and they become like the drawings of food on a Pharaonic tomb wall. Oh, yes, the average man grabs at immortality with his dying breath, and he finds it—in his heirs, work, town, culture.
But the end of everything! How much destruction must man or nature wreak before your death becomes intolerably petty, truly mortal? Do you need an ice age or a swollen sun incinerating the Earth? Or would less suffice to end your fantasies of permanence? Your heirs slaughtered before your closing eyes? Your business in bankruptcy, your home and art in cinders? Let us say your church and all of its priests and every written or graphic mention of your god is destroyed, danced on by the sharp-clawed demons who serve some other, younger, crueller god. Let us say the city that has withstood all invaders for thousands of years, the city your family has lived in for as far back in time as you can peer, this pearl of the sea or the sands, this green and pleasant England, this eternal Rome, this pink Jerusalem or holy Mecca, this home of you and yours is dismantled, every last brick, the last bomb flattening the last house just before the last spittly drops of blood pump clear of your stuttering heart. Venice sinks into the sea. Paris burns. London howls. New York crumbles and Athens is reduced to its net ash. Not yet the end of everything for you? Every copy of every work of every author of the world’s literature ignites under the watchful eyes of unquenchably pyromaniacal illiterates. The very last copy of the very last history of your country or any other changes into black smoke, and all you can hope in your last breath is for the scantiest sliver of immortality: perhaps, some generations from now, word of mouth from one long-memoried genius actor to his heir to his heir to his heir will result in a brave effort to recall Hamlet and write it down again . . . and what does happen at the end? Hamlet poisons himself? Thumps Polonius with a club in a darkened room? Dresses up as a gravedigger and sneaks out the back?
The following items will be irretrievably lost someday quite soon: Beethoven’s works. The beer you prefer. All record of your ancestry. The place you first kissed a girl. Toffee. Coffee. The landscape you associate with peace and liberty. Any evidence of your boyhood, real or just fondly recalled. The sensation that all that stands before you and your loved ones is a series of aspirations, accomplishments, setbacks, meals, ceremonies, loves, heartbreaks, recoveries, next acts.
Will you remember me, Margaret? Will you see what I accomplished here, and will you clarify it for the world? I have no one else, you see, to trust. If you ever loved me, or only the idea of me, please, please, rid yourself of your illnesses and make my work live on.
CCF is asleep. I have much to finish, especially if mad Ferrell is coming to stamp about with police and dogs.
January 6, 1955
One likes to be right, Macy. And to be right for the right reasons, that’s good, too. This morning, as I look back over what I wrote yesterday, I have the unpleasant feeling, shameful almost, that perhaps I was sometimes right for the wrong reasons. Today, reading this, it isn’t quite clear to me just where and in what fashion I caught Trilipush in a lie. And yet, I remember the sensation—a sensation, Macy, as plain and real as the taste of chocolate, or the brush of wind on your face—that he was lying. And I certainly wrote then in my notes that I knew he was lying. But rereading it now, the certainty seems somewhat faded. I could’ve told Margaret about Caldwell’s interest in archaeology, and she could’ve written to Trilipush in turn, I suppose. No matter: if it wasn’t that, it was something else. Too tempting to say that hindsight brings clarity. More likely time blurs the truth. I don’t question the correctness of my certainty then, only my ability to express it now. I’m no man of letters, Macy, that’s your job in this partnership. So make it clear how I catch Trilipush out.
And, also, I can blame myself now, I suppose, that I was unable to convince the police to look into this straightaway. The disappearance of an Englishman and an Australian, four years earlier, during a war, didn’t seem to the constable on duty to have the slightest relevance to his job. He told me to report it to the British consulate, and if they ordered an investigation, he’d look into it. I couldn’t budge him, and I saw his native pride in saying no to me, as if I were the King of England, and not in fact yet another of the Englishman’s put-upon colonials. That was Saturday the 30th.
I returned to my hotel to await word from my watchers. They did not appear. I stayed awake until midnight. Nothing. I descended to the street, looking for them. I thought I saw one of them, but when I approached, he spoke no English, and I couldn’t, at the end, be sure whether he was one of my team or not. The truth is, Egyptian boys don’t look terribly different from one another. I began to fear the worst: Trilipush in his desperation had done my poor boys some serious harm.
Sunday, 31 December, 1922
Dreamt I was sitting behind you, my hand on your hand on your thigh. We were sitting together in a safe, close space. I was whispering into your ear. I was holding your other hand, using your finger to point at the symbols on a papyrus, pouring into your soft ear the secrets hidden in those pictures.
The sun is already up, and there is activity on the other side of the cliff wall. I sat first on a bluff and then closer, on the balcony constructed above the entry to Tut’s treasure hole, and I watched the photographer take posed pictures of the great man. It is too much, the equipment, the miles of calico and linen, the jugs of preserving fluids, the vats of photographic fixatives, the countless sifting screens and barrels and picks and carts, the train built specially for him, rail by rail out of the Valley, the dozens of admirers, the journalists pleading for a word. All of that should be enough. But no, now we must have this puff after puff, silver flash and blue flash, click after click, and “Over here, Mr. Carter, look this way, please, sir,” the unblinking Eye of the world devouring him without ever reducing him. He was tireless—click, click, click, puff, puff, puff—feeding the world with his image. The great man in his tent. In front of his hole. With his minions. Pretending to oversee something. Walking some treasure up and out, into the sun of knowledge and fame. Consulting with this one or that one. Thinking. His is the tomb of the Restoration, the evidence that nothing vanishes forever, eventually everything returns in its glory. And here are the thin, temporary photographs to prove it.
And there, 200 yards down the path when I return, is Ferrell, rodential and rank, poking at the cliff face.
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br /> The next day, Sunday the 31st, in my panic, I again visited the places I knew: Trilipush’s former villa, Carter’s crowded site, where I watched him pose for photographers, and the blank stretch of desert that had once been Trilipush’s site. Everywhere nothing. I returned to my hotel, praying that my little army of informants would appear. Nothing. I consoled myself that perhaps they’d followed him somewhere, and there he stayed, and therefore there they stayed. But my position felt worrisome. I went to the travel office, and they confirmed that Trilipush and Finneran were still scheduled to sail the following day, the tickets had even been paid for. I hired a new boy to watch the rail station for anyone of the unmistakable appearance of Trilipush or Finneran. He, at least, reported to me after the day’s last train: they had not left Luxor by rail. I prepared my next move: I wired the details of our arrival to the British consul in Cairo, told him I was going to bring him a suspect in the 1918 murder of Captain Marlowe for our joint interrogation, and to prepare himself. See here: I was using every tool I had to solve crimes no one else was even willing to investigate, Macy.
That evening, the 31st, to make certain I’d done all I could, I crossed the river one last time to walk the Trilipush site again, but this time, as I stepped off the ferry on the Nile’s western bank, the crowd waiting to board the ferry’s eastbound return included a native boy I would’ve sworn was one of my missing army of watchers. The boy was carrying a large package. When I tried to catch his attention, though, he ignored me, just stepped on the boat, and I couldn’t reach him. I lost sight of him. I pushed my way to the front of the pier and watched as the ferry left, but I couldn’t see him until, as the boat chugged out to the current, I spotted him suddenly, staring at me from the deck, as if he’d been there the whole time, and I would’ve sworn, even at that distance, that he was laughing.
Of course, I again found nothing at Trilipush’s site, and I know enough of human psychology at times of stress not to take too seriously those sensations of apprehension that tickled me in the last sunlight, that suspicion I was being watched. Even the little boy’s laugh was probably more a sign of my heightened nerves than of anything real.
(Sunday, 31 December, 1922, continued)
Atum-hadu faced the most daunting example of the Tomb Paradox in all Egyptian history. It is, at tenth glance, a puzzle with no solution. To secure his immortality, his name must survive forever aboveground and his body below it, preserved, mummified, and sealed into a minimally outfitted tomb. With nobody left to tell the tale. While the world upstairs melts in the desert sun: his name was on no king list. The XIIIth Dynasty was fast becoming a lumpy purée of fact and legend, quicksand lacunae bubbling with satisfaction where once kings had strode.
WALL PANEL L: THE LAST HOURS OF EGYPT
Text: Atum-hadu was abandoned. He left Thebes and crossed life-giving Nile and walked alone; he carried his goods, his Admonitions, paint, reed, ink, brushes, his cat. The cobras inside his stomach had died. Across mighty Nile he burnt the small boat he had captained, and he watched the silver flashes of the fire against the sky. To the east the invaders sacked his palace, and he could hear the cries of his women. He was empty of this world. He carried his goods into the tomb Seth had given him.
Analysis: The last minutes of his reign. The last minutes of Egypt. Unimaginable sorrows, regrets, but not without a certain beauty, the end of days. Surrounded by blood, danger approaching rapidly. Not danger to his life, but to his afterlife. He is abandoned by everyone. But all is now clear: the puzzle—which has tormented small minds for millennia, stymied Hyksos rampagers and ancient grave robbers and Harriman and Vassal and all those who doubted Atum-hadu’s existence—unveils itself for us, Reader. We can now map, chamber by chamber, the work he performed, both that last day and in the events and days leading up to it.
We will understand why there were no seals or inscriptions on the doors.
We will understand the bodies and their placement, the bloody footprints.
We will understand the amateurish illustrations and the expert text.
We will understand how a man alone achieved his immortality, filled and hid his tomb from everyone.
To reiterate, then, we have Figure 1—The Tomb of Atum-hadu, detail excluded:
The thinness and lightness of camouflaged Door A are now explained. Even a man of Atum-hadu’s prowess cannot be expected to have lifted a heavy stone door into place, sealed it on his own. So let us speculate that he built this subtle but sufficient screen himself, stone-disguised wood, plastered it shut behind him when he had everything he needed inside. With the door closed behind him, he set to work in something that must have resembled peace.
FIGURE 2—THE CHAMBER OF ATUM-HADU’S WOMEN
Rebirth into the underworld required reconsummation, which required stimulation of the mummy. This chamber contained all that was symbolically necessary for the act. The beaded slippers of some beloved concubine, the scattered, multi-coloured gossamer veils of favourite dancing girls, and the extraordinary paintings covering the walls: all conceivable shape and variety of women, in activities and positions the Admonitions have so eloquently described as Atum-haduan preferences. At the instant of Atum-hadu’s death, these garments would be suddenly filled by the lovely associates the king had kept all his life. The paintings on the walls would swell to three plump dimensions, then leap to the floor, giggles and sighs echoing through the supernaturally glowing chambers of Atum-hadu’s voyaging apartments.
Who painted these figures? Why, observe: the same hand that had decorated over previous days the History Chamber. Sealed in his own tomb while still quite alive, he created with his own Atumic hand his own escorts to the underworld, relied on his own untrained talent to decorate the unforgiving walls, paint staining his fingers and face and robes. He would frolic in this first chamber, just as soon as he had completed the business of shedding his life and, with the ladies’ touch to help him re-create himself, be reborn as his own child.
And who, more than any other, dominates these walls? Examine the small, excellently preserved figurine situated between and behind the crumbling slippers. This beautiful woman draped only in a robe, her eyes sparkling even in sculpture, her smile-sneer an invitation and a revolt—she is reproduced all over this chamber made holy by her presence, her delicate hand, each long, slender finger articulated into the graceful arch of riverside narcissi, in her drowsy languor, lounging in all manner of posture: full portraits done from the sobbing king’s memory, profiles, hurried sketches, and details worried over for hours as he strained to capture on a wall all that he loved: her bursts of energy and wit, her spells of sorrow and fatigue, the angry flash in her eye when her whim was denied her, the satisfaction she took, at the beginning, merely from being with her king and knowing that he loved her. Wherever she had escaped to spend her remaining mortal years, she would spend eternity at his side.
FIGURE 3—THE CHAMBER OF THE ANSWERER
The bloody footprints and the beautiful, plain rectangular pedestal are the centrepieces of the Chamber of the Answerer. Here the shawabti, or “answerer,” held his post. The small figurine, done in Atum-hadu’s likeness, with his unmistakable mischievous grin, stands directly in the centre of the long, heavy stone pedestal, and answered for the king on his voyage to the underworld, fought battles on his behalf (with the assistance of the blood-covered soldiers standing symbolically in ranks, represented by bloody footprints). Surrounding the shawabti are four balls of petrified dung (presumably camel or elephant) surmounted by carved scarab beetles, symbols of rebirth for the Egyptians.
FIGURE 4—THE THREE ROYAL ANTECHAMBERS
In the Three Royal Antechambers, Atum-hadu arranged items symbolic of his earthly power, and the tools with which he guaranteed his immortality. The walls are covered with scenes of feasting, hunting, warfare, pictures of wealth, treasure, clothing. As nearly as one can be sure, I would say that these, the weakest paintings in the tomb, were completed last, when the king was in his terminal ex
haustion. All of the painted items would become real upon the king’s death. Further, magnificent tangible items are laid on the floor:
• The carved sceptre, a curved wooden crook, inscribed on its side with the five names of Atum-hadu’s titulary, and its upper tip whittled into a face of a god, perhaps Atum himself;
• A beautiful ebony-inlaid wooden coffer containing a complete copy of the Admonitions, all eighty verses on a series of papyrus no larger than the forty-eight verses of Fragment C (which I have had with me on expedition and will be carrying with me tomorrow when I return to Cairo with CCF) but written on both sides, forty-eight on the obverse (the same forty-eight as on Fragment C), thirty-two on the reverse;
• A blood- and paint-spattered robe, likely the very garment the king wore while preparing the tomb;
• The reeds, brushes, pots of paint, and cutting tools he used to prepare the tomb’s walls and furnishings.
The complete text of the Admonitions is a particularly significant find, settling the importance of my early and devoted work on that text and on Atum-hadu’s reign. If, in the sixty previously discovered verses, we see Atum-hadu as a strong man driven by his appetites, then we see another side of him in the final twenty. In these, he is more keenly aware of his sufferings and of the complex questions put to him by the future. He writes with a more marked interest in his digestive difficulties (as in Quatrains 38–41), and the suffering caused by women who have not returned his love (as in 62 and 69). Of particular interest here, I would draw the reader’s attention to: 68, which identifies unique marks on Atum-hadu’s body with such intriguing precision; 34, in which the poet-king longs for an “unwinder” who will carry his name to great heights in a restored world (Osiris would be the traditional interpretation of this, and yet I cannot help but feel a compliment sent my way by my fraternal king); 63, which in simple, unrhymed words clarifies the order of kings in the late XIIIth Dynasty, ending with Atum-hadu; 43, 64, and 67, which appear on Pillars seven and eight; and 14, which appears on History Chamber Wall G.
The Egyptologist Page 40
