The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  FIGURE 5—THE HISTORY CHAMBER AND THE SHRINE TO BASTET

  After decorating the History Chamber with the chronicle of his life and reign, and an abbreviated version of the Coffin Texts (the obligatory guide to the underworld, which the poor man apparently had to reproduce entirely from memory at the last moment, having just remembered to include it and not having much space), the king must have been exhausted as well as covered in paint. But he had to proceed, no doubt in sorrow tempered only by the knowledge that soon such sorrow would pass. But still, for those hours in which he prepared the Shrine to Bastet, Atum-hadu must certainly have suffered. It is not difficult to imagine that the beloved animal, choking on some ancient fish bone, had breathed her last in his arms as he wept and pleaded with a deaf deity.

  Yet now even grislier business awaited him. He had probably begun it days earlier, had probably been forced to consider his options the moment he came to himself straddling the pulpy remnants of his Master of Largesse.

  FIGURE 6—THE CHAMBER OF THE MASTER OF LARGESSE

  I see now that further elucidation is in order, and the text which appears on the walls of the Chamber of the Master of Largesse tells the tale:

  Twelve days before the end, when Atum-hadu had so unwillingly destroyed his Master of Largesse, when he began burning the Master’s clothing as a first step toward preventing him from winning immortality, the king stopped [to consider].

  The great king decided to make use of the Master for all eternity. The Master would make his apologies to Atum-hadu for one million years.

  Atum-hadu had seen the Overseers of the Secrets at work. Though he knew their magic, Atum-hadu did not have the required seventy days. He was pursued by the Hyksos, who knew that he had escaped them. He was pursued by enemies of all sorts. He did not have time. He proceeded with haste, but according to the laws and practices.

  He suffered greatly.

  When his task was complete, he drew upon the linen the face of a man repentant, servile, and restrained.

  Analysis: The horrific (albeit still amateurish) paintings attending this remarkable text are astonishing, showing as they do the king sickened by his task. It is worth clarifying just what the king meant by his enigmatic words.

  Having killed the Master, defending himself from the fierce attack described on Wall Panel K, the king apparently came to several conclusions in quick order. At that instant he must have decided on all the actions he carried out in the next dozen days. Rather than destroy all trace of the Master and his body (“preventing him from winning immortality”), the king realised that his treacherous Master of Largesse would provide companionship and financing for the king’s journey, his mere mute presence sufficient to represent vast wealth.

  The Overseers of the Secrets were those priests trained in mummifying bodies, which means that Atum-hadu knew enough (or thought he did) about mummification to perform the ritual himself. The process, as we understand it, is not pleasant, and one must imagine with sympathy a man—even a man hardened by war and suffering—performing this procedure on a member of his own family—even a hated member.

  The nude torso is slit along the left side and emptied of its contents. Four organs are preserved in a chemical whose exact nature is still unknown to us. They are then wrapped in linen and placed in the canopic jars, decorated with intricate sculptures of the heads of the four sons of Horus: intestines with the falcon-headed Qebehsenuf, stomach with the jackal-headed Duamutef, lungs with the baboon-headed Hapy, and liver with the human-headed Imsety. That said, it is interesting to note that there are no canopic jars in the Chamber of the Master of Largesse, an aberration that will be explained later in this preliminary summary of our findings.

  The brains—irrelevant in Egyptian anatomy and religion—were generally removed from the skull by a hook or a straw and discarded. In the case of the Master, the wall illustrations would imply that his skull had been crushed in his death, and cephalectomy was therefore both speedier and less tidy.

  The body was washed and filled with some sort of chemical preservative. And the mystery of this substance, which puzzles us to this day, is not explicated by Atum-hadu’s tomb. At the end of seventy days, the body was deemed ready for wrapping. Now, observe: if the mummy of the Master of Largesse is not in precisely the same condition as others found under the sands, let us be clear: Atum-hadu did not have enough time to do the job properly, and had never performed this complex and mysterious ritual before, except on his cat. Further, he was the only man on the task, ill, wounded, despairing, and hunted. He had limited tools and perhaps only an amateur’s best guess at the chemicals needed for the terrible undertaking. And so, if the Master’s mummy looks slightly unorthodox, or has decayed along a different path, well, that is only further evidence of the unique nature of this find.

  The hole in the body was sewn up. It is strange, considering what the tragic king had already gone through for this process, but it would appear from the wall paintings that this is the task which most profoundly affected Atum-hadu’s delicate stomach. One group of the narrative illustrations depicts these dreadful hours: the king’s face curls in horror as he begins to stitch. He drops the needle and thread, flees the tomb, stands outside, talks to what appears to be a kindly peasant woman who offers him shelter in her home, and he is sorely tempted but knows this cannot be. His throat catches, and he quietly rejects her kindness. When she leaves, he falls to the ground and weeps. He then returns to his task, stricken.

  In traditional mummification, the stitched wound is then patched with a seal of the eye of Horus. Gold, jewels, amulets are laid on the body. The fingers and toes are each capped with gold. Though I cannot be certain, I believe it is safe to assume that this mummy probably lacks such gaudy accoutrements.

  Normally, each toe and finger is wrapped separately in the linens. Then the arms and legs. Then the body and head, twenty layers thick. Some sort of resin glue is then used to seal all this bulky linen work, and a mummy mask covers the head. All of this is a task for several men, not for one. We can only imagine his exertions, the procedural corners cut by the hurried monarch. The king’s leg was horribly wounded in one of the last battles of the Hyksos war, and it required all of his failing strength to wrap the heavy body with even five layers of linen and then roll it, centring the mummy of his onetime ally on the floor of its burial chamber.

  Having completed his wrapping, the king used some ancient chemistry or linen work, the mystery of which eludes me, and emblazoned on the corpse’s chest the symbol of Atum-hadu’s reign—the vulture, sphinx, and cobra, along with the inscription HORUS CONSUMES THE HEARTS OF THE WICKED.

  Lacking a mummy mask, the king painted a face directly upon the linen-wrapped head, re-creating the Master as a man who would do his king’s bidding without argument or treachery. Linen strips are by no means easy surfaces to decorate, let alone to convey repentance, servility, and restraint. But with simple, affecting brushstrokes, the king performed an act of monumental forgiveness edging into the divine, transforming his greedy and unreliable escort into another man entirely, creating a companion and father he could trust.

  The text on the wall of the Chamber of the Master of Largesse concludes:

  “You are young again, you live again. You are young again, you live again.” The king repeated the ritual words into the ear of his friend and earthly father, who had loved the king as a son, for as long as he had walked on the world.

  Whatever the significance of my nerves at the sight of that boy on the Nile ferry, it’s an undeniable fact that somewhere evil was being done, because, early the next day, January 1st, when I arrived with my luggage at the dock and waited to board the steamer to Cairo, Trilipush and Finneran never appeared. I stood on the dock and eyeballed every passenger as they walked aboard the gangplank with wobbly legs. I waited until the purser’s last call for departure rang out. I asked him to check his list: “Yes, sir, Finneran and Trilipush reserved and paid, but not aboard.” I cannot recall if I was excited
or worried. I leave that to you, Macy, to describe. But I let the boat leave without me, consigned my luggage to a porter, and set back to my work in a frenzy.

  I hired a boy to watch the docks and sent another to the rail station, and then I hurried back to the police, where I was now able to rouse an inspector with the undeniable fact of two missing persons, not from 1918 but from that very day, an American and an Englishman, archaeologists, guests of Egypt, and now officially missing. (The tension produced by gently stretching the truth is sometimes enough to propel otherwise immobile objects along a path.)

  I’m enclosing the very brief newspaper clipping from the Luxor Times of February 11th, 1923, “Australian Detective Helps Kena Police.” That paper, a serious and reputable one, came out every three days, I believe, in those years. It’s a short article, but it lays out the conclusion of these events plain enough, and the small drawing does justice to the Harold Ferrell of 1923.

  I led the copper to Trilipush’s villa (the resident journalists greeted us but had seen nothing), and then across the river, using a police motorcycle on the far bank. This time, another quarter-mile or so further past Trilipush’s excavation site, the policeman and I found a gramophone with Trilipush’s name inscribed in the lid. Odd sight: the device was just sitting on the path, a lone gramophone in the middle of the desert. A disk was still resting on its table, and I marked down the title: “I’m on the Back Swing, Sit Down, Dear.” Some hundred feet farther on, there was evidence of a bonfire, including remnants of burnt clothing. Something was afoot, something very bad indeed. I guided the inspector back around the cliff face and into the Valley of the Kings to Carter’s site, and there I asked Carter if he’d seen Trilipush or Finneran again since he and I spoke. He hadn’t. I had the inspector ask if any of Carter’s men had any knowledge of Trilipush whatsoever. The question was passed among the men, and before long, one of them—a native—admitted he’d actually worked for the Englishman for the month of November, and what of it? We took him aside. This suspiciously defensive Egyptian—a strong-looking, bald bloke of about thirty or thirty-five—described abandoning Trilipush’s expedition at the end of November, as it had plainly failed, and he claimed he hadn’t seen the Englishman since November 25th, the day he came to work for Carter. He denied knowing anything of Finneran, even the name. We took his name and address and watched him walk back to his digging work.

  Events moved very quickly now, Macy, so pay attention. I had two hypotheses, which I had no choice but to pursue simultaneously, as time was ticking away very fast indeed: (a) Trilipush and Finneran had been spooked by my discoveries and had flown secretly, Finneran to Boston with his gold, Trilipush as far away as possible from my investigation of the Marlowe-Caldwell murders, OR (b) they had been set upon by someone who knew of their golden find, and foul play was afoot. I had to chase both possibilities, but I needn’t’ve bothered with Hypothesis A, as it turned out. Still, I had someone watching the railways already, and I telegraphed the hotel in Cairo to alert me should my suspects appear up there somehow. Further, upon our return to the police station, the inspector put the word out to his men to keep their eyes open for anyone of Trilipush’s and Finneran’s descriptions, likely to be moving with a vast amount of luggage, which they would be very unwilling to open to an enquiring policeman. If they were seen, they were to be considered very dangerous indeed.

  But, as I said, such steps were quite unnecessary, for having taken them, the police inspector then discovered in his files that this same black at Carter’s site who’d worked for Trilipush had been involved in a violent incident in his previous employment on the Cairo–Luxor steamer line! For this brawl, he’d been arrested and then released, and he’d also been fired from his post on the riverboat. This had been at the end of October, after which he must have gone to work for Trilipush, who apparently was happy to hire a known thug—interesting, that. The copper and I left immediately from the station to investigate the native’s home. And, behold! We arrived just a few minutes before the man himself: he’d left Carter’s site in the middle of the workday, directly after we’d spoken to him. Very suspicious. We arrived just in time, for in the din of this native’s arguments and fumbled explanations and wife’s wailing and children’s crying, I found under his bed another of Trilipush’s inscribed gramophones and, right in the open on a table, a plate containing easily a dozen cigars with black-and-silver bands bearing the monogram CCF. That settled that. We had our suspect in custody by the afternoon of Monday, January 1st, 1923. The murders had taken place at some point between the time Trilipush left our interview and that morning. It will not surprise you to hear that our native’s alibis were quite, quite feeble.

  I blamed myself then for some of this, and I still do. If I hadn’t let Trilipush go his way two days earlier, he would’ve been alive and facing a more appropriate justice than murder at the hands of his ex-employee. If I could’ve relied on my army of watchers, if I’d been able to find Finneran at the excavation site, I could’ve—well, I don’t rightly know what I could’ve done. Trilipush was a murderer, after all, and knew he was nearly caught, so he didn’t see me as his protector, though he should’ve done. Justice protects us as well as punishes us, Macy. Trilipush could’ve yet saved himself from his rough and unnecessary end, if he’d turned himself in to me, but the proud ones never do, and often they’d rather die than be caught.

  The police interrogations of the Egyptian (I can’t find his name in my notes—frustrating to me as a historian and an embarrassing lapse on my part as detective, I admit) were as harsh as they could legally be, and I participated to the extent my expertise in the case and in criminal psychology could be of assistance. The suspect denied any knowledge of the murders, no surprise, claimed Trilipush’d given him the cigars and the gramophone as gifts back in November. Not impossible, said one of the police inspectors, but then as questioning proceeded, the Arab’s story changed, and at one point he admitted to assaulting Trilipush violently (more than once, he added later) and stealing the gramophone, as if these half-truths were going to bring his predicament to an easy end. All he accomplished with them, though, was losing the support of those few listeners who still generously hoped he might be innocent of the crimes. Later, he retracted even that limited confession of violence, until his compiled stories had become a stew of incompatible nonsense. Even though he nearly admitted to the killings (and if you knew how to listen, the confession was clear), he never did reveal where he’d hidden the bodies. Also, he insisted on one point with unshakable tenacity, no matter how harsh the interrogation: he maintained there’d never been any trea-sure at all, that Trilipush had never found a single thing. Now this claim was so far distant from the facts that it cast as unbelievable every single word of the desperate man. But he clung to this one lie so insanely that it became apparent that he was simply never going to reveal which cousin or cache he’d delivered the treasure to.

  The police wanted that treasure, and you can be sure they pressed him hard on this point. But the Gippo just kept saying to me, “You have been there? Then you know it is empty.” Well, of course it’s empty, Abdul: you emptied it. In the end, he stubbornly refused a signed confession for any of it, which I’m certain resulted in an even harsher sentence than if he’d seen fit to cooperate.

  The local authorities didn’t need much convincing from me. The murder of two Westerners at the hands of a native, in this period of huge touristic interest in Egypt (thanks to Carter’s good work)—shilly-shallying wouldn’t be tolerated, and the Egyptian Government as well as the American and English consuls were most gratified with the fair and speedy trial and appropriate sentence.

  As for me, if I was unable to answer with unshakable certainty all of my clients’ questions, if I did not find any of the four bodies it had become my business to find, at least in this one case I was instrumental in identifying, apprehending, and escorting the malefactor to his punishment. The English and Australian consuls were also grateful for my accountings
of the events of 1918.

  How tidy it would be if we’d found Caldwell’s and Marlowe’s remains, if we had Trilipush’s and Finneran’s bodies, and had been present to witness this Egyptian walking away from them, his hands dripping blood! Fairy tales, Macy. Oh, no, my colleague, rare is the criminal who doesn’t demand a little thought from the detective to complete the story. But there could be no doubt what had happened, the history detailed at trial and in the enclosed Press clipping: a notoriously violent and vengeful native (and not rich, to be fair), fired by his employers at the riverboat line for brawling, latched on to a Western archaeologist, in the hopes of being present when something worth stealing was found. When the expedition faltered, he left to join a different one. When he later learnt, perhaps from gossip in Carter’s camp following Carter’s visit to Trilipush’s site, that the failed expedition he’d abandoned had suddenly turned wildly successful, the murderer returned and spied the loot guarded by two men, one of whom was injured no less. At some point between my interview with Trilipush on the 30th and the morning of the 1st, when they were due to take the riverboat north, this Egyptian had ambushed Finneran and Trilipush, murdered them, burnt their clothes, dispatched the bodies, and hidden the treasure. Had he not been so foolish as to hold on to a gramophone and the cigars, mere knickknacks compared to his hidden loot, he might’ve escaped justice. That he’d required confederates for his crimes—especially the transport and stashing of vast treasures—cannot be denied. But deny it he did.