The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Educating the masses,

  Go-go

  15 August, 1918

  Cherished BQ,

  Bit of a cock-up. Any wise counsel you care to offer would be most welcome.

  You’ve heard these cockle-warming tales, I suppose, from up in Luxembourg or some such, where on Christmas Eve, there are little front-line truces and our men and the Boche stop shooting for the night and instead share drinks and exchange gifts and dance a bit before going back the next morning to the daily work of plunging bayonets into each other’s bellies? Fine, I say, and no crime there. Well, similarly, out in an otherwise unremarkable suburb of Cairo, there is an establishment for gentlemen of refined tastes, which civilised outpost I have visited from time to time when the interrogatees brought in for questioning have for too long tended to be old women and village elders. The management of this establishment, inspired no doubt by the admirable humanism displayed in those Yuletide trench respites, does not discriminate against clientele of any particular nationality or political belief. No one thinks this inappropriate, considering the dreadful wartime conditions to which we are all submitting ourselves. And, of course, now that I think of it, what an excellent location for potential counterintelligence work, a purpose to which I shall certainly now put the facility, and have probably put it already in my previous visits, now that I think about it.

  “I don’t much feel like these little finishing school sessions anymore,” I told my cobber ward in a fit of honesty and spite at being at his beck and call when he turned up the other night, chirping questions about Akh-en-Aten and my childhood bedroom.

  “You’re not enjoying them?” he asks and looks absolutely as if I have dashed his heart to splinters.

  “I am not, darling Matilda.”

  “I see. Well, I hardly think that’s your choice,” he replies, tart as you like.

  “Really?” I say. “You think your position is as strong as that?”

  And at that, with a calm smile, he simply recited the address of that establishment I was describing above, the tiresome brute. Seeing my expression, he mentioned how long it had been since he has been promoted, despite his bold and tireless efforts on behalf of Allied counterintelligence. And, furthermore, clearing his throat, and showing a momentary hesitation rare in this magnificently confident swine, he requested—do prepare yourself, Bev, for this—that our tutorials leave the formality of the study-tent and that I take him to examine the monuments in situ, introduce him to archaeologists as my colleague from Oxford, a recent graduate, and give them my recommendation that they hire him after the War. Bev, I ask you. “I shall do no such thing,” I am afraid I replied. “And no one would believe me if I did, you ridiculous colonial convict’s son.”

  “I see.” One minute he is quiet, smiling, presumptuously demanding. The next he has precisely that face young men in London sometimes have when you explain that they cannot come and live with you forever even if you did have rather a nice evening together the night before. It is a dangerous warning face, I know that much. And so I apologised for my short temper, excused myself by muttering something about being heartsick for poor Trilipush, from whom there was still no word, damn old Johnny Turk. I meant no offence, I said, and I will be better in a few days, if he could just give me some time to mourn and pull myself together. “Of course,” he says, at once bright-eyed again. “We’ve been working hard, and you’ve lost a mate. Everyone has to let off steam now and again. Let’s meet in a few days. I didn’t mean to push you too hard just now. I just think we should start thinking of our situation more like a partnership.” Yes, Bev, I can hear you nagging me for details and accuracy, but that was precisely his word; I have been careful to present all of these encounters without exaggeration. “A partnership you’ve been preparing me for, so after this War we can think about working together as a team.” Quite. His mood was restored, and off he bounced.

  Now then, Bev, I could rather use a bit of your calm advice, if you follow me.

  HM

  11 November, 1918

  Bev, Bev, Bev!

  Well today is quite a day, and no mistake. You have no doubt heard the news by now. The future begins again! There will be a bit of time lost before demobilisation, but I would guess I should be home well before summer. And then back to my studies, and then back here to dear Egypt in happier circumstances to apply myself to the gentlemanly pursuits of desecrating tombs and exhuming the dead. And where will Bev be, I wonder to myself sleeplessly.

  As for my little problem, I believe you found an elegant solution; your counsel was subtly worded but wisely conceived: “When the War ends, things will take care of themselves. Be patient and do try at least to pretend to be kind to the boy.” Trust Bev for seeing to the nut of the issue!

  And so yesterday, I conducted my tutorial in a state of not entirely feigned excitement. I told him that I had something to show him, some dazzling news. I swore him to secrecy, an oath he undertook with moist-eyed Aussie sincerity, and then I allowed him a glimpse of that papyrus you failed to ask Wexler about, which document you will recall I found in a bazaar, but which I told him I had dug up before I had the pleasure of meeting him, and had held on to since, waiting for sweet Peace, when I could bring it back to England for analysis. Bless his bright convict’s head: to give him (and me as his tutor) credit, he read the relic with care, and immediately came to the same conclusion I had. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked in delight. “No question at all,” I declared, though the truth is quite a bit hazier; the thing could absolutely be a forgery, and even if it is real, it is still hardly conclusive as to— well, never mind, you couldn’t conceivably care less, and the point of my story is elsewhere, right here in lovely, peaceful A.D. 1918. Either way, the rest of my intrigue unfolded along its own impeccable logic. “Where did you find it?” He salivated. I told him that dear old Trilipush (of course) and I had uncovered it on one of our many rambles back in early 1915 just before poor Ralph headed off to his tragic Turkish end. I was a bit drunk on my creative powers: I told him we had dug it up while under enemy fire. “Have you been back to the site since?” he asked, bursting with excitement. “If this was there, perhaps there’s more! Mightn’t, mightn’t his tomb be near where this was buried?” he burbled.

  “Dear boy, I do think so. I do absolutely believe a tomb is waiting for us down there, and I think I know where. Now listen: the War is almost over.”

  “Is it? How do you know?” asks my most perfect idiot-tormentor, some twenty-four hours before the Armistice was signed.

  “For heaven’s sake, listen. I will have to return to Oxford to finish my studies before I can come back here to conduct any full-scale excavation, but I intend to take the opportunity we shall have between now and the time we are shipped home to do a little more surface digging, to try out our glorious in the field, you and me, on a preliminary expedition.”

  Honestly, Bev, I thought he was going to weep. He positively hugged me, a little boy on Christmas morning with a shiny new train. I was tempted to engage him in a more manly embrace, but I did not dare spoil the lovely tableau taking shape.

  “Shipped home?” he said suddenly, all rapt with concern. “Can they force us to go back home? Can’t one stay here?” Apparently Australia calls to him no more than it would to me or you. At least he has learnt that much under my tutelage.

  Well, you should see by now how your surprisingly sage advice is playing out, Bev. Tomorrow he and I depart for a four-day leave. I showed him the paperwork, already completed, and he gazed at his dear papa with childlike wonder. Tomorrow he and I are heading south, into the very heart of archaeology in this mad, beautiful country. Carter and Carnarvon are doing interesting work in the Valley of the Kings, and I think it would do my career a bit of good to meet chaps like that now if I can. My orphan is practically wetting himself to meet them, too, but that, of course, is sadly not to be.

  For down there, far from here, in the magical light of desert dusk, hills and hills away fr
om anything and anyone, complex affairs will work themselves out simply, as you predicted they would, and I shall return to normal life free of any unnecessary weight on my mind.

  Have you absolutely fallen for a life in London, Bev? I am thrilled to hear about your rooms, of course, I simply cannot wait to see them, but I hope you do not find them too, too comfortable, nothing permanent. Please do not dismiss me on this, I am utterly sincere, think hard: Oxford, you know, is where I simply must be, and then I shall be back here and back there and back and forth, teaching and digging and writing and teaching and digging and writing. Doesn’t the life appeal to you, just a bit? Half your time in a don’s flat in Longwall Street, and half in a tent in Egypt, a mature and tolerant country, after all. Mightn’t one keep the friends one loves the best near one in such a life as that?

  I shall write again on the 16th, free and light.

  Eternally,

  H.

  (Sunday, 31 December, 1922, continued)

  There is neither text nor illustration to explain the tomb’s ninth and final chamber, but this should not surprise us. By now all is clear. It is asking too much to hope for more explicit illumination.

  He prepared his own sepulchre, placed the Master’s donated organs in necessarily simple clay pots at the corners of his own chamber. He was no sculptor: each pot’s lid was inscribed with the name of the appropriate god and an effort to draw their difficult shapes—baboon, falcon, jackal, man. He completed copying his Admonitions and to preserve his name on earth, ran back outside, buried one copy in a cylindrical jar (Fragment C, discovered 1915), another in a cloth a few yards away (Fragment A, 1856). A third, limestone copy (Fragment B, 1898) some messenger had been instructed to carry to distant lands but had in fact stashed not much farther afield. The original and complete text of the Admonitions he placed in a magnificent coffer in the Second Antechamber, an extra guarantor of immortality, as all writers merited an afterlife of a million years.

  And then, with whatever strength remained to him, he turned to face the flickering torchlight, walked one last time the rooms in which he would await his admission to immortality.

  What will the final moments feel like, wonders the last king of Egypt as he sets to his one remaining task. What will his last breath taste of, and the first one after it?

  His hands shake with foolish fear and hunger. Some of his fingers are smashed, swollen, broken in battle or from his work on the Master. His fingers are stained with paint, and they stink still of preservatives and his father-in-law’s guts.

  The chemical treatment of his feet and legs will be excruciating, but with the numbing effect of the slow-acting poisons he will have already consumed, and with the further comforting knowledge that immortality is approaching and he has thwarted his enemies for all time, he will be able to wrap his feet and legs tightly. He will remark how far he has come in this life, from how low to how high, and how high he will soar in the next, where his name will ring out forever. The preservative treatment of his groin and trunk will be almost unbearably painful. But he will bear it, and wrap himself to his waist. The embalming fluids across his cheeks feel like ice fire, and the fumes in his nose scorch his brain. The drops that fall over his parched lips and tongue gag him. His eyes cloud and burn, but he does not stop. There is no time to stop, for soon the poisons will complete their work, and he must complete his own before his departure. He tightly wraps his face and head.

  He has rehearsed the solution to his final, intractable problem, practised it over and over in his solitude, and while no solution is flawless, this is the best that Fate has allowed him: the long, measured strips of linen laid out across the floor. Even as the preservative’s sting grows crueller, he clutches the linen in his fist. Lying on the tomb floor, he rolls, gathering the wrapping as best he can around his arms and trunk as he goes, finishing the task, he hopes, at the chamber’s exact centre, precisely at the moment of his departure.

  Darkness. The king’s final pains recede. His breathing stops for a spell, the length of time no longer measurable. He drifts in silence. And then he awakens to music. The first face he sees is his father’s, already risen and now standing over him, repentant, servile, restrained, loving. So lovingly he has with his own gentle fingers opened his son’s eyes from sleep. And now the women enter the room, their almond eyes striped with malachite kohl, their copper bodies under sheer and clinging shirts. They approach and caress him sweetly. They love him so. They unwrap him and anoint him with oil. And when they have prepared him, they lead her in, at last: in floats his queen, her long-fingered hands reaching for him. She is healthy and fresh and only for him. The food descends from the walls and fills long tables. The new, unimaginable music grows louder, and his wife leads him away from life’s pain and loneliness. Far beneath him, mere men will daily speak of him with awe, their honeyed exhalations of his name forming clouds that will waft him high above the masses of rivals and pedants, above poverty and mockery, above snobs and villains, secure from enemies and doubt and betrayal. His mysteries and riddles remain unsolved for millennia stacked upon millennia until another should find him, embrace him, twist and fuse with him, vanish into him, and win, for discoverer and king alike, the eternal love due an immortal name, Atum-hadu and Trilipush, Trilipush and Atum-hadu, Trilipush, Trilipush, Trilipush.

  ARTHUR PHILLIPS GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE KIND ASSISTANCE OF:

  the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan (particularly Marcel Marée), Jim Forte, Norman Fruman, Daniel Goldner, the Hennepin County Public Library, Catherine Keenan, Peter Larson, Jaromir Malek and the Griffith Institute, Ross Mallett, the Moreno-Bormann Circus of Paris, Anthony Palliser, Stephen Quirke, Michael Rice, Kelley Ross, Chris Tyrer, Kristen Vagliardo, Kent Weeks and the Theban Mapping Project, and the invaluable example of Miss Vivian Darkbloom;

  AND IS DEEPLY INDEBTED TO:

  superstar editor Lee Boudreaux, Julia Bucknall, Tony Denninger, Peter Magyar, Mike Mattison, ASP, DSP, FMP, MMP, incomparable agent Marly Rusoff, Toby Tompkins, Daniel Zelman, and, of course, Jan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ARTHUR PHILLIPS was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His first novel, Prague, a national bestseller, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, received the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel, and has been translated into seven languages. The Egyptologist is his second novel. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

  Visit www.TheEgyptologist.com

  Continue on to read excerpts from

  Arthur Phillips’s other novels

  The Song Is You

  Prague

  Angelica

  Read on for an excerpt from

  The Tragedy of Arthur

  A Novel

  by Arthur Phillips

  PREFACE

  Random House is proud to present this first modern edition of The Tragedy of Arthur by William Shakespeare.

  Until now, Shakespeare’s dramatic canon consisted of thirty-eight or thirty-nine plays, depending on whose scholarship one trusted and whose edition of the Complete Works one owned. Thirty-six plays were included in the so-called First Folio of 1623, published seven years after the playwright’s death. Two more—collaborations, likely delayed for copyright reasons—were added to subsequent seventeenth-century collections. A thirty-ninth play, Edward III, has over the last two decades garnered increasing academic support as having been written, at least in part, by Shakespeare, but it was published only anonymously in his lifetime and is by no means universally acknowledged as a Shakespeare play. A further two works—Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won—are referred to in historical documents, but no copies of either have survived. Another dozen or so plays—the so-called Apocrypha—do exist and are debated, but none have acquired anything approaching scholarly consensus as being the work of Shakespeare.

&
nbsp; The Tragedy of Arthur was published as a quarto in 1597. Its cover’s claim that the text is “newly corrected and augmented” implies a previous version now lost, but this 1597 edition was, as far as we now know, the first play to be printed with Shakespeare’s name on the title page, pre-dating Love’s Labour’s Lost by one year. Likely banned, or at least judged politically dangerous and therefore excluded from the 1623 folio, the play apparently fell into disfavor, and only one copy of that 1597 quarto has so far been discovered. It was not found until the 1950s, and has been held in a private collection until now. The Tragedy of Arthur is, therefore, the first certain addition to Shakespeare’s canon since the seventeenth century.

  The story it tells is not the legend of Camelot most readers know. There is no sword in the stone, no Lancelot, no Round Table, no Merlin or magic. Instead, Shakespeare seems to have worked from his usual source for history plays, Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The resulting plot is something more like King Lear, a violent argument of succession in Dark Ages Britain. But, like Lear, it is about so very much more, and the white heat that courses through the whole structure is Shakespeare’s unmistakable imagination and language.