Later, as mint tea and biscuits are served, he chats with Laura, who tells him that she studied history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford:
“I did a dissertation on Osiris,” she announces. She goes on to outline the well-known myth: the god’s dismemberment, his sister Isis’s search for his parts, her conception of Horus from the one part of him that she couldn’t find and so was forced to remake for herself, and Osiris’s subsequent adoption as the deity of death and resurrection by the people of the Nile, who’d depict him in their art with a large phallus, rising to inseminate each day.
“A res-erection,” Serge quips. Laura looks back at him through her glasses without laughing. He pictures the girls he’d see emerging from St. Hilda’s gates during his stint in Oxford—riding bicycles, chatting with friends or clutching books as they headed to lectures: maybe one of them was her. SOMA: the School of Military Aeronautics’ buildings merge in his mind with the funerary complex Petrou pointed out to him from the Circular tram on the way back from Ramleh, the Royal Tombs—and Alexander, a young Macedonian soldier, morphs into an ankh-bearing, hook-bearded god.
“The sun itself entered the body of Osiris,” Laura’s saying. “He’d swallow and pass it, bringing about the repetition of creation, the timeless present of eternity. The ancient Egyptian cosmology had no apocalypse, no end: time just went round and round …”
Her little lecture fades out, and there’s silence for a while on deck, broken only by the regular plash of the bow and the creaking of the tiller. The man holding this smokes a black, wooden chibouk; another river-man sits cross-legged at the prow, staring at the water like a mesmerised Narcissus. The crew’s completed by two more Egyptians: one of them lounges at a fixed spot on the cabin’s roof, reaching up to casually pass the front sail’s boom above his head each time they go about; the other lurks inside, preparing food. The landscape slips by indifferently. Like the crew, it looks bored, weary of being stared at. At sunset, it turns a chemical shade of pink, then green, then changes, via white, to the same dark blue tone as the sky. As they drop anchor they’re besieged by insects: grasshoppers, cicadas, moths, mosquitoes. They look like flocks of birds, congesting the whole air and covering cabin, deck, sails, crew and expedition members alike in a twitching and vibrating coat.
“Maybe we’re the shit,” Serge says to Falkiner.
“Get the nets up,” Falkiner instructs the helmsman, who seems quite unbothered by the insects—perhaps because his chibouk’s smoke is keeping them away from him. The helmsman murmurs something at his crew, who slowly haul mosquito-netting around the deck’s rear, from the roof above the cabin’s entrance to the helm beside the rudder, wedging two vertical poles between it and the boards so as to form a tent. They then pick some of the larger insects from the netting’s outer surface, fry them over a stove and eat them with dourah paste. The Europeans, meanwhile, dine on a stew of dates, figs and pigeons. They drink wine too: Serge, Laura, Alby and Pacorie in moderation, Falkiner to excess. He spends a good hour after supper issuing invocations to the night air:
“Hail, ye gods, whose scent is sweet,” he chants, arms pressed to his side like they were when he assumed the same declamatory tone on the quayside in Boulaq. “I am a swallow; I am a swallow. O stretch out unto me thy hand so that I can … so that I can … so that I may be—may be!—may be able to pass my days in the Pool of Double Fire, and let me advance with my message, for I have come with words to tell …”
“What is that stuff he’s saying?” Serge asks Laura.
“It’s from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” she replies, hand pressed to her forehead as though this action alone allowed her to think. “ ‘The Book of Stepping Forth by Daylight,’ in fact, if I recognise this passage rightly.”
“First thing ever written for a dead readership,” mutters Alby.
“Who then is this?” asks Falkiner. Not waiting for an answer, he continues: “It is Ra, the creator of the names of his limbs. Who then is this? It is Tem the dweller in his disk. I am yesterday; I know today. Who then is this? It is Osiris; or (as others say), it is his dead body; or (as others say), it is his filth. I gather together the charm from every place where it is, and from every man with whom, with whom it is … and though … Hang on … Ah! yes: And though I be in the mighty innermost part of heaven, let me stay—remain!—remain upon the earth …”
Serge turns his head towards the river bank, but can’t make it out anymore. Water and sky have disappeared too: there’s no moon. Only the glow of the helmsman’s chibouk lights the scene at all, intermittently revealing, etched across the faces of the crew, looks of bemused indifference to the bearded interloper’s drunken incantations.
He wakes just after dawn to a landscape that seems utterly synthetic. The sun, rising behind hills, is tearing the mist into gauzy shreds. The sky’s a worn, scratched kind of red, spliced with orange streaks; the desert’s laced with purple. The soil beneath the floodline is, as Pacorie pointed out yesterday, black—a painted-on, superficial kind of black, as though some giant inkpot had been knocked over and stained its surface. The Nile water looks synthetic too: grained and oily, like film. It runs past the boat’s prow at an obtuse angle; again there’s that slight leeward slippage. Again Pacorie observes Serge studying the flow and shunt. As they drift past a village (Falkiner’s forbidden any stops, citing reports of plague) from whose tower a muezzin’s chant spills, the Frenchman says to him, reprising yesterday’s conversation as though no time had passed between it and the present moment:
“It’s counter-intuitif in more ways than one.”
“What?”
“ ‘Upper,’ ‘Lower.’ ‘Upper’ should be newer, but it’s older. Its formations were made sooner, when the continent was first construit.”
“Civilisation and culture too,” Alby joins in. “This is where it all began.”
“I thought it all began in Alexandria,” says Serge.
“Alexandria is where it ended,” Alby corrects him. “The Christianity and reason that took root there were a re-modelling of dead pharaonic fable. Beneath the cross, the ankh; behind monotheism, a plethora of older deities …”
The boom of the foresail sweeps slowly through the air above them, guided by the languid crewman’s forearm. Pulleys whirr, teeth click. Serge is so used to the boat’s rhythms by now that they colour everything around him: he has the impression of being not in nature but in some giant mechanism, like a clock, sextant or theodolite. The stalks and herons that strut and peck their way through marshes look mechanical; the marshes themselves, the fields, settlements and stretches of desert beyond them look mechanical as well, alternating and repeating like a flat panorama that’s wound round and round by a dull, clockwork motor. Passages of desert suggest epochs—present, Napoleonic, ancient—which loom into focus like so many photographic slides, one following the other with an automated regularity; sometimes several epochs appear simultaneously, as though two or three slides had been overlaid. Even the movements of humans take on a mechanical aspect: chibouk-stuffing, tiller-plying, boom-guiding, forehead-rubbing, test-tube-lowering and hoisting, spying. Events follow the same sequence as they did yesterday: Alby and Pacorie and Serge conduct their three-way stand-off; tea and biscuits are served; Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth—constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise. This time she describes to him the festivals performed at Abydos:
“People descended with lanterns and statuettes, awaiting his funerary barge. When it arrived they’d shout: ‘Osiris has been found!’ A priest wearing a jackal mask would lead the cortege to the cemetery, carrying a chest, and people—”
“A chest?” Serge asks.
“A wooden chest containing silt and seeds: his body, which Isis, through her various travails, had recombined. The statuettes—of corn, earth and
vegetable paste—were buried in the ground, and the whole ceremony culminated three days later with the building of a pillar in the temple court—”
Serge, listening to her, his thoughts mechanically tinted, pictures the priest’s chest as a wireless set, filled with black metal filings. The image forms so clearly in his mind that he interrupts her to announce:
“Isis was a coherer.”
“What’s that?” she asks.
“The old sets operated through coherence,” he explains. “The signal made the particles all jump together and conduct the current, in bursts either short or long. That’s how dots and dashes were—”
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
“Radio,” he tells her. “It’s a gathering-together too.”
Falkiner, eavesdropping, grunts in amusement, then calls Laura over to assist him further with his plotting. In the evening, after the insects have descended and the nets have gone up, they eat pigeon and date again. Falkiner gets drunk again. This time he declaims, in Serge’s honour, from “The Book of the Pylons”:
“Homage to thee, saith Horus, O thou first pylon of the Still-Heart. I have made my way. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee …”
“I recognise this bit,” Serge comments.
“Lady of tremblings,” Falkiner intones, “with lofty walls, the sovereign lady, mistress of destruction, who—wait—who sets—setteth—setteth in order the words which drive back the whirlwind and the storm … Saith the pylon: Pass on, thou art pure …”
“Pylons?” Serge asks Laura. “Is he making this bit up?”
“No,” she resumes her role as annotator. “Pylons were gateways—to both temples and the underworld.”
“Homage to thee, saith Horus,” Falkiner continues, “O thou second pylon of the Still-Heart. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee: Lady of heaven, mistress of the world, who terrifieth the earth from the place of thy body …”
“The deceased, who was himself awaiting recombination, had to pass them all,” Laura explains, “naming the guardian of each.”
And name them Falkiner does. By the sixteenth pylon it’s Terrible One, Lady of the Rainstorm, who planteth ruin in the souls of men, Devourer of dead bodies; by the twentieth it’s Goddess with face turned backwards, Unknown One, Overthrower of him that draweth nigh to her flame … The twenty-first speaks of her secret plots and counsels. Then comes a long list of the names of all the pylons’ secondary guards:
“Tchen of At is the name of the one at the door; Hetepmes is the name of the second; Mes-sep is the name of the third; Utch-re is the name of the fourth …”
The crew, again, look on indifferently. Eventually the recitation fades out, but Serge hears its loops and repetitions in the chafing of the anchor-chain against the Ani’s side, the clicks and beeps of insects, long into the night.
By the third day, the landscape has grown more hilly and less fertile; now the desert extends all the way to the Nile’s banks. Its formlessness seems to have overrun not only the feeble effort to contain it within field-boundaries but also any attempt to box it temporally: today, it’s no longer epochs that stare back at Serge from it, but time’s basic units themselves, its material particles, freed of their hourglass-walls and multiplied to infinity. He still has the impression of being held in a machine, but now it’s one whose operator has abandoned it—or, perhaps, died inside it, at its very core—leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore. Actions are reduced to their own remnants: Pacorie’s arm flops and reels over the side like a decrepit lever or gear-handle; he, Alby and Serge spy on one another so half-heartedly it’s almost comic, their circular choreography of jottings, sideways glances and averted gazes no more than a set of empty and incomplete gestures. After tea Laura, purely out of habit, lectures him, half-heartedly as well, on the more secret ceremonies to Osiris:
“They were held in underground spots,” she says slowly, hand resting languidly across her forehead. “We don’t know what was said because the contents were never divulged. They could have been tied in with Thoth …”
“Why do you say the word in German?” Pacorie asks in a similarly disinterested tone.
“What word?”
“Tod. Mort. The death.”
“No, Thoth,” Laura explains. “The god of secret writing, whose cult centre was Hermopolis.”
“Little round Thoth again,” Serge murmurs.
“He carried cryptographic hymns and spells.” Laura, if she heard his words, ignores them. “Moses, with his stammer and his tablets of the law, grew out of him. He had his own book: with it, it was said, you could enchant the sky and understand the language of the birds, and other animals as well—even the little ones, right down to microbes. But it was lost …”
Nobody takes her up on this, and so the conversation ends. When the insects come, Serge watches one caught in the netting and, turning again to Laura, asks:
“What is it with scarabs?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why are there models of them everywhere, all patterned and inscribed and so on?”
“On the underside, for printing,” she says, even more slowly: her apparatus, too, seems to be voiding itself. “On the upper side, to represent Khepera, god of both the rising sun and matter—matter that’s on the point of passing from inertness into life. His emblem is a beetle.”
“Hail, Khepera, in thy boat,” Falkiner slurs, already drunk, “the three-fold company of gods is thy body …”
“Khepera was part of the solar trinity Khepri-Ra-Atum,” Laura barely manages to add. “He was a writer too. And a judge. These attributes were important in Egyptian cosmogony; that’s why scarabs are common …”
“Secret writing,” Falkiner announces. “Isis and Horus, the Department of … Department of … that shineth … doest homage … I am … I am all that is, was and will be and no mortal has ever lifted my veil … and so saith Isis …”
He continues, like a distant and plague-ridden muezzin, to slur out half-remembered snatches of his scripture. When he runs out of phrases to recite, he repeats the single word “Isis,” pronouncing it over and over again, more and more slowly each time, before his voice, too, breaks down into grains and runs away.
ii
They arrive at Sedment the next morning. It’s an upland of desert, exposed and windy. Qufti, drawn from nearby villages, form a chain from the main site towards a light railway, just like they did at Abu Zabal—only here they don’t seem to be carrying stuff in, but taking it away. There are holes everywhere, funnel-shaped pits riddling the ground: some are cordoned off with rope and neatly cleaned-out; others gape in disarray like ruined mine-shafts or natural craters. At the base of some Serge can see hatches, most of which are splintered, giving him a glimpse of lower holes beneath the holes, leading to more splintered hatches which, in turn, lead to lower shafts.
“Most of these top ones are mastabas,” Laura says as they walk past one pit after another.
“Masturwhat?” asks Serge.
“Mastabas: low-lying tombs of the early dynastic period. They had rectangular mud-brick superstructures and hollow substructures of four or five chambers. Below these, there are later tombs.”
“Below them?”
“Yes: later dynasties buried their dead lower. Then still-later ones built beside, around, through and all over these earlier-later ones, and so on almost endlessly. This place is a giant warren.”
“Looks more like a giant dump,” Serge says, pointing to the mounds of debris all around them. Shards of broken pottery protrude from these, alongside scraps of paper that he can’t, in passing, make out as either old papyri or contemporary news-pages, plus short lengths of what looks like copper. Beetles scurry up and down the surface of these mounds like mountaineers negotiating faces and approaches. He and Laura come to the spot where Falkiner seems to have established his headquarters: a gully or
ravine that cuts a gash into the landscape, in which tent-poles support a canvas canopy that extends a more conventionally front-door-like tomb-entrance into a kind of covered porch.
“We’ve got to get on top of pilfering,” are Falkiner’s first words to her. “It’s become endemic: tools, food, everything. The Qufti say it’s Sebbakhîn and Arabs, but their word’s not to be trusted. We must let them know that the cost of anything in their charge that goes missing will be docked from their own salaries.”
C Page 35
