Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (34 page)

TRIP NOTES

There’s no easy way of getting there. The first hurdle is Cairo airport, and seasoned travelers have a name for each airline that goes that way: B.O.A.C.—Better on a Camel. P.I.A. (the Pakistani line)— Please Inform Allah. United Arab Air—Use Another Airline. It was my dubious luck to be booked on Ethiopian Airlines, for which even these jokers have as yet no pseudonym. I draw a veil. As for Cairo airport ... it’s more like a cavernous warehouse teeming with people than any airport I’ve ever seen. Fortunately I had been warned that progression through this mob scene is near impossible without the aid of a “courier,” and now to my rescue comes Mustapha of Life Travel, located in the Nile Hilton Hotel. Life Travel is indeed the key to getting in and out of Cairo; later, Mustapha guides me and Erich Lessing, just arrived from Vienna burdened down with a ton of photographic equipment, through the maze of confusing signs to the Luxor plane.

James Manning meets us at the Old Winter Palace Hotel where I am staying, a substantial neo-Victorian maroon-colored pile on Luxor’s main street overlooking the East Bank of the Nile. Compared to Erich’s hotel, the Savoy, which is early-American-motel in concept, it does have a certain old world charm. Prodded forward by James (for at that point I would willingly have settled for the long sleep of the Pharaohs), we embark on a whirlwind tour of temples and tombs. We clamber into a calash, the pretty little horse-drawn open carriage that is the main means of transportation here, and proceed to Luxor temple. Its huge sandstone columns are reminiscent of the more grandiose movie palaces of the thirties—or is it the other way round? Forward to the Temple of Karnak, a majestic stone forest of soaring pillars and massive columns affording innumerable mysterious vistas and perspectives. Some say it got its name from Napoleonic soldiers who thought it looked like the huge prehistoric stones of Carnac in Brittany—one can visualize a homesick French soldier remarking to his
copain, “Tiens, mon vieux! On dirait qu’on est rentré à Carnac
.”

To achieve the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank, one has a choice of ferries: the tourist ferry which costs twenty-five piasters (about thirty cents), or the regular ferry used by the locals—identical except for its price, one piaster, and its passengers. These are mostly Arab boys and men—one sees few women anywhere in Luxor—with an amazing assortment of bicycles, packages, crated chickens, containers of all sorts. On the other shore is a conclave of donkeys, camels, ponies, and a few motor taxis into one of which we pile.

The road to the tombs leads past spectacular crags, in crevices of which nestle mud-brick villages, desert-colored like their surroundings. How old are the villages? I ask. Literally as old as the hills; they date from pre-Pharaonic times, built and rebuilt with new mud brick as the old disintegrates.

Once in a while we see a house with brilliantly colored frescoes painted round the windows—one fresco, with intricate border design, covers the entire front of the house, giving it the two-dimensional look of a cutout doll’s house. The frescoes, clearly derivative of the tomb paintings, indicate the householder has made a pilgrimage to Mecca and are a pictorial record of his journey; they depict men, animals, implements with the occasional up-to-date addition of a gaudy airplane or helicopter.

Arrived at the necropolis, we scramble in and out of various tombs, down dizzyingly steep stone steps, through long, low tunnels and passageways (“Mind your head!”), some dimly lit with electric light, others seen only by flashlight. The better-preserved ones, with their elaborate representations of grapevines, dancing girls, musicians, amusing monkeys, could have made rather splendid nightclubs, I reflect. Yet in view of their purpose, were they perhaps a sort of eternal nightclub for their mummified occupants?

We stand at the threshold of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the selfsame spot where in 1922 Howard Carter, holding a flickering candle in a tiny opening bored into the chamber, was struck dumb by what he saw; to Lord Carnarvon’s impatient inquiry “Can you see anything?” Carter replied incoherently, “Yes, wonderful things.” The wonderful things, of course, have long since been removed; only a sarcophagus, a recumbent gold statue of Tutankhamun, and a few murals remain. The wonder, to me, is that these poky little chambers could have contained so much treasure.

Tomb follows tomb. Up and down, in and out we stumble; I soon lose track of the dynasties—anyway the carvings, cartouches, bas-reliefs begin to look alike. Disloyally, I inwardly echo the philistine sentiments of our former governor Ronald Reagan, who said, much to the displeasure of California conservationists bent on preserving the redwood forests, “Once you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen ’em all.” I can’t wait until tomorrow, when we shall see the latter-day Carters/Carnarvons/Petries uncovering before my eyes the stunning treasures of the Temple of the Goddess Mut.

We arrive just as the sun comes clattering up over the horizon —so sudden and spectacular is its appearance that one almost expects to hear an accompanying roar. The work crew are already at it: atop a hill the Reis, or supervisor, stands with his big stick while scores of boys and men (aged, I am told, from eight to eighty) are deployed throughout the Precinct, some whacking away with hoe-like tools, others scooping up the loose earth into baskets to be dumped out on the other side of the Reis’s promontory.

My overall first impression of the Precinct of Mut is one of a desolate expanse of sand and rubble, with here and there a ruined stone gateway on which can still be seen the carved hieroglyphs, a few badly damaged sphinxes, a statue or two. To the untrained eye it all looks mostly disheartening. Is this what I have come six thousand miles to see? Yet from the occasional cries of discovery, emitted by the excavators in authentic tones of excitement, I realize I am witnessing the very process that has stirred men’s souls from earliest times: the search for civilization’s origins.

The precinct is divided up into large squares marked off by string barriers to enable the diggers to pinpoint the exact position of each found object. In one square James Manning is searching out a mud-brick wall, remnant of a village built atop the temple foundations in later times. Aided by one of the skilled “Kufti” workers (of whom I was to learn more later), he strokes gently away with a soft-bristled hand brush at the dirt covering the contours of the mud bricks. “It’s as delicate as brain surgery,” he says. The operation reminds me of a child’s magic artist pad, blank paper which when lightly rubbed with a pencil reveals a picture. Sure enough, in a few hours a bit of wall does emerge, visibly separated from the surrounding earth. Mud-brick excavation was rarely done in Egypt until recently, James tells me; excavators were after inscriptions, bas-reliefs, friezes. Much of archaeological value was lost due to bulldozing through to find these treasures. As he works, James tosses an occasional shard into baskets kept handy for the purpose.

In another square Richard Fazzini, co-director of the expedition, confers excitedly with Abd El-Fattah el-Sabbahy, the young Egyptian assigned by his government’s Department of Antiquities to the project. They call me over: “Look! One of the Kuftis has just found this when he was clearing up! It was lying upside down, looked like just another rock.” It is a fragment of granite statue with hieroglyphs, recognized by Richard as similar to one in the Cairo Museum.

Fazzini’s wife, Bobby Giella, photographer for the expedition, snaps away at the finders and their finds whilst Lisa Kuchman, a graduate student in Egyptology at Toronto University and a pottery expert, marks on each basket the date and exact spot where the shards were found.

William Peck, art historian of the Detroit Museum and an expert on ancient Egyptian drawings, meticulously maps the outlines of walls and passageways as they are uncovered by the diggers. He sports a T-shirt made for him by a friend, which bears the legend “W. F. Petrie School of Egyptology” with a heraldic design of spades around the slogan “Dig We Must!”

Our excavators are not the first to be caught up by the puzzling attraction of the Goddess Mut. They were preceded by two doughty Victorian ladies, Miss Benson, daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and her friend Miss Gourlay, who had thought the area “a place to seize upon the imagination” and who dug about, apparently with no very clear idea of what they were doing, during the winters of 1895–97.

I sit on a recently unearthed granite leg, more comfortable than the surrounding rocks, reading up on these ladies in their book
The Temple of Mut at Asher
, published in 1899, whilst observing the dig in progress. Leafing through the Benson-Gourlay photographs that illustrate their book, I see that nothing much seems to have changed at the site, although there is a lovely photo of Miss Benson, tricked out and hatted as though for a croquet party in the Archbishop’s garden, supervising the work from the present Reis’s hill.

“We were desirous of clearing a picturesque site,” writes Miss Benson. “We were frankly warned that we should make no discoveries.... Thus we began without any idea of publishing an account of our work.... We began our second season in the same mind, but unexpected discoveries demanded publication.” (Their publication was by no means universally acclaimed by fellow-Egyptologists; J. Vandier, a French savant, sourly calls it “
décevant.”)

Besides describing their finds, the ladies seem to have swiped quite a few of them. “The authorities were very kind in letting us retain many of those objects which were not of importance for exhibition in the museum,” observes Miss Benson blandly. In a letter to her mother she says, “We found a rose-granite Osiride sitting statue of Rameses II yesterday,” adding in a footnote: “This statue was given to my sister, and is now at Tremans.” I am told that some of the Benson loot was recently auctioned at Christie’s by a collateral descendant, fetching in excess of a hundred thousand dollars. Today they would not get away with it, for the law now requires that an Egyptian representative of the Department of Antiquities be attached to oversee each foreign concession as watchdog of the treasures.

By nine o’clock the sun is already high, and a welcome breakfast break is announced. We all pile into an ancient Land-Rover, which lurches across a short stretch of rocky desert to the Canada House, built to accommodate the expedition. It is a ramshackle warren of small bedrooms, workrooms, and dining room. Near the entrance to an open-air storage area a sleepy cobra takes his siesta. “He’s a bit of a bother,” say Bobby Giella, “always lying about on the shards. The snake charmer was supposed to come yesterday, but was delayed.” (Shades of trying to get the plumber to call at our house in California!)

Here is my first opportunity to take stock of the diggers, to discover something about their own origins, to probe their motives: what strange compulsion drives this group of young Americans to forsake hearth and home for the dubious pleasure of scrabbling in the hot Egyptian dust from sunup to sundown? And their Egyptian counterpart, Fattah, graduate of the school of Egyptology in Cairo, to choose this arduous, low-paid profession over easier, more remunerative work?

A French scholar of the last century, appalled by the systematic plunder of temples and tombs by Egyptologists of the day, described Egyptology as “a passion so violent that it is inferior to love or ambition only in the pettiness of its aims.” As I listen to our excavators explain what is happening at the Temple of Mut, I recognize the violent passion—but the aims have changed radically in the past several decades.

These Egyptologists are driven souls, all right, and when you get to know them they will admit to this. Thus Fattah: “Egyptology is a kind of disease, it’s in the blood of a person. Also, I warn you, it’s highly contagious!” And Fazzini: “Egyptologists may be nutty, but they are harmless, except possibly to other Egyptologists.”

How did they first get started? All seem to have been bitten by this bug at a very young age, five to seven is average. I think of my seven-year-old grandson, the lender of
An Alphabet of Ancient Egypt
, and the strange otherworldly glow in his eyes when he heard that his granny was going to see a dig; is he one of the predestined? If so, he will be in prime time to participate in the Mut excavation, estimated to last for at least twenty-five years.

Richard Fazzini, an ebullient thirty-five-year-old New Yorker who has been digging on and off for some fifteen years between stints as curator of Egyptian art for the Brooklyn Museum, says he does it because it’s fun: “There’s something new every day, and the day’s not long enough to satisfy your interests. You may get engrossed in pottery and neglect your walls. Or you may come across a fragment of a statue that fits another found the year before. It’s a constant challenge. Archaeologists are essentially problem-solvers. Go to any dig house and look at the bookshelf— you’ll find nothing but mystery stories and science fiction. Most archaeologists are avid mystery readers, and they’re also drawn to sci-fi which portrays a vision of different worlds at different times.”

I asked Fattah what ultimate dream makes him toil away day after day brushing mud brick. “To see again the whole Precinct of Mut after reconstruction and restoration, with all the temples illuminated! I’ll be eighty years old.”

The Mut mission is one of a dozen or so international missions in the Luxor-Thebes area. During my stay in Luxor, I met Poles, Austrians, French, English, all no doubt dreaming some variant of Fattah’s dream in their respective languages.

Hard by the Canada House, a short walk up the hill, is the concession of Karnak North, sponsored by the Institut Français d’Archéologie. I wander up there, but not alone; one must be accompanied by an Arab with a stout stick to ward off the savage guard dogs, one of which, I am told, chewed up the leg of an unwary tourist only last year. The concession is housed in a fairy-tale stone hut which looks ancient, but was actually built in the 1930s by the Institut. There I find a charming middle-aged couple, Jean and Hélène Jacquet, who have been digging at this site for eight seasons, collecting, surveying, working on publications.