Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (36 page)

Her first intimation as to her true Egyptian origins had occurred much earlier. “When I was three, I fell downstairs and was pronounced dead. But by the time the doctor came the corpse was quite lively. I kept saying, ‘I want to go home.’ Where is your home? he asked. ‘I don’t know, but I want to go home.’ Then when I was six I saw a picture of this temple in an encyclopedia my father had given me.
‘That’s
my home!’ I told him. ‘But why is it all broken up—where’s the garden?’ He said ‘Don’t be silly, that’s just an old ruined temple, thousands of years old.’ But I found the garden in 1956. They were building workshops on it—I told them, ‘You shouldn’t be putting that in the garden,’ and sure enough I found the little irrigation channels and fossilized remnants of bushes, flowers, fruit trees.”

Um Seti came to Egypt at the age of twenty-eight and has never been back to England. She was married briefly to an Egyptian: “He couldn’t stand my cooking. Also he liked only modern things, I only liked ancient objects. We divorced after two years.” Thereafter she worked for the Department of Antiquities in the capacity of “daily paid skilled workman,” excavating, cataloguing, assembling pottery fragments. “In the Department, I’m known as ‘the Mad One,’ ” she says in her complacent way.

She has done considerable writing about antiquity but claims that most of her work was plagiarized or stolen by dishonest colleagues. This autumn, her
Story of Abydos
is scheduled to be published in the United States: “I’m relying on Tutankhamun for advance publicity in America, although I never did like that family.” He died young, didn’t he? I ask. “Yes, Horemheb saw to that—he gave him a good wallop in the head. Oh, Tutankhamun was thoroughly spoiled! Of course until he was eighteen he had to do what he was told, so he never was a real ruler.” She gossips on about the family, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their children: “Akhenaten was a pacifist, of course, let the country go to pot. But Nefertiti wouldn’t stand for it; she left him and who can blame her?”

Did Um Seti ever see her parents again? I ask. “My mother came out once, but we quarreled—we didn’t see eye to eye about Hitler. I cried for three days when Hitler died. Recently I read
The Last 100 Days
, and I cried all over again. Oh, he may have been a little rough on some people but we could use somebody like him today.”

I am getting rather fed up with Um Seti and her fly-infested hovel, so we take our leave after briefly inspecting her eternal resting place, a brick tomb that she had constructed in a corner of the yard. Erich observes that it’s no wonder she admired Hitler: “It fits right in with the authoritarian, static Egype of the Pharaohs.” Her adopted son, Seti I, seems to have been a thoroughly nasty piece of work, too; like Hitler, “an upstart with no royal lineage behind him,” according to Sir Alan Gardiner, one of his main legacies a charter prescribing “frightful punishments” for his political enemies.

Um Seti’s delusion may be just an extreme example of the most striking characteristic of the Egyptological mind: its total divorcement from contemporary happenings, its equally total involvement with the world of thirty centuries ago. Glimpses of this come through in the writings of the early practitioners. Thus Miss Benson in a letter to her mother: “Lucy so excited on the political situation gives me quite a turn. We try to talk politics a little, but on the whole talk more about what happened 6,000 years ago.” And Sir Alan Gardiner, blissfully oblivious of the world about him: “We started on our summer holiday in 1914 with the happiest hopes.... I was to go ahead of the others to do some work in Berlin.... We met in Copenhagen, and hearing news of the declaration of war crossed over to Sweden.” The good soul adds, “I was myself too ignorant and careless of politics to have even a suspicion of the impending tragedy.”

Time and again I bore witness to this curiously detached frame of mind. During my stay in Luxor, the French elections, fateful for Europe, took place; the outcome of the American coal miners’ strike hung in the balance; Israeli troops crossed into Lebanon. Erich and I, who privately agreed we were the only sane people in Luxor, were longing for news of these events but not a word of any of this was breathed by our new-found Egyptologist friends. “Doesn’t anybody here ever read a newspaper, or listen to the news on the radio?” I asked. Well, no; but the deepest passions are stirred by politics of the Eighteenth Dynasty, furious arguments rage over assessment of the true role of Tutankhamun, or Akhenaten, or the goddess Mut.

Item
: We are in the tomb of Rekhmire, Theban nobleman of the Eighteenth Dynasty, gazing at the magnificent wall paintings of hunting, fishing, banqueting scenes. One wall is devoted to temple workshops showing leatherworkers, carpenters, blacksmiths, brickmakers. Erich Lessing, a Bible expert, tells me that the last are believed to be the Children of Israel in slavery, making bricks without straw as per the account in Exodus. James Manning, eyes blazing, bursts out: “That’s hogwash! Absolute hog-wash!” Lessing, possibly fearing fisticuffs, beats a hasty retreat: “I only said
believed
to be.”

Item:
An Egyptologist who wishes to remain anonymous takes violent issue with the widely held assumption that Akhenaten sought to introduce monotheism into Egypt. “Bullshit!” he shouts angrily. “It was his mother, Queen Tiy, who was the genius behind that movement. Akhenaten was an epileptic idiot, a freak!” Seeing that I am writing this down, he adds hastily “For God’s sake, don’t quote me on that.” Does he half believe, I wonder, that Akhenaten might yet spring from the nether shores into his sturdy funeral barque to bring a defamation-of-character suit in the nearest courthouse?

Item:
What of the goddess Mut? A banal cipher, the unimportant, simple wife of the great god Amon? “Not a bit of it!” exclaims one of the Egyptomaniacs (as I have come to think of them). “Mark my words, although she’s been terribly neglected— there’s hardly a mention, not even a monograph, about her in the scholarly literature—she’ll end up being recognized as one of the most complex, diversified deities in the whole Egyptian pantheon! It will be an unveiling!” Given the urgent immediacy with which these remarks were delivered, he could, I thought, be expounding on the posthumous reputation of an Indira Gandhi, a Golda Meir....

TRIP NOTES

There are daily planes to Aswan but we opt for the stately train, the Cairo all-sleeping-car express which disgorges most of its passengers in Luxor and proceeds to Aswan, a three-hour run. Erich, Fattah, and I are ready for the 7 a.m. departure but the train is not; after an hour’s wait, Fattah consults the stationmaster, who explains the driver overslept! At last we are on board, our compartment like one of the shabbier efforts of the British Railways but actually, Erich tells me, built by the Hungarians in the 1960s. The scenery gets lusher and more tropical as we approach Nubia. We head for the Old Cataract Hotel, its magnificent outdoor-indoor terrace with brightly painted basket chairs unchanged since Agatha Christie described it in
Death on the Nile
. One can even get Pimm’s Cup there. The hotel garden is a spectacular riot of giant hollyhocks, banana plants, and brilliant flower beds; I would gladly have tarried there, but our purpose is to meet Fattah’s colleague Gamal Wahbah, director of the Salvage of Philae Monuments, and to learn something of his work.

Travelers of the last century described Philae, then known as “the Pearl of Egypt,” in rhapsodic terms. Amelia Edwards, who went there in 1873, wrote: “Seen from the level of a small boat, the island, with its palms, its colonnades, its pylons, seems to rise out of the river like a mirage.... As the boat glides nearer between glistening boulders, those sculptured towers rise higher and even higher against the sky. They show no sign of ruin or of age. All looks solid, stately, perfect.”

The feathery palms, the glistening boulders, the sculptured towers have long since been submerged by the waters of the dam—to rise again, however, under the guiding hand of a remarkable twenty-eight-year-old Egyptian scholar, Gamal Wahbah.

We drive to Gamal’s office near Aswan, partake of the regulation hot, sweet black tea, and depart by boat for the island of Agilkia, a granite rock on which we can already see the stunning fruits of Gamal’s labors: vast colonnades and pylons, just as Amelia Edwards saw them, “solid, stately, perfect,” soaring against the glaring blue Egyptian sky. Fattah is amazed; he was here on a visit with Bobby Giella only last year, when there was nothing but a concrete foundation. How is it done?

UNESCO has funded the operation to the tune of some twenty million dollars; an Italian contracting company, Condotti Dotte-mazzi, does some of the rebuilding, but Gamal vehemently stresses time and again that responsibility for the direction of the work is in Egyptian hands: “The foreign expeditions have Egyptians attached to them, but here it’s
all
Egyptian: the chief engineer, the architect, the workers—all the preparations and experience are furnished by Egyptians.”

From Moustapha Naqui, chief engineer, we learn something of the magnitude and method of the operation, which began in 1972 and will be finished in ’79. His first step was to build a cofferdam round Philae, pump out the water, remove the mud from monuments and pavements. The engineers made a complete plan of the temples, giving the exact position and measurements of each stone dismantled—more than forty-two thousand blocks. These were kept in a storage area while the work of preparing a foundation on Agilkia went forward. There are more dizzying statistics—heights, widths, numbers of pottery fragments found—but I don’t pay much attention because I am seeing it all happen before my eyes; even as Naqui is speaking, two workmen are struggling with bits of a stone king, fitting them together to be put in place in the pylon.

We wander through the work in progress and Gamal points out the cornice, with bas-reliefs of Ptolemy giving offerings to Isis, already reconstructed from scattered blocks and erected in its original position. Along the way, Gamal and his co-workers have come upon some important discoveries: “The second pylon had lost the three upper courses, missing since before Napoleon’s day. We found the scattered stones and for the first time in modern history those courses have been replaced, and the pylon is complete.”

In another major discovery, during the dismantling the excavators found more than two hundred re-used blocks of a small Twenty-sixth Dynasty chapel from which they have reconstituted complete scenes, soon to be rebuilt as originally conceived. Thus Agilkia, the Cultured Pearl of Egypt, so to speak, may end up out-shining its predecessor. The major reconstruction will be completed by April, 1978, after which Agilkia will be opened to tourists; nor is this all, for in another two years the inhospitable granite will be covered with imported soil to nourish plants, palm trees, grass, flower gardens, a reincarnation of Philae as the ancients knew it.

Gamal is currently working on a book about the restoration of Philae, and the new light shed by his team on the history of the island, formerly thought to contain only Ptolemaic relics: “We found work by Ramses II, also artifacts from the Twelfth Dynasty, more than a thousand years before the Ptolemys.”

Again, key to success of the operation are the Kuftis, ten of whom live here in tents the year round except for an occasional visit home to their families in Kuft. “They are very, very intelligent,” says Gamal with measured emphasis. “Their eyes have the experience of the antiquities, they have soft hands to clean the objects. They supervise the other workers and make sure the blocks are put in the right position, and inform us if anything goes wrong.” The chief Kufti, Doctor Sha’had, is now introduced. Is Mr. Sha’had a Ph.D., then? I ask Fattah. “No, his family named him Doctor because they hoped he’d be one!”

We now take a short boat ride to Philae to watch the diving operation in which the stones outside the cofferdam are retrieved from the depths of the Nile under the joint direction of Lieutenant Commander David A. Bartlett of the British Navy and his Egyptian counterpart, Lieutenant Commander Tarik Fifaat. Twelve English lads and twelve Egyptians work in pairs from derelicts moored near the submerged island. The commanders seem like perfect specimens of their respective nationalities: Bartlett, a handsome, rugged, blue-eyed man; and Fifaat so slender and mobile, his black eyes fringed with the double-thick lashes that have been one of the most attractive features of Egyptians since the days of tomb paintings.

Bartlett shows me a 1902 photograph of Philae as it then was, part of a large collection from the British Museum which they use as a guide to reconstruction of the temples. “There are about three hundred and fifty stones to be recovered from the Temple of Augustus, two hundred and forty have been brought up so far,” he says. An Egyptian and an English frogman are preparing to dive, struggling into their thick black outfits and compressed-air gear. They splash in, and guide the waiting hook and rope dangled from a crane to their quarry. There is a brief flurry when it turns out they brought up the wrong thing, a stone from a pillar, as yet unmarked—they are supposed to go only for the loose ones. “If a stone is taken from a pillar at random, once raised, there’s no way of knowing its right position in the temple,” Bartlett explains. “Once it’s marked, and the mud cleared off it, we can look at the code years from now and see how it fits in the wall.” Bartlett himself dives down to mark the blocks for the use of the archaeologists.

Bartlett may be one of those to whom, as Fattah said, Egyptology is “highly contagious.” Except for occasional brief calls at Egyptian ports, he had never stayed there until this assignment came along two years ago. He immediately started reading up on Philae and became totally absorbed in the island’s history. “I find it absolutely fascinating, specially to be working in the shadow of the new Philae being constructed.” He goes over there about once a week to see how it’s coming along, and is “amazed at it all.” He hopes to come back for the official opening—“that is if I’m invited. It’ll be a grand ceremony, no doubt, with boatloads of dignitaries from all over Egypt.”