The Egyptologist (12 page)

"Now listen, Pushy," Kendall chimes in, interrupting almost at once
the careful presentation I had outlined. "I hear old Egypt's tapped out.
Nothing left under the sands. All the other big fellows nabbed the good
stuff already. What do you have to say to that?"

I ask them to open their prospecti to the page labelled "Odds of
Success." "I think it extremely unlikely. We know the names of several
hundred ancient kings, and have found the tombs of only several
dozen. There are expeditions uncovering extraordinary treasure right
now, even as we speak, though the digging season is mostly ended for
Egyptian summer. In the case of Atum-hadu, three fragments of his
writings have been found in approximately the same area, yet no relics
of his burial have ever appeared on any antiquities market. Which im•
plies that his tomb is intact, luxuriously equipped, and in the Deir el
Bahari region shown on this map." I helped them open their prospecti
to the map, which matched the larger version I had on an easel teeter•
ing in front of a large oil painting of Margaret holding a rabbit or a
rabbit-fur muff.

The men peered at the map, which gave me, in the claws of my re•
current personal curse, the opportunity to visit CCF's Pharaonic water
closet, where I strained under an untimely attack of explorer's gut,
which has tormented me ever since the War, dysentery a nasty little
camp follower in Egypt.

Upon my return, CCF was still squinting at the map, indecipherable
lines and legends to him, but the others had broken into two distinct
groups: Mitchell and Lathorp, giggling to each other over a copy (un•
surprisingly open to Quatrain 42, 'Atum-hadu Favours Four Acrobatic
Sisters") of
Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt
(Collins Amorous Litera•
ture, 1920; new edition through Harvard University Press expected,
1923); O'Toole and Kovacs sitting aside, saying nothing at all.

"Jesus on fire, why won't Harvard pay your way on this, eh,
Pushy?" CCF himself enquired, and I knew he was not truly troubled
by the question; he merely did not wish to appear too easily convinced
in the eyes of his partners. "Caught screwing a Dean's wife, were you?"

I guided them to the individualised sketches I had included in their

booklets on the "Personal Collections" page. "Now, gentlemen, do you
want Harvard to own what I find? Do you want this to be the Harvard
Collection of the Tomb of Atum-hadu? When the Lathorp Collection,
the O'Toole Collection, the Kovacs Collection could fill your own
homes with the gold of an Egyptian king and, after you are gone, carry
on your name forever in the private wing of the museum of your
choice? Know this: every museum in the country will be slavering to
house your collection
under your name
in their museum
forever,
as I took
the liberty of imagining in these sketches. And here we reach the key
issue, gentlemen: the longevity of your names. This is something our
friend Atum-hadu understood. If they speak of your name after you are
dead, then you are
not
dead. Think hard about this. Your money can
buy you precisely what Atum-hadu's bought him, what every king of
Egypt knew was the most valuable commodity he could possess:
immor• tality.
Now when the day comes, what are you going to leave behind? A
department store? A construction company? A trust fund? A series of
flimsy indictments filed by an envious attorney general? Or are you
going to make your
name
live on
forever,
mankind's ultimate prize?"

"Now stop for just a moment, Perfesser." Perhaps I have gone too
far; everyone leans in to hear Heinz Kovacs's whisper. "If I may just
say. I did a little poking around, see, a little arkie-ology of my own.

Like to know what's what before I write whopping big cheques to En•
glish fruitcake explorers and pornographers." (I will explain that
misconception presently.) "Now my boy goes to Harvard, and his per•
fesser tells me your pharaoh didn't even exist. So how's that then?"

I will admit that I suffered just then a pang of envy, nothing more,
just a single throb, because as I stood amidst the Boston
nouveaux riches
and answered their inexperienced questions, I thought of Howard
Carter, leisurely checking his bank balance in Cairo, then simply wiring
his placid, noble sponsor back in England, demanding some handsome
sum and waiting for his Cairo account to swell accordingly. I thought

of Oskar Denninger, nicely outfitted by the plucky Weimar Republic,
and of Giancarlo Buoncane pouring into the sands of the Sudan the
quarterly profits of Cassini
Distillatori, boozily willing
to
prime
the

pump as long as necessary until steaming gold geysered back out of
that barren Sudanese earth. And I thought of my own "colleagues" at
Harvard, taking time out from their busy schedules of miseducating
undergraduates and confounding my work and meddling in my finan•
cial backing to go spend Harvard's immortal endowment by fouling up
the tombs of teensy priestlets.

"Like anyone with vision, ambition, a sense of risk-taking, Mr. Ko¬
vacs, you understand what it means to be surrounded by small-minded
enemies who hate you not because you hate them, or have wronged
them, but because you ignore them, since they are too puny to be of in•
terest to you. As the Internal Revenue Service or the Attorney General
must seem to you, so do Professors ter Breuggen and Fleuriman seem
to me, for it is they, I assume, who are the criminal befuddlers of your
son. Gentlemen, I read Oriental languages and Egyptology at Oxford
University. I pulled the writings of this king—this 'imaginary' king as
Claes ter Breuggen would have it—with my own hands from out of the
Egyptian earth. I believe only in what is real, as you gentlemen do.

Now if I were to lay out before you the threads of scholarship, pains•
takingly gathered over decades and spun to their most tensile resiliency
in my own work, if you were to pore over this abundant knowledge as I
have, you would, in your simple common sense, laugh at the hairsplit•
ting chatter rising from the sterile offices across the river, and you
would say, as I read in the
Boston Mercury
recently that you said of the
Attorney General, 'Why don't that boring little man stick with his own
beeswax and leave Heinzie Kovacs to Heinzie Kovacs!' and bravo, I
thought, as I read that."

"Bravo, indeed," chimed CCF. O'Toole filed his nails. "You see what
I'm thinking here, JP? " CCF addressed O'Toole. "Answers everyone's
needs, seems to me. Pushy, tell 'em about what the tomb probably looks
like."

When asking rich men for their money, be a little standoffish. They
want to know that they will get their money back with interest, but
they also want to see that you understand there is no guarantee they
will. Even as you guarantee they will. They want you to be smarter

than they are, but not in everything, and to acknowledge their superi•
ority in matters of finance and "common sense." They would like to dis•
play one or two insights into your expertise that have not occurred to
you before. Any more than one or two, and they will think you a fool;
any fewer, arrogant. They do not want you to ask for their money; they
want you to present them with an opportunity and accept less of their
investment than they are willing to make. Be dubious of their money,
stress the risks even as you underplay the rewards. These, I am afraid,
are the lessons any Egyptologist must master. Example:

"Gentlemen. The tomb of Atum-hadu is probably a simple opening
into the desert cliff face itself. Attending your walk into this covered ar•
cade are illustrations of the events of Atum-hadu's reign, and hiero•
glyphs describing his glories and heartbreaks, invocations to the gods.
Here, as you walk, the paintings tell a story, as if you were at the mov•
ing pictures: on your left, let us speculate, he leads his troops against
the Hyksos invaders, or the secessionist would-be kings of the eastern
delta, or black armies from the African south. On your right, you

watch as he battles conspirators in his own court, impatient nobles who
vie for his throne, while he serenely draws close to himself his trusted
advisers (as you gentlemen are mine), and his queen, Her Beauty As•
tonishes the Sun. This much you and I see as we walk down the entry
hall. Now through a small aperture we must crawl and we notice a
smell unlike anything you have ever smelled before. I will not say it is
immediately sweet or pleasant, but that is because it is unfamiliar—no,
more than
unfamiliar
(which promises familiarity just ahead): it is per•
manently unique. You have never smelled this and never will again: it is
the first whiff of air that has wafted undisturbed for 3500 years. I do
not know if it will make you smile (as it does me) or will make you
retch or will arouse you. Our eyes can scarcely open from the sting and
the heat and . . . the glare. Yes, the glare, gentlemen: the uncertain light
from our electric torches reflects back to us, magnified into blinding
rays from gold and glass and ivory and beads and lapis lazuli and gold
and gold and gold. Now shall we enter, you and I?"

"I'm sold," says Finneran.

"As well you should be, sir. We know much of our host, Atum-hadu.
We know from his writings the external pressures that shaped him, the
persona he created to carry him through his career. We know of his
overpowering appetites, which he could satisfy only for brief periods
and with great difficulty. We know of the family that failed him, the
queens and concubines who sustained him, the trusted Master of
Largesse who was his greatest adviser, and there, before us, we see all
of this. On the wall near the golden sarcophagus of our king we see the
most intricate, delicate, erotic drawings of Atum-hadu's amorous ad•
ventures, and figurines which, after the tomb was sealed, came to life to
warm the king on his voyage to the underworld. And there, on a raised
and ornate table, between gigantic statues of the gods Atum and Anu¬
bis, there it is: a complete copy of the
Admonitions of Atum-hadu,
the
king's writings, undeniably onymous at last, and on the walls, an even
fuller description of the king's life, of which it must be admitted —
though the confession means we are now dragged kicking out of that
entry arcade, past the blur of hieroglyphs, and returned here, to CCF's
drawing room—that we know very little for sure, and to feed my fam•
ished critics their paltry due: some have said Atum-hadu and his tomb
are not only unknown but unknowable, as the king did not technically,
literally, exist. Not true, of course, but daunting for the nervous in•
vestor or nervous explorer. Which is why neither of those types were
invited here today."

And there followed a page-by-page examination of the prospectus
booklets: "Odds of Success." "Who Was Atum-hadu?" "The Tomb
Paradox, General." "The Tomb Paradox, Atum-hadu's Case." "The
Role of Erotic Poetry in Atum-hadu's Court." "Evidence for Tomb
Placement and Contents." "Estimated Market Value of Selected
Prospective Items." "Maps of Egypt and Deir el Bahari." "Personal
Collections." Not all of the Partners were awake for every section of
our talk (the dozing J. P. O'Toole's golden pencil, finding itself left to
its own devices on its notebook, drew a series of minimalist waterfalls),
but at least one of them was attentive for any given topic.

"Let's speak privately later, you and I and Heinzie, CC," brogues