The Egyptologist (17 page)

The story of Fragment C's discovery is one of great personal signifi•
cance.

Early in 1915, Marlowe and I had requested and received simulta•
neous six-day passes to make a trip far to the south. Our true aim was
to explore the relic-rich Theban west bank. Officially, though, we justi•
fied such a long leave with intended intelligence negotiations with some
nomadic tribesmen. We never did manage to find them, so instead it
was paradise: days of archaeology, pretending there was no War.

The morning of our third day, I cut the motorcycle's engine and
Marlowe vaulted out of the sidecar to unload some equipment, and I
recall him complaining of the demands one of his many women was
making on him. At the time, if I can keep them clear, he was balancing
a French singer in Cairo and a Russian countess in Alexandria, and
more of the local copper-skinned beauties than can be counted, and one
of these alluring women of brushed gold had been demanding that
Marlowe read the Koran and convert to Mohammedanism and become
her husband, a notion that made him laugh so hard he bit his tongue
and then cursed and held a handkerchief to his bleeding mouth. I was,

I believe, likely telling him of my plans to refurbish Trilipush Hall after
the War.

Soon we were at work, investigating Deir el Bahari, directly (if my
map reading was correct) on the opposite side of the thick wall of cliffs
from the fabled Valley of the Kings, just a few hills and dales further
into the desert from Hat-shep-sut's temple, and quite completely iso•
lated from view from both of those sites. We were scarcely digging,
merely scanning the ground and cliff face for glimmers of man-made
interference. Were we looking for Atum-hadu? Well, yes, we were in
that area (after previous, fruitless efforts wandering in and out of easily
breached caves and holes) in the hopes of finding something to corrob•
orate Harriman and Vassal, but we also would have
denied
we were
looking for Atum-hadu; we were still not convinced he ever was. We
only agreed that, if he had been, it was reasonable that his tomb would
be hidden and near his capital (?) at Thebes (?). As the Valley of the
Kings, the state-run necropolis, was inaugurated much later with

Thothmes I, and as Harriman and Vassal had made their discoveries
not far from each other, quite near where we stood, Deir el Bahari
seemed the most promising place.

After some hours of slow walking in careful patterns, I spotted what
seemed at first to be a smooth patch of sand to the far left of the path,
as if all the finest grains had huddled together amidst their coarser
brethren. This patch quickly revealed itself to be a smooth stone, and

as Marlowe and I brushed at it, its size grew, as if it were the top of an
emerging head and the very earth our loving, labouring wife. We
brushed until we had a perfect stone circle, approximately two feet in
diameter. The heat was extreme, and Marlowe took a turn in the shade,
sipping at the water, shielding his eyes to keep a keener lookout, for it
is human nature that at a moment such as this, one grows quiet and
suspicious. I began gently probing the area around the stone with the
deliberation that is our art's watchword, dull of course to anyone who
does not understand the potentially catastrophic costs of hurry. It is
precisely this hypnotising rhythm that makes a discovery such a release
of emotion, comparable to only one or two other experiences in a man's
life.

Some time later, after several changes, it was again my turn to dig,
and I brought to the surface a cylindrical jar, the blank top of which I
had noticed some hours earlier. I placed the jar on the earth between
us, and we simply stared at it before Marlowe dared to lift the lid.

Which is when we heard horses' hooves and, a moment later, a shot
ringing out. Marlowe dropped the lid, smashing it beyond repair, and
reached for his Webley. I reached inside the jar and withdrew a bulky
papyrus, cursing that no measure of protection could yet be taken for
it, and I placed it as gently as I could (more gunfire now) under my
shirt, between my belly and my belt. "Get that out of here, my dear
friend. It matters more than our skins," Marlowe said with elegant
calm, and before I could stop him, he was moving up the path,
away
from the motorcycle, firing haphazardly, making himself occasionally
visible, drawing, in short, the four horsemen (bandits, German agents,
we did not know) towards the west while my exit to the east was freed.

"Go! I'll find my way out of this, old fellow. You can count on it." I ran
towards the motorcycle. I carried
Atum-hadu Admonitions Fragment C
snugly at my waist.

I circled the 'cycle around to the northwest as I saw Marlowe break
from the rocks. I sped towards him, and as bullets flew overhead, he
leapt into the sidecar, head first. I turned us quickly, sand flew, and off
we went, both of us laughing until we wept and Marlowe singing an
old Balliol song.

We stopped at Luxor. The craving to hurry and open our find was
powerful but not as powerful as our discipline. We wrapped the pa•
pyrus in damp cloth and talked constantly through an excruciating and
sleepless night. When we agreed it was safe, we examined the scroll's
first panel and knew at once, within a single line, what we had: three
fragments of Atum-hadu's Admonitions had now been found in Deir

el Bahari. A day later we returned to base early, only to learn that I had
orders to prepare to leave Egypt (for Gallipoli, though I did not know
it yet). And so, of necessity, we agreed to leave our treasure in Mar•
lowe's care, to tell no one, and to wait. I think, in both our hearts, we
thought we were waiting for my death in battle.

I next saw Fragment C more than three years later, in December
1918, after my unexpected and lucky return from Turkey, alone, practi•
cally on foot. I reached our diminished base in Egypt a month after the
Armistice, only to learn that my great friend had vanished before my re•
turn and was likely dead. Heartbroken, I vowed that I would devote my
life to our shared work and discovery. I entered his tent, secured Frag•
ment C, and took it with me when I was demobilised not long after.

That Marlowe died while I survived Gallipoli can hardly be credited
to a wise guardian angel. It cannot be accepted at all, except perhaps as
the bumblings of a dizzy Destiny who chose
me
to fulfil a crucial task, a
task perhaps even Marlowe would not have been qualified to perform.
This is the only condolence I can draw from his tragic end.

And in my mingled sorrow and ambition, I decided to wander
somewhere new, change everything, cut myself off from all the easy

help waiting for me in England. Knowing the reputation of Harvard
University, I went to the United States, hoping to put my painful
Wartime memories behind me in a strange land. To build a new life. To
honour my fallen friend. To continue our joint work where I had only
my own talents to support me.

Saturday, 14 October, 1922

An introduction to the Atum-haduan Admonitions:
The author of
the Admonitions may have been a king, he may have been posing as a
king, he may merely have been imagining a king. Hero, fraud, or
artist? I have found one's own tendencies dictate one's answer to that
question.

Another question: how should one translate poetry written in an•
cient Egyptian, which has not been used for more than 2000 years, and
which we do not entirely know how to pronounce, as in common with
Hebrew and Arabic, its vowels were not written? Did its poetry
rhyme? Did it move in rhythm? Any answer is unverifiable.

Now, observe: Comparative Translations: Quatrain 73, the same se•
quence of hieroglyphs purporting to be written by Atum-hadu (pur•
porting to be the king of Egypt) and translated by three different
Westerners, two of whom are illegitimately purporting to know what
they are doing:

A beauty 'd gaze and touch
Can rain down joy or sorrow
In equal measure.

When my Queen examined me
Her gaze is as potent as her touch,

Exciting here the most delicious frissons
There the most excruciating torments.

Atum-hadu's sweet lover

Stroked the royal member first with her eyes
Then with her claws, until they tear

And make bleed the rigid sceptre of his power, and he sighs.

Observe: Harriman bowdlerised, as the preceding extract should
make quite clear. Typical of the Victorian moralist, he deemed nothing
worth finding that did not bear the lavender scent of uplift. Faced with
something decidedly neither pre-Christian, proto-Christian, or even
anti-Christian, but simply not-even-slightly-related-to-or-interested-in-
Christianity, he was forced to find in Atum-hadu someone other than
Atum-hadu. Witness this passage from his Introduction to his
Athens on
the Nile,
1858:

When, having exerted oneself to understand the people of ancient Egypt and
the bafflement they expressed in the face of nature and the universe before
Christian revelation, Atoom-Hadoo's writings provide a marvellous discovery.
For one finds in the king's poems an all-consuming desire for knowledge, and
it is this, above all, that made him a worthy ruler in his era and makes him
now a worthy subject of study. From this distance, "through a glass, darkly,"
as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, we can see in this ancient, dusky prince a
man struggling in his desire for what in our era we would call Christian en•
lightenment and divine wisdom. If his topics may sometimes shock us (and I
cannot recommend that ladies be exposed to them), let us nevertheless face
them boldly, as they are the essential questions of life itself

Jean-Michel Vassal, the French discoverer of Fragment B, thought
little of Harriman, and though he could not recognise his own faults as
readily as he could Harriman's, I will allow him to express his opinion
of his predecessor in Atum-haduan studies. From the preface of
Le Rol
Amant
(1899, Englished as
The Lover-King
in 1903 by Marie-Claude
Wilson):

As for proving to dubious minds of dubious calibre the existence of
Atoumadou, one must also confess that our own side have done us inestimable
harm in the form of those bloodless dilettantes I will not name who
—
choking at the sight of a nude woman, blanching like a virgin schoolglrl at the very
mention of man's darker urges, the iniquities of a callous deity, the tempta•
tions of power, or the baser motivations of this beast-ape Man
—
have pre-
sented to the world a feeble Atoumadou softened like an old woman's lapdog,
castrated, soaped, and fluffed, red and blue ribbons in his fur, fed fat with al•
mond marchpane and numbed by laudanum and lack of open-air exercise,

and so as a result, it falls to me (and the scholarship of France, the nation
most closely tied by Destiny to the protection and proliferation of the great
Pharaoh's thought and writing) to restore to..
.

(This sentence, incidentally, continues on for more than three pages
in my edition of Vassal. Credit is due to Mrs. Wilson for her stamina.)

His protestations of fearless honesty aside, Vassal, too, stopped well
short of an accurate translation, preferring instead his mild titillations
suitable for murmuring to ladies in the privacy of Parisian boudoirs,
but not so forthright as to have the translator prosecuted by the touchy
French authorities.

As Harriman hoped to find Queen Victoria in golden tunic and
cobra-vulture crown, Vassal was eager to see in Atum-hadu an ancient
Casanova, a practical Machiavelli, a prototype Napoleon. Both men
mistranslated as necessary to achieve their portraits, leaping far beyond
the available evidence to arrive at the conclusions they longed for.

It is vital not to allow one's desires to carry one from observing to
creating. Both translators confused what they found with what they