The Egyptologist (29 page)

"Please just wait one second there," said Sonia, asking His
Majesty King Atum-hadu the Engorged to hold the line while she
fetched a piece of paper to take a message. She released my hand and
stepped away from the vibrating table, rummaged in the dark of the
room for a moment or two. She relit one of the candles and laid on
the table a board of some sort, I can hardly describe it, this oddity. It
was a folding piece of wood painted with an ornate alphabet and
numbers. On top of the board she placed a kind of lens with
crosshairs in its centre, large enough to point at one of the painted
letters at a time. The glass was set into an ivory disk on tiny rolling
wheels, with delicate indentations to hold in velvet-lined luxury the
tips of your fingers. Sonia placed my hands on the disk, and in the

dim light of the one black-and-white-striped candle, their four ancient
hands seemed very pale and soft on the peculiar device, as if made of
the same ivory.

"So ask, ask, dear boy. He's waiting for your question." I did not
understand what I was meant to do.

"Oh, I'll get the ball rolling," says Len. "Great King Atoom-hadoo,
who will be of the greatest help to our friend Ralph in his quest for
you?" And the glass and ivory absolutely begins to skitter across the
table under our hands, stopping here and there, very precisely cent•
ring its crosshairs over the letters A H A H R T N W .

"Ah, well," chided Len. "His Majesty seems to be having a bit of fun
at our expense."

"Majesty, we're not here for your amusement. Perhaps you don't
know just how we view kings in our day (no offence intended to you
and yours, Ralphie). If you don't wish to speak to us, so be it, but we
won't stand for any—" and Sonia positively scolded the spirit of the last
king of the XIIIth Dynasty for engaging in "immature shenanigans."
There was a moment of silence and calm, and then the disk flew again,
nearly throwing my fingers from it in its haste: A H A H R T N W.

"Maybe he just wants to stay with yes and no," suggested Len.
"No, no," I finally found my voice. "Let me try. Lord of the Nile,

Master of Two Kingdoms, where shall I find you?"

R X K S T.

"Oh, this is really too much," exclaimed Sonia, removing her hands
from the ivory, which then tipped onto its side under the unbalanced
weight of my and Len's fingers. "I really must apologise, dear Ralph,"
she said as she switched on the electric light and we all squinted in the
glare of the 1920s. "I had hoped, you know."

"Please, I found it all fascinating," I said. "I am rather more scien•
tific on these matters, so I cannot say that I sat with you as much of a
believer."

"Of course not, dear, of course not," said Sonia, and she smiled pre•
cisely as one wants one's mother to smile when she allows your lie to
traipse by unharassed.

I bade them good night, left them waving to me from their doorway,
hand in hand, made plans for breakfast tomorrow, and I lie now in my
vibrating cabin (irritatingly Spartan after what I now know is available
on the ship — I have half a mind to go back to Cairo to take it up with
the man at the ticketing agency).

I do not wish to encourage quackery, Margaret, but these lovely,
lovely people must have been rather well-practised, well-
synchronised confidence artists and helpful amateur Egyptologists
both, and eager to see me succeed, for how else to explain that A H A
H R T N W, plus a few spaces, yields "aHA Hr Tnw," which means
"a fighter for honour" in the standard Roman-alphabet transliteration
of hieroglyphs, and "rx-k st" translates, to the letter, as a very encour•
aging "you know the place"? What can I write here, Margaret? I saw
what I saw. I do not believe it any more than you. It cannot have hap•
pened. It happened.

I have just awoken, 4.15 in the morning by my watch. In my dream just
now, the engine-buzz of my wooden walls became the murmur of an
impatient audience in a full lecture hall, like the room where I met you,
but infinitely larger. Thousands of people are awaiting my remarks. I

sit at a table on the stage with my lecture in front of me, several sheets

in a hand I recognise as my own boyhood efforts to write demotic
script. I am a little uncomfortable due to the weight of my headpiece,
burdened as it is with golden figurines on the brow representing a vul•
ture, a sphinx, a cobra, you, your father, Inge, and the Nordquists.

Next to me on the dais sits Carter, very chatty, though in the rising ulu•
lating coming from the far, far back of the Boston audience, it is in•
creasingly difficult to concentrate on his flattery: "Of the utmost
importance, of course, we must always maintain, the manner in which
we proceed from chamber to chamber within the tomb, my admiration
extends far beyond your discoveries and encompasses also your heart."
The ululating grows louder and sweeps forward over the crowd, row
after row of Boston ladies suddenly standing to shriek with contorted
faces, flinging their arms and programmes towards me in pleading.
"How do you maintain your calm in the face of such pressures?" asks a
visibly nervous Carter. Half the crowd is ululating now, tearing at their
collars and belts, the throaty howling, a noise as old as Egypt, echoing
from the Boston ladies, Dean Warren, Professor ter Breuggen, all of
Finneran's flunky and criminal partners. Inge has torn her dress away
from her magnificent body, and even you stand now, shaking off the
groggy murk of painkillers to wail as everyone is wailing, and I stand
up from the table and stride forward, naked and powerfully tripodal,
holding my lecture in one hand and Carter's still beating heart in my
other.

I am tired. My eyes are heavy but I feel so very strong, strangely
strong.

Friday, 27 October, 1922

I awoke late this morning and heard the news from one of the na•
tive pursers that last night a brawl erupted between two members of
the kitchen staff and that one of the devils cut the other with a bread
knife before two waiters could restrain him. I learnt also that the com•
bat had begun over an insult by one of the blacks to an American

tourist, and that the other Egyptian was moved to fight because he
could not bear rudeness to Westerners. He defended the insulted
American against his own countryman. A fighter for honour.

I finally convinced the purser to take me to where the poor fellow
was lying, bandaged up, recuperating from the slashes to his arms and
back. His English was not bad, but we spoke mostly in Arabic. I intro•
duced myself, explained a fraction of my plans, presented him with a
copy of
Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt
(inscribed to a "fighter for hon•
our"), and described the merest sliver of what I expected to find in my
king's tomb. I asked him a few questions, and the answers were highly
satisfying: a native of Luxor, he knew the paths and byways of the
areas west of the Nile like the back of his hairy hand. Did he have
strong friends that he trusted? He did. Did he wish to make more
money than he had ever seen? He did. Did he wish to participate in a
venture more important than emptying ashtrays on a riverboat? Not
much of a talker or a smiler, for all his fire to defend insulted Western•
ers, Ahmed looked me up and down and insolently agreed (for all the
world like a sergeant-major I once knew, short-cropped hair and
snarling silences). Either way, my expedition now has a headman,
though it took some negotiating to convince him he would work for
salary and
baksheesh,
not for "a share of the treasure." And while he did
not leap to his feet, bow down, take my salt, pledge his lifeblood, well,
he was wounded only a few hours earlier.

I gave him the address of my villa and instructions for preliminary
purchases and hiring. Discretion was stressed. He nodded his replies.
He asked for and received two days to recover, attend to personal af•
fairs onshore. And our meeting was over. I waited a bit for a burst of
gratitude or childish pleasure, but received only that unblinking stare.

Breakfast with the Nordquists, fond farewells, give them address of
my villa, invite them to come often, visit my site when we are up and
running with a public operation. They are justifiably thrilled.

Journal:
Alight in Luxor! Rental agent's representative awaits
with cart and donkeys to carry my luggage to the villa, takes payment

through November 30. Banking concerns a matter of some urgency
now. Banks closed until Sunday.

My luggage installed and key in hand, I take the ferry across the
Nile, hire a donkey, and ride out to walk the sacred land I have not
seen in seven years, since 1915, soil holy to the ancients and myself in

equal measure. The emotion is difficult to express as I trot past unimag•
inable changes, tourists filing past sights that, in 1915, had been

nothing at all, mere sand dunes still sheltering hidden mysteries; Anti•
quities Service guards making their scheduled rounds; the complex of
Hat-shep-sut's temple at Deir el Bahari; and the roped-off land where
Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum will be digging again in a few
days' time. I passed all of this, trotted up and on behind Winlock's site,
over hill after hill, one after another, the gentle rising and falling land
along the cliff face, until at last I recognised the landmarks Marlowe
and I left behind seven years ago, the day we discovered Fragment C
and fled with it in such a swashbuckling hurry.

This preliminary tour of the ground gives the experienced eye an
idea of the challenge ahead, the scope of the problem: how many possi•
ble places to break ground, how many men will be needed, how long
we can expect to work, what sort of specialised equipment we shall
need. I draw a pen-and-ink survey of the cliff face, noting every possi•
ble cleft on its facade, plotting a strategy, ranking by likelihood of suc•
cess all the areas I can cover, setting priorities, as time and money
demand.

Assuming my financial backing is secure, I think a team of ten men
will suffice for early explorations, this number quickly growing as the
digging becomes more intense. I do not think, if Marlowe's and my
guesses are correct, that this will become a case of several hundred men
moving vast amounts of earth. I know where my king should be, at
least I think I do. Assuming the financial backing is secure. Sunday's
issue.

Tonight, I sleep in my villa on the secluded banks of the Nile, closer
and closer to my king and my destiny.

Saturday, 28 October, 1922

On "guessing" where to find a tomb:
The Reader, not unreasonably,
asks how one loses a tomb for 3500 years and how one knows where to
look for it again.

Even if a tomb were publicly acknowledged, over 3500 years
things do get misplaced. Even a pyramid, while not easy to lose, has
now and again been found where no one recalled leaving it. One hy•
pothesis of Atum-hadu's invisibility: we are looking too low; his tomb
(like Hat-shep-sut's first try) was built into a cleft halfway down a cliff
face, then covered with rubble, all too easy to forget. Weather and ero•
sion may conspire to cover a tomb with rocks and mud. Slaves build•
ing another tomb nearby may dump the dirt they excavate onto an
older tomb, hiding its front. Or they may build their own working

huts right over an older tomb's entryway. Clumsy archaeologists today
might dig and dump
their
dirt on a tomb without noticing. Or the tomb
front might resemble something else, a bland facade not worth peeking
behind.

And, recall, the tomb was perhaps never meant to be noticed from
the outside, as was clearly the case with our Atum-hadu. For, consider
the last days of his life: invasion from the Hyksos to the north and
Africans to the south. Betrayed by his nobles. Rival kings setting them•
selves up elsewhere on the Nile. The end of the world, in short, and no
exaggeration: the end of all tradition, culture, daily life, rightful author•
ity. In well-lit retrospect, we or some XVIIIth-Dynasty Johnny-come-
lately, silver-spoon-sucking princeling can always come along and say,
"Tosh, it was only an Intermediate Period, and lo, a mere ninety to one
hundred years later the garish princes Ahmose and Kamose wrapped
up the business of driving out the invaders and reinstating proper rule."
But as you watch your world collapsing, that future is just a faint hope
among a crowd of likelier dooms, and you can see only an eternity of

despair stretched out before you.