The Egyptologist (31 page)

ally worried about the expenses ahead, but I have vowed not to waste
another minute doubting my backers. Instead I cabled CCF and en•
couraged him once more with a promising picture of the coming weeks'
labours.

A busy day follows. In the few hours before Ahmed is due to meet
me, I collect portable and nonperishable foods, a cooker, matches, cells
for the electric torch, et cetera.

When I return to the villa for lunch and my meeting with Ahmed,
the Nordquists are there, the good people. I have Ahmed wait while I
show the dears my preparations, maps, library, tour them around Villa
Trilipush with pride, and they are kind and complimentary, a pleasure.
Over lunch, I help them plan their itinerary, advise which tombs are
worth the trouble and which are derivative. They set off, waving
farewell to me and my silent headman, the very image of one's sweet,
doddering parents.

Ahmed is going to be an excellent foreman, and I must congratulate
myself again on discovering him. He is all business, no smiles or chitchat.
I explain to him that our temporary but essential challenge will be to hire
and move enough men to our site and have them moving earth, while
maintaining discretion as the concession politics untangle themselves.
(Success will certainly produce a concession, but in the awkward mean•
while, one must be outwardly respectful of how things are done.)

Winlock and Carter have not started yet; Ahmed and I were first on
the scene, and so there was no shortage of poor, strong, uncurious men
looking for work. We hired some for now, and engaged plenty for later.
To be sure, Ahmed's few choice mentions of a curse on any who at•
tempt to dig for King Tut-ankh-Amen, and his remark here about
Carter's bankruptcy and there about Winlock's criminal record, and a
nonchalant but audible comment that both Carter and Winlock have
used flogging to keep their natives in line should keep the labour mar•
ket nicely softened up for the coming season. I hardly endorse such
methods, but I did not wish to chastise him on our first day, and his in•
appropriate behaviour was on my account. As it is, we shall begin our
expedition with a small, mobile core of six stout men, including Ahmed

and myself. He will report at dawn tomorrow with donkeys and har•
nesses, heavy shovels and picks, canvas sacks, and a wooden cart, and
we will begin, though the route still troubles me.

Margaret:
In the bazaar today, I found two items you will appreci•
ate. The first is a little toy, a fine gift someday for some clever little boy,
my sweet Queen, some rugged little fellow with a taste for Egypt and
his father's company (unknowingly receiving a lifelong training as a fu•
ture biographer!). It is a jack-in-the-box, painted like a brickwork
tomb. One cranks the handle, and a faint ghostly screech emerges, like
gas escaping from a nearly sealed bottle of fizzy drink. The noise grows
louder until the top of the tomb opens and up rises a fake-stone sar•
cophagus, a kingly face painted on its head. Keep winding and the top
of the sarcophagus opens with a pop, and a golden mummy case rises.
Crank more and the mummy case slowly opens to reveal a lily-white
mummy, a childish smile and lovely blue eyes peeping through its
linens as it sits up.

Even better, my love, is a little painted figurine made of dried mud,
a striding fellow in tunic, sandals, and crown, a competent reproduc•
tion of some anonymous Middle Kingdom work. The winning feature,
though, was the sly little grin on his face, completely unacceptable in
such pieces, not the usual calm smile but an absolutely inappropriate
and charming expression of knowing mischief. It is the perfect compan•
ion piece to the other statuette I travel with, the one I received at an in•
timate luncheon
a deux
at Locke-Ober (as Inge lingered at a cafe table
outside).

You were glowing; love had quite illuminated you, even if I did not
yet realise it. You were adorable, quoting from the book I had told you
to read. "Is it true,"you asked, sly kitten, "that when the tomb was
closed and sealed, they believed everything inside it came to life?"

"That's right," I said, proud of your progress.

"And paintings of feasts became feasts, and statues of beautiful
serving girls became beautiful serving girls?"

"Yes, my dear, you have it." I looked up, and you were handing me
that perfect little statue: you, nude but for a modest blanket. "Daddy

found out this Frenchman was coming through Boston, so he paid him
to sculpt me. I was thinking, maybe if you put it in your room, when
you close the door and switch off your light, well, you never know, do
you?"

Tomorrow I go to the site, but tonight you are here with me in my
villa, M., quite come to life at my side. Good night, my love.

Tuesday, 31 October, 1922, Excavation Day One

At last, into the fight! Now evening, and I am back at Villa Trili¬
push, the end of our first day. We are moving with a fine speed at last.

Ahmed arrived this morning when it was still dark, and he had the
heavy gear and animals ready on the far bank. More importantly,
Ahmed had solved my geographical issue. Last night he succeeded in
the reconnoitre task I assigned him, stout fellow, and this morning he
bent over the giant map on my main worktable and pencilled in a better
route than I could find, leading from the river to the path where Mar•
lowe and I found Fragment C, but never passing within sight of anyone
who would find our progress threatening. (In the event of a proven
Atum-haduan find dangling in front of their faces, Lacau will happily
cut Winlock's concession down to make room for me.)

Thanks to our early start, Ahmed tells me we had the pick of the
mules and equipment. It is for precisely this luxury, Ahmed explained,
that he presented me with receipts for significantly more than I had
budgeted, but such is the price of doing the job right, he reminds me. I
was at a loss, actually, staring at the figures in my leather accounts
book and the pile of scrawled slips my man dropped on the table. "Why
are you looking like this? I can bring you to every one of these mer•
chants to verify." A bit of a child, Ahmed is. "Mistrust makes figs of
men," he informed me with Koranic intensity, and I suspect I may have

misunderstood him, but I can scarcely allow him to think my Arabic is
lacking, or he will attempt all manner of mischief with the workers.

Across the river, our first four team members awaited us on don•
keys. Dawn on the Nile's west bank, and we followed Ahmed in a wide

loop to a path behind Deir el Bahari. The entire hike took no more
than ninety or a hundred minutes, up and down the rocky hills. "There
is a faster route here," muttered one of the anonymous quartet, but
Ahmed quieted him with a hard look, bless his black heart.

And then we were there, where Marlowe and I had had our great
victory, and where I was now returned with my own team to consum•
mate the work my partner and I had begun seven years before. We
were there! Under the high cliffs, on the sand which sunrise was flat•
tering as orange-rust, I called a halt, which Ahmed seconded. I ordered
two of the men to begin a preliminary inspection of the lowest part of
the cliff face, walking along the terraced paths which abut and twist a
ways up the cliff wall, examining it for jarring unevenness or excessive
smoothness, symmetrical markings, anything at all that seemed man-
made. My other three men hiked some hundred yards out from the
cliff, looking upward while the sun was still low, to examine the higher

reaches of the cliff wall for likely clefts, marking off anything I missed
in my first sketch. Mean-while, beginning at the landmarks Marlowe
and I had made to help us find our way back here, I continued farther
to the north and west, simply trying to get a sense of what if anything
had been trampled over by Winlock. While the men marched along in
their gowns and head wraps, covering their eyes, touching the cliff
wall, I found the two boulders leaning against each other that Marlowe
and I had noticed when we parked the motorcycle, and the pile of
smaller stones we had placed atop one of them when we realised we
had discovered something.

"It will be near here," I called to Ahmed in Arabic.

"Was he a rich king?" Ahmed asked, and to the point. I would have
to keep an eye on this one, and no mistake.

Ahmed led me up a path he knew to the top of the cliff wall, some
300 feet above the valley bed. It took us an hour to ascend to this high
position, from which my four workers below seemed the merest mice in
a vast field searching for one particular twig. Unfortunately, standing
on this point, we would be visible to parts of the Valley of the Kings on
one side of the wall, and Winlock down in the main basin of Deir el Ba
-

hari on the other. So, if there were discoveries to be made from the top
down, I would have to work quickly. Clearly, the high clefts would
have to be our first priority.

The trouble with these clefts, and their appeal as secret tombs, is
that they are invisible from the cliff path above and inaccessible from
the ground below. I sent Ahmed back down to the base and then out
far enough onto the main valley floor so that he could signal to me with
waving arms when I stood directly above the clefts in my drawing,
which procedure we repeated until I had placed markers on the cliff-
top path, a dozen positions from which ropes would be hung for my
close inventory of the cliff face. By this time, our day was nearly com•
plete. We trooped back to the riverbank following our wide safety loop
and bid each other
salaam
until first light tomorrow.

On the gramophone: "No Man's Land Belongs to Me, Otto."

Dominoes: A snake up and then back down the stairs ending in a
spiral formation under my main worktable. The clicking sound brings
the cats!

Wednesday, 1 November, 1922

Ahmed and I disagreed for some time (he with a restrained menace
in his voice) as to how best to secure a rope 300 feet above a rocky
death. Even as he asserted an expertise with knots (not without some
thin-skinned pride), he was praising my upper-body strength (accu•
rately), and claiming a Mohammedan contravention (new to me, but he
was adamant) against undertaking any action that would show a
hubristic desire to fly in the manner of the Prophet's ascension to Par•
adise. Doctrine is doctrine, so with my heart pounding in my ears, I
flung myself down 100 feet of cliff while my four labourers wasted
valuable time gawking at my bumping, yelping descent until I reached
Cleft 1. I alit on a smooth ledge, still in sunlight, but found it was the
front porch of nothing at all; the sun easily lit the far back wall of the
aperture, no more than four or five feet deep. No inscription, pottery
shard, sealed or secret door. I spent an hour assuring myself of this,

brushing at every available surface, jabbing with a long metal rod to
see if any wall resisted more or less than any other, but I was exploring
a water-worn cleft in a cliff face and nothing else. I may have been the
first man ever to set foot on it, or I may have been preceded by medi•
aeval hermits (though I would well understand if they found the perch
too isolated and depressing), or perhaps by ancient tomb architects,
scouting out possibilities, tetchily shaking their heads at another poor-
quality cleft. And another morning vanishes, quite mortal indeed.

I hauled myself up to the summit, an exhausting business, resting
whenever I could find a notch to place a foot, and my arms were
twitching and I was spitting dust when I scrambled to the top, where
Ahmed was lying down, having a smoke under a makeshift sunscreen:
a Hotel of the Sphinx bedsheet (with that mad emblem of vulture,
sphinx, and cobra) spread out and supported on sticks. I cursed his
laziness and had him prepare me lunch, which we shared in the pale
yellow shade. The sun hit the sheet and cast its emblazoned seal in a
slightly darker shadow between us. "Hotel of the Sphinx," says unsmil•
ing Ahmed in English. "A-One, Jack. You are a happy digger, eh?"

"Where did you learn English?"

"I don't speak English," he replied in English.

"Digger
is a term for Australian soldiers," I explained. "I am English,
so the term is inappropriate."

"I hate the Australians," he replied calmly, in English. "They were
the worst men here during the War. Worse than any of the others, even
the Turks. They made whores of everyone. You English, yes, you are
trouble, and the French,
pah."
Ahmed spat. "The Americans, I do not
know them. But the Australians. These were a disgrace, these men." All
of this he said with a strangely toneless voice, his hand rubbing the
short fringe of hair around his temples. It is an odd thing, to hear the
grievances and passions of a native people, the misunderstandings or
petty concerns that animate them but that are inexplicable to Western•
ers. I can understand Ahmed's ancient ancestors better than I can un•
derstand Ahmed himself, but then his ancestors were their own
masters, not Protected by foreign Powers. To cheer him up, I described