The Egyptologist (34 page)

Paris. Boston is a horrible bore. You are beastly to have left me
alone this long. Daddy is a bore. Inge is a fat bore. What am I sup•
posed to be doing here with my time while you are off having
grand adventures ? I know that "it is all for us," and when you
come back it is our future you are going to carry home, I know. But
still. Being here under Daddy and Inge's thumbs makes me feel
like a little girl. I know that they only want what's
best for me,

but
that also seems to mean
boring me to tears.

m.

Monday, 6 November,
1922

Pay men for one week, send them home. I am not in fit condition to
work.

Wednesday, 8 November, 1922

Night. Three days lost to fever, et cetera. By nightfall, I am able to
rise. The cats were a comfort in my illness, especially dear Maggie. I
eat dinner for the first time since Sunday. After days of nauseous, anx•
ious sleep, I am, tonight, of course, unable to sleep. I am curious what
ancient, desiccated wine cellar Carter's found at the bottom of his
stairs. I shall climb aboard a nocturnal donkey, trot into the Valley, and
find my heartbroken colleague atop his stairway to ancient rubbish
bins, and I shall succour him in his despair at six years of wasting
Carnarvon's good, easy money.

Later:
I dressed in native garb. I paid a boy with a boat to ferry
me across, and made the moonlit Valley in not much time. Hiked up a
side path, behind Rameses VI's tomb, to look again at the precious
stairwell. But instead I found a few of Carter's workers, standing watch
and sleeping, no sign of the great man himself. And there was a pile of
boulders
atop where the staircase had been.
Nothing else. If there ever was
a staircase, if heat and solitude and frustration and fever have not tick-

led me into meaningless hallucination, then Carter has apparently
reburied his find.
Exchange a few s
alaams
and chitchat with his workers.
My disguise is flawless. From what they told me, Carter has set his
team to work in the
other
direction, trenching around the ancient huts
of the workmen who built Rameses VI's tomb. What a man, this
Carter! What style! Faced with a black eye unlike anything in Egypto•
logical history (six years and a staircase to a dry hole), and with his
noble moneybags sitting in Haw-haw House back in green England,
Carter's simply buried his folly and turned his back on it. Never hap•
pened! A trickster, our Mr. Carter, it now seems. Makes one wonder
what else he has covered up in his glorious past.

I set off, back to the river by way of his villa in Gurna. The win•
dows were unshuttered, the moonlight silvering one side of the house.
A little corner of England deposited here in Egypt, his easels and books
sitting in tidy order in what must be a sitting room and study. The
easel's back was to the window, so I cannot comment on his skill as a
painter. He did not clear away his tea things, no doubt he was drinking
something potent to erase the dreadful memory of burying rather than
digging, covering up his staircase from the 1890s. Who else besides me
heard, too early, of his "triumph"? How many souls did his workmen
tell? "Ah, yes, Lord Carter has found King Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb
today! He found the staircase today, and tomorrow the treasure room!
Tell all the cousins!" Poor Carter. No wonder the tea things sit un•
washed.

The back of the house revealed an interesting tableau, framed by
the green-painted window sashes. He was sleeping like a man at peace,
which is odd, unless one considers the sleeping draught he likely
gulped to beat back his roiling worries. His thin eyeglasses were folded
on the bedside table, over a pre-slumber read, the cover of which was
the same colour as
Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt,
which would not
surprise me, but I could not quite make out the title. Carter himself lay
under white sheets and a tent of mesh. He held his old, wrinkled hands
up near his neck like some rodent burrowed down for a long, hard win•
ter. I do not envy the questions coming the poor man's way.

Thursday, 9 November, 1922

Journal:
After losing three days to fever and sublimated, unneces•
sary worry, I awake early today, refreshed and ready to work. I feel ab•
solutely tip-top. Set out food for Maggie and the Rameses.

Ahmed and the men are waiting, loyal and relieved to see me
healthy at last. They have come every morning and left only after hours
of waiting. Today their eagerness to work is palpable and infectious.

They look at me with enthusiasm and respect.

I have the men continue their careful scraping of the cliff face abut•
ting the rising path. Our progress is heartening, though progress with•
out discovery can also be viewed as a shrinking field of prospect, but I
do not indulge such thinking. I clear three more clefts. Not many re•
main, and more difficult work will be required, I fear.

Maggie and the toms take their supper with me in my dining room
and spend the evening peering curiously at the gramophone.

Friday, 10 November, 1922

Journal:
Distribute two dozen of CCF's monogrammed cigars to
the men as
baksheesh.
Tokens of my faith in my workers. It is often and
boringly repeated that Carter "inspires loyalty in his men." But "inspir•
ing loyalty," as I learnt in the Army, is a caveman's trick. Anyone can
do it with gifts or fear.

Today I acknowledge the need to begin planning for next steps. I
send two of the men out into the flat basin of this section of valley, to
mark with stakes a square, 100 yards out from the cliff wall and 100
yards long, centring on the site of Fragment C's discovery. If it comes
to excavating trenches, we will be ready. I ask Ahmed's opinion how
easily we could hire a team of 100 men and equip them all with digging
tools. The timing is certainly possible, but the cost will require waiting
for the Partnership to act. And the Partnership will need to be pre•
pared for a full-team budget. With nothing to show yet, I am unwilling

to go back to Lacau or to Winlock, but it is simply not feasible to tramp
in a full excavation team unseen.

Saturday, 11 November, 1922

Book notes:
Change the epigraph to 11 November, 1922! The 24th
was too generous by a full thirteen days!

Journal:
And today we were smiled upon. Just as I was about to
change strategy, the world reveals itself to us in a new light, and we see
more than anyone else has ever seen before. It is late at night now, and
I write from my cot under the stars, outside the tomb of King Atum-
hadu. I have sent Ahmed to cable CCF and feed the cats.

My heart still beats with the knowledge of our victory, the strenu•
ous and delicious effort to taste every instant—where do I begin? I cast
aside the moon and haul back to the sky the solar chariot and replay
our day from its glorious dawn:

The morning was spent swinging in and out of two of my very last
clefts. I was practically forced to crawl when atop the cliff wall so as
not to be seen from the Valley below, now a hive of wasteful, aimless
trenching. I had left Ahmed to secure the ropes above and had two men
out in the basin beginning to poke at the soft ground, leaving the two
other men still scouring with slow diligence the cliff wall alongside the
path. My instincts were infallible.

After lunch I was halfway down to the third cleft of the day, sensing
that my nearly complete inventory was doomed to futility. Worse, I had
misjudged the length of rope I would need to reach the floor of the
crack for which I was aiming, and I realised in frustration that I would
need to climb to the top and buy longer rope for tomorrow to reach this
last array of lowest ridges. I was halfway back up the cliff face, cursing
my ill-preparedness, when I heard shouting from below, my idiots who
had been told to keep quiet at all costs. At the same moment, two blis•
ters opened up on my hands, making climbing viciously painful. I

called up to Ahmed for assistance, with predictable results. I looked
down and saw the four men all gathered in the same place, perhaps

200 feet below me. It took me twenty minutes more to reach the top,
flaying the skin off my palms as I rose, looking up for the persistently-
invisible Ahmed, looking down at the shrinking cluster of my men,
doing apparently nothing. I rested and swung. I climbed and stung. At
last I reached the top, found no Ahmed, and crawled along the path.

Ahmed, it turns out, was already on his way down to look into the
men's excitement, and by the time I reached the bottom, at least three-
quarters of an hour had passed.

Which is to say, no time at all, considering how long my friend has
been waiting for me under the earth! What had we found? By God,
what had we
not?
One of the men—name escapes me, cannot regularly
tell two of them apart, perhaps brothers—had in his scraping noticed
on the cliff wall at eye level a very small patch of smooth, whitish rock,
sunk a few inches back into the dirt and stone of the cliff face, not

100 feet from where Marlowe and I found Fragment C. The aberration
was, when they found it, the size and shape of a thumb, an oblong and
perfectly flat rock where all around it was irregular brown dust and
stone, packed hard, crumbling only when hit with force. It was exactly
the sort of thing that had led to a dozen false alarms in our work so far,
and by the time I arrived they had taken it upon themselves to try to
confirm their discovery, hacking at the brown wall, levering against the
white stone with a metal bar, managing to scratch its surface, triple its
size, and enrage me for violating my instructions to touch nothing in
my absence.

I told Ahmed to explain the rules to the men again; there would be
no
baksheesh
for damaged finds. I examined the stone under a magnify•
ing glass and found on it what appeared to be regular patterns, though
it was hard to be sure, considering the scraping the men's levers had
caused. The white rock was without question an entirely different sur•
face than the stone even a foot above it, so if it was large it extended
downward only, but it did not display the texture of erosion. I sent the
men to fetch shovels and brushes from the donkeys, and I set to work
myself with painstaking care. "This is it, then? We are close?" says
Ahmed, his first sign of real enthusiasm yet.

Neither supper nor nightfall slowed me in my cautious work. And,
to their credit, Ahmed and the men showed no interest in leaving the
site even as the sun set, though it was hard to know for sure, as their
Arabic has grown increasingly incomprehensible over the past week;
private slang and slurring seem to be replacing proper diction. Using a
variety of specially crafted small chisels and brushes, ranging in size
from a half-inch to more than a foot, I worked steadily, a surgeon con•
ducting the most delicate of operations. Tempting as it was to use bat•
tering rams and dynamite (as the early fellows did decades ago), our
responsibility is not only to preserve the item inside (rushing it off to a
museum or private collector) but to see everything in its original con•
text, and to map and re-create that context for posterity. For observe:
we never know the range of our ignorance. We do not know what sig•
nificance we fail to see by hurriedly smashing a wall that seems blank
and meaningless. Preserve every stone and fragment, note each brick's
relation to every other brick before removing anything: this is the care
that separates the professional from the tomb-plunderer. And so, if I
delay in the description of this unsurpassed day, it is only to give you,
eager Reader, a sense of both the building excitement and the strange
passage of Time.

For at the moment of discovery, Time goes all agog, flows in every
direction at once and at every imaginable speed until the sun flies
through the sky even as you feel you have just begun; your work will
never end; you can count your every breath; you can imagine what you
are going to see, behind this door, in the greatest detail (for it was a
door, oh yes, I will reveal that much); you can picture every golden
bracelet, majestic throne, jewel-studded garment, alabaster sarcopha•
gus, calcite head atop a canopic jar of royal organs. And, more: one can
see the change that will overtake one's life in that instant, the dress
your beloved will wear at your wedding, the glimmer of gold on the
sash around your sovereign's neck as he asks you to rise. One knows,
too, what one will feel a mere foot farther on, though how long it will
require to penetrate that single foot one does not know: which shall be
the
instant? The shard of shattering crystal time that will embed itself