The Egyptologist (39 page)

know anything more about it, just put everything back the way it
was. As soon as you can.

I'll be healthy and so very good to you, just for you. But you
have to come home now.

Your girl.

m.

(Sunday,
19
November, 1922, continued)

What is all this? Did I already know of all this? Did my cable
telling you he was a liar and a stranger reassure you after this? If this is
nothing but misunderstandings exacerbated by crossed letters, then
more letters will only distort things further, each one passing the next,
curdling it into nonsense as they float blindly past each other. What is
going on there now, right this moment? I am reading of events of long
ago, of extinguished stars. I cannot understand who Ferrell is, or how-
he has crept into my family's bosom.

You will be well, you will be well, you will be well. I will it. I have
never doubted it, never worried. Once, only. At the museum that rainy
day in June, I worried. I have never told you.

I escorted you to the Museum of Fine Arts, Inge still a silent, hover•
ing valkyrie, though by now I had noticed in her face the expressions
of an incurable debauchery, particularly as we passed the magnificent
Maiherpri loincloth (and I tried in vain to interest you in how Carter
had stumbled upon it way back in '02).

As we gazed at the statue of the ram-headed god Herishef, I told
you how as a boy I had dreamt of opening tombs even before I knew
what the dreams meant, even before I knew the word
tomb
or had ever
read of excavations. Before I even had the vocabulary to explain it, my
imagination produced the most wonderful things in my sleep: comfort•
ing caves filled with lights and warmth and sleeping bodies in soft beds,
animals and friends and food and happiness, always in a safe, enclosed
place, far from danger. I was probably three or four at the most, and
my claustrophilia had begun.

And I explained to you the displays we were passing, even as I no•
ticed you were needing to rest more often. I described Harvard and its
conservative faith in old excavators using old methods. As recently as
1915, I was telling you, Lyman Story still wanted to use TNT for his
expedition for this very museum! "Harvard is not ready for Atum-hadu
or for me," I said, "but they will be." I turned to you, and you were
shaking: out of sympathy for my trials, or from the beauty of the relics?
"Nothing to worry, sir," says businesslike Inge, already leading you off
to the ladies' lounge. Twenty minutes limped by, but then out you
came, fresh as anything, lovely, ready for a day of shopping and eating.

You had never looked so lovely and fresh, but you did not seem to re•
call
anything
of the last hour, including the stories of my childhood. Oh,
my love, your father told me you will be well. The doctors have told
him you will be well. I know you will be well. You must have faith in
that, and you must have faith in me. At night, alone, it is difficult to
have faith, I know. But you must. Ferrell is smoke.

And I will make what you so endearingly call my "Find," no matter
the obstacles, no matter the misunderstandings or outright treachery,
the yellow fog of crisscrossed letters. Your father is confused about me,
or he was, but this will pass, if it has not already, and not another word
need be spoken. On 19 November, your Ralph was thinking about you
with love, no matter your father's passing worries, no matter the curse
of Ferrell you are suffering on my account. You will read this when I
come home, and we will compare notes, and laugh at the distortions of
time and distance and postage.

Since Trilipush's find, I found Boston suddenly chilly. There was neither
money nor love here. I had only that tongue-lashing I took from Finneran and
Margaret's refreshed insistence that Trilipush and only Trilipush was everything
to her. Days passed and I didn't hear from Margaret and I no longer went to their
home. I was ready to wash my hands of the cursed Finnerans. If Trilipush had
found his dirty gold, either he'd come home or he wouldn't, and you know what
my bet was. It made no difference to me, because if he'd killed Paul Caldwell, I'd

go to Egypt to prove it, to shout it loud enough for even the stubborn Finnerans
to hear round the world.

I spent slow, empty days checking my transcripts, redrafting notes, submit•
ting my reports and expenses to London, interviewing another of Trilipush's stu•
dents, or explaining to HQ why my pursuit of Paul Davies had required so much
time in Boston. I hardly think they cared. I wrote my other clients, telling Tommy
Caldwell, Emma Hoyt, Ronald Barry, and the Marlowes of my progress.

I would sit in my hotel, doing this busywork, waiting for the day to head to
New York, hoping Margaret would come looking for me one last time, or if, in
some anger, I finally saw that that was unlikely, I was just waiting for news, for
anything. I felt that something clear and clarifying would happen; there'd come a
moment when it would be obvious that the time had come for me to move on to
Egypt or, instead, to stay close to Margaret's side, to protect her, to catch her in
the storm that was sure to come. I was a young man, Macy. Something could've
changed with her. Life could've taken any number of turns, you know. And so if I
sometimes stood outside her home, raging in the dark, I know you can under•
stand that, as a man of the world.

And I did see her a few more evenings: once she turned up, and all evening
didn't mention his name even once, just fell asleep on JP's sofa with her head on
my lap and her hand in mine, abusing me cruelly, and I watched her breathe for
hours and hours. She'd appear at my hotel these last nights, and each time I had
my little speech ready; maybe this was the night she would fall into my arms and
I would save her. But the time was never right. She'd be vicious, call me a crybaby
or a bore if I ever stopped making her laugh or refused to dance. On the way to
the club she'd be telling me about Trilipush's latest news (always good, always
vague), and no sooner were we inside JP's than she was climbing the stairs look•
ing for the man himself and her drug. I'd sit there stroking her head, and then,
when she was able, I'd walk her home, struggle, in the grey dawn light, for the
words, for even the opportunity of words. I vowed again to end this.

Monday, 20 November, 1922

Withdraw pay for the men, though the account audibly creaks at
the disbursement. It hardly matters. I will go without before they will; I
will never abandon my men. And I am off to the site.

I arrived at just the right moment to prevent a cataclysm: I found
the dark bastards setting at Door C with a sledgehammer. I was as af•
fected as if they were striking me. Ahmed was sitting there, smoking
one of CCF's cigars, looking on at the mauling. I shouted for them to
stop, but at least one more slamming crunch was heard before the noise
ended. We stared at each other in mutual incomprehension.

I have clearly left them alone too long, counted at least on their abil•
ity to follow orders if not respect the precision and passion of my work.
My disciplinary financial penalties were understood at last. I distrib•
uted their pay accordingly reduced. Now I noticed the injured man has
never returned. And Ahmed was a silent, glowering beast.

Only then did I hobble over and examine the damage they had done
to my Door C. My own fault. I should never have left them on guard so
long near the hypnotising wealth hidden behind this last foot of rock.

The loss of the inscription on Door C is nothing less than tragic, and
the Antiquities Service will be right to chastise me for not having
brought in an Inspector, though I can hardly do so now, with the evi•
dence that this is Atum-hadu's tomb again lying in a fine dust at my
feet. I should have marked down the inscription back on the 17th, but
my injury prevented me at the time. How could I have known this
would have happened? I should have known. Now I must re-create the
inscription from memory:

ATUM-HADU, LAST KING OF THE BLACK LAND, AUTHOR OF THE
GLORIOUS ADMONITIONS , SAILS TO THE UNDERWORLD,
ACCOMPANIED ONLY BY THE WEALTH OF HIS MUCH-RAPED LAND.

I explain to the men that their brutality has delayed our discovery,
not hastened it, and that the mountains of gold on the other side of this
door must now wait, as I cannot risk opening Door C without first sta•
bilising the fissures caused by their savage pounding, or I will lose the
artwork I am sure to find on the door's opposite side. Which means
plastering will be necessary. (This will also give me the curatorial op•
portunity of reinscribing onto the restored door a facsimile of the hiero-

glyphs lost to the idiot hammers, simply to give a sense of the original
inscription's size and placement.) I send two men for plaster, water,
trowels; Ahmed to Carter's site to see how he is now filling his days;
and a third man to Winlock's end of Deir el Bahari. Reports of inaction
there will be useful for renegotiating a concession.

The report from Winlock's camp: nothing of interest, random dig•
ging, brushing things they have had out of the ground since last year.
At Carter's camp, they are clearing land desperately to the south and
west, digging feverishly in search of their buried reputations, though
Carter himself has fled to Cairo. Six hours later, they are definitively
idiots: the plaster is all -wrong. Despite hours of different mixtures try•
ing to make do with what they brought me, all I do is splash Door C
with white water. Send them back to town for proper plaster.

It is early evening before I get another try. Fill the main fissures and
allow it to dry, -which it does. Slowly.

Tuesday, 21 'November, 1922

This morning I find that the first coat of plaster dried well in the
door's fissures, but also in the bucket. When my men finally deign to
appear, I send them back to town for more plaster and a new bucket.
It is evening before they arrive, this time -without water, -which one of
them finally brings after nightfall, nearly ten o'clock. Time is haemor-
rhaging and probably my support in Boston as well. I am tempted to
sleep in Villa Trilipush tonight, but the foot is on fire and I no longer
trust these hammering apes to be left on guard.

Margaret:
You will ignore Ferrell and keep your father on track,
won't you? You already are, I am sure. You are my protectress and in•
spiration, as I stare at your photograph by lamplight and desert
starlight outside His Majesty's tomb. I can see you across a desert con•
tinent and a sea as you prepare for bed high above the moon-frosted
snow of the Garden.

In this photo, the light was behind you, making you a silhouette
against white, a near perfect profile, bending forward to look at some-

thing on the table (if I recall, it was the necklace with the cameo I gave
you), and your beauty reproduces itself in the smallest detail: your eye•
lashes just protruding over the profile of your nose, making a bird's
wing of black, the thinnest of fine lines.

I remember the night you were gently crying in my arms, troubled
by your illness and your anxiety for my departure, and I touched my
finger to the corner of your eye, caught a fugitive tear under the tip of
my finger, and pulled it and your streaking eye makeup to your temple,
just to dry your tears, but I produced in that gesture the perfect face of
a pharaoh's queen, the malachite stripe of the eye of Horus.

The twenty-three-year-old daughter of the department store
pharaoh is stately in profile, alluring in three-quarters, overwhelming
head-on. The thin nose with its expressive nostrils, as if controlled by a
dozen dedicated strings at the hands of a thousand-fingered puppeteer
of unsurpassed sensitivity and haughty pride. The slightest upward mo•
tion of her eyebrow and we commoners know her will and shall serve
it. The pouting, heavy lower lip, under the cresting wave of the upper,
carved from smoothest yellow stone, the single, loving chisel stroke

that cleft the heavenly valley below her nose. The arching neck, a bit of
swan, a bit of swelled sail on a Nile
felucca.
The majestic curve of her
fine figure, her treasures, her mysteries of line and texture, that dress
slit directly in the centre-back, as if merely the continuation of her
magnificent crevice, and she turns from the throne to consider the slave
who kneels at her sandalled, beaded feet, and she raises her hand to
strike with naked blade the miscreant who brought her the wrong
drinking vessel, when her king appears behind her and stills her tensed
hand.

Wednesday, 22 'November, 1922

The men return early, and I am finally equipped to plaster the dam•
aged door, while Ahmed sits, cobra-silent, smoking another of CCF's
cigars and crunching fresh dates. But by late afternoon, the door is still
damp. Time is killing me. I have no choice but to leave them on guard