The Egyptologist (56 page)

statues, rush and papyrus sandals, that couch with the carved foot•
boards, boomerangs, lunch boxes carved to resemble trussed ducks,
perfume jars, toilet tables, bin after bin of unused underwear, candle-
holders shaped like little ankh-people, ornate this, oviform that, loti-
form the other, golden whatnot, flails and crooks and sceptres,

furniture depicting the king in lion form trampling his enemies, riding a
chariot with his own ancestors, thousands of beads to string, just
one
of
these items would have justified all of Carter's years, Carnarvon's
money, let alone flinty Finneran's. All for this
nobody,
it is enough to
make one literally sick, the messy confusion, it is enough to make one
feel crushed under it, as if one could imagine all of that wealth and fur•
niture just pressing down on top of one in one's own mummy wraps,
crushed like a pellet of clay under the wheels of that god-awful war
chariot, nauseating. The American journalist quite agreed.

Saturday, 23 December, 1922

Carter really is a megalomaniac, CCF and I agree on this. Oh no, he
simply will not be satisfied until everyone admires him and everyone
works for him and he makes dramas out of everything. You can imag•
ine my surprise to find a police constable striding up the path toward
my tomb when I came down from my cliff-top bed this morning. Mr.

Carter had sent him to "make sure everything was all right up here."
Yes, thanks, as if I needed Carter to keep my tomb all right. "Mr.

Carter had some thefts and wanted to know if you have suffered, too?"
Of course! Carter is clumsy and loses something in his unwieldy inven•
tory and the police must be called in on the assumption that some
crafty burglar is troubling all of Egypt's rational archaeologists as well.

I laughed and waved off the officer, but he wanted to tell me all about a
burglar in Carter's home and missing this and that, and stains on
Carter's bedsheets. "Is everything all right here, sir?" Oh, for heaven's
sake, of course it is, ducks. "Might I have a look-see at your dig? I'm
something of an amateur of archaeology myself." It is all I can do to bar
the great idiot's dust-kicking steps towards Door A. "Are you hurt, sir?

Is there something you want to tell me?" and other daft questions of the
novice Egyptian constabulary acting as Carter's spy.

I finally see off my rival's little agent, and CCF and I debate which
of our myriad tasks to take on next, much work still to be done to sta•
bilise the interior of the tomb, correctly map it and its objects, apply the
preservatives to the untreated paintings, finish transcribing the walls.

CCF is a marvellous help.

I landed at Alexandria late on the 24th, Macy, and made Cairo by train the
next day, Christmas, though you hardly notice in Egypt. I worked fast: our man
had indeed been at the Hotel of the Sphinx and had left it on the 26th of October,
holding his suite open for his return, so his reports to Boston had been truthful to
that date at least. The deskman also said Finneran had been at the hotel as well,
stayed the night nine days before me. I, in my turn, spent the night of the 25th,
space at the inn Christmas night. No talking donkeys, though.

Sunday, 24 December, 1922

Work. Miserable bowels. The gramophone does not help. The work
is hard. It makes one think about immortality. To the average man, I
suppose, the Egyptian notion of immortality is the most foolish super•
stition. But that is only because our idea of eternal life has changed,
whether we are Christians or not. Though we agree with our Nile an•
cestors that immortality is still man's most important accomplishment
(more important than love, or a mild reputation for virtue, more press•
ing by far than friendship), we are not so mad as to think that our
bodied
are transported into an afterlife. We use a different vocabulary,
salva• tion of souls, lasting fame.
Call it what you will, but to make one's name
ring out after the names of your inferiors and tormentors are snuffed
out, that is something all of us still hope for. (And, most delicious of all,
to have this happen before their physical lives end, so they can feel the
last wisp of their names vanish while they still breathe and know—

know,
ter Breuggen—that when their mouldering carcass is discovered
and tossed into the ground, it will already be anonymous hair and skin,
on its merry way to becoming anonymous carbon ash, while others of
us will become stars and suns.) I do not know of anyone who does not
aspire to this permanence, even if they claim not to. The world is lit•
tered with the arcs de triomphe and such-and-such juniors, the chatter•
ing artists nervous to know their work will last, poets committing
suicide to assure their fame, last wills and testaments trying to control
heirs, names annually read out in churches and synagogues, ornate
tombstones and deathbed I-love-yous, bequests and named donations,
money left to political parties and charities. We are all plenty Egyptian
still and no debate.

I am not an idiot. When the time comes, I know that I will be
dead.
I
will not be strumming a winged stringed thing, or even (as I planned as
a boy) be savouring the hot, fleshy delectations of a palm-lined, Anu¬
bis-guarded, Isis-assisted Egyptian underworld. I speak of something
lighter, finer, more intellectually and spiritually unassailable and inex•
haustible. Immortality for us, though it will be bodiless, is not without
consciousness: the consciousness at the precise moment of the expira•
tion of our bodies that our name will carry on.

CCF agrees.

Monday, 25 December, 1922

Journal:
Belly protests as if I have swallowed sharpened knives,
but CCF and I continue our work into the late afternoon. Then clear
out rubbish, empty pails, burn this and that.

Margaret:
I have just had a visitor. It has been rather a while since
I have spoken to anyone. Besides your chatterbox father, I mean.

She came to see me, the sweet old girl. I had just emptied the pails.

She caught me rather tired, quite at the end of my resources, sitting
outside the tomb, massaging my aching thigh.

"Dear boy, they said I'd find you up here."

I thought perhaps I was hallucinating—the sudden appearance of
one of the people one would most like to see. She was so kind to me on
that boat. She shielded her eyes from the glare and climbed the last
steps, lifting her old-fashioned dress to scramble over a rock with sur•
prising ease.

"Dear Ralph, you look unwell. Whatever has happened to you up
here?"

"Nothing. Searching. Hard at work. Made an extraordinary find."
She sat beside me on the rock, caught her breath, took my hand.

Had she been you, I would have fallen into her arms. "Poor boy, look
at yourself. You're much thinner."

"But tell me about you, Sonia, what you have seen on the trip of a
lifetime. The Rameses tombs? That circus down there at the Carter
hole?"

"Oh dear, a bit jealous, are you? There's no need, believe me. I see
these things so clearly. It doesn't matter."

"What doesn't matter?"

"All that. I've seen more than I care to of this country. It's cold and
hard here." And then it was sh
e
crying in
my
arms, shaking, and then
just as quickly she had had enough and was sitting up, dabbing her
face. "I've lost my Len, you see, just two days ago. So very fast here."
She looked west, at the bluffs softening into the open desert. "People
seem very temporary here, all this space and history. I'm taking him
home tomorrow. You look like how I feel. He liked you, you know. Oh,
very much. He said so that first night on the boat. I hope those spirits
haven't sent you off in the wrong direction. You mustn't take them too,
too seriously. They'll have their little fun, you know. They were human
once, too, and dying doesn't make you smart, I shouldn't think. Or
honest. Or even interesting, now that I think of the dull conversations
Len and I used to have with them. I'm done with ghosts now."

"Poor Len. Poor Sonia."

"You could come back with me, you know. I could so use the help.
All the difficult work ahead. My children live too far away, too busy."

Help? "To get Len home. You could see our home, and our summer
house on the lake. It's very peaceful there. In the winter, you know,
there's so much snow to shovel away from the front of the house. Len
used to do it, but I can't ask the kids to help. Oh, dear Ralph, do come
and rescue me from all that. We'll get you cleaned up at my hotel, some
clothes, have a doctor take a look at that leg, and then you'll rescue this
old woman who needs you so much."

Margaret. Just a few days ago, I would have gone, just a few days
earlier. And I could have cabled for you to join us there. You and I tak•
ing care of her in her rambling house, summers on the lake, gardening.
The newlywed caretakers down in the other house, going to the mar•
ket, cooking. Fixing this and that. Plenty of time for reading, playing
tennis, taking you out on her sailboat. Would have answered every•
thing.

"I am too close to the finish, Sonia, to my find. So terribly close."
"Of course. Of course, dear boy."

"Perhaps I might join you later, when I am done here."

"That would be fine. I'd like that very much. If you won't consider
again and simply come now, right now, just walk away with me ... "

She picked her way back down the rocky path. I sat in front of my
tomb door, too exhausted to stand. She would turn and wave as she de•
scended the winding path. When high rocks hid her, I could imagine
her thinking she had seen the last of me, but then the path would turn
and she would appear again, smaller, and surprised to still have me in
view, she would wave again. Just once more she stopped, quite small,
waved her white handkerchief, a tiny figure far beneath me. Shovelling
snow.

Tuesday, 26 December, 1922

CCF and I spend the day cleaning, analysing Chamber 8, reading
wall inscriptions and illustrations. Make measurements of furnishings,
et cetera.

Wednesday, 27 December, 1922

Today Carter began to lift into the light what only the chosen few
have seen underground, but he is bringing them up to the waiting
crowds and cameras in the most gruesome fashion, as if he has become
the prince of death. The stretchers, the bandage wraps: it is a vision of
the War itself. I suspect from the shape that the wrapped figure now
arising under Carter's command is the spear-bearing statue I saw down
there, but all bandaged over, as if the ancient soldier's lungs bubbled
with mustard gas and his eyes wept those brown, gritty tears. The
overwrought display: the tiniest boxes emerge carried by three men on
a march to Lucas's cave, every beaded slipper to be sprayed and glued
and restored in this massive factory of antiquities, monument to one
man's vanity, this violation of a poor boy-king's last hopes for peace.

We left for the south on a boat the next day, reaching Luxor on the 27th. By
the way, Macy, feel free to add any local colour you think helps: hot weather,
camels, natives, all that. No feeling for it myself, but I think it does draw a certain
class of readership, and film people eat it right up.

On the 27th, I made my way to the suburban address Trilipush had given his
Cairo hotel for forwarding messages. Instead of Trilipush, two American journal•
ists were sharing the rent on this villa, their headquarters for sending dispatches
on the King Tut dig. They'd taken it on the 10th of December. And had they ever
heard of an archaeologist named Trilipush? One of them laughed, sarcastic:
"Popular fellow." Another gentleman had come last week asking the same ques•
tion. What did they tell him? "We said that if he's an archaeologist, then Howard
Carter would know him, but I've never heard of your boy, chief." They told me
how to find Carter's site and were happy enough to take some money: if they
caught wind of Trilipush or Finneran again, they'd contact me at once at my hotel
in Luxor. "Yes, boss, we sho'nuff will!"

Off I went to the big show: the mob of workmen and tourists that marked the
excavation of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Now, one of the great benefits of