The Egyptologist (61 page)

Margaret? Or did you, too, require someone more like me—polished,
proven, endorsed? I long to know this about you.

Ferrell tells me the boy discovered Egypt in a library. Did we feel
the same, he and I, as boys in love with this land? I remember the ur•
gency I felt when waiting for new books or the next number of
Chroni• cled of Egyptology
and
Annals of Modern Egyptology
and
Archaeology
to
arrive at the Hall. The excitement was unbearable certain days, imagin•
ing the covers, hoping for colour plates, the feel of the transparent
paper over the frontispiece engravings.

From Ferrell's cold data, the inspired thinker can invest the story
with warmth: early 1917, Caldwell arrives in Egypt, the land that had
beckoned him since he was a boy of eight. He is tireless in his efforts to
see everything. He learns Arabic, visits the pyramids, tours whenever
he can win passes. After a while, he sneaks off-base when he is not
given leave, as Egypt is too powerful for him, too real when compared
to the unreality of his service in a colonial army, doing his bit in a war
that has not the slightest bearing on him. Imagine him, Margaret, so
obsessed with this land that he loses all interest in potential punish•
ments. He knows the penalty for his repeated illicit absences, but this
war seems every day less real. Perhaps in a muddy trench in Luxem•
bourg he would have been more attentive (or dead). But in the pres•
ence of his desert, the spitting bray of camels for hire, each of them
calling him to trot into the dark and touch the noseless beauty of the
Sphinx, to sit at the foot of Cheops's great pyramid and consider where
in this vast desert he would meet his destiny—it would have been im•
possible for him to fear some slow-moving, slow-thinking sergeant (los•
ing, throughout the late watch, hand after hand of patience by the cone
of lamplight in the guardhouse).

And then one day when I am injured and lost in Turkey, Paul Cald•
well probably learns that a British officer visiting the Australian camp
is, in civilian life, a rising Egyptological expert, even now conducting
expeditions when the War allows. I knew Hugo Marlowe's manner all
too well. I have no doubt that Caldwell approached him over and over,
trying vainly to win his attention. And failing that, I can well imagine

that he simply began to follow Marlowe (stationed fully forty miles
away) out of sheer fascination with his work, but also because Mar•
lowe knew
everything.
Caldwell must at last have won Marlowe's atten•
tion and trust, it hardly matters how. I can imagine Marlowe taking the
boy under his wing, and the thrill with which Caldwell heard details,
methods of scholarship and exploration, the latest research, and what
topic more gripping than the latest thinking about Atum-hadu?

But of course. Of course Marlowe would have discussed Atum-
hadu with Caldwell. Marlowe had Fragment C in his tent, waiting for
my return. He would have told Caldwell all about Atum-hadu, and
everything in that story would have made beautiful sense to the poor
boy: a civilisation where a man of genius could make and remake him•
self every day until he was king. Perhaps Harriman had already been
part of Paul's childhood reading, and Atum-hadu's fire, pale as it was in
that version, had already singed him. And now Marlowe introduced
them.

If he had survived the War, he would have been allowed to become,
perhaps, a librarian, maybe a teacher in a provincial boys' school. He
could have been as intelligent as I, as charming as I, as well-made as I,
but without credentials and wealth and all the rest, he would have been
an oddity, a circus freak, a poor boy who
do amusingly
knew some trivia
of Egypt for inscrutable reasons of his own. Would you love me if I
were that, if that were me? No, how could you. No one will remember
Paul Caldwell, and no one should.

The final days of Egypt. There must have been such a day, the final
day. The final hour. The final instant. There was in every cataclysm
precisely such a single last moment, incredible, but true: a last casualty
in the Great War, a final victim ravished by the Black Death, one last
Neanderthal to parent a first
Homo sapiens.
And there must have been a
last man to worship Atum and, at his death, to take with him all the
mysteries of his cult. There was a last man who knew how to pro•
nounce ancient Egyptian; a whole language died with him and all we

can do now is strain to hear its echoes by leaning very close to books
and wishing hard.

And for Atum-hadu there was this day when all was inarguably lost,
when no escape remained, walking in an empty palace, stepping over a
man with his face bludgeoned to pudding. How did the king feel that
afternoon? Sleepy, so terribly tired. Wishing it could be some other
way. Longing for his queen and a peaceful place they could rest to•
gether.

There was this day; this day came and then ended, snatching the
whole universe with it. There was this last sunrise over pig-faced
hordes at the gate under the command of foreigners and the temples
burnt and the histories all burnt and the ways and the words and the
stories and the aspirations and the certainty of an endless future in
which honours and love are your due—merely because you live in a
time of peace—all vanished. There was instead this last day, and Atum-
hadu stood still for a moment, looked around him and said his

farewells, though no one heard them. He was trapped by circumstances
beyond the control of any man, even the embodiment of Atum the great
creator. No servants, no army, no bearers, no women, no money, no
time.

The "end of everything." This is the adult's bogeyman, the only
ghoul that survives the nursery to rise before us from time to time and
give us quaky guts. This is more than the fear of death, for at one's own
demise, one clutches to the condolence that at least something else lives
on that represents us or matters to us, somehow preserving us, if only it
is the knowledge of the things and people that we love surviving us and
enduring.
Our children's lives continue, so ours do not really end:
this is mod•
ern man's pathetic scrap of Egyptian immortality. Some, of course, will
cling to their subdued Christian heaven or sternly orgiastic Allah's par•
adise, but for most, there is something simpler in the wings: kids,
grandkids, the family business, the life's work, or just the trappings of
one's humdrum affairs: the pub and the high street continue on, the
football club, the Government and the Constitution and the old regi•
ment. If one is not depressed by these institutions ploughing on heart-

lessly, celestially unmoved by one's death, then one is conversely heart•
ened and they become like the drawings of food on a Pharaonic tomb
wall. Oh, yes, the average man grabs at immortality with his dying
breath, and he finds it—in his heirs, work, town, culture.

But the end of
everything!
How much destruction must man or na•
ture wreak before your death becomes intolerably petty, truly mortal?
Do you need an ice age or a swollen sun incinerating the Earth? Or
would less suffice to end your fantasies of permanence? Your heirs
slaughtered before your closing eyes? Your business in bankruptcy,
your home and art in cinders? Let us say your church and all of its
priests and every written or graphic mention of your god is destroyed,
danced on by the sharp-clawed demons who serve some other, younger,
crueller god. Let us say the city that has withstood all invaders for
thousands of years, the city your family has lived in for as far back in
time as you can peer, this pearl of the sea or the sands, this green and
pleasant England, this eternal Rome, this pink Jerusalem or holy
Mecca, this home of you and yours is dismantled, every last brick, the
last bomb flattening the last house just before the last spittly drops of
blood pump clear of your stuttering heart. Venice sinks into the sea.

Paris burns. London howls. New York crumbles and Athens is reduced
to its net ash. Not yet the end of everything for you? Every copy of
every work of every author of the world's literature ignites under the
watchful eyes of unquenchably pyromaniacal illiterates. The very last
copy of the very last history of your country or any other changes into
black smoke, and all you can hope in your last breath is for the scanti•
est sliver of immortality: perhaps, some generations from now, word of
mouth from one long-memoried genius actor to his heir to his heir to
his heir will result in a brave effort to recall
Hamlet
and write it down
again . . . and what does happen at the end? Hamlet poisons himself?

Thumps Polonius with a club in a darkened room? Dresses up as a
gravedigger and sneaks out the back?

The following items will be irretrievably lost someday quite soon:
Beethoven's works. The beer you prefer. All record of your ancestry.
The place you first kissed a girl. Toffee. Coffee. The landscape you as-

sociate with peace and liberty. Any evidence of your boyhood, real or
just fondly recalled. The sensation that all that stands before you and
your loved ones is a series of aspirations, accomplishments, setbacks,
meals, ceremonies, loves, heartbreaks, recoveries, next acts.

Will you remember me, Margaret? Will you see what I accom•
plished here, and will you clarify it for the world? I have no one else,
you see, to trust. If you ever loved me, or only the idea of me, please,
please, rid yourself of your illnesses and make my work live on.

CCF is asleep. I have much to finish, especially if mad Ferrell is
coming to stamp about with police and dogs.

January 6, 1955

One likes to be right, Macy. And to be right for the right reasons, that's good,
too. This morning, as I look back over what I wrote yesterday, I have the unpleas•
ant feeling, shameful almost, that perhaps I was sometimes right for the wrong
reasons. Today, reading this, it isn't quite clear to me just where and in what fash•
ion I caught Trilipush in a lie. And yet, I remember the sensation—a sensation,
Macy, as plain and real as the taste of chocolate, or the brush of wind on your
face—that he was lying. And I certainly wrote then in my notes that I
knew
he was
lying. But rereading it now, the certainty seems somewhat faded. I could've told
Margaret about Caldwell's interest in archaeology, and she could've written to
Trilipush in turn, I suppose. No matter: if it wasn't that, it was something else.
Too tempting to say that hindsight brings clarity. More likely time blurs the
truth. I don't question the correctness of my certainty then, only my ability to ex•
press it now. I'm no man of letters, Macy, that's your job in this partnership. So
make it clear how I catch Trilipush out.

And, also, I can blame myself now, I suppose, that I was unable to convince
the police to look into this straightaway. The disappearance of an Englishman
and an Australian, four years earlier, during a war, didn't seem to the constable on
duty to have the slightest relevance to his job. He told me to report it to the British
consulate, and if they ordered an investigation, he'd look into it. I couldn't budge
him, and I saw his native pride in saying
no
to me, as if I were the King of En•
gland, and not in fact yet another of the Engisshman's put-upon colonials. That
was Saturday the 30th.