The Egyptologist (68 page)

am afraid I replied. "And no one would believe me if I did, you ridiculous
colonial convict's son."

"I see." One minute he is quiet, smiling, presumptuously demanding. The
next he has precisely that face young men in London sometimes have when
you explain that they cannot come and live with you forever even if you did
have rather a nice evening together the night before. It is a dangerous warn•
ing face, I know that much. And so I apologised for my short temper, excused
myself by muttering something about being heartsick for poor Trilipush,
from whom there was still no word, damn old Johnny Turk. I meant no of•
fence, I said, and I will be better in a few days, if he could just give me some
time to mourn and pull myself together. "Of course," he says, at once bright-
eyed again. "We've been working hard, and you've lost a mate. Everyone has
to let off steam now and again. Let's meet in a few days. I didn't mean to push
you too hard just now. I just think we should start thinking of our situation
more like a
partnership."
Yes, Bev, I can hear you nagging me for details and
accuracy, but that was precisely his word; I have been careful to present all of
these encounters without exaggeration. "A partnership you've been preparing
me for, so after this War we can think about working together as a
team"
Quite. His mood was restored, and off he bounced.

Now then, Bev, I could rather use a bit of your calm advice, if you fol•
low me.

HM

11 November, 1918
Bev, Bev, Bev!

Well today is quite a day, and no mistake. You have no doubt heard the
news by now. The future begins again! There will be a bit of time lost before
demobilisation, but I would guess I should be home well before summer. And
then back to my studies, and then back here to dear Egypt in happier circum•
stances to apply myself to the gentlemanly pursuits of desecrating tombs and
exhuming the dead. And where will Bev be, I wonder to myself sleeplessly.

As for my little problem, I believe you found an elegant solution; your
counsel was subtly worded but wisely conceived: "When the War ends, things

will take care of themselves. Be patient and do try at least to pretend to be
kind to the boy." Trust Bev for seeing to the nut of the issue!

And so yesterday, I conducted my tutorial in a state of not entirely feigned
excitement. I told him that I had something to show him, some dazzling news.
I swore him to secrecy, an oath he undertook with moist-eyed Aussie sincerity,
and then I allowed him a glimpse of that papyrus you failed to ask Wexler about,
which document you will recall I found in a bazaar, but which I told him I had
dug up before I had the pleasure of meeting him, and had held on to since, wait•
ing for sweet Peace, when I could bring it back to England for analysis. Bless his
bright convict's head: to give him (and me as his tutor) credit, he read the relic
with care, and immediately came to the same conclusion I had. "Is this what I
think it is?" he asked in delight. "No question at all," I declared, though the
truth is quite a bit hazier; the thing could absolutely be a forgery, and even if it
is real, it is still hardly conclusive as to— well, never mind, you couldn't con•
ceivably care less, and the point of my story is elsewhere, right here in lovely,
peaceful A.D. 1918. Either way, the rest of my intrigue unfolded along its own
impeccable logic. "Where did you find it?" He salivated. I told him that dear
old Trilipush (of course) and I had uncovered it on one of our many rambles
back in early 1915 just before poor Ralph headed off to his tragic Turkish end.
I was a bit drunk on my creative powers: I told him we had dug it up while
under enemy fire. "Have you been back to the site since?" he asked, bursting
with excitement. "If this was there, perhaps there's more! Mightn't, mightn't his
tomb be near where this was buried?" he burbled.

"Dear boy, I do think so. I do absolutely believe a tomb is waiting for us
down there, and I think I know where. Now listen: the War is almost over."

"Is it? How do you know?" asks my most perfect idiot-tormentor, some
twenty-four hours before the Armistice was signed.

"For heaven's sake, listen. I will have to return to Oxford to finish my
studies before I can come back here to conduct any full-scale excavation, but
I intend to take the opportunity we shall have between now and the time we
are shipped home to do a little more surface digging, to try out our glorious
in the field, you and me, on a preliminary expedition."

Honestly, Bev, I thought he was going to weep. He positively hugged me,
a little boy on Christmas morning with a shiny new train. I was tempted to
engage him in a more manly embrace, but I did not dare spoil the lovely
tableau taking shape.

"Shipped home?" he said suddenly, all rapt with concern. "Can they force
us to go back home? Can't one stay here?" Apparently Australia calls to him
no more than it would to me or you. At least he has learnt that much under
my tutelage.

Well, you should see by now how your surprisingly sage advice is playing
out, Bev. Tomorrow he and I depart for a four-day leave. I showed him the pa•
perwork, already completed, and he gazed at his dear papa with childlike
wonder. Tomorrow he and I are heading south, into the very heart of archae•
ology in this mad, beautiful country. Carter and Carnarvon are doing inter•
esting work in the Valley of the Kings, and I think it would do my career a bit
of good to meet chaps like that now if I can. My orphan is practically wetting
himself to meet them, too, but that, of course, is sadly not to be.

For down there, far from here, in the magical light of desert dusk, hills
and hills away from anything and anyone, complex affairs will work them•
selves out simply, as you predicted they would, and I shall return to normal
life free of any unnecessary weight on my mind.

Have you absolutely fallen for a life in London, Bev? I am thrilled to hear
about your rooms, of course, I simply cannot wait to see them, but I hope you
do not find them too, too comfortable, nothing permanent. Please do not dis•
miss me on this, I am utterly sincere, think hard: Oxford, you know, is where
I simply must be, and then I shall be back here and back there and back and
forth, teaching and digging and writing and teaching and digging and writ•
ing. Doesn't the life appeal to you, just a bit? Half your time in a don's flat in
Longwall Street, and half in a tent in Egypt, a mature and tolerant country,
after all. Mightn't one keep the friends one loves the best near one in such a
life as that?

I shall write again on the 16th, free and light.

Eternally,
H.

(Sunday, 31 December, 1922, continued)

There is neither text nor illustration to explain the tomb's ninth and
final chamber, but this should not surprise us. By now all is clear. It is
asking too much to hope for more explicit illumination.

He prepared his own sepulchre, placed the Master's donated organs
in necessarily simple clay pots at the corners of his own chamber. He
was no sculptor: each pot's lid was inscribed with the name of the ap•
propriate god and an effort to draw their difficult shapes—baboon, fal•
con, jackal, man. He completed copying his Admonitions and to
preserve his name on earth, ran back outside, buried one copy in a
cylindrical jar (Fragment C, discovered 1915), another in a cloth a few
yards away (Fragment A, 1856). A third, limestone copy (Fragment B,
1898) some messenger had been instructed to carry to distant lands but
had in fact stashed not much farther afield. The original and complete
text of the Admonitions he placed in a magnificent coffer in the Second
Antechamber, an extra guarantor of immortality, as all writers merited
an afterlife of a million years.

And then, with whatever strength remained to him, he turned to
face the flickering torchlight, walked one last time the rooms in which
he would await his admission to immortality.

What will the final moments feel like, wonders the last king of
Egypt as he sets to his one remaining task. What will his last breath
taste of, and the first one after it?

His hands shake with foolish fear and hunger. Some of his fingers
are smashed, swollen, broken in battle or from his work on the Master.

His fingers are stained with paint, and they stink still of preservatives
and his father-in-law's guts.

The chemical treatment of his feet and legs will be excruciating, but
with the numbing effect of the slow-acting poisons he will have already
consumed, and with the further comforting knowledge that immortality
is approaching and he has thwarted his enemies for all time, he will be
able to wrap his feet and legs tightly. He will remark how far he has
come in this life, from how low to how high, and how high he will soar
in the next, where his name will ring out forever. The preservative
treatment of his groin and trunk will be almost unbearably painful. But
he will bear it, and wrap himself to his waist. The embalming fluids
across his cheeks feel like ice fire, and the fumes in his nose scorch his
brain. The drops that fall over his parched lips and tongue gag him. His
eyes cloud and burn, but he does not stop. There is no time to stop, for
soon the poisons will complete their work, and he must complete his
own before his departure. He tightly wraps his face and head.

He has rehearsed the solution to his final, intractable problem, prac•
tised it over and over in his solitude, and while no solution is flawless,
this is the best that Fate has allowed him: the long, measured strips of
linen laid out across the floor. Even as the preservative's sting grows
crueller, he clutches the linen in his fist. Lying on the tomb floor, he
rolls, gathering the wrapping as best he can around his arms and trunk
as he goes, finishing the task, he hopes, at the chamber's exact centre,
precisely at the moment of his departure.

Darkness. The king's final pains recede. His breathing stops for a
spell, the length of time no longer measurable. He drifts in silence. And
then he awakens to music. The first face he sees is his father's, already
risen and now standing over him, repentant, servile, restrained, loving.
So lovingly he has with his own gentle fingers opened his son's eyes
from sleep. And now the women enter the room, their almond eyes
striped with malachite kohl, their copper bodies under sheer and cling•
ing shirts. They approach and caress him sweetly. They love him so.

They unwrap him and anoint him with oil. And when they have pre•
pared him, they lead her in, at last: in floats his queen, her long-
fingered hands reaching for him. She is healthy and fresh and only for
him. The food descends from the walls and fills long tables. The new,
unimaginable music grows louder, and his wife leads him away from
life's pain and loneliness. Far beneath him, mere men will daily speak of
him with awe, their honeyed exhalations of his name forming clouds
that will waft him high above the masses of rivals and pedants, above
poverty and mockery, above snobs and villains, secure from enemies
and doubt and betrayal. His mysteries and riddles remain unsolved for
millennia stacked upon millennia until another should find him, em•
brace him, twist and fuse with him, vanish into him, and win, for dis•
coverer and king alike, the eternal love due an immortal name,

Atum-hadu and Trilipush, Trilipush and Atum-hadu, Trilipush, Trili•
push, Trilipush.