The Egyptologist (7 page)

BOOK: The Egyptologist

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in Cairo until we had cleared, cleaned, and catalogued each breath-
stealing treasure from Atum-hadu's tomb.

Reader, as I sit today, at the humming conclusion of this adventure,
with my dear friend and colleague, the explorer Howard Carter, both
of us guests in the home of our dear friend, Pierre Lacau, the elegant
Director-General of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, some three
miles from the Hotel of the Sphinx, where I began my journey in Oc•
tober, three months ago, I gaze out on the evening Nile and invite you
to join me on the magnificent adventure of a lifetime, 3500 years in the
making.

Professor Ralph M. Trilipush
18 January, 1923

Residence of the Director-General of the Antiquities Service
Cairo, Egypt

[RMT—Verify 24 November and 18 January before typesetting.]

Journal:
11 October, and I have just finished composing certain
necessary background elements of this work, to be assembled in the
proper order later. I can now begin my log from the beginning, wel•
coming you, Reader, to Egypt.

I reached Cairo yesterday, my first visit to this wondrous city since
1918. I came by rail from Alexandria, after disembarking from the
Cridtoforo Colombo,
which vessel bore me here (after a train ride from
Boston) from New York, via London and Malta, where I passed a very
relaxing week in preparation for my coming work. I have now estab•
lished my temporary headquarters here in the gold-and-pink Pharaoh
Suite of Cairo's veined-marble Hotel of the Sphinx. While I have no
taste for luxury, I do need a certain amount of space to perform the
myriad tasks I have at hand, and the millions more to come, and the
consortium of Boston's wisest and wealthiest Egyptological experts and
collectors who are financing this expedition would not wish to have its

leader worn down—before he had even moved south to the site—by
residence in substandard lodging.

For the extent of an archaeologist's tasks sometimes surprises the
layman. By way of example, I shall, when at the site, be the Director of
a vast enterprise, commanding an army of workmen, responsible for
their salaries, behaviour, honesty, efficiency, and well-being. I shall be
measuring, diagramming, cataloguing, and often preserving in some
haste several hundred objects, ranging in size from a jewelled earring to
the exquisitely carved and painted walls of a massive sepulchre. I shall
be negotiating with bureaux of the Egyptian Government, which, for
its own protection, is still overseen whenever necessary by the guiding

wisdom and financial probity of the French and English Governments.
I shall simultaneously be composing a scholarly work, detailing events
three and a half millennia old, and likely translating newly found erotic,
political, and acerbically witty texts written by a genius in a language
that has not been in common use for well over two thousand years.

And I shall be preparing detailed reports back to the wise Partnership
that is financing all of this frenzied toil. Thus, if I have begun my trip in
some style, it is dictated by scientific necessity.

That said, for all its vaunted luxury, the Hotel of the Sphinx dis•
plays Egypt's creeping decadence. It is a tourist hotel (in a land that to
me has always been an explorer's frontier or a soldier's outpost), and it
represents the modern Egyptian's apparently insuperable innate urge
to barter his noble patrimony for a shilling. The hotel's emblem —
stitched to every conceivable surface — sports a nonsensical group of
vulture, sphinx, and cobra, surmounting a motto—an extract of
hieroglyphs which warn (to whom I cannot imagine, since who
amongst the hotel's guests could be expected to read hieroglyphs?)
HORUS CONSUMES THE HEARTS OF THE WICKED.

Horus, ancient Egypt's falcon-headed sky-god embodied by every
Egyptian king, would perhaps hesitate to endorse this hotel, and yet,
even here amidst the faux-Pharaonic trappings of a fanciful antiquity,
through the open patio windows, from out over the Nile, the smell and
feel of the real Egypt—
my
Egypt—waft in, and all the modern
luxe
of the

suite curls and crumbles under the hot exhalation of the kingdom as it
was, sighing to me from across millennia. Atum-hadu, in his power and
his glory, summons me even here, as I sip (without the worry one felt,
even in Finneran's private barroom, about the American liquor-lawmen)
lemonade and gin from cut crystal on the balcony overlooking my Nile,
and revolving seventy-eight times per minute on the gorgeous, colossal
cabinet-model Victrola XVII I have installed next to the balcony door, is
"He's a Fella Who Gets His Way (and Who Can Blame Him?)."

In this respite from my labours, I caress with undiluted joy the rec•
ollection of my recent send-off from Boston, though it seems ages ago,
a party whose guests included the expedition's financial backers and
their ladies, celebrating both our approaching good fortune in Egypt
and my engagement to the daughter of the house. The images coalesce
into clear memory: crisp evening attire and the new light gowns, glow•
ing paper lanterns, and a Negro jazz orchestra stationed in the garden
courtyard, its music drifting in and out of the open doors and windows
of Chester Crawford Finneran's Commonwealth Avenue mansion in
the unseasonable heat of early September:

Canis and man is

A grand combination.
Gee, my dog is swell!

The already dense Egyptian decor in the Finneran home prolifer•
ated for the party: CCF had installed at the head of the ballroom two
golden thrones on a faux-brick dais. As the climax of the evening's
events, he walked Margaret and me up the three steps to our seats
before topping us with outrageous (and structurally inaccurate)
Pharaonic crowns, then scowled at the bandleader, told him to "give
the jungle noise a rest," and lifted his goblet, bringing an alcoholic tear
to an eye or two with the words "Now, desert sands aside, there's no
treasure in this whole wide world means a thing to me next to that little
girl up there on the throne where she belongs." A flurry of "aww" and
"ohhh" and "CC's so sweet" fluttered in the air before the grinning old

bear batted his paws at the noise and it retreated. "But that don't mean
you're comin' back empty-handed, Pushy!" Vast amusement. "No, folks,
folks, serious now, what dad wouldn't just leap at the chance to pick up
a son-in-law like this one, hey? English gentleman, well-educated, ex•
plorer. Honestly, Margaret and me are of one brain on this: we both feel
like the luckiest gal in the world! Now then, you go get our gold, Pushy,
my boy, and if you come back with piles of it, ingots and jewels and
crowns, well"—wily squint through winding coils of cigar smoke —
"that'll just about pay Margaret's dowry!" His splendid oratory extorted
its just homage from the gathered party, while my fiancee and I waved
from under our tipping toppers, and I squeezed Margaret's hand to

keep her awake, as the excitement had not surprisingly exhausted her in
her fragile health. She smiled through heavy lids and murmured, "This
is really swell, isn't it, love? All this fiesta. I could do with a siesta."
Even in her fatigue, she was celestial, grateful to her father and me. The
crowd cheered our nuptials and the success of my mission, perhaps not
precisely in that order, as CCF had muscled several of the party into be•
coming partners in Hand-of-Atum Explorations, of which he is Presi•
dent and I am a shareholding Technical Consultant. The band started

up again with a peculiar fox-trot, presumably appropriate to Egyptian
exploration and an age-old piece of zoological trivia:

If you prefer not to hump on just one bump
Then you 'd best be wary of the dromedary.

But if you'd like to jump and srump and pump
Between two big lumps
—

"Not so fast, boys," interrupts CCF, and the music stumbles to silence
one instrument at a time, a sizzling cymbal the last to get the message,
"because we've got a little surprise," and CCF calls up Kendall and
Hilly Mitchell, Beacon Hill jollies I had met at an investors' meeting
and then again when, at CCF's request, I had gone for some very dis•
creet cocktails with Kendall at his exceedingly discreet club, •where he

interviewed me about my background and Egypt with alarming tenac•
ity and secrecy, an interrogation I simply could not understand until
this very moment, when Hilly laughingly tossed her scarcely sheathed
hips and bumped the Negro from the piano bench, and Kendall loos•
ened his tie and struck a
boulevardier
pose. While Margaret struggled to
prop her heavy eyelids, I listened to our musical tribute, composed by
these two party personalities, delirious with cash and inherited real es•
tate, undeterrable donors of personalised song lyrics for gala events on
Beacon Hill and in Back Bay. I transcribe here from the drink-ringed
dedication copy of the lyrics I was subsequently presented ("To Ral-
phie! Here's hopin'ya dig up a 'mummy' fer yer new 'daddy'! Lotsa
good good luck, from your Yank pals H & K Mitchell!"). Kendall war•
bled while Hilly jangled up and down the keyboard with clumsy fists:

Pushed early down from Oxford,
With his trouders 'round his ankles,
Came young R. M. Trilipush

And he'll admit the mem'ry rankles.

Well, off he went to Egypt

Where he was meant to fight the Kaiser,
But after several years at war

He left the Kaiser none the wiser.

Instead he sweated in the Orient
Upon his knees and hands.
(Now, try not to be prurient,

I mean that he was digging in the sands!)

He dug and dug with another limey
Until, as Boche guns assailed them,
Those two Brits, they shouted "Blimey!"
For their spades had sure not failed them.

["Unlike ours!" I recall CCF bellowing at this point, referring to, I
believe, some waiters who were slow in fetching him another drink.
"Oh, Daddy, really," my Margaret gently chided him, her knees pulled
up under her chin.]

What they found that day
All of us surely know

It keeps our wives awake at night

And makes our (ahem!) imaginations grow.

They found terrific hieroglyphic,*,
The writings of some Pharaoh,

Which Pusby published in plain English,
And thrilled the market to its marrow.

[At his club, I had corrected Mitchell several times, explaining with
increasing frustration that
hieroglyphic
was an adjective and
hieroglyph
the
noun, and that his use of the term
Pharaoh
for an Egyptian king prior to
the XVIIIth or XlXth Dynasty was thoroughly anachronistic and,
frankly, grated on my ear. The Xlllth-Dynasty Atum-hadu would have
been referred to as "King" not by the Hebraicised metonymical device
per-o.
I repeated this easily a dozen times as silver shaker after silver
shaker came to the table, filled (the waiter loudly announced each time,
for the benefit of whom I cannot say) with "your iced tea, Mr. Mitchell!"
That said, his use of
hieroglyphic
when he meant to say
hieroglyph
I now
grudgingly acknowledge as a possible debt to rhyming.]