The Egyptologist (8 page)

[music stops, Kendall shouts the words]

"And mine, too! And mine, too!"
"And mine, too! And mine, too!"

[pointing to guests who, like him, had invested in Hand-of-Atum]

For he sure came to implore us,
And for an hour or do did bore us,
But now, by Isis, Ra, and Horus,
01'Pusby will reward us!

[I should discuss the word
implore
for, if it was not used simply to
make the Mitchells' task of rhyming more manageable, it merits clarifi•
cation. To say the least. I will come back to this point, as to just who
was imploring whom.]

By Isis, Ra, and Horus,
Ol'Pusby will reward us!

The crowd soon mastered this couplet and chanted it for some ex•
hilarating minutes while, to my infinitely deeper pleasure, Margaret
glowed and glittered under the full moon splashing through the ball•
room's glass ceiling, the silver light licking her blue and sparkling eye•
lids (a Cleopatran effect she and Inge had devised for the evening), and
whether she had fallen asleep or was merely savouring the entertain•
ment behind closed eyes, her beauty was then, as always, overwhelm•
ing. I felt at that instant as if I had achieved everything I ever dreamt
of. A paradox, to be sure, as I had not yet set off on this expedition. I
cradled her delicate, pliant hand in mine, each of her long, slender fin•
gers articulated into the graceful arch of riverside narcissi, and she was
then, in her drowsy languor, as always, the personification of so many
ancient drawings, lounging beauties carved in calcite and lime to line
the halls of palaces, the long-fingered serving girls and goddesses
painted on tomb walls to beckon, to arouse, to accompany the home•
sick dead into the next world.

Having carried my exhausted beauty upstairs and kissed her off
to slumber, pulling her bedclothes up to her carved ivory chin, I re-
descended and danced with Inge and the Partners' wives, some of

whom found the close contact of a bona-fide Egyptian explorer rather
too heady a draught for their natural Boston modesty, and more than
once I felt the firm, caressing need to remind the ladies of the proper
hand positions for certain popular dances.

After midnight, the party spilled out of Finneran's ballroom and
across Arlington Street. (An image to cherish forever: my future father-
in-law, self-described "gentle as a lamb," kicking with grunts of exertion
and boyish joy the prone figure of a man who had, as the party crossed
into the Public Garden, attempted to grab Finneran's pocket watch on
the run. The regretful robber called out for help from the police. "Here
we are, son, not to worry," immediately cried four members of the
Boston constabulary whom Finneran had at the party to protect himself
from any liquor-control inspection. And with a quiet "Thank you, offi•
cers," Finneran retreated and allowed the bobbies to deliver their more

professional beating to the cutpurse, interrupting them just once, in order
to withdraw from his whimpering assailant's pocket enough money to
cover "the polishing of my blood-spattered boots, you hooligan.")

CCF had had tents and roasting spits brought out to the Public
Garden; the visible aromas of roast suckling pig rose towards the slen•
der blue-grey clouds, and guests circled the waitresses in their skimpy
Egyptian servant-girl costumes, grabbing—depending on their ruling
appetite—at the waitresses' trays or their buttocks, while other, alco¬
holically calmer revellers wandered down to the duck pond to com•
mandeer the public pedal boats shaped as gigantic swans, or—in rolled
shirtsleeves and sheer slip dresses—waded into the cool water, falling
into each other's slick, goose-pimpled arms.

I stood aside, content in my natural role as an observant explorer,
released, for the moment, from my duties as guest of honour, and I was
happy, so very happy, when from my left, in the shadow between low-
drooping willows that swayed like giant, green jellyfish, I heard my

name gruffly called. Under a dome of willow branches, as fully en•
closed as if we were circus dwarves waiting for a cue to emerge from
under the bearded lady's close, musty hoopskirt, I found myself pleas•
antly hypnotised by the perfect, pulsing orange circle of Finneran's
cigar end, illuminating at its brightest a few filaments of blue smoke
(and presumably my own face), but nothing else. "Wanted to wish you
good luck," said my invisible patron, and the orange circle faded to a
coiled spring of dully glowing grey. "We've all taken our measure of
you. Don't let us down." Orange circle swells and recedes, swells and
recedes. "I never will, CC." "I'll always do what's best for my Margaret,
you know, father and mother both to that little girl." "Of course, CC, of
course." "Happy to have you in the family." "Many thanks." "She
picked you and I approved. I picked you and she approved. Doesn't
matter which, you know." "Of course, CC." Orange circle glows bright
and fades. "Don't know about you English gentry, but family in our
country's a serious issue." "Of course, CC." Orange circle. Pause.
"Keep that in mind is all." "Of course, CC." "People counting on you,
Ralph. Lot of people. Lot riding on you. Lot of trust in you." All of
which was CCF's shy preamble to presenting me with this large
wooden humidor inlaid with swirling black ornamentation and filled
with cigars, each chosen specially by Boston's finest tobacconist and
banded with the black label with silver monogram:
CCF.
And the

orange circle of his cigar end fades and grows, fades and grows . . .

. . . just as this morning, this dawn of 12 October, an orange light is
now appearing over the Nile's eastern bank. I have spent the night
working here on my balcony, sustained by gin-lemonades and sweet
mint tea in glass tumblers painted gold, tracing my finger over the in•
laid ebony swirls of my humidor, now containing a set of fine brushes
and inks to copy the wall illustrations I hope to find in Atum-hadu's
tomb. (I do not smoke cigars, but they should make fine
baksheesh,
and
the box is lovely.) I sit on the still-warm balcony, watch my sun rise,
and examine the lump of sugar half-dissolved in my tea, for all the
world like the crumbling foundation stone of a temple ruin.

I shall be, in some six weeks, thirty years old, an age I have long
hoped to celebrate in this, the country of my dreams, achieving, by that
milestone age, the necessary unparalleled victory to justify thirty years
of life. And, as I consider the party for my departure from Boston, as I
consider the king who has rested undiscovered some 3500 years, I
could almost wish that this moment—here on the fast-brightening bal•
cony of my Cairo hotel — might never end.

I mean something more by this than merely blurting out that I do
not wish to grow older, that I would prefer to be excused from blunder•
ing into corpulent middle age and bleary post-prime. I mean, rather,
that here, in the early summer of one's life, with preparatory glory still
thrumming behind one and seismic triumph perhaps mere weeks

ahead, one desires to hear the soprano of this one particular mosquito
singing in one's
ear forever,
to see these precise midges waver forever in
their nervous indecision, hypnotised by the very sun which will soon
scorch them, to feel the pinprick heat of this glass of mint tea, warming
each crevice of three fingertips forever, to see that sugar's disintegra•
tion pause
forever.
One's blood roars with the desire that somehow this
instant of possibility and potential be seized and held, vibrating and
glowing orange in one's softly closed fist. That one might stroke and ex•
amine this captured moment, feel its velvety tread in one's palm, that I
might remain quivering on the brink rather than tumbling headlong
into the future, until I have had my fill of the present. Or, think of it
like this, Reader: one climbs a high, steep hill. Then, after years and

years of climbing, one sees the crest within reach and one realises that,
upon achieving that crest, only two possibilities remain: up and over, to
begin an accelerating descent, or .. . to continue moving in the
same
di•
rection one has grown accustomed to and fond of, to
continue
the way
one has come, up and up, to ignore the fallible earth that ceases to rise,
but to rise oneself nevertheless.

And if you should sit up for a moment from your soft easy chair and
wonder, Why? Why Egypt? Why the desire to rummage in the dust? I
can only suggest that the kings of Egypt kept climbing. They mastered

those frilly, fleeting moments, imprisoned them in soft cages. In their

•wrapped corpses with their organs bottled in canopic jars, and in their
picture-alphabet and in their beast-headed gods, the best Egyptians
lived with the certainty that they were owed eternity, that they lived
and would live forever in a present of their own choosing, unhaunted
by the past, unthreatened by the future, luxuriously entertained in a
present they could extend as long as they wished, releasing these
savoury moments on their own terms, not at the imperious demand of
mere days, nights, suns, moons.

Margaret, may I share with you a darker memory of my shining
youth? It is not the sort you prefer, but it makes a point. As a boy, I re•
call a village vicar berating me
(r
optional) for my obsessive interest in
the Egyptians. (This would, of course, happen only when my father
was abroad on expedition and unable to protect me from the vile
clergyman, and I would wander away from the Hall, roam into the vil•
lage near our estate. Where the vicar did not realise who I was, so far
from my family grounds.) At any rate, time after time, he would appear
unannounced. I was easy to surprise, as from a very early age I was
generally bent over my labours, wonderfully ignorant of all that hap•
pened around me. And he would snatch my work from me, crumple up
hard-won hieroglyphs. He would, with a noisy, liquorish menace, un•
cork the usual cant: "Boy, how can you think it wise to truck with this
culture of death?" Even at ten I knew the correct answer to that cata•
clysmic catechism: "Right you are, Father. Much better to stick with
the life-embracing imagery of a cult that worships a bleeding corpse
nailed to bits of wood." Of course, I had to be in the mood for a thrash•
ing, or worse, if I chose that path.

But the point, which I understood even at that age: Egypt was

not — I must repeat for Readers who still do not know it—a culture of
death, for all the mummies and bottled lungs, the jackal-men and
cobra-queens. The Egyptians were the inventors of immortality, the
first men who saw they could live forever.

Atum-hadu wrote:

The gods and I walk slowly arm in arm
And sometimes we do not walk at all,
But sit upon a rock and watch the charm

Of two goats f ing behind a peasant's wall.

— (Quatrain 13, Fragment C only, from
Desire

ant) Deceit in Ancient Egypt
by Ralph M. Trilipush,
Collins Amorous Literature, 1920)

Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home
Sydney, Australia

December 6, 1954
Mr. Macy,

In my experience of human behaviour (and I've seen all there is to see, it's fair
to say), I've concluded there aren't but five motivations for a man to do anything.
They're hardly mysterious, you know: money, hunger, lust, power, survival. That's
all there is. You hear in the courtrooms and in the cinema all sorts of fancy-dress
explanations why someone becomes Prime Minister or kills his neighbours. But if
you listen hard, it's all just the same five balls, juggled up in the air, decorated with
distracting words. No one ever did a damn thing but for one of those five.

Which brings us to the tale of Paul Caldwell and Catherine Barry, Bolshevik
and former librarian, a tale of a power-hungry traitor, a manipulative woman
playing on the emotions of a vulnerable young man, leading the weak into cor•
ruption. The story of Paul's tragic death in Egypt begins right here, when he's
eight or nine years old in Sydney, pushed towards his doom by Catherine Barry,
cold, dangerous, terribly beautiful.

I am surrounded by my reconstructions of Miss Barry's words (July 10th,
1922), a typically self-justifying letter from her, an interview I did with her brother
(July 11th, 1922), and the summary I wrote for my final report back to London. I
also have the letter from Ronald Barry (the brother), engaging me to find any evi•
dence of Paul Caldwell's survival and, if he was alive, to procure his address dis•
creetly. Ronald, I'm sure, meant to kill Caldwell. It obviously never came to that,
and it's fair to point out no one'd ever hired me to
protect
Paul Caldwell.

So my memory's feeling well-primed, no matter the shouting coming from