The Egyptologist (21 page)

and I showed you how to write Atum-hadu in hieroglyphs. All the
while, your frosty duenna lingered by the front door, talked to the His•
torical Society workers (delighted at the crowd they had drawn, re•
lieved that the police had not broken up the event on decency charges).
What were my impressions of you then? Well, my Miss Finneran was a
lively young woman, mildly but not irrevocably spoilt, and clearly a lit•
tle intoxicated by her first exposure to Atum-hadu. I was not terribly
surprised when she said she would be honoured if I would escort her to
the Museum of Fine Arts at some later date, where she might have the
pleasure of my elucidation of the Egyptian relics on display. Oh yes, do
not permit suspicious Inge to rewrite history, my dear. It was
your
sug•
gestion we meet again, my most forward flirt. I have been your crea•
ture ever since.

Of course, I did not fool myself that you were taken with
me,
pre•
cisely. No, I could see that another twentieth-century woman had
found the words of the XIIIth-Dynasty king to be an overwhelming
eau de cologne.

My darling, I am stuck in Cairo, awaiting my licence to proceed
from the Antiquities Service, and I wonder what you are doing this
very instant. Here it is 17 October, at 11.36 P.M. How I wish I had a
device that allowed me to peer at you right now, a telescope of the most
powerful kind. I would watch you ceaselessly, my love.

Wednesday, 18 October, 1922

Journal:
Nothing at the post. Four days before my Master of
Largesse and the backers will wire and refill my coffers, I set off to
continue purchasing supplies in the markets and speciality stores dedi•
cated to men in my position. A full day, and the activity eases the bore•
dom I was feeling from my forced delay. Paints, brushes, pencils,
chisels, carving knife, electric torch, camp bed: my list is slowly being
filled when, on a quiet side street, I note the storefront of a tailor. I will
need several more suits, for working and socialising, and something
formal for an official Tomb Opening (an event usually involving high

officials of the English, French, and Egyptians, possibly General Al¬
lenby, et cetera).

I pushed through hanging beads and into a well-lit little space
where a tall Egyptian was prematurely stooped from spending years
under this low ceiling, and I was soon in a padded, wicker armchair,
sipping cardamom coffee with the proprietor while two young boys
wheeled in gold-painted cart after cart of fabrics. The tailor and I fin•
gered this and that, discussed the merits of certain cloths for resisting
the heat while still catching the eye. I was impressed enough by ten of
the samples to order suits of them (CCF would have paid ten times as
much in Boston) and stood for my measurements. The triple mirrors
offered me left- and right-handed versions of myself to play with, pro•
files in only my undershorts with my bare feet aligned heel to toe, while
below me a crouching servant measured my legs and called out the
numbers to a scribe cross-legged on a cushion, his sleeves rolled up to
reveal hairless arms with embossed veins like relief maps of river
deltas, and somewhere behind a curtain out of sight, I heard female

whispers and subdued tittering.

A small deposit and the suits will be ready in one week's time, the
25th. Go to tourist agency to postpone departure, booking on the
Cheops.

And then, as I was strolling along, pleased with my purchase,
thinking of my fiancee, I came upon an inspirational sight on a street
corner: a wooden easel with two folding stools where tourists could
pay to have their likeness painted on a convincingly broken piece of
pottery, dressed in Pharaonic garb, surrounded by a hodgepodge of
'glyphs. A fat Egyptian was painting the profile of an American boy
while his parents watched, laughing, trading audible asides at the
artist's expense.

Well, I certainly shall not pose for a tourist's knickknack, but an of•
ficial portrait, begun prior to the opening of Atum-hadu's tomb and
completed after it, would have a certain timeliness to it, a marker in my
career, admired on a wall in Boston or London or Cairo. With a week's

delay still, I have the time. Upon my return to the hotel, I ask the con•
cierge to arrange for the best portraitist he can find to come to my
rooms. I begin my sittings tomorrow.

An evening at the cinema. In the darkened hall, chewing dates and
figs, the natives and I are equally astounded by the moving picture: an
Englishman wrestles a lion, then enters a tent where a beautiful woman
with almond eyes awaits him. Later he battles bandits and enters a
Pharaonic tomb, where he runs his hands through mountains of loose
gold and jewellery. A mummy stands as if alive and attacks the English•
man, but he dispatches the ghoul with a pistol shot.

Thursday, 19 October, 1922

Journal:
Today's activities included two hours of meditation while
the artist pencilled his rough plans onto the canvas. I also found an ex•
cellent craftsman of valises, an unadulterated delight, which I know my
brother Atum-hadu would have savoured in preparing for his travels,
too—the soft scale of the crocodile, the glistening brass of the hasps,
the burnt-black monogram
(A
being only 1/3 the cost of
RMT,
of
course, but that is one of the perquisites of kinghood). Nothing at the
bank today, though of course the wire is not officially due for three
days yet.

Tonight, I toil in the clamour of a little cabaret where the
chicha
smoke forms jinn who embrace their puff-cheeked masters with mas•
saging fingers. I watch the smoker by the door: a nest slowly coils
around his head, the faint echo of an ancestor's mummy wraps, but
each time the door opens to his right, all at once the smoke rushes out,
away, up into the star-flecked, plum-coloured sky. The door closes and
he begins again, shrouding himself top to bottom with smoke; the door
opens and invisible plunderers again unravel his work.

On immortality and "The Tomb Paradox":
Immortality is, of course,
the central issue under the sands. The ancient kings, I would remind
my lay readers, all shared a healthy desire to live forever in a well-

equipped eternity. To achieve this personal permanence, two elements
were necessary:

Margaret:
M., a memory forms like smoke gathering around my
head: that village vicar who would appear when I wandered away from
Father and the Hall. "Tell me, child. Do you believe in the immortality
of the soul?" Aside from him, I do not remember fear in my childhood,
but in the case of this vicar, I can conjure today the varieties and inten•
sities of childish terror I felt at the mention of his name, at the sight of
his face across a street (calibrated before and after he caught sight of
me), the sound of his voice, the feel of his massive, speckled hand on
my shoulder, the smell of his breath, the harsh, changeable weather of
his moods, and that tingling dread, most intense, when he would
present me with some gift.

"Yes," I mumbled, nearly choking on the proffered sweet.

"And what are the requirements for the soul's immortality in ever•
lasting paradise?" He leaned in close to hear my answer, placed his ear
directly before my mouth, where he must have heard the slurping and
crunching of the candy, and I saw deep into that bristled conch shell,
red and flaking from winter cold.

I was
not
trying to mock him, not at that age, Margaret. No, I was
relieved,
for I knew the answer to his question! I had happened to read it
that very day, absorbed until well after dark by Bendix's
Nile Kings
(a
work I can no longer endorse for scholars). I was relieved, relieved,

and I spoke before I heard a faint stammering voice in my brain telling
me to stop: "The survival of your remains and your name. Your name
in chronicles, your body in the mummy wrap, and your heart, lungs, in•

testines, and liver in canopic jars. Figurines of serving girls to arouse
you for the act of re-creation ... " My voice was slowing down at the
same speed his ghastly ear withdrew and was replaced by the smoothly

shaven face (with a red-brown sliver of dried blood) and the so-blue
eyes, and the shards of skin speared and quivering in his eyebrow.

And yet from here the beating that followed seems not to have been
administered to me; I can instead (in this Oriental music here that may
be scarcely changed from that of 3500 years ago) see that beating deliv•
ered to the boy Atum-hadu, still a commoner in the increasing turmoil
of his times, realising slowly but with delight that he was endowed with
gifts that none around him possessed, that his ascent to the very pinna•
cle of his world (though that world was crumbling even as he scaled it)
seemed inevitable. If in his ascent he offended or was forced to aban•
don those around him, the cruel vicars of his world, that was to be ex•
pected, even enjoyed, enjoyed
even in the beatings themselves
("What are
you laughing at, wretch?" I recall my own clergyman asking, as the ex-
boxer-turned-man-of-God's blows rained down harder on the little boy,
somehow already the stronger of the two).

But immortality—that is the central issue, and the basis for what I
term "The Tomb Paradox," which, I notice now, is as good a title for
this book as any other.
The Tomb Paradox: Atum-hadu, Ralph Trilipush, and
the Solution to the Puzzle That Had Lasted Three Millennia.

On immortality and the Tomb Paradox:
The ancient kings required
a fair amount of luggage for a successful journey to the afterlife, and as
much of that luggage appeared to the average man-on-the-Nile to be
gold, jewellery, and luxury furnishings, the temporarily dead king was
certain to attract unwanted visitors into his private tomb whilst he was
in the awkward middle period between dying and rebirth. The honey
of his trappings would draw enough ants to destroy his eternal picnic
and perhaps even his corpse. (And potential tomb-robbers significantly
outnumbered potential tomb residents, as not even ancient Egypt
promised immortality to just any farmer or washerwoman.) Thus, the
kings were torn between building, on the one hand, showy but impene•
trable tombs and, on the other, completely hidden tombs.

The problem with the former: impenetrability over eternity
does not
exist.
Even if the royal tomb architects outthought the wiliest tomb-

robbers for 500 years . . . that is only 500 years, a drop in the ocean.
The problem with the latter solution: even if the king swallows hard
and accepts the humiliation of being buried in an unmarked tomb, far
from the temples built to perform the rituals which would speed him
into the underworld, even if he would surrender being seen as the sort
of king who knows how to throw a funeral and stock a good-looking
tomb, all in order to keep his tomb location a secret (surrendering one
sort of immortality for another), he then faces a malignant question:
just how secret is secret enough?

For, now, observe: your tomb architect certainly knows where your
richly appointed temporary resting place is and how to enter it. He in
turn will use a few hundred workers and slaves, at least, to build, dec•
orate, and stock it. Well, we can solve that, you and I: use prisoners of
war, and then, when the tomb is ready for occupancy, simply slaughter
the men who made it. Of course now we have to bury them some•
where far from the tomb site: how to transport them there, dead or
alive? Now who else knows, who told their cousins to expect them
back from work late tonight, work in Deir el Bahari? And the men
who, at your orders, slaughtered the prisoners — do they suspect why
they did it? Did one squeal to a brother-in-law who needs money?

Loose ends proliferate. As for the architect, the man who knows all
your secrets: reward him! Shut his mouth with treasure, pleasure, and
immortality of his own! Palaces and gold and a fine tomb just for him,
to discourage him from emptying yours the day after you take up resi•
dence in it. You breathe easy, for a moment, and then you recall the
plundered tombs of your ancestors, all of whom thought they had
pulled the wool over the eyes of eternity. Their emptied pits are there
for you to consider whenever you feel like taking a walk out from your
capital in Thebes, to stroll the bluffs and valleys in the moonlight, to
see just where their tombs were ransacked and the authorities, in a
panic, dumped the remnants of their bodies and goods into hastily
constructed caches, group sites where once powerful men and women
now lie on top of each other in crumpled, unravelling heaps, hoping