The Egyptologist (36 page)

cats fed, and with an impressive train of new gear, though before this
adventure is done I will have to go to Cairo myself for some of the
more critical scientific equipment. Also, tonight I must send him for
mosquito netting if I am to sleep outdoors again—my arms resemble
one of my father's relief maps of the Himalayas.

We began at once, driving wedges under the door, digging as we
went along its top and sides. The work is painstaking, and by lunch we
have dug a space around the door's perimeter about a foot deep but still
have not loosened it. We have concluded our only choice is to run

ropes behind and around it and then with all twelve of our arms control
its descent onto its outside face, onto padding to protect any micro•
scopic inscriptions invisible to my lenses, on top of rollers we can tie di•
rectly to the donkeys' harnesses. Back to it.

5.00 — I am now able to discern a seam where the top surface of the
door abuts something, probably the ceiling enclosing the space behind
the door. I am able to place the first wedges into this seam, hammering
bars into the slim resulting space, and gently prying the block of the
door away from its frame until one of the first wedges falls out of view,
behind the seam, and we all hold our breath as we hear it click against
stone. We are nearly there. I insert a testing rod into the space where
the wedge fell (a space -we would already be in, curse the Metropolitan
Museum of New York, if we had enough men and were not forced to
lurk in the shadows like criminals). I perform a candle test to assure no
poisonous gases leak from the crevice. There is not enough space to see
into or to insert a torch so, eager as I am for a look, I call a break for
the men to rest. They chew jujubes, say nothing, grin at me whenever
they catch my eye.

7.30—An hour of backbreaking pulling before the first motion of
the door is achieved and I am able to lower a small candle inside the
tomb and press my eye to the space. At first my vision cannot adjust
to the dark, to the haloed, wick-speared cone of the light, unstirred
by any moving air, nor can I yet see what I hope to see (shadows,
winking metals), and for a long moment for all of us, there is only

breathless anticipation. "What do you see, curse you?" mutters
Ahmed in English. "Immortality!" I say (change the epigraph from
Abdullah to Ahmed, though the bugger hardly deserves his name
mentioned at all).

Finally, a space clarifies itself, walls of a dusty white, a section of a
similar floor, but little else. By nightfall we have succeeded only in
clearing the door far enough from its frame that we will be able tomor•
row, with fresh muscles and a night's sleep, to succeed in lowering it. I
authorise Ahmed to return with extra hands and I send the
men
home.

Monday, 13 November, 1922

11.00 A.M. —Ahmed, late but with six men today, arrived at 8.30.
Paid five salaries to date, and the two new men for today only. We have
just now lowered the door onto its padded transport, crushing flat the
transport cylinders almost at once. It must weigh, we agree, nearly
2000 pounds, and the men strained to lower it safely, and the two new
men hobbled off doubled over, clutching their backs, but the job is

done and I was immediately down a single step and into my chamber
with an electric torch. The air—hot, thick, immobile for 3500 years —
was delicious. The door had stood at the centre of one wall of a square
chamber, approximately fifteen feet to a side, perhaps seven feet tall.
Every surface was a uniform, smooth, yellow-white stone. Of objects,
wall decoration, statuary, footprints, guardian gods, wall inscriptions, a
later inventory will perhaps be able to reveal what I have been unable
to see so far, alone and with my one torch. But I would say, tentatively,
that of these, for the time being, I would have to say it appears proba•
bly that there is very little and conceivably none at all to speak of so far.

I stand and write in what I am for now forced to call "the Empty
Chamber" of the tomb of Atum-hadu. A map would appear thus:

(FIG. C: THE EMPTY CHAMBER)

Despite my explicit orders, I found Ahmed stepping into the Empty
Chamber. "Out!" I cried. "This space cannot tolerate amateurs." He did
not move or acknowledge me, just swept his torch around the walls,
and I watched misinterpretations infect his tiny mind. He sighed and
stalked out. What difference can it make to him? He is paid for his
time, surely the slower the better for salaried men. "Send the men home
for the day," I called after him. "You and four men at first light tomor•
row." For I needed the rest of today to consider and to perform careful
analysis of this room.

Now it is nightfall. I do not judge Ahmed's reaction with harshness.
I, too, might despair and write the word
disappointment
rather than s
uc-
cess
here, were I not better informed. Now, observe: it is precisely
Ahmed's ignorance and childishly predictable frustration that are the
key issues here, the best defence that the architect of Atum-hadu's
tomb could conceive. By the flickering lamplight here in the Empty
Chamber, I lay on my cot and I understand precisely what such a room
means. Imagine a tomb-robber in ancient days. Though we know now
that there never were robbers in this tomb, definitively none, the archi•
tects did have to plan for them. So, imagine the architect preparing for
the thief. For the thief, imagine a man like Ahmed, who has with some
scoundrelly mates exerted vast effort to get past the massive door they
found by chance or guile. At last, skulking around so as not to be seen
by whatever authorities took an interest at the time, they stumble into

the transit point of the final Lord of the Nile and they find in the form
of this empty room a smiling apology: "Nothing to be found here, old
chum, off you go to plunder elsewhere." For none but a keen-eyed soul
mate will notice the faint outline at the back wall, nothing less than an•
other door, nearly invisible by clear intention but indubitably there.

And even R. M. Trilipush, the king's rightful discoverer, did not notice
it until nearly 8.00 P.M., his men having gone, and his own spirits a lit•
tle troubled.

(FIG. D: THE EMPTY CHAMBER, CORRECTED )

A gentle chiselling and dusting, a few hammered wedges, and there
is no question about it at all. Tomorrow we proceed deeper into this re•
markable labyrinth laid out for us by our lord Atum-hadu, this puzzle
which is also in its turn a solution to the different puzzle presented to
the king himself, the most brilliant solution to the most horrifically
complex Tomb Paradox in the history of this extraordinary land.

Consider Quatrain 78 (ABC, from
Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt,

Harvard University Press, 1923):

No falcon will spy on us, no saluki hound renowned for sight
Will see as I take Isis roughly, her mouth and her rear.

When Ma'at's wet kiss is to my left and Sekhmet's breast to my right
Mortal enemies, thieves, traitors will all wander above us,

blind in a desert sere.

As pretty a synopsis of both the Tomb Paradox and the delights of
the underworld as one could hope to find. And for any ancient lucky
enough to find Atum-hadu's entry, inside it there was only a discourag•
ing room, apparently already plundered. Let us form an hypothesis as
to how the Tomb Paradox could be honoured here: we can imagine that
Atum-hadu arranged that the man who would seal the second, inside
door (Door B) would be killed by the man who later sealed Door A,
who in turn was marked for subsequent murder by a third man, who
knew nothing of the tomb location at all, or of the purpose behind his
lethal contract. Atum-hadu's death is followed by two others, unrelated,
inexplicable even to their perpetrators and hardly noticed at all in the
permanent nightfall which had overtaken Egypt by the end.

Tomorrow, we penetrate our king's tomb, interrupt his avid inter•
course with his eternal bedmates. Tonight, sleeping in his Empty
Chamber, I can almost hear him, breathing steadily, sated, knowing
that his camouflaging murders have been carried out to his instruc•

tions, that his women will pleasure him forever, that he was more clever
than our resentful mother, Time herself.

Tuesday, 14 November, 1922

Ahmed returns, shamefaced, delighted with Door B. "Milord Trili¬
push, your falcon's eye and bloodhound's nose and unfailing heart are a
model to us all and a symbol of all the gifts the Englishman offers Egypt."

We begin the same painstaking process again, but now in flickering
torchlight and shirt-drenching heat, as we outline the placement of the
second door. We double-check and triple-check it for seals, inscrip•
tions, markings of any sort, and I am pleased to find none, confirming
beyond any question my hypothesis as to the function of the Empty
Chamber. I give each of the men a turn with the magnifying glass, and
the six of us agree: blank.

Now, two of them stand guard outside, two serve as runners to fetch
water and tools as requested, while I chisel with care and precision, and
Ahmed holds the torch, mostly to stop him pacing like an old woman.

The outline of the door deepened and clarified itself quickly, as if
the white-yellow wall was a very superficial camouflage and we were
now into the darker dirt of complicity with our waiting king. It is clear
that several crowbars will be necessary, and as there is a slight incline
to the Empty Chamber—descending from the cliff path down to the
second door—it will likely require a wheeled stretcher and a strong one
at that to move the second door out of the tomb, and it will have to be
secured on such a transport precariously on its side to fit through the
space left by Door A, unless the Antiquities Service decides to leave
Door B ajar,
in situ,
for a purist
frisson
in tourist season.

Given all these complexities and the impossibility of thieves making
any headway with such a barrier, I left the men to stand guard and
sleep in the Empty Chamber under their vulture-cobra-sphinx-Horus-
consumes bedsheets, and I returned to town. I wonder what family
lives the men have that they are not expected home and can sleep in the
desert on a moment's notice.

At the post, there is a letter from my fiancee, dated twenty-four
days ago (a lifetime ago, before our find), and there is a cable from my
Master of Largesse, proving himself the worthy equal of any who ever
held that title: WELL DONE! SEND DETAILS. CREDIT COMING. Purchase
crowbars, food, et cetera.

And now, from this distance, dusk on my terrace at Villa Trilipush,
an anti-malarial cocktail in hand, Maggie purring on my lap, the
gramophone singing, I imagine what awaits me behind Door B, the
shadows cast against the white walls by the torchlight, the door behind
us, the crowbars dropped in wonder. Tomorrow.

Oct. 21

Hey-ho, Ralphie!

While you're off chasing black girls around the casbah (oh,
yes, sir, I went to the moving pictures the other night and now I