The Egyptologist (40 page)
with Ahmed's solemn word he will watch them and enforce my will, so
that I can go to the bank for news of the letter of credit due today, the
wire of the 16th being too small to consider as anything but a bonus
from CCF personally.
The bank clerk shows solicitude for my injury but regrets to inform
me that as of yet, et cetera. Return to the site.
It is early evening before I am able to recarve the lost inscription
into the plaster, and then give the go-ahead to start placing wedges.
The men set to the work with all the pent-up energy of young boys re•
covered from a long illness, and their enthusiasm is catching. Ropes,
wedges, cylinders are in place by midnight, and everyone readily agrees
to stay the night if necessary.
Their childish moods ought not to surprise me. I blame myself for
any problems we have encountered, for the men do not stand to gain
what I do, nor do they have my passion. They need a firm hand and a
guiding voice. I explain myself to them, and we understand each other
again. We renew a brotherhood that forms in only a few experiences in
a man's life.
Thursday, 23 November, 1922
Earliest hours after midnight. I write by lantern light now as the
men share a meal, and stretch their legs and aching backs before we re•
turn to this final door, this Door C. Behind it lie a tomb, a treasury, a
history, a genius now black and crumbling under his linen wraps. The
explorer must pause here, to acknowledge the responsibility, the vast
expanse of time about to be breached.
The men are ready. It is now . . .
Later. Dawn rises on Deir el Bahari, but the sun is too faint to illu•
minate a mystery unlike anything in this mystery-wrapped land. The
Pillar Chamber joins our map, and Atum-hadu's humour is unmistak•
ably in play:
(FIG. F: THE FIRST SIX CHAMBERS, 23 NOVEMBER, 1922)
How my map has sprouted in the sleepy sunlight of 23 November!
The new team will arrive with Ahmed tomorrow, and now I have the
day to myself at the site to rest, make measurements, take notes, clean
up our debris, and prepare for our assault on Door G, "the Great Por•
tal." Carter's face at this discovery, I can scarcely imagine. He would
cross his arms, keep his silence, reveal nothing.
But first, I must relate the events of the past eight hours, the horri•
ble and the wonderful, the betrayals and the triumphs. I must remem•
ber to sleep today.
Door C required our muscles and our hearts, but she finally yielded
to us more easily than her violent predecessor. We were able to lower
her until such time as I can manage her trip out of the tomb to a labora•
tory for careful preservation and examination, before her final journey
to a permanent home in a central gallery at the Cairo Museum. By our
electric torches, the inside face of Door C (its top surface now) seemed
disappointingly blank, and I had to block the new opening and shout at
the men to stop their griping about how I had wasted their time when
the sledgehammer would have served. I ordered them all outside. I
entered the next room alone, my heart pounding, my foot and ankle
nicely numb. What I found, I must admit, baffled me: a narrow niche,
quite empty at first glance (a more thorough investigation will have to
wait—first I must commit to paper my accurate recollection of the
order of events). And no more than three feet in front of me, directly
across from Door C, another of Atum-hadu's maddening doors
(Door D). A bare, thin room—perhaps a granary, I thought, though
without grain. A room for statues to guard the tomb? But then where
were the statues? I heard the men back in the Chamber of Confusion,
debating something in their private dialect. I continued examining
Door D and the walls of this niche, trying to comprehend Atum-hadu's
bizarre sense of mortuary security, trying to unravel his Tomb Paradox
alongside him. A burial place for wives? Servants? Animals? Storage
for weaponry? Or clothing since turned to dust? Food? I stood still in
my deep consideration, I cannot say for how long. I felt a tug on my
sleeve. "Lord Trilipush," said Ahmed. "Please, sir, come outside. Let us
break bread, take some air. Let me tend to His Lordship's unfortunate
foot while His Lordship determines our next step." Ahmed's kindness,
all the more impressive for being so damned rare, moved me. I hobbled
out of the baffling tomb, leaning on my cane. He led me down the cliff
path in the purple darkness and set me on a rock, brought me a meal
and hot coffee, asked me what we had found and what it meant. He
changed my bandage with a nurse's touch, though he need not have
bothered being gentle, as the reeking, blue-black injury is entirely with•
out sensation. We chatted for half an hour, perhaps longer, and the first
streaks of pearl appeared in the east. It was something of a college tuto•
rial for him, and a chance for me to expose my cramped thoughts to the
air. I tried several hypotheses, explained to him the complexity of every
Tomb Paradox, and the fiendish complications of this one in particular.
He understood, and I was pleased to see an intelligence in his eyes.
After this respite, though, I was eager to work. But Ahmed was hungry
for learning, and his questions about excavation and preservation,
about my attempt to restore the inscription on the front of Door C for
curatorial purposes, about the likely wealth of an end-of-dynasty tomb
were all insightful. We chatted on.
It was only when they reappeared that I realised I had not seen the
three other men for some time. They came down the path towards us,
shimmering out of the murky light, white with dust, spitting, and they
hurled their beastly hammers to the ground. "Nothing!" they shouted
to Ahmed in suddenly distinct Arabic. "Nothing. Pillars and nothing at
all." And they mounted three of the donkeys and trotted off into the ris•
ing sun, not caring what path they took.
"What have those swine done?" I cried and hopped back to the
tomb. Oh, what had they not done? The dust and rubble bore grim,
stony witness: my men had been overwhelmed with greed. They had
destroyed Door D, revealing a second narrow room and Door E,
which they destroyed, revealing a third narrow room and Door F,
which they destroyed, revealing the haunting Pillar Chamber.
The rage I felt is difficult to describe here. I have nothing in my life
to compare it to. Even as I write now, hours later, my eyes fill with
tears, my pen shakes. I can only ask myself, and not without scorn,
Why was I surprised? When in my life have people not proven them•
selves to be precisely like this? No one can be trusted, except those
rare ones we love, the wives and fathers.
The betrayal of me, of science, of their own heritage, of Ahmed, the
man who had honoured them with this work! He stood next to me,
shaking his head, and his anger was plain. For observe: I cannot say
what information had been pounded to dust. I cannot say what small
treasures were lifted off the floor and wound in the criminals' head
wraps or in their gowns as they left, protesting too loudly in clear Ara•
bic that they had found "nothing." When the time comes, I see now, I
will have no choice but to tell the Antiquities Inspector that there never
were Doors D, E, and F. My hands are tied. Their crime has forced me.
I sent Ahmed away, though the loyal man wished to stay by my
side, explore the damage and the new rooms right with me. But his or•
ders were clear: fire those men, hire honest replacements who will be
paid at the end of every three weeks, rather than weekly. Off he went,
muttering in our shared dismay.
I turned back to my tomb, howling at her violation, but still a tri•
umph. The three "Royal Storage Chambers"—identical, symmetrical,
of the most brilliant design in their simplicity and solidity, their elegant
proportions and mystical purity—were undoubtedly designed to hold
paraphernalia specifically necessary for the king's voyage to the under•
world. And, with no question at all, the three chambers held, in this
order: food (long since decomposed); incense (lit at the time of burial
and now vaporised, though the 3500-year-old, sealed-in smell of it was
still faintly but unmistakably present and astoundingly like one of Mar•
garet's perfumes, the one in the little beaded carafe shaped like an an•
cient amphora); and gold coins or small jewellery, something shiny, of
medium value, but just small enough to be grabbed by donkey-thieving
ingrates whose names I do not even know.
But, ah! The Pillar Chamber! Here Atum-hadu has left us an
enigma to tickle us a bit longer before all is revealed behind Door G
(which the vandals apparently did not see in their dust clouds, too
eager to stomp off with their burgled baubles and showy protests of
disappointment).
I have just spent several hours of the afternoon and evening thirstily
measuring and conducting an inch-by-inch survey of each and every
surface of the Pillar Chamber. The Pillar Chamber is approximately
twenty-five feet long and contains twelve identical floor-to-ceiling stone
pillars, round, brilliantly white and unmarked, their perfect cylindrical
shape a mathematical accomplishment of such internal significance that
any further ornamentation to the room would have been vulgar or per•
haps even counterproductive to Atum-hadu's pious requirements. The
spacing of the pillars is regular, four rows of three—each pillar is about
twelve feet in circumference—never very good at maths — so that
means about three feet in diameter—their placement makes it difficult
to walk across the room quickly, so any ancient tomb-robber would
have had difficulty making a speedy entrance or escape—their pro•
portions are almost certainly mathematically precise and significant,
and if one takes the proportion of the total space in the room, as in
25 X 15 feet = 375 square feet, of which 12 pillars X π r
2
where
r =
1.5
1.5
75
150
2.25
3
.1
4
900
2250
67500
7.0650
12
141300
706500
84.7800
so then 84.78 square feet of the room are pillars, meaning a proportion
of 84.78/375, or precisely the proportion used in— There were, of
course, twelve dynasties preceding Atum-hadu's own, so the pillars
represent without question the twelve previous dynasties, which he
viewed himself as protecting, symbolically, in his burial—zodiacally,
the placement of the pillars represents the placement astronomically of
the constellation we call Sirius, which the Egyptians took as the celes
tial incarnation of Isis, and to thank her for her assistance guiding
Atum-hadu to—we must seriously consider the likelihood that the pil
lars contain valuable material cached within their hollow forms, and
must somehow be stabilised and opened—the ancient robbers whom
Atum-hadu feared more than anything would have found their
progress through the tomb stymied by fine threads running between all
twelve pillars, making the Pillar Chamber nothing less than a deadly
spider's web entrapping the fat flies in filaments laced with a lethal poi
son known only to the ancient magicians of— Twelve tribes of israel
