C (35 page)

“The old sets operated through coherence,” he explains. “The signal made the particles all jump together and conduct the current, in bursts either short or long. That’s how dots and dashes were—”

“What are you talking about?” she asks.

“Radio,” he tells her. “It’s a gathering-together too.”

Falkiner, eavesdropping, grunts in amusement, then calls Laura over to assist him further with his plotting. In the evening, after the insects have descended and the nets have gone up, they eat pigeon and date again. Falkiner gets drunk again. This time he declaims, in Serge’s honour, from “The Book of the Pylons”:

“Homage to thee, saith Horus, O thou first pylon of the Still-Heart. I have made my way. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee …”

“I recognise this bit,” Serge comments.

“Lady of tremblings,”
Falkiner intones,
“with lofty walls, the sovereign lady, mistress of destruction, who
—wait
—who sets—sett
eth—
setteth in order the words which drive back the whirlwind and the storm … Saith the pylon: Pass on, thou art pure …”

“Pylons?” Serge asks Laura. “Is he making this bit up?”

“No,” she resumes her role as annotator. “Pylons were gateways—to both temples and the underworld.”

“Homage to thee, saith Horus,”
Falkiner continues,
“O thou second pylon of the Still-Heart. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee: Lady of heaven, mistress of the world, who terrifieth the earth from the place of thy body …”

“The deceased, who was himself awaiting recombination, had to pass them all,” Laura explains, “naming the guardian of each.”

And name them Falkiner does. By the sixteenth pylon it’s
Terrible One, Lady of the Rainstorm, who planteth ruin in the souls of men, Devourer of dead bodies;
by the twentieth it’s
Goddess with face turned backwards, Unknown One, Overthrower of him that draweth nigh to her flame …
The twenty-first speaks of her
secret plots and counsels
. Then comes a long list of the names of all the pylons’ secondary guards:

“Tchen of At is the name of the one at the door; Hetepmes is the name of the second; Mes-sep is the name of the third; Utch-re is the name of the fourth …”

The crew, again, look on indifferently. Eventually the recitation fades out, but Serge hears its loops and repetitions in the chafing of the anchor-chain against the
Ani
’s side, the clicks and beeps of insects, long into the night.

By the third day, the landscape has grown more hilly and less fertile; now the desert extends all the way to the Nile’s banks. Its formlessness seems to have overrun not only the feeble effort to contain it within field-boundaries but also any attempt to box it temporally: today, it’s no longer epochs that stare back at Serge from it, but time’s basic units themselves, its material particles, freed of their hourglass-walls and multiplied to infinity. He still has the impression of being held in a machine, but now it’s one whose operator has abandoned it—or, perhaps, died inside it, at its very core—leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore. Actions are reduced to their own remnants: Pacorie’s arm flops and reels over the side like a decrepit lever or gear-handle; he, Alby and Serge spy on one another so half-heartedly it’s almost comic, their circular choreography of jottings, sideways glances and averted gazes no more than a set of empty and incomplete gestures. After tea Laura, purely out of habit, lectures him, half-heartedly as well, on the more secret ceremonies to Osiris:

“They were held in underground spots,” she says slowly, hand resting languidly across her forehead. “We don’t know what was said because the contents were never divulged. They could have been tied in with Thoth …”

“Why do you say the word in German?” Pacorie asks in a similarly disinterested tone.

“What word?”

“Tod. Mort
. The death.”

“No, Thoth,” Laura explains. “The god of secret writing, whose cult centre was Hermopolis.”

“Little round Thoth again,” Serge murmurs.

“He carried cryptographic hymns and spells.” Laura, if she heard his words, ignores them. “Moses, with his stammer and his tablets of the law, grew out of him. He had his own book: with it, it was said, you could enchant the sky and understand the language of the birds, and other animals as well—even the little ones, right down to microbes. But it was lost …”

Nobody takes her up on this, and so the conversation ends. When the insects come, Serge watches one caught in the netting and, turning again to Laura, asks:

“What is it with scarabs?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why are there models of them everywhere, all patterned and inscribed and so on?”

“On the underside, for printing,” she says, even more slowly: her apparatus, too, seems to be voiding itself. “On the upper side, to represent Khepera, god of both the rising sun and matter—matter that’s on the point of passing from inertness into life. His emblem is a beetle.”

“Hail, Khepera, in thy boat,”
Falkiner slurs, already drunk,
“the three-fold company of gods is thy body …”

“Khepera was part of the solar trinity Khepri-Ra-Atum,” Laura barely manages to add. “He was a writer too. And a judge. These attributes were important in Egyptian cosmogony; that’s why scarabs are common …”

“Secret writing,” Falkiner announces. “Isis and Horus, the Department of … Department of … 
that shineth … doest homage … I am … I am all that is, was and will be and no mortal has ever lifted my veil … and so saith Isis …
”

He continues, like a distant and plague-ridden muezzin, to slur out half-remembered snatches of his scripture. When he runs out of phrases to recite, he repeats the single word “Isis,” pronouncing it over and over again, more and more slowly each time, before his voice, too, breaks down into grains and runs away.

ii

They arrive at Sedment the next morning. It’s an upland of desert, exposed and windy. Qufti, drawn from nearby villages, form a chain from the main site towards a light railway, just like they did at Abu Zabal—only here they don’t seem to be carrying stuff in, but taking it away. There are holes everywhere, funnel-shaped pits riddling the ground: some are cordoned off with rope and neatly cleaned-out; others gape in disarray like ruined mine-shafts or natural craters. At the base of some Serge can see hatches, most of which are splintered, giving him a glimpse of lower holes beneath the holes, leading to more splintered hatches which, in turn, lead to lower shafts.

“Most of these top ones are mastabas,” Laura says as they walk past one pit after another.

“Mastur
what?”
asks Serge.

“Mastabas: low-lying tombs of the early dynastic period. They had rectangular mud-brick superstructures and hollow substructures of four or five chambers. Below these, there are later tombs.”

“Below
them?”

“Yes: later dynasties buried their dead lower. Then still-later ones built beside, around, through and all over these earlier-later ones, and so on almost endlessly. This place is a giant warren.”

“Looks more like a giant dump,” Serge says, pointing to the mounds of debris all around them. Shards of broken pottery protrude from these, alongside scraps of paper that he can’t, in passing, make out as either old papyri or contemporary news-pages, plus short lengths of what looks like copper. Beetles scurry up and down the surface of these mounds like mountaineers negotiating faces and approaches. He and Laura come to the spot where Falkiner seems to have established his headquarters: a gully or ravine that cuts a gash into the landscape, in which tent-poles support a canvas canopy that extends a more conventionally front-door-like tomb-entrance into a kind of covered porch.

“We’ve got to get on top of pilfering,” are Falkiner’s first words to her. “It’s become endemic: tools, food, everything. The Qufti say it’s Sebbakhîn and Arabs, but their word’s not to be trusted. We must let them know that the cost of anything in their charge that goes missing will be docked from their own salaries.”

“Where shall I put my things?” she asks him.

“In the tomb behind me,” he says. “Second chamber.”

She moves past him; Serge starts walking with her.

“Whoa! Where do you think you’re going, Pylon Man?” Falkiner barks.

“I thought—” Serge mumbles.

“Well, don’t,” the archaeologist growls back. “You’re in a tent in sector K.”

He jerks his thumb off to the left. Serge makes his way over the uneven ground in the direction the thumb indicates and eventually finds his tent, pitched in an uncordoned and neglected crater. The crater’s shallow; the wind rushing across the upland swirls down into it, throwing handfuls of sand against the canvas in a way that seems intentional, malicious. Sitting inside, he wonders what to do. Unpack? There are no shelves or cupboards here; nothing but a thin and dirty mattress on the floor. Attend to his brief? He takes his notebook out and reads the two words written in it so far:
Méfie-
toi
. Not much to go on. Slipping it back into his breast pocket, he leaves the tent and wanders the site for a while. He climbs to a high spot and gazes down over the excavations. The Qufti-chain, viewed from above, looks like a tail or ribbon lightly fluttering beneath a kite whose main frame is suggested by the posts and strings being laid out on the ground in intersecting triangles, the triangles’ overlap allotting to each of the site’s mounds and craters its own sector, or sub-sector. Falkiner’s directing this pegging-out of station-marks, standing with the instruments he’s brought down on the
Ani
and has lost no time in having unpacked. His body’s shrunk by height and distance. His voice, too: Serge can see from the movements of his arms and shoulders that he’s barking orders at the men who scurry around shifting the posts and paying out string, but these are silenced by the wind. If Falkiner’s surveying, Serge wonders what he’s doing.
Über-
surveying: is that what Petrou would call it, after Alexander’s
über-
Hellenism? Flat, unencumbered, plain, Macauley told him. He looks away from the site: to the north, the landscape flattens; to the south, it rises in ridges, plateaus, hillocks. Any of these spots could house a pylon. Taking his notebook out again, he writes, below the first two hyphenated words, a third one:
Arenow
.

That evening, a pot of stew is brought to his tent. After eating it, he wonders where the latrines are. Wandering around in search of them, he bumps into Alby.

“You in sector K?” the Antiquities man asks. “I’m in F. Windy, isn’t it?”

“Where are the toilets?” Serge asks.

“Use a pot,” Alby shrugs back. “They’re everywhere.”

The next morning Serge wanders around some more. He wanders down to the jetty. It looks firm enough to land the segments of a radio mast. Should he write that down? He’ll remember it. He wanders back to the main site again, and follows the paths trodden between one hole and another, the lines made by the strings. It’s an aimless wandering: he has to wait another day before the
Ani
sets back off to Cairo. Sometimes the paths split, or end, or double back on themselves; sometimes the strings angle him back to an intersection that he crossed ten minutes or a half-hour earlier, but he doesn’t mind: it helps him pass the time. At around noon he finds himself descending into the long gash where Falkiner’s tents are. Falkiner himself is absent; Serge passes unhindered through a tent-porchway to a chamber of tomb proper that’s been turned into a living room: a desk, sofa and deckchair have been set up in it, and a carpet has been spread across the floor, its pattern strangely offset by the decorations on the walls.

“Found your way here after all?” asks Laura, appearing in a doorway that leads further in. For the first time since he’s met her, she’s smiling—in a way that makes Serge feel embarrassed, as though found out, although what for he can’t quite think. He tries to smile back.

“Come in,” she says, rubbing her forehead again.

Her chamber has been turned into a kind of warehouse. All kinds of numbered objects lie around it—some crated, as though ready for dispatch, some open, still awaiting processing. Some, like two wooden coffins covered on both outside and inside with inscriptions, are large, occupying a pallet each; others, like a set of headbands, necklaces and bracelets laid out on the floor in rows, are tiny; yet all seem to be accorded the same meticulous attention. This indiscriminate assiduousness has been applied regardless of age as well. Not all the objects are old: some, like a sardine-can with German writing on it, a scrap of newsprint, a wristwatch with a snapped strap and a leather boot with rusty cleats and a frayed lace, are clearly relatively modern—yet they, too, have been dusted down, laid out and numbered.

“I have to inventorise it all,” says Laura, nodding towards two large ledgers lying face-open on her table.

“So it
was
newspapers I saw in those mounds,” Serge says, “and not papyri.”

“Could have been,” she replies; “could equally have been papyri. It’s an eclectic mish-mash around here. The newspaper that page came from is eighty-two years old, while other scraps we’ve found have headlines from six months ago. It’s like that across all periods: the chambers have been gone through so many times that you get Fifth Dynasty, Late Kingdom, Napoleonic and modern objects lying side by side. By noting where you found each you can date the various interventions, right back to the outset. Watch out.”

Serge is running his hand over one of the two coffins.

“Why? Are they infectious?” he asks.

“No, delicate. The wood’s rotting away, and the ink’s fading. I have to copy the writing.”

Serge lowers his face into the coffin: the texts are written in deep, blue-black ink that disappears in places into the dark mahogany, which, in turn, is full of holes.

“Ants,” she explains. “It’s funny: ‘sarcophagus’ means ‘flesh-eating’—and now it’s being eaten itself. Some of the objects we’ve found are in too delicate a state to be examined here. Pacorie takes a swab off them; then they get sealed and shipped back up to Cairo for examination.”

“What are these flies made of?” Serge asks, pointing to a necklace that’s composed of several plastic-looking insects all threaded together.

“Flies,” she answers. “They
are
flies, preserved in resin. Necklaces of this type were fairly common. This one beside it’s a mixture of ivory, carnelian and glaze.”

She passes her hand over a set of beads strung in repeating sequences of white, gold and blue, with a red spacer-bar between them. Circular and domed, they look like tiny insulators made of porcelain or coloured glass.

“Look at all these scarabs!” Serge exclaims excitedly. There must be twenty or more of them. Their shapes, sizes and patterns are as varied as those of the ones he came across in the museum or the market—on top of which there’s a detail that he hasn’t seen before: two or three have, carved into their underside, not images or patterns, but whole sequences of words.

“Secrets of the heart,” says Laura, noticing him peering in bemusement at the hieroglyphic phrases. “In New Kingdom burials, the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience were confided to these things.”

“And that’s what’s written on them, to be printed out after his death?” he asks.

“It’s more complex than that,” she answers. “What’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgement and weigh down the heart. It had to weigh less than a feather, or the soul was doomed.”

“So the scarab
withholds
the vital information even as it records it? Even as it
prints?”

“Exactly. They were often placed in the heart-cavity. This one,” she continues, picking up a sparkling grey scarab carefully, “is made of basalt. And the one beside it is rough quartz.”

“But it’s got copper wound around it,” Serge says, pointing with his little finger to a band circling the beetle’s waist. “Why would some grave-robber or archaeologist wind copper round it, then leave it behind?”

“The copper would have been there from the start,” she says. “The ancient Egyptians used it a lot. This bowl’s copper; so’s this ewer.”

She flicks the latter with her finger; it rings out tight and clearly, like a tuning fork. Serge follows its vibrations round the chamber with his eye. The place looks less like a warehouse to him now, and more like the backstage area of the Empire Theatre where he visited Audrey. The anachronous medley of objects, their jumbled juxtaposition, seems as incongruous as the faux restaurant interiors, modern cars and Amazonian horse-heads. One of the objects in the room looks quite familiar: a shallow, open box in which a kind of circuit-board is fixed.

“Is that Isis’s cohering set?” he asks, nodding at the thing. Straight metal strips divide its wood at regular intervals; above these, cut into the box’s side, are notches, every fifth of which is larger than the four on either side.

“Professor Falkiner thinks that it’s some kind of game,” she answers. “You move up one side and down another, with the players starting at opposite ends. The notches are for counting. You can see the tenth and twenty-sixth lines are connected, which suggests that you could jump from one spot to another, like in Snakes and Ladders.”

“So where are the dice?” he asks.

“They probably used knuckle-bones. A pair of these were found a few feet from the board—I think …” She steps back to the table and flips through the ledgers till she comes across a diagram. “Yes: right beside it.”

“Wow, you really are forensic,” Serge says, looking at a photograph pasted beside the diagram, confirming the positions, indicated by the latter, in which objects have been found. Beside each object in the photo there’s a little stand-up card bearing a number—presumably the same one with which it’s been labelled in its new location here in Laura’s props-room.

“Oh, this is nothing,” she replies. “You want to see forensics? Come with me.”

She leads him through another doorway to a chamber to the side of hers. Pacorie’s in here, chemistry set fully unpacked, tubes, slides and beakers laid out all around him.

“L’Homme Pylon,” he says by way of greeting, “bienvenue.” He has a ledger too, in which he’s entering readings.

“He’s scraped, scratched or rubbed at virtually all the objects in my room,” Laura tells Serge. “The earth around them too; the walls, the floor, the lot.”

Pacorie, faced with this accusation, shrugs. “Is necessary.”

“And what have you found?” asks Serge.

“Gypsum, limestone, manganese, copper, calcite, the garnet, amethyst, red jasper—or, to state it in a mode more
scientifique:
Mn, SiO
2
, Cu, CaCO
3
, CaSO
4
.
Surtout
, the C: the C is everywhere.”

“The sea?” asks Serge.

“The letter: C.”

“What’s C?”

“
Carbon:
basic element of life.”

Laura tugs at his sleeve, in a way that’s familiar to him, though not from her. He follows her back to her chamber. At the back of this is a third opening, the only one he hasn’t been through yet.

“What’s behind there?” he asks.

“The part where all this stuff came from.”

“Can we go in there?” he asks.

“No,” she tells him. “Falkiner will be back soon.” It’s the first time she hasn’t used the word
Professor
when talking about him—as though, inside the tomb, and perhaps only here, her allegiance and complicity were gravitating away from him and towards Serge. She’s still holding his sleeve. Releasing it eventually, she says: “Come back in two hours, after lunch. He’ll be out again then.”

Serge returns to his tent, where he’s served some more stew in a pot that looks just like the one he’s using as a commode. He dozes after this, then wanders the site again, this time keenly aware of the plethora of buried objects it contains: he pictures coffins, boots, board-games and sardine tins lurking beneath him, particles shaken from the sand and plaster by each footstep trickling down across their surfaces. A rat scurries across the path in front of him, then disappears into a hole. Some of the tomb-openings have wasps’ nests growing, mould-like, on their splintered hatches. He has to detour round a hovering cluster of them on his way back to see Laura.