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By Root 1024 0

are a wonderful, heroic man, Ralphie, you know I do, but I don’t like having you gone all this long time. I don’t like it at all, and I think that if there are any more of these expeditions after we are married, I will come with you, or I will wait only at Trilipush Hall with crowds of friends and servants, or at a hotel in Paris. Boston is a horrible bore. You are beastly to have left me alone this long. Daddy is a bore. Inge is a fat bore. What am I supposed to be doing here with my time while you are off having grand adventures? I know that “it is all for us,” and when you come back it is our future you are going to carry home, I know. But still. Being here under Daddy and Inge’s thumbs makes me feel like a little girl. I know that they only want what’s best for me, but that also seems to mean boring me to tears.

m.

Monday, 6 November, 1922

Pay men for one week, send them home. I am not in fit condition to work.

Wednesday, 8 November, 1922

Night. Three days lost to fever, et cetera. By nightfall, I am able to rise. The cats were a comfort in my illness, especially dear Maggie. I eat dinner for the first time since Sunday. After days of nauseous, anxious sleep, I am, tonight, of course, unable to sleep. I am curious what ancient, desiccated wine cellar Carter’s found at the bottom of his stairs. I shall climb aboard a nocturnal donkey, trot into the Valley, and find my heartbroken colleague atop his stairway to ancient rubbish bins, and I shall succour him in his despair at six years of wasting Carnarvon’s good, easy money.

Later: I dressed in native garb. I paid a boy with a boat to ferry me across, and made the moonlit Valley in not much time. Hiked up a side path, behind Rameses VI’s tomb, to look again at the precious stairwell. But instead I found a few of Carter’s workers, standing watch and sleeping, no sign of the great man himself. And there was a pile of boulders atop where the staircase had been. Nothing else. If there ever was a staircase, if heat and solitude and frustration and fever have not tickled me into meaningless hallucination, then Carter has apparently reburied his find. Exchange a few salaams and chitchat with his workers. My disguise is flawless. From what they told me, Carter has set his team to work in the other direction, trenching around the ancient huts of the workmen who built Rameses VI’s tomb. What a man, this Carter! What style! Faced with a black eye unlike anything in Egyptological history (six years and a staircase to a dry hole), and with his noble moneybags sitting in Haw-haw House back in green England, Carter’s simply buried his folly and turned his back on it. Never happened! A trickster, our Mr. Carter, it now seems. Makes one wonder what else he has covered up in his glorious past.

I set off, back to the river by way of his villa in Gurna. The windows were unshuttered, the moonlight silvering one side of the house. A little corner of England deposited here in Egypt, his easels and books sitting in tidy order in what must be a sitting room and study. The easel’s back was to the window, so I cannot comment on his skill as a painter. He did not clear away his tea things, no doubt he was drinking something potent to erase the dreadful memory of burying rather than digging, covering up his staircase from the 1890s. Who else besides me heard, too early, of his “triumph”? How many souls did his workmen tell? “Ah, yes, Lord Carter has found King Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb today! He found the staircase today, and tomorrow the treasure room! Tell all the cousins!” Poor Carter. No wonder the tea things sit unwashed.

The back of the house revealed an interesting tableau, framed by the green-painted window sashes. He was sleeping like a man at peace, which is odd, unless one considers the sleeping draught he likely gulped to beat back his roiling worries. His thin eyeglasses were folded on the bedside table, over a pre-slumber read, the cover of which was the same colour as Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt, which would not surprise me, but I could not quite make out the title.