The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [117]
I remember the night you were gently crying in my arms, troubled by your illness and your anxiety for my departure, and I touched my finger to the corner of your eye, caught a fugitive tear under the tip of my finger, and pulled it and your streaking eye makeup to your temple, just to dry your tears, but I produced in that gesture the perfect face of a pharaoh’s queen, the malachite stripe of the eye of Horus.
The twenty-three-year-old daughter of the department store pharaoh is stately in profile, alluring in three-quarters, overwhelming head-on. The thin nose with its expressive nostrils, as if controlled by a dozen dedicated strings at the hands of a thousand-fingered puppeteer of unsurpassed sensitivity and haughty pride. The slightest upward motion of her eyebrow and we commoners know her will and shall serve it. The pouting, heavy lower lip, under the cresting wave of the upper, carved from smoothest yellow stone, the single, loving chisel stroke that cleft the heavenly valley below her nose. The arching neck, a bit of swan, a bit of swelled sail on a Nile felucca. The majestic curve of her fine figure, her treasures, her mysteries of line and texture, that dress slit directly in the centre-back, as if merely the continuation of her magnificent crevice, and she turns from the throne to consider the slave who kneels at her sandalled, beaded feet, and she raises her hand to strike with naked blade the miscreant who brought her the wrong drinking vessel, when her king appears behind her and stills her tensed hand.
Wednesday, 22 November, 1922
The men return early, and I am finally equipped to plaster the damaged door, while Ahmed sits, cobra-silent, smoking another of CCF’s cigars and crunching fresh dates. But by late afternoon, the door is still damp. Time is killing me. I have no choice but to leave them on guard 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 recovered 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 return 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 illuminate a mystery unlike anything in this mystery-wrapped land. The Pillar Chamber joins our map, and Atum-hadu’s humour is unmistakably 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 Portal.” Carter’s face at this