The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [118]
But first, I must relate the events of the past eight hours, the horrible and the wonderful, the betrayals and the triumphs. I must remember 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 laboratory 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 without 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 tutorial 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 rising 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