The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [132]
The chatter at lunch was unbearable as the ladies all challenged each other for touristic dominance. Behind their scarab brooches of diamond and onyx and under their straw headpieces, they spat pit names at each other, waging battle for supremacy with tales of authentic sights of unspoilt beauty, witnessed in only the most privileged circumstances.
“Well of course you’ve seen Rameses VI’s hole, and not bad accommodations if you must die in Egypt,” one lady scolds another who dared admit she was impressed by R6’s tomb, “but the Rameses II colossi down at Abu Simbel are vastly superior, if you can be bothered to make the trek to see real art.”
“Not bad, true,” sighs a third. “I cast an eye over them. Cheeky fellow he was, having himself done up in that gaudy dimension. And the sculptor a regular Michael Angelo. But there is something about seeing only the expert-acknowledged masterpieces, you must agree, that deadens one’s palate. Surely the discovery of a new piece with your own eyes and taste is as important as mere passive appreciation? Surely that is why we are here, the very first to see this Tut chappy, though I doubt we can expect anything as magical as the first time I stumbled, really, into the work at Tuna el-Gebel, the glasswork carvings . . .”
“Done by an overeager student. The hidden masterpieces are down at Nuri and El-Kurru.”
“Maestrosities, I’d call those. Really, you must get to the Sudan, though you’ll have to know the right people to be allowed in, I could drop them a line for you . . .”
“. . . that site where King What’s-His-Name just up and slapped his cartouche on the previous chap’s monuments? Hardly fair play . . .”
“. . . a six-day trip to reach it, but the sunrise there is unlike anything . . .”
“. . . sunrise? Astronomy is not art, dear girl.”
“You should see what they are finding up at Atum-hadu’s tomb,” someone added, and everyone was quite curious, as they always are when the great king’s name is mentioned.
Finally Carter muttered his remarks, and then we were all paraded, three at a time, down the sixteen magic stairs and into little Tut’s hole for a hunched walk down a bare corridor and our precious glimpse of a haphazard storage room with this and that tossed any which way inside it. I heard it compared to the property room of an ancient opera, and for a moment the thought occurred to me that perhaps wee King Tut had ransacked a preexisting tomb, erased Atum-hadu’s name and written his own on it. It was often done.
“What’s that dreadful aroma?” asks some civil servant’s wife, and Carter tries to explain that the tomb’s air is 3200 years old, but I also realise that my bandages need changing and I can do without this display anyhow. I stride out.
Margaret, poor Carter has foolishly made his discoveries in full public eye and now must pay the price: a carnival of twits twittering around him while he works. He spends his days hauling amateurs through a tomb where every single placement of your foot must be carefully considered, where every breath you exhale adds deadly humidity to the air, pollutes the delicate gesso of a painted box or the inscription on a wall, where some great lady’s stray sleeve might brush against an item which, until preservatives are applied, can literally disintegrate at the touch, and one of these ladies today was even wearing a dangling silver and sapphire necklace, which could have fallen or brushed something when she bent over to look closely at an item in this storage room of Tut’s. Tours of clumsy, uninformed, admiring fans! Poor Carter!
This storage chamber, this Tut’s tomb, one does grow tired of hearing about it. Seeing it, after all the chatter of the natives and the