The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [136]
Journal: A few hours’ consideration and planning, out of the sun, taking sweet tea. After lunch, I now feel able to consider again the state of Atum-hadu’s puzzling legacy. A stage performance has begun, a small-town imitation of the cabaret I saw in Cairo so long ago. The girls nod as coins fall at their slippered feet, the drums throb and odd fiddles keen, and the veils drift down like leaves shaken loose by a light autumn breeze.
Historiography lesson: Understanding the relationship between a (complicated) life and a later (simplified) account of that life, using the case of Atum-hadu: One can imagine one’s own future archaeologist making a terrible mess of it. Trying to explain you, he fills and fudges where he must, and all of your nuance and detail—which is precisely what makes you you—is lost or imagined, replaced by the nuance of your chronicler instead. Your virtuous behaviour, your generosity or bravery or acts of humble gratitude—if there is no record of it, it did not happen. And if there is instead a record of something else—a momentary lapse, a persistent rival’s well-recorded lies, an angry lover’s obsessive, unilateral collection of correspondence, a detective’s confident miscomprehension of a smudged dossier—what will your hapless excavator say of you?
And this is why one must be careful to leave one’s own truth behind oneself, honest but unambiguous, loose ends snipped off: the Admonitions of Atum-hadu, for example, or this very notebook, whatever the result of my work.
When our excavator, our clarifying biographer, comes for us—as we all certainly hope he will—when he chronicles our life and simplifies it enough for the dimmest reader to grasp and remember forever, how can we have helped him ahead of time? How can we help him know when to stop digging and start writing? Where is the centre of our life, the core of our character, with all extraneous detail eroded? Under one layer is another and another, under each silk veil more silk, under dust more dust, behind one door another and then a sepulchre and an outer sarcophagus and an inner and the cartonnage and the golden head mask and the linen wraps and then . . . a black skeleton in tight, crispy skin, intact but with no brain, liver, lungs, intestine, stomach. Is this the truth? Or did we, in our rush to get to this “answer,” pass right by the humble truth, knock it down, cover it with the dust of our hurried burrowing?
I think before further excavation, which is slow and expensive, the tomb as it stands now deserves a more careful examination, a detailed inventory of my hurried progress to date.
I have underestimated the amount of ink, paper, and paint I will need to copy down the tomb’s extensive illustrations, the ladder I will need to read and copy out the highest rows of hieroglyphic inscriptions. So, off now for last supplies, with nearly the end of my funds, and then to bed with the regal cats.
This is my last night in a soft bed for a spell because, with this next phase of the excavation, it only makes sense that I sleep at the site. Tomorrow I move out of the villa; it is a burden for now. Must think of a plan to care for the cats.
The next day, the 30th, things had gone from bad to horrible in no time at all. He wasn’t well, your great-uncle, swinging from screaming rages to periods of quiet that were anything but calm. I’d rarely seen him drink before, but now he was on the nose. Obvious he hadn’t slept. I’ve seen men in his predicament before, Macy, and it’s interesting how alike they are. Pressure does predictable things to men, that’s what I’ve learnt. There