The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [162]
All at once, Atum-hadu understood that the end of everything had arrived. Nothing that he loved would survive. All would be forgotten or misunderstood.
He ran outside into the light of the palace courtyard, saw the blood on his robes and on his hammer and on the torch, and he fell to the ground and struck the ground and wept at the course of all things.
Illustration: The long text beginning at the ceiling leaves little space for illustration. Copying and translating this text into these notes has taken most of the day. Explaining the hieroglyphic system and grammar to CCF as I proceeded slowed me down, but the effort was rewarded as he begins to grasp the depth of our discovery.
Then Chester and I cleaned up some of the mess in the tomb. I attended to Wall Panel K and hurried to restore some of the damaged, smeared, or stained illustrations or text that had suffered from Chester’s foolishness last night. I walked a bit down the path to try to relieve my throbbing belly for a hopeless half an hour, my thoughts wandering, so many tasks clamouring for priority. Return to the tomb. Burn a few things in the first chamber, watch the smoke sucked out the front door into the evening sky. CCF is very intrigued by how all this is done. He is a great help. He is very paternal. I have not slept more than a half-hour of last forty-eight. Really must sleep now though tormented I forgetting leaving something undone needs immed att’n. CCF, am I forgetting someth? No, go to sleep. Fine. Lie down but then right up again because I hear voices in the front chamber, but its noth
Thursday, 21 December, 1922
Journal: Reader, my fiancée’s father has arrived in Egypt to help with the expedition at the site, and this morning I assign him simple tasks I can trust him to perform correctly inside Atum-hadu’s tomb while I have business elsewhere.
I find Carter’s site has new facets. True to their word, the Metropolitan expedition has given him everyone and everything he needs. Miles of bandages and calico and wadding to wrap his finds as they emerge from underground. A motorcar. He is swimming in attention and help, native workers, admirers and friends (though one wonders, with sympathy, how he can distinguish the sycophants from the sincere). And there are the thronged tourists again, even dear Len and Sonia Nordquist right there in the front row, I am ashamed to write, cooing and snapping photographs side by side with the great man himself. Carter is swaddled in the trappings of a success beyond measure, but he himself is quite unchanged. He still holds over all our heads that Carter manner, that special secret knowledge that mists up your eyes when you try to look at him directly. He speaks Arabic with a local accent, no must or mould of dusty academia on him. And even in a foreign tongue his manner is unchanged. How he carries this success! “You there. Run ask Mr. Lucas if he has everything he needs,” he orders me in Arabic, the moment I place my head in his command tent to say hello. I bow and do his bidding—what else can one do? Lucas is easy to find. He is the chemical specialist on loan from the Egyptian Government, yet another expert bowing down before the great leader, feeding the insatiable furnace of Carter’s ego. “Yes, thanks, all set,” Lucas answers after I find him setting up his laboratories a few hundred yards away in Tomb 15, emptied out for King Howard’s convenience. And there, more excess: the paraffin and preservative sprays in labelled and numbered red cans, adhesives and solvents, the endless and hyphenated names of chemicals, incomprehensible in their various combinations, skulls on labels as if Lucas were a magician or an Overseer of the Secrets, the wax, the excess, the horrific