The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [163]
Friday, 22 December, 1922
Slept on the ridge in the open air and let CCF keep the cot. Prefer to give him some privacy down there. Quarters too close to share.
Today Carter opened his wretched hole to the Press, and I do not know why I do this to myself, the sight of the gawking tourists, the sound of all that blather for a minor king, I should just walk away, but it acts on me like a siren’s lethal warble, and I went in to have a look at Carter’s tomb again, escorting a sarcastic American journalist who called me Mohammed. It really is too awful: Tut displays quite the same excess as his dapper little acolyte. And to see the Nordquists, back yet again for more sugary excess, looking impressed out of politeness, I could not even bring myself to talk to them, and that room, that storage chamber of the little upstart’s tomb, it is a grotesque display, this waste pile, the leopard-skin robes, clothing crusted in gold sequins, statues, rush and papyrus sandals, that couch with the carved footboards, boomerangs, lunch boxes carved to resemble trussed ducks, perfume jars, toilet tables, bin after bin of unused underwear, candleholders shaped like little ankh-people, ornate this, oviform that, lotiform the other, golden whatnot, flails and crooks and sceptres, furniture depicting the king in lion form trampling his enemies, riding a chariot with his own ancestors, thousands of beads to string, just one of these items would have justified all of Carter’s years, Carnarvon’s money, let alone flinty Finneran’s. All for this nobody, it is enough to make one literally sick, the messy confusion, it is enough to make one feel crushed under it, as if one could imagine all of that wealth and furniture just pressing down on top of one in one’s own mummy wraps, crushed like a pellet of clay under the wheels of that god-awful war chariot, nauseating. The American journalist quite agreed.
Saturday, 23 December, 1922
Carter really is a megalomaniac, CCF and I agree on this. Oh no, he simply will not be satisfied until everyone admires him and everyone works for him and he makes dramas out of everything. You can imagine my surprise to find a police constable striding up the path toward my tomb when I came down from my cliff-top bed this morning. Mr. Carter had sent him to “make sure everything was all right up here.” Yes, thanks, as if I needed Carter to keep my tomb all right. “Mr. Carter had some thefts and wanted to know if you have suffered, too?” Of course! Carter is clumsy and loses something in his unwieldy inventory and the police must be called in on the assumption that some crafty burglar is troubling all of Egypt’s rational archaeologists as well. I laughed and waved off the officer, but he wanted to tell me all about a burglar in Carter’s home and missing this and that, and stains on Carter’s bedsheets. “Is everything all right here, sir?” Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course it is, ducks. “Might I have a look-see at your dig? I’m something of an amateur of archaeology myself.” It is all I can do to bar the great idiot’s dust-kicking steps towards Door A. “Are you hurt, sir? Is there something you want to tell me?” and other daft questions of the novice Egyptian constabulary acting as Carter’s spy.
I finally see off my rival’s little agent, and CCF and I debate which of our myriad tasks to take on next, much work still to be done to stabilise